EITAN WILF
University of Chicago
Swinging within the iron cage:
Modernity, creativity, and embodied practice in American
postsecondary jazz education
A B S T R A C T
In this article, I seek to contribute to the
anthropology of embodied practice by asking, what
would embodied practical mastery that mandates
constant differentiation look like, and what would
be its cultural and social determinants? In doing so,
I draw on ethnographic fieldwork I conducted in a
postsecondary jazz school in the United States.
Through an exploration of how jazz educators cope
with the paradoxical task of training the body and
liberating it, I inquire into the challenge of
negotiating the tension between the two key
modernist ideas of rationalized schooling and
Romantic creativity in contemporary institutional
contexts. [embodied practice, schooling, creativity,
modernity, improvisation, jazz music, USA]
AMERICAN ETHNOLOGIST, Vol. 37, No. 3, pp. 563–582, ISSN 0094-0496, online
ISSN 1548-1425. C 2010 by the American Anthropological Association. All rights reserved.
DOI: 10.1111/j.1548-1425.2010.01273.x
ne distinguishing feature of anthropological studies of embodied
O
practical mastery has been their focus on those forms of practice
that are organized around a normative set of embodied features
that ought to be perfected and honed by practitioners. Marcel
Mauss, for example, in his “Techniques of the Body,” elaborated
on such activities as swimming and running, arguing that “every technique
properly so-called has its own form” and that “this specificity is charac-
teristic of all techniques” (1973:71). The importance of techniques of the
body, according to Mauss, is that they provide people with the “certainty of
pre-prepared movements” (1973:86), thus allowing for efficacious action in
the world. Pierre Bourdieu, although introducing notions of processuality
and temporality into the discussion about practical mastery, maintained
this emphasis. In the beginning of Outline of a Theory of Practice (1977),
Bourdieu rejected objectivist approaches in the social sciences that at-
tempt to explain social behavior as a set of discrete rules of action. Instead,
he offered “strategy” as a more accurate explanatory model for practice, be-
ing a set of embodied dispositions and generative schemas that are uncon-
sciously acquired in childhood and that account for agents’ ability to im-
provise within various situations in a way that, nevertheless, accords with
and reproduces their positions within the social structure (Lamaison and
Bourdieu 1986). Thus, practical mastery, for Bourdieu, remained overde-
termined, allowing for variation by virtue of rules of combination of a set
of normative embodied dispositions rather than by virtue of creativity and
innovation.
This emphasis has persisted even in those recent anthropological stud-
ies that have rejected Bourdieu’s notion of practical mastery on the ground
that it ignores the role of awareness and conscious discourse in the learn-
ing process of embodied practical mastery in all its stages (Bryant 2005;
Hirschkind 2006; Mahmood 2005; Starrett 1995). For example, drawing on
Talal Asad’s (1993) contribution to the study of discipline, Saba Mahmood
has argued that anthropologists need to return to an Aristotelian notion of
“habitus,” understood as the conscious honing and cultivation of bodily
American Ethnologist  Volume 37 Number 3 August 2010
dispositions and practices as a means of inhabiting spe-
cific cultural notions of personhood. In the project of disci-
plined self-cultivation advanced by a women’s piety move-
ment in Cairo that Mahmood studied (and also in projects
of “bodily reform” in general; see Comaroff and Comaroff
1992:70), the body becomes the focus of heightened col-
lective and individual awareness and explicit rules not only
in the first stages of learning but also later, as one engages
in “constant vigilance and monitoring of one’s practice”
(Mahmood 2005:139). Although these studies have success-
fully problematized Bourdieu’s assumption that practical
mastery remains outside of the sphere of individual aware-
ness, I would argue that they share with the approach they
criticize the analytical focus on forms of practice that are
organized around the perfection of a normative set of em-
bodied features.
In this article, I contribute to the ongoing and fruit-
ful conversation in anthropology over embodied practical
mastery by asking, what would a mastery that relies on and
mandates constant differentiation, regeneration, unique-
ness, and open-endedness look like, and what would be its
cultural and social determinants? In doing so, I draw on
ethnographic fieldwork I conducted in a postsecondary jazz
school on the East Coast of the United States, “Common-
wealth School,”1 and in the jazz scene in New York City.
Commonwealth is part of ongoing changes in the modes
of socialization into jazz music in the second half of the
20th century, changes that have entailed the increased insti-
tutionalization and professionalization of jazz training. As
I show in the following discussion, the increasingly mass-
mediated form of jazz training, the heightened competition
among musicians in a dwindling marketplace for jazz, and
the impact of Romantic notions of creativity that mandate
uniqueness all give rise to a specific form of embodied prac-
tical mastery that emphasizes open-endedness, differenti-
ation, and innovation in addition to the mastery of a spe-
cific set of normative embodied dispositions that need to be
cultivated and honed by all students. As I argue, such a no-
tion of embodied practical mastery relies on techniques of
generating temporary bodily practices that must be applied
whenever one’s playing becomes similar to that of other
players, to enable one to avoid standardized playing and to
gain an edge in the marketplace. Teachers stress time and
again the importance of incorporating the “vocabulary of
jazz” into students’ playing bodies until they can play it “un-
consciously,” but they also instruct students to constantly
monitor their playing for signs of embodied playing habits
that result in improvisation resembling that of other stu-
dents. They provide them with the means to disrupt these
habits via direct manipulation of the playing body so that
new bodily habits can emerge. Such self-conscious manipu-
lation of the body is a way of mitigating the effects of the in-
creased commodification and standardization of jazz train-
ing that have been incorporated into students’ playing bod-
564
ies and that, consequently, diminish their chances of suc-
cess in the marketplace for jazz music. Additionally, it is a
means of realizing a Romantic ideal of creativity that em-
phasizes uniqueness and individuality.
In discussing this specific form of embodied practical
mastery, I have a second goal. To a certain extent, the rise
of postsecondary jazz education is part of a broader social
trend. Postsecondary education in the arts was once limited
to classical music, the plastic arts, and dance. Today, how-
ever, socialization into a growing number of art forms, from
poetry writing (Myers 1993) to turntable technique (Muther
2004), takes place within institutions of higher education.
This recent trend toward conflating bureaucracy and social-
ization into the creative arts problematizes a division be-
tween art and bureaucracy that scholars have come to ex-
pect ever since the Romantic movement, which objected
to any routinization and formalization of the arts (Taylor
1989, 1992), and that was reinforced by Max Weber’s (1978a)
sociological writings about rationalization, which posited
the disenchanted and formalized nature of modern bureau-
cratic organizations. Against the background of these ori-
entations, institutionalized art education has been held to
be a contradiction in terms by many scholars (Adler 1979;
Elkins 2001), who have argued that creative thinking cannot
be cultivated within the institutional environment of the
modern school (Bryant 2005:228). How, then, could artis-
tic creativity, which, according to the Romantic ethos, de-
pends on being in touch with one’s unique inner nature
and voice rather than conforming to outside models of be-
ing, be cultivated within the rationalized bureaucratic orga-
nizational structure of the university, with its institutional
paraphernalia of standardization such as curricula, syllabi,
and tests? How could neophyte artists be trained in cre-
ativity, regeneration, and differentiation by formalized pro-
cedural means? What would modern forms of “routiniza-
tion of charisma” through “charismatic education” look like
(Weber 1978b)?2
I argue that understanding the possibility of an open-
ended embodied practical mastery is key to answering
these questions because it is through the formalized pro-
cedural manipulation of the body that jazz educators suc-
ceed in training students in creative practice that empha-
sizes differentiation and regeneration in addition to shared
and normative embodied practices. In pointing to the for-
malized and procedural cultivation of creativity within a
modern bureaucratic organization in the form of open-
ended embodied practical mastery, I seek to add to the
recent studies that have argued for the enchanted, affec-
tive, and creative aspects of modernity and its institutions
(Asad 2003; Comaroff 2008; Comaroff and Comaroff 2009;
Connolly 2002; Hansen 2009; Hirschkind 2006; Mazzarella
2009; Schmitt 1985). I argue that postsecondary jazz edu-
cation is about the challenge of negotiating the tension be-
tween the two key modernist ideas of rationalized schooling
 Modernity, creativity, and embodied practice
and creativity. Through an exploration of how jazz educa-
tors cope with the paradoxical task of training the body
and liberating it, I seek to contribute to theorizing cre-
ativity and the ways it might be invested in the body
in modern institutional contexts. As I argue in my con-
clusion, this is a necessary step if scholars want to un-
derstand an increasingly visible trend in the present his-
torical moment: the bureaucratic cultivation of creativity
(as in the case of formalized art education), on the one
hand, and the creative cultivation of the modern bureau-
cratic organization (as in the turn to the arts in the search
for better organizational models), on the other hand—
what I call “modern creativity” and “creative modernity,”
respectively.
The institutionalization of jazz training
Socialization into jazz music throughout most of the
20th century took place outside of formal institutions of
education3 : Musicians learned to play jazz through emu-
lation within the sites where the music was performed or,
with the dissemination of recording technology, by listen-
ing to previously recorded music (Berliner 1994; DeVeaux
1997; Ogren 1989; Peretti 1994; Wilkinson 1994). Although
many jazz musicians received some formal musical ed-
ucation in the early 20th century in and around New
Orleans and possessed various degrees of musical liter-
acy (Chevan 2002), they received this training after many
years of absorption of, and active participation in, jazz
music (Wilkinson 1994:37). Most importantly, the train-
ing they received did not so much concern jazz per se as
it did learning how to read music and play instruments
(Chevan 2002:206). Training was informed by classical-
music norms, and, often, classically trained music teachers
used classical-music method books for this purpose (Ogren
1989:30).
This situation persisted after the “Great Migration,”
as numerous musicians moved from the southern United
States to northern urban centers during the 1920s. The
increasing visibility and success of jazz music from the
1920s through the 1940s in these centers was not accompa-
nied by social acceptance but, rather, by deep ambivalence.
Threatened by its participatory nature, its percussive em-
phasis, and its association with the red-light districts in New
Orleans and Chicago and motivated by racial bigotry, white
middle- and upper-middle-class people understood jazz to
be both a threat to morality and a debased form of music
(Ake 2002; Ogren 1989; Marquis 1998). This understanding
formed the background for the exclusion of jazz music from
music schools’ curricula in this period despite (or because
of ) its growing commercial success. Toward the end of the
1920s and through the 1930s, jazz was allowed into educa-
tional institutions only in rare cases.
 American Ethnologist
The G.I. Bill, instituted after World War II to allow vet-
erans to continue their higher education, including the
pursuit of music degrees (Marquis 1998; McDaniel 1993;
Murphy 1994), and the Civil Rights Movement, which in-
creased the cultural legitimacy of black music (Monson
2007), led more higher-education institutions to integrate
jazz into their curricula in one form or another.4 Against
the background of the dwindling demand for jazz and the
disappearance of performance venues,5 jazz programs be-
gan to play a growing role in the cultural reproduction of
jazz music in the second half of the 20th century by provid-
ing both alternative sites for socialization and occupational
opportunities for musicians as teachers (Ake 2002:112;
DeVeaux 1998).6 These programs offer professional train-
ing in the form of a rationalized curriculum that is imple-
mented through newly devised teaching aids such as in-
struction booklets and audio and video material that have
reconfigured the mode of the cultural reproduction of jazz
music.7 Indeed, the increased dissemination of standard-
ized knowledge in the form of method books and various
types of textual artifacts and “print capitalism” (Anderson
1983) has been one of the most visible markers of postsec-
ondary jazz education (Ake 2002; Lopes 2002:261). A typical
jazz program covers a number of topics such as arrang-
ing, jazz composition, ear training, harmony, and ensem-
bles and offers instrumental labs and classes that focus on
different stylistic, instrumental, and performance-related
considerations; private classes; classes in music technology;
and improvisation classes. Each area of study usually com-
prises several different courses that cover various aspects or
levels of the topic.
It should be clear, then, that jazz programs do not rep-
resent simply the preservation of the musical tradition and
its inculcation in a new context. Rather, socialization into
jazz music in postsecondary jazz education, inasmuch as
it takes place in classrooms and is mediated by codified
and standardized mass-produced pedagogical material, in-
volves new challenges and paradoxes for both teachers and
students, who strive to inform their playing and teaching
by the traditions, ideologies, and ideals—whether real or
imagined—of the music. As I argue, it is precisely these new
paradoxes and challenges that account for culturally spe-
cific embodied practical mastery in which the playing bod-
ily habits become a focus of ambivalence, monitoring, and
agency, caught between cycles of learned ignorance and
awareness, and constantly reconfigured to allow for regen-
eration, differentiation, and open-endedness. In this article,
I highlight this aspect of postsecondary jazz education as
a way of exploring, first, the possibility of a notion of em-
bodied practical mastery that relies on and mandates con-
stant differentiation, regeneration, uniqueness, and open-
endedness, and, second, the social and cultural conditions
that might give it rise.
565
American Ethnologist  Volume 37 Number 3 August 2010
“Building muscle memory”: Crafting
the normative body
In classes, clinics, method books, and informal conversa-
tions with students, jazz educators stress time and again the
importance of transcribing the recorded solos of jazz mas-
ters and practicing them in their entirety or dividing them
into selected “licks” and phrases and practicing these ex-
cerpts in every key. This aspect of jazz training has been
documented widely (Berliner 1994).8 Here, however, I fo-
cus on its bodily infrastructure. The goal of such practice
is to ingrain the solo, or its parts, in one’s body. Indeed,
when teachers speak of mastery of the jazz idiom, they fre-
quently index the body, via different tropes, as the locus
of such mastery. For example, after one student in a class
I observed finished playing jazz legend Freddie Hubbard’s
trumpet solo on the tune “Birdlike,” which she had first
transcribed and then memorized, the teacher exclaimed,
“Yeah! Every key now, right? Just keep playing that solo for
six months, all these things, just get it right in your blood.
That’s the way the week should start.” Frequently, the fin-
gers function as a synecdoche for the body because of their
visibility in manipulating most of the instruments used in
the production of music. Consider the following excerpt
from a class in which a teacher addresses the students about
the intended results of a practice routine:9
There’s a lot of notes in this class, and the way I look
at this class, it’s very comprehensive. You write it down
and then summer comes along and you ask: “What am I
going to practice?” You take one thing, like this [phrase
that is written on the board], and you just, like that—
I’m gonna pull that out, I’m gonna focus on that for like
a few months. It takes for about twenty-one days for a
habit to happen. So you’re gonna start, and then after
twenty-one days your finger muscle memory will start
to take place. For it to become where you are like un-
conscious and if I woke you up [at] five in the morning
and said, “Wow, play some shit!” [Students laugh.] That
takes about six to nine months where you can even not
think about it and do it in your sleep, you know—finger
patterns and muscle memory.
These words suggest that “learned ignorance”
(Bourdieu 1977:19) is a crucial ideological trope in this
conception of embodied practical mastery. One is sup-
posed to have the idiom of jazz ingrained in one’s “fingers”
and “muscle memory” so that he or she can improvise
“automatically,” as it were. The notions of “unconscious-
ness,” “sleep,” and lack of “thought” connote precisely the
absence of deliberative agency, on the one hand, and the
presence of “the body that plays,” on the other hand.
The player relegates his or her agency to the body, which
now acts as the sovereign agent. This meaning is nicely
figurated (Fernandez 1986) in the term muscle memory,
566
which couples the muscle—the concrete and material
tissue that contracts and expands—with the abstract and
subjective quality of memory. In this account, it is the body
that remembers, not the deliberative human subject. Such
a perfection of action that bypasses the deliberative agent is
made possible only through a very intentional, meticulous,
and long process of conditioning the body to “remember,”
so that, as Bourdieu would argue, the player can “forget.”10
Before problematizing the notion of “learned igno-
rance” that these quotes suggest, it is necessary to elabo-
rate on the specific nature of the body in jazz improvisation.
The body is implicated in numerous functions as an essen-
tial infrastructure for the production of jazz music as it is for
music in general. Musicians carry their instruments and in-
teract with them in the production of sound by the manipu-
lation of the body. In the case of singers, of course, the body
itself is the sole instrument. Subtle relations between dif-
ferent muscles and organs, processes such as breathing, leg
posture, mental concentration, and so forth, are involved in
playing. Within the jazz school, these considerations might
take center stage in private instrumental courses that do
not concern jazz solely, or they might appear momentar-
ily in improvisation classes. However, because improvisa-
tion classes are typically composed of students who play
different instruments, such instrument-specific focus does
not often occur. Rather, as the commentaries I gathered re-
veal, jazz educators discuss a limited number of aspects of
bodily mastery that play an important role in the produc-
tion of jazz. One of the most important of these aspects is
the mastery of the vocabulary of jazz.
Jazz improvisation is not a creation ex nihilo. Rather, as
is common in many forms of improvisatory performance,
the performer relies on a common stock of building blocks
that he or she can draw from in the course of performance
(Finnegan 1988; Lord 1984; Sawyer 1996). These building
blocks are elements that have become conventionalized
within a specific tradition of performance and appreciation.
Jazz is characterized by its own conventions that pertain
to harmonic, melodic, and rhythmic elements; execution
(phrasing, timbre); communicative forms between play-
ers; modes of presentation; and repertoire (Berliner 1994;
Jackson 2002; Monson 1996). It is possible to learn many
of these conventions by practicing the transcribed recorded
solos of jazz masters, which are held to be prototypes of
these elements.
For example, a teacher of an advanced improvisation
class instructed his students to “look for turn-around vo-
cabulary,11 especially in the last two bars of the blues—the
way he [the soloist] uses chord tones, chord scales, chro-
matic approach, bop scales, and symmetrical diminished
[scales]. These are some of the things to look for. And what
you want to do is pick them up, one that appeals to you,
and practice it in every key.” The teacher instructed his stu-
dents to search for elements that are specific to the jazz
 Modernity, creativity, and embodied practice
idiom in the master’s solo, to isolate and incorporate them
through practice in every key. The purpose, as one guest
clinician told students in a workshop, is to have each of
these building blocks “in your fingers [so that] in the mo-
ment of truth you can manipulate it without difficulty.”
“The moment of truth” is the real-time of jazz improvisa-
tion, in which, ideally, one’s fingers take charge because
they have been trained in the vocabulary of jazz. Similarly,
another clinician urged students to “learn as many tunes as
you can—it prepares you to different situations with your
fingers. . . . Learn it by heart as soon as you can—take it off
the paper. That way you will internalize it better—you will
own it. Your fingers will own it.” Standard tunes are con-
sidered to be prototypical of the idiom of jazz, with its dis-
tinct melodic, rhythmic, and harmonic conventions. Their
incorporation—again, in one’s fingers—prepares the im-
proviser to function in “different situations” that emerge in
group improvisation.
Significantly, it is precisely the incorporation of the vo-
cabulary of jazz, that is, the ingraining in the body of the as-
pect of jazz improvisation that is most specific to this genre,
which makes learned ignorance and incorporated playing
habits problematic for the jazz educators I worked with.
“We all tend to be button pushers”:
The melancholic normative body
I was sitting among 20 students in an advanced-level impro-
visation class. The teacher had just finished demonstrating,
on the piano, a number of ways of generating rhythmic va-
riety in one’s solo. He paused for a moment and then said,
Playing in half notes is harder.12 Try playing a great line
in half notes on this tune. I promise you, it will make
you feel like—“I want my mummy.” It will make you
crawl up with tears. I promise you, half notes will kick
your ass. That’s because your ears have so much time to
think notes, to choose notes, to select them, that often
they can’t make a decision: “Where do I go from here?”
You have so much time to shape the melody. And when
you transcribe [your solo] or listen back to the melody
[of your solo] when you play in half notes, they sound
so fucked up, sounds like you can’t play them. Yet you
can . . . play a pretty decent eighth note line. Now what
does that tell you about your ears? What your ears re-
ally control? Not much! Not those eighth notes! I mean,
if they can’t shape the half notes or the quarter notes,
how the hell is it doing eighth notes? The answer is it
ain’t doing the eighth notes! Your mind and your fin-
gers are playing the eighth notes. So if you really want
to find out what your ears—the degree that it’s in con-
trol and stirring the shit here, try playing a half note solo
or a quarter note solo. That would be great.
The teacher’s words puzzled me. Why would it be a bad
thing to have one’s fingers “stir the shit”? After all, is not
 American Ethnologist
training the body and cultivating muscle memory and fin-
ger patterns one of the most important aspects of jazz train-
ing? My confusion only grew as I began noticing further
commentary that reflected similar discontent. For exam-
ple, during one workshop, a guest clinician scolded the stu-
dents who had just finished playing, saying that “they are
not thinking of things to play. They are just hoping that their
fingers will bring them to a nice place.” In an interview, a
teacher told me in a resigned tone that “I find that we all
tend to be button pushers, you know . . . you learn patterns
that work and then you do those patterns. I know that ac-
tually all instruments do this.” That which, at one point, is
considered to be an example of perfected bodily condition-
ing becomes, at another point, an example of mere “button
pushing” and “pattern playing,” actions that connote, per-
haps, the mechanical valves of an engine.
Consider the following statements made by a teacher in
two consecutive classes in a course on harmonic consider-
ations in improvisation:
I don’t want to turn into a factory, so when we go out
and play—“oh, OK, yeah, he studied with, and he stud-
ied with, and he studied with,” and it all sounds like
the same automobile, you know. No, I don’t want to
turn into a factory. It shouldn’t be that way. . . . So don’t
just come in trying to play stuff on chords. You know—
here’s the next diminished lick. I don’t care! Who cares?
Everybody else is going to learn it anyway. That’s gonna
go around the school like a virus anyway, so every-
body’s going to play the same shit anyway. I don’t care,
and the CDs don’t care, because I’ll listen to it once and
then put it on the shelf and it will sit there for the next
fifty years. It doesn’t matter.
These words reveal the present, historically specific,
moment in jazz history within which such ambivalent eval-
uations are made and the semantic fields from which they
draw. The fingers become an icon of the problematically
mechanical because numerous students, inculcated within
the same institutions and with the same methods, play the
same patterns and licks. Within this specific historical mo-
ment, the fingers, which represent the body as a whole,
come to be negatively viewed as the locus of mechanical ac-
tion in the sense of action that standardizes and dehuman-
izes. The trope of mechanization plays a prominent role in
these descriptions of postsecondary jazz education because
of a concern about what might be called, drawing on Walter
Benjamin (2002), “the jazz musician in the age of his me-
chanical reproduction.” The fingers turn out to be an ob-
ject of concern but not necessarily because they are condi-
tioned to play “automatically.” Indeed, as I indicate above,
this is a condition of possibility for jazz improvisation itself,
and jazz educators stress time and again bodily perfected
action as a goal of practice. They are not shy about invok-
ing the trope of the machine to emphasize this point, as
567
American Ethnologist  Volume 37 Number 3 August 2010
when one teacher instructed his students to “program your
fingers—practice slowly,” thus treating the fingers as a kind
of computer software. Rather, it is the implication of such
automated playing when duplicated by masses of students
that is of concern to teachers.
The teacher in this case targets students’ habit of re-
lying on phrases and patterns—licks—in their improvisa-
tion. His reference to the “diminished lick” is not acciden-
tal. It invokes patterns that work over what are known as
diminished scales and chords. Students use these patterns
frequently because they can play them on many chords,
especially on dominant chords, which are ubiquitous in
jazz harmonic progressions.13 Learning such patterns al-
lows students to improvise “correctly” in different playing
situations. At the same time, however, they sound the same
as other students.14 The trope of the “virus” does not simply
express a negative evaluation of the lick. Indeed, as jazz ed-
ucators stress time and again, such patterns are the alpha-
bet of the language of jazz. Rather, it conveys jazz educators’
feelings about the mode and conditions of jazz training and
transmission in the present, namely, the sheer numbers of
students educated in the same manner, which is conducive
to “contagion” and, thus, standardization. Indeed, Com-
monwealth School is a case in point. Among the roughly
four thousand students who are enrolled in it each year,
hundreds focus on jazz training as a major, and many others
engage with jazz to a lesser extent. The school has played a
key role in the standardization of jazz training by educat-
ing thousands of players in the more than six decades of
its existence, developing a curriculum that has been imi-
tated by other jazz programs across the United States and
the world, initiating exchange arrangements with interna-
tional jazz programs, and producing and disseminating a
large number of textual artifacts in which various aspects
of jazz training are codified in print.
On a more general level, this ambivalence resonates
with a cultural anxiety about mass production and mechan-
ical reproduction, which have served as icons of both per-
fection and soullessness in U.S. history (Batchelor 1995;
Hounshell 1985).15 Indeed, jazz educators frequently revert
to culturally specific tropes of mechanization and mass pro-
duction to articulate such concerns. Thus, in the excerpt
above, the school becomes a car factory—a key metaphor
for standardization in U.S. culture that invokes Fordism. In-
deed, other teachers at Commonwealth School expressed
fears that reverberate with the theme of the factory and
the history of mass production. They often referred to the
school as “Chords ‘R Us,” adapting the name of the giant
toy retailer Toys ‘R Us and thus pointing to their unease
with the school’s role in encouraging and perpetuating re-
liance on mass-mediated codification and inculcation of
musical knowledge, which are held to be conducive to stan-
dardized playing.16 As one teacher bitterly told me, apro-
pos changes that he tried to introduce in the ways im-
568
provisation is taught in the school, “They don’t call us
the Chord Factory for nothing with all that Chord-Scale
here.”17
“Find your voice,” “and then you will work”:
The hybridity of Romantic sensibilities and the
marketplace
To fully appreciate the cultural specificity of the embodied
practical mastery that I discuss in this article, one needs to
look more closely at the cultural and social determinants
of jazz teachers’ ambivalence toward students’ bodily play-
ing habits. To begin with, jazz musicians understand jazz
improvisation as a cultural practice that is concerned with
more than bodily execution. As in other musical genres, the
practice is interrelated here with cultural notions of person-
hood that stipulate the characteristics of the person who is
good at such a practice (Bryant 2005; Duranti and Burrell
2004). Specifically, jazz educators frame jazz improvisation
in terms that resonate with Romantic notions of the creative
self.
Consider the title of the second page of the admissions
information brochure distributed to prospective students
by Midtown School: “Find your voice. Create your destiny in
jazz.” One of the brochures distributed to prospective stu-
dents by Commonwealth School announces on its cover,
“Let us discover you.” These two slogans emphasize, first,
the idea of discovery of something that preexists such dis-
covery, and second, the notion of something personal and
unique that pertains to the prospective student and that
is the subject of discovery (“your voice” and “you”). These
slogans mobilize Romantic notions that continue to in-
fluence Western ideas about art, creativity, and the indi-
vidual (Taylor 1989, 1992; Wittkower 1973). The Romantic
movement emerged against the background of neoclassi-
cal norms in the arts, especially literature, that emphasized
received tradition and rationality. It attempted to provide
an alternative to these notions by highlighting, instead, the
importance of the individual, imagination, and emotions.
More importantly, it posed the personal nature of each in-
dividual as a source for action, truth, and a way of life. As
Charles Taylor argues, “This notion of an inner voice or
impulse, the idea that we find the truth within us, and in
particular in our feelings—these were the crucial justifying
concepts of the Romantic rebellion in its various forms”
(1989:368–369; emphasis added).
Initially, these Romantic notions were concerned with
articulating the radical difference between human life and
other forms of life, in general. However, they soon shifted
to a focus on the differences between individual people. In
the same way that human life is radically different from all
other forms of life, each person has his or her own unique
nature that ought to prescribe how he or she should live his
or her life. These notions stressed that one’s inner voice and
 Modernity, creativity, and embodied practice
impulses are themselves one’s only way of accessing one’s
nature, and, thus, expressing them is the sole means of at-
taining self-understanding. Explicit in these ideas was a de-
mand to be in touch with one’s inner voice and a warning
against surrendering to external pressures and conforming
to outside models of being. This view entailed the rejec-
tion of outside structures and prearranged models for ac-
tion that could sever one’s contact with his or her inner
voice.
An example of the way in which jazz pedagogy res-
onates with Romantic notions of self-realization was given
in the commencement ceremony at Commonwealth School
in September 2006, when the president of the school ad-
dressed the students with the following words:
There are a lot of different talents here. You’re going
to hear a few people who are quite formidable players.
Try to let that inspire you and not deter you. And here’s
what I would say. If you were a young Thelonious Monk
sitting out in the audience, I would say to you: don’t
try to sound like Oscar Peterson. Sound like Thelonious
Monk. That’s what the world needs you to sound like.
And if you were a young Bob Dylan, I would say don’t
try to play like Eric Clapton. You be Bob Dylan. And if
you were a young Cassandra Wilson, I’d say don’t try to
be Sara Vaughan, you be Cassandra Wilson. And that’s
going to be hard to do because you’re going to hear
people who can really do things you’d like to do some-
day, and you’re going to want to imitate that but ulti-
mately you got to come back to who you are, what you
were put on earth to do, what you were meant to do
as a musician, as a human being. So we admitted you
to Commonwealth, not someone else. You’re the per-
son we want to have here—you’ve got something to say
that’s unique and special, and that’s what we want to
hear from you.
The notions of the existence of a unique voice, personality,
and talent; of the danger of imitation that is bound to cor-
rupt this voice; and of an almost moral and ethical respon-
sibility to be true to one’s voice are interrelated with each
other and resonate with Romantic notions of creativity.
To be sure, a number of scholars have documented an
emphasis on the search for a unique sound and style as a
key moral value in conceptions of personhood among dif-
ferent groups of jazz players (Berliner 1994; Monson 1996).
For example, Alessandro Duranti and Kenny Burrell (2004)
outline the traits of a specific notion of personhood that is
characterized by a search for a unique personality, framed
in terms of being “honest” with oneself and “humble” to-
ward other players. Such a search is realized in the individ-
ual and collective pursuit of new harmonic, melodic, and
rhythmic solutions to musical situations that arise in the
course of performance and in the pursuit of a unique sound.
Duranti and Burrell invoke Ralph Waldo Emerson’s ideals of
self-realization, improvement, and resistance to conformity
 American Ethnologist
to describe a notion of a self whose duty is not only to be
honest with itself but also to relate morally to the perform-
ing group through sensitive playing. In this respect, jazz
educators’ dissatisfaction with their students’ standardized
playing is no different from complaints about the stan-
dardization of various art forms due to bureaucratized and
market-driven art training (Adler 1979; Elkins 2001; Myers
1993).
Although these arguments are helpful in pointing to
the possibility of analyzing jazz performance in terms of
the moral and ethical parameters that might underlie it,
I would argue that the resistance to standardized playing
among the jazz educators I worked with results not from
an attempted escape from the marketplace that is informed
by Romantic notions of self-realization and autonomy but,
rather, from Romantic notions of self-realization and au-
tonomy that have been conflated with an orientation to
success in the marketplace. Such an orientation is based
on the understanding that, given the dwindling demand
for jazz and paucity of performance opportunities, on the
one hand, and the exponential increase in the number of
trained musicians that graduate from jazz programs, on the
other hand, standardized playing might decrease students’
chances of securing income through playing. Success in this
specific context means not only being a good and creative
player but also having work. These are two sides of the same
coin.18
Consider the following comments by a participant in
a recent JazzImprov conference panel, significantly titled
“Can you make a living in jazz?”19 The participant, a well-
known jazz musician, offered the following advice:
And once you realize—you look in the mirror, it’s a very
objective thing, you put the tape on of what you played
last night and you listen to yourself objectively. This is
not good and bad, this is not I feel good and bad, you
should be over that by now. And when you listen you
see what you do that is you. Now this is not something
you can do in ten seconds. But when you start looking
into yourself, realize who you are through other people,
through influences, through influences that you ab-
sorbed and transformed, and perhaps not transformed,
and you start to cut away the extra fat to get to the
real heart of the meat, you start to see, slowly—it takes
time—you start to see what it is that you do well. If
you develop what you do well—you will work. . . . My
point is that if you do something very well, if you are
in the top three or five, if you’re one of the great ones
in that particular thing, and [this thing] can be as spe-
cialized . . . if you’re the first, second, third, fourth—you
know, it’s a hard cold fact; if you’re among the top in
that particular thing in that area of the world, if you’re
that—you start to work.
Realizing “who you are” by “cutting away the extra fat to
get to the real heart of the meat” is advice that resonates
569
American Ethnologist  Volume 37 Number 3 August 2010
yet again with Romantic notions that emphasize individual
self-realization through the elimination of superfluous so-
cial layers. Yet these notions are reconfigured here to assert
that being in touch with what makes one unique is a means
of gaining a competitive edge in the marketplace. Unique-
ness is achieved by perfecting what one does well and out-
doing other players in that specialization.
Another way in which Romantic notions and the ideas
of the marketplace are conflated within jazz education
stresses stylistic or qualitative difference rather than superi-
ority in a specific musical dimension or quantitative excel-
lence. Consider the following excerpt, which is taken from a
clinic given by a guest artist at Commonwealth:
I typically record myself when I practice and I’ll listen
to these shards, these snippets, these germs of ideas
and use them as catalyst for compositions. We are ob-
ligated to be as honest with ourselves as possible—there
are areas that require daily maintenance. There are ar-
eas that require specific attention, not because there’s
necessarily a problem, but because there are points
that possibly could be polished and honed and these
could become the cornerstone of your concept, of your
approach. It could be your hook, so to speak. . . . So
they become our signature. There are some players that
have a very unusual vibrato, or tone—tonal color, or
tonal abnormality, so to speak. This could be some-
thing that can be used to our advantage. . . . I’m really
trying to encourage people to take note of personal dif-
ferences, your personal defects, your personal charac-
terizations that will set you off because . . . there are le-
gions of great players out there in the world on a global
level. And given that everybody has access to the same
information, we have to raise the bar here and give our-
selves the edge. . . . There are great players all over the
world having a lot of chops and technique and facil-
ity. . . . So right now we have to look into what’s gonna
be our hook. And everyone has a hook, everyone has
a hook. And if you’ll give yourselves the time and the
patience and discipline and honesty to evaluate what
you have, we can extract that and we can make that
something worthy of note. . . . And this is the thread of
our discussion—identifiable characteristics in our mu-
sic that will set us off. You know, in a police lineup of
saxophone players, I mean, blindfolded, can you tell
one guy from the next? Sonically?
The speaker’s emphasis on “personal defects,” that is, some
form of technical deficiency that results in identifiable mu-
sical output, signifies a different orientation to the cre-
ative voice, in which the pressure on product differentiation
equals in importance the specific quality of such differenti-
ation. In this example, it is not instrumental excellence that
matters, as in the previous speakers’ comments, but, rather,
musical peculiarity, a quality that is determined by differ-
570
ence from other musicians’ playing.20 This project of under-
standing “what you are” is framed as a moral obligation too,
an almost ethical imperative to cultivate a self whose ulti-
mate goal is gaining a competitive edge in the marketplace
against the background of the “legion of players” who have
access today to “the same information.” As another well-
known clinician put it in another context after making the
same points: “And then you will work.”21
I argue, then, that the jazz program has come up with
a hybridized conception of creative agency that stipulates
that, in the fierce competition of the jazz world, being
unique gives a musician the cutting edge that results in gigs.
In other words, the jazz program reconciles Romantic sensi-
bilities and the marketplace via a cotranslation between the
notion of the “unique self” and that of “product differenti-
ation.”22 This hybrid ideology is crucial for understanding
the cultural specificity of the embodied practical mastery
that I describe below.
Such a specific emphasis emerges also as a conse-
quence of many jazz programs’ neglect of ensemble and
group playing in favor of individual solo construction.
Group playing requires a high level of interdependency
among players in the real-time of improvisation (Monson
1996; for a phenomenological perspective that concerns
group playing in classical music, see Schutz 1977). The cod-
ification of jazz pedagogy has made it much easier for jazz
programs to focus on teaching solo construction in abstrac-
tion at the expense of group playing. Because of its context-
bound and pragmatic nature, improvised group playing has
been more resistant to codification. In addition, teaching
solo construction allows for processing more students. En-
semble classes typically mandate fewer students. Postsec-
ondary jazz education’s abstraction of jazz music from its
pragmatic abode is perhaps epitomized by the ubiquity of
play-along recordings, which allow students to practice solo
construction over a recorded rhythm section. These devices
have become synonymous with the rise and expansion of
postsecondary jazz education (Chinen 2007). These condi-
tions have amplified the concerns with the individual im-
provising voice and with the means that would assist it in
becoming unique.
The conflation of Romantic sensibilities and an orien-
tation to success in the marketplace is crucial to highlight
because it is the basis for a creative orientation that em-
phasizes not only a search after a personal voice, as previ-
ous interpretations of jazz improvisation have put it, but
also a pressure toward continuous differentiation and re-
generation in case that personal voice becomes identical
to the voices of other players. In other words, even if a
player thinks that he or she has found a personal improvis-
ing voice, that player will have to further differentiate him-
or herself from other players whenever the danger of stan-
dardization emerges.
 Modernity, creativity, and embodied practice
The challenge of open-ended embodied
practical mastery
Jazz educators’ mixed evaluations of the same bodily prac-
tices under this notion of embodied practical mastery prob-
lematize the widespread tendency within anthropologi-
cal studies of embodied practice to focus on those forms
that rely on or mandate the perfection of a normative
set of embodied features. Anthropologists have been more
likely to debate whether embodied practical mastery en-
tails “learned ignorance” (Bourdieu 1977:19; Mauss 1973) or
“learned awareness” (Bryant 2005; Mahmood 2005; Starrett
1995) than to explore the possibility of a cultural conception
of mastery that is, paradoxically, open-ended and, as I argue
below, radically generative.
Let me suggest why such an analytical choice has
been institutionalized within the anthropology of embod-
ied practice. Interestingly, a number of scholars have turned
to musical practice to theorize embodied practical mastery,
in general. However, they have drawn from a very specific
tradition of musical practice. Consider the following words,
written by the German ethnologist Richard Thurnwald in
his book Banaro Society, first published in 1916:
The institutions of the social organization dominate
the individual to such a degree that his actions be-
come almost automatic and are generally no more con-
sidered than is his gait or the fingers of a good piano
player. The automatization of our thinking and the pre-
arrangement of our personal behavior by formalities
saves [sic] energies and facilitates the conscious pro-
cess in the reciprocal relations. [Strathern 1996:12; em-
phasis added]
As Andrew J. Strathern argues, Thurnwald’s emphasis on the
unproblematic action of the individual’s body was shared by
many of his contemporaries in European ethnology, such as
Mauss and the Annales sociologists. What I note here is the
invocation of the piano player as an exemplar of embodied
practical mastery. Ninety years later, and from a perspective
that emphasizes the importance of awareness in embodied
practical mastery, Mahmood explains Michel Foucault’s no-
tion of “subjectivation” by bringing “the example of a virtu-
oso pianist who submits herself to the often painful regime
of disciplinary practice, as well as the hierarchical struc-
tures of apprenticeship, in order to acquire the ability—
the requisite agency—to play the instrument with mastery”
(2005:29). Now, arguably, both Thurnwald and Mahmood
have in mind the pianist who is trained in the classical
music tradition, whose mastery is evaluated in terms of
the degree to which he or she is able to execute a given,
usually textual-artifact mediated, piece of music. In other
words, this form of embodied practical mastery revolves
around a normative axis—a given repertoire and the ability
 American Ethnologist
to execute it with perfection according to certain criteria of
evaluation.
The case of the jazz musician is different in radical
ways. Jazz students do not have a normative axis in the form
of a given musical piece that they need to execute. Rather,
they need to come up with their own improvisations and
musical ideas. To be sure, this requires instrumental tech-
nique, and, furthermore, jazz improvisations are frequently
framed by sections of notated music that need to be exe-
cuted. In addition, as I explain above, improvisations are
evaluated in terms of their adherence to certain stylistic
conventions. In that respect, instrumental technique and
stylistic features do, indeed, serve as a type of normative
axis similar to the way they do in classical music. Yet, cru-
cially, equaling these features in importance is the require-
ment to develop improvisations that are highly distinct
from those of other musicians. This requirement involves
more than developing a personal style of embellishment
(Bryant 2005). As I show in the next section, if technical
mastery and the mastery of stylistic features are embodied,
then the problem of similarity between and standardization
of jazz musicians becomes the problem of embodied play-
ing habits that need to be constantly reconfigured and dis-
rupted, not only perfected, and this is a cultural notion of
embodied practical mastery that is radically different from
what anthropologists have come to expect.
The argument I advance here does not contrast the aes-
thetic body to the normative body. The normative body, as
the locus of practice that revolves around specific and de-
finable norms that ought to be perfected, might, and fre-
quently does, have aesthetic dimensions (Hirschkind 2006).
The converse is also true—aesthetic bodies might have
dominant normative dimensions, as the case of the classi-
cal pianist’s playing body makes clear. To give another ex-
ample, bodybuilding in the United States is experienced by
its practitioners in aesthetic terms, and yet it is organized
around the practice of perfecting the body in accordance
with very fixed norms that are definable in fine-grained, de-
tailed, and clear terms (Linder 2007). A more fruitful distinc-
tion, then, would be between different aesthetics that might
inform embodied practical mastery. The peculiarity of the
context I am discussing here results from its organization
around an aesthetics that requires people to differentiate
themselves from one another, a Romantic–modernist aes-
thetics that is also grounded in the economic logic of prod-
uct differentiation. Jazz students may share the same class-
room with one another, but in that classroom they are told
they need to reconfigure their embodied practical mastery
so they do not sound like one another. In the next section, I
describe the bodily practices through which such reconfig-
uration and differentiation are realized as part and parcel of
the embodied practical mastery of jazz improvisation in the
specific historical moment and setting of the present-day
United States.
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American Ethnologist  Volume 37 Number 3 August 2010
“Now you have to think simple!” The bodily
infrastructure of procedurally generated
creativity
Jazz educators express their concern about the implica-
tions of learned ignorance as it is taught and practiced
at Commonwealth School through an epistemological bi-
furcation. They anchor their ambivalence toward mass-
produced bodily playing habits in an epistemological ide-
ology that is based on the contrast between the ear and the
eye as representing distinct and unequal modes of knowl-
edge and agency. For example, in the midst of writing mu-
sical examples on the staved blackboard, which was already
filled with written notes, a teacher in an advanced course
addressed the students with the following words:
You should try to learn these tunes as much as you can
by ear. Try to learn something once a week, some kind
of a tune. You should learn a melody, something. Force
yourselves to memorize. Up here [points to his ears],
not on paper, because this was an ear music. You see,
what’s happening is that when you come into school it
becomes the other way around. It becomes this: your
eyes teach your hand what to play and then finally
your hands are teaching your ears. With these cats [the
legendary players] it was the other way around. They
heard the tune, they learned a lot of these tunes on the
gig, so their ears—it had to get into their ears before
they could teach their fingers. That’s the way it went.
So you want to try to get to that point where you can
hear—get it in your ear and then let your ears teach it
to your fingers, rather than looking at that paper, and,
you know, keep repeating it. You dig?
As scholars of jazz music have noted, notions of oral-
ity and literacy have been salient in the ideological self-
understandings of jazz players. Although, in practice, it is
impossible to define jazz as pertaining to either orality or
literacy—notions that have proven analytically problematic
when considered to be mutually exclusive (Collins and Blot
2003; Heath 1986)—some jazz players have considered lit-
eracy to be antithetical to jazz improvisation for different
reasons. They are convinced that orality actually defines
improvisation because of jazz’s relative independence from
the textual artifact and because of the reliance on the ear
as a mode of communication among players in the real-
time of improvisation (Berliner 1994), or they draw a pre-
sumed connection between orality and jazz music via the
latter’s African heritage (Brothers 1997). At times, the rejec-
tion of literacy is grounded in jazz players’ desire to draw
a distinction between jazz and classical music, in which
the textual artifact holds an important role—a distinction,
one must add, that had been eagerly cultivated by insti-
tutions of classical music (Levine 1989; Nettl 1995). Fre-
quently, though, jazz players have held shifting and con-
tradictory evaluations of the written score (Chevan 2002;
572
Duranti 2008; Prouty 2002), as when they have held it to be
a valuable means of studying classical music, for example,
or a marker of “high art” (Lopes 2002).
The ideological mobilization of the eye and the ear that
I am pointing to here—although still positing the ear as su-
perior to the eye—is grounded in the current, historically
specific moment. The teacher quoted above argues that the
recent expansion of postsecondary jazz programs repre-
sents a reversal of the epistemological hierarchy that un-
derlies great jazz. The introduction of jazz music into the
academic setting has made the eye ubiquitous as a mode
of accessing and producing musical knowledge, at the ex-
pense of the ear. The “eye” is a reference to the dependence
on textual artifacts as a means of disseminating standard-
ized knowledge within postsecondary jazz education. Stu-
dents learn to improvise by reading the formulae that teach-
ers write on the blackboard or from the hundreds of method
books that are available on the market. The problem, so
the teacher suggests, is that the eye is a mode of accessing
knowledge that is uncritical. It does not allow the player to
really assess how he or she sounds, both vis-à-vis and inde-
pendently of other players. The eye is conducive to the un-
critical incorporation of mass-mediated knowledge that re-
sults in increased standardization. By implication, only the
ear is capable of critically discerning how one plays. If jazz
students used their ears more often, they would not sound
like carbon copies of one another. Notice that the fingers
themselves, as indexes of bodily playing habits, are neutral
in terms of their value within this epistemological hierar-
chy. They are not sources of knowledge but only a means to
its execution. In principle, they can be conditioned by the
ear, as was the case with the great jazz masters. The prob-
lem is that, in the current historical moment, the fingers and
hands are conditioned by what the eye reads. The teacher’s
diatribe is a call for the restoration of the “old” epistemolog-
ical hierarchy, in which the ear is given its due place as the
source of true knowledge.23
Let me now turn to a detailed analysis of the ways in
which jazz educators actually try to restore the epistemo-
logical hierarchy that, in their opinion, is conducive to the
production of “great” jazz. In the middle of a course titled
“Improvisational Techniques,” one teacher tried to show
students how to build solos based on the repetition of a
limited number of simple melodic and rhythmic motifs. He
asked the students to come up with their own well-defined
motifs and develop them in the course of improvisation.
However, while playing over the harmonic progression of
the tune “Lady Bird,” the students had trouble coming up
with different motifs, especially in terms of rhythmic va-
riety. Each, in turn, tended to play successions of eighth
and sixteenth notes. The teacher stopped the playing a
number of times to scold students, saying, “You are play-
ing too complicated! Simplify it! . . . Simplify it!” Despite re-
peated attempts, the students continued to play the eighth
 Modernity, creativity, and embodied practice
and sixteenth notes. The following exchange then took
place:
Teacher: Try not to think complicated. You want to
think in rhythm. I am not even concerned with the
damn melody notes, I want you to think like drum-
mers, OK? [In an announcing voice] Guest drummer of
the day! [Pause. Teacher looks at the students. A guitar
player raises his hand.] Let’s go! You don’t have to play
any high hat notes [referring to the cymbal]. I just want
you to play the rhythm [on the snare drum]. [The guitar
player looks confused, but starts to adjust his guitar for
playing.] No, you are going to the drum set, man.
Student: Oh, the drum set?
T: Yeah, go to the drum set over there.
S: Oh. My God!
T: See that? [Laughter.] Alright, you don’t have to do
anything but tap the snare. [Student adjusts himself be-
hind the drums.]
T: Now you have to think simple!
S: [In disbelief] So I have to do what we were just doing?
T: Yeah! In time! In form! All you got to do is use one
hand. You don’t have to play all the drum set. Alright,
ready? OK, here we go: One, two, comp, and . . . [The
bass and piano players play with the guitar player, who
plays the drums.] Good, not bad. That’s it! [The teacher
turns to the students again while the guitar player
returns to his seat.] Guest drummers! Anybody else?
Guest drummers! You want to try that, man? [talking
to the vibraphone player, who agrees and then goes to
the drum set]. Alright, some more retrograde phrases.
Think in rhythm! OK, like I said, you don’t need a lot
of chops. All you need is to play with one hand, al-
right? Here we go. You look good behind that drum
set, man! [Laughter.] You are a drum star now. Alright,
ready? One, two, a-one, two, three, four. [The vibra-
phone player plays rhythm on the drum with the bass
and piano players.] Don’t get too complicated. . . . You
cats are trying to play all this shit on a new instrument!
No! Slow down. Less, less. I’m trying to make you mini-
malize here!
One of the frequent claims that teachers make con-
cerning students’ improvisation is that their solos are a
long succession of eighth or sixteenth notes. This is be-
cause, they say, students learn how to play by practicing
patterns and licks that they then apply to the harmonic
changes while making their point of reference the single
chord. Thus, when improvising on a harmonic progression,
students typically progress from one chord to the next, and
their improvisatory considerations are reduced to playing
the “correct” notes on each chord in turn. This, in itself,
teachers explain, is a result of jazz education’s reliance on
 American Ethnologist
chord-scale theory, a body of conceptual knowledge that
is supposed to aid students’ improvisation by spelling out
for them the appropriate scales that match different chords.
This theory was initially developed unsystematically by var-
ious musicians and educators in the jazz world as early as
the mid-1940s, and it then became codified with the insti-
tutionalization of jazz education. By virtue of their reliance
on such standardized knowledge as disseminated via text-
books, jazz programs played a major role in this processes
of codification.24 Because the point of reference becomes
the single chord and the scale that derives from it, students
tend to play as many patterns and notes as they can dur-
ing each chord’s length. Many of them consider it a mark of
excellence to come up with as many notes and patterns as
possible to fit each chord. This explains students’ tendency
to play eighth or sixteenth notes that bear no relation to
the tune’s melody or broader form but are solely tied to one
chord at a time within the tune’s harmonic progression. The
result is what some teachers refer to as “machine-gun play-
ing,” in which the body is conditioned to play rapidly, pat-
tern after pattern, in a standardized way—both in the sense
of being monotonous and in the sense of being similar to
other students’ improvisations.
Frustrated that the students continue to fill up their so-
los with too many notes and no distinguishable and mem-
orable rhythmic figures that can serve as developable mo-
tifs,25 the teacher in the above dialogue asks the guitar
player to sit behind the drums and to produce simple rhyth-
mic figures while the bass and piano players accompany
him. He assures him that he does not need to control the
whole drum set but, rather, hit only the snare drum with
one hand. A clue for the rationale behind this move lies in
two of the teacher’s phrases: “Now you have to think sim-
ple” and “you don’t need a lot of chops.” By asking the gui-
tar player to produce the rhythmic figures on an instrument
that is foreign to him, that is, a drum, the teacher achieves
two goals. First, he spares the student the need to think
about adjusting the rhythmic figures to the changing har-
monic context of the tune because the snare drum, unlike
the guitar, is not a pitch instrument. In this respect, this ac-
tion is about simplifying a task so that the student can focus
on only one of its elements, namely, rhythm. Greg Downey
(2008) describes a similar example in which capoeira teach-
ers reduce their students’ “degrees of freedom” in an effort
to minimize their opportunities to commit errors when they
learn a new complex movement.
However, in the case that I am discussing here, the
teacher’s request has an additional and much more impor-
tant goal. He asks the guitar player to produce the rhyth-
mic figures on the drums because it is a way of preventing
the guitar player from relying on the playing bodily habits
that account for his failure to produce anything other than
successions of eighth and sixteenth notes. As soon as the
student’s hands and fingers are removed from the guitar’s
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American Ethnologist  Volume 37 Number 3 August 2010
neck, on which they have been trained to function in a
certain way, he “has to think simple”—he does not have a
choice because he “doesn’t have the chops” on the drums.
Chops is a term jazz players use to denote, for the most part,
the physical aspects of playing technique. The guitar player
cannot fall back on his chops when he plays the drums be-
cause he does not have well-developed technique on this
instrument. His body is at a loss. Now he must actually
think about what he is playing. Under these conditions, the
teacher hopes that the student will be more likely to pro-
duce novel ideas, which is impossible as long as he relies on
the bodily playing habits that are the result of his training.
The intricacies of this process might be grasped by way
of a short excursus into phenomenology and its exploration
of the bodily infrastructure of lived experience, which, to-
gether with pragmatism, has revealed the contingent, unin-
tended, and emergent nature of action and the self, which
individuals normalize and unify ex post facto (Csordas 1994;
Dewey 2000; Joas 1993; Mead 1934; Merleau-Ponty 2002).
Maurice Merleau-Ponty, in Phenomenology of Perception
(2002), argued that, fundamentally, we humans are subjects
who are conscious of the world via our bodies. The body is
not an object in the world just like other objects. Rather, it
is the medium through which other objects exist for us. It
is “the unperceived term in the center of the world toward
which all objects turn their face” (Merleau-Ponty 2002:94).
Under normal conditions, it remains marginal to, that is,
presumed within, our perceptions. This unique positional-
ity of the body gives “consciousness” and “understanding”
new meanings in Merleau-Ponty’s schema, for conscious-
ness becomes consciousness of an object mediated by the
potentialities of the human body:
Consciousness is being-towards-the-thing through the
intermediary of the body. A movement is learned when
the body has understood it, that is, when it has incorpo-
rated it into its ‘world’, and to move one’s body is to aim
at things through it; it is to allow oneself to respond to
their call, which is made upon it independently of any
representation. Motility, then, is not, as it were, a hand-
maid of consciousness, transporting the body to that
point in space of which we have formed a representa-
tion beforehand. In order that we may be able to move
our body towards an object, the object must first exist
for it. [2002:159–160]
For Merleau-Ponty, then, understanding and intentional-
ity are embodied—they occur via the body. They entail a
“harmony between what we aim at and what is given, be-
tween the intention and the performance” (Merleau-Ponty
2002:167). In this anti-Cartesian, nonrepresentational, and
nondenotational but performative sense, consciousness “is
not I think, but I can” (Merleau-Ponty 2002:159).26
574
Merleau-Ponty’s observations are of little use in ex-
plaining why jazz students play in a standardized fashion.
Technically speaking, they are fully capable of playing in a
nonstandardized way. At stake is not the mastery of a com-
plex technical task that is foreign to their playing bodies.
The above dialogue, for example, is concerned with the task
of minimizing the number of notes students play. However,
Merleau-Ponty’s ideas can illuminate the corrective mea-
sures that jazz educators introduce as a way of mitigat-
ing standardized playing. For, if one’s consciousness of the
world is mediated by the potentialities of the body and its
habits, the act of reconfiguring the body changes its poten-
tialities and therefore one’s consciousness of the world. The
appropriation of new habits and fresh instruments, such as
learning to drive a car, and, by implication, the renuncia-
tion of use of such instruments and unlearning of habits,
changes human “existence” (Merlaeu-Ponty 2002:166). It di-
lates or contracts our being-in-the-world in the sense of the
body’s potentialities.27
Today’s jazz educators have a nuanced understanding
of this dynamic in that they realize the limited efficacy of
discursively trying to bring their students to play in a non-
standardized way because what is at issue is their bodily
playing habits (see Csordas 1990 on the nondiscursive el-
ement of embodiment). This is not to say that language
use in the course of socialization into jazz is of no efficacy
(Black 2008). Duranti, drawing on Edmund Husserl’s notion
of “intentional modifications,” that is, “shifts in our ways of
thinking of, feeling about, or coming into contact with the
same object” (2009:208), documents the ways in which jazz
educators use language to bring about such modifications
in their students’ consciousness, which ultimately involve
their embodied being. However, the intentional modifica-
tions that I describe are much more radical, in that jazz ed-
ucators enact changes in their students’ consciousness via
more direct modification, proceeding to the origo of their
students’ being-in-the-world: their actual bodies. They re-
configure students’ bodies so that what students have
been used to intending musically—because they can—
becomes impossible. The result is a stage in which students
must rearrange their “corporeal schema[ta]” (Merleau-
Ponty 2002:164), that is, a unified possession of the body
in which they know where each limb is and how it inter-
acts with other limbs and with the world as “an attitude
towards a certain existing or possible task” (Merleau-Ponty
2002:115). It is precisely in such a moment of rearrangement
of corporeal schemata that the creative space opens up and
students have the opportunity—they do not have a choice,
actually—to think of other modes of improvising that are
different from the standardized patterns they have been
trained in. Whereas Merleau-Ponty turned to amputees
and the phenomenon of phantom limbs to anchor his
“existential analysis” (2002:157), jazz educators orchestrate
 Modernity, creativity, and embodied practice
a kind of metaphoric amputation to produce existential
change.
This rationale organizes the excerpt with which I
opened the third section of this article, which explored jazz
educators’ ambivalence toward bodily playing habits. In
that excerpt, the teacher advises his students to try to play
only half notes. They will discover that they cannot play a
descent solo if they use only half notes. This means, so he
argues, that it is their fingers that actually “stir the shit”
rather than their ears because playing half notes actually
gives the player more time to think editorially, as it were,
and to decide what to play. The teacher’s instruction to play
only half notes is a way of neutralizing bodily playing habits
that are limited to producing eighth and sixteenth notes,
that is, “machine-gun playing.” Playing half notes neutral-
izes such habits, and students, thus, have to think, which in
this specific context means to use their ears. It is a way of
creating intentional modification through direct manipula-
tion of one’s body.
I have observed teachers use such tactics a number of
times. These attempts are adjusted to the particularities of
each instrument. A teacher who could not bring a piano
player to come up with innovative melodic ideas during
an ensemble class finally instructed him to improvise only
with the thumb and the little finger of his right hand. This
significantly limited the student’s habituated mode of play-
ing. It created more space in his playing and forced him to
think about every note that he played. Similarly, the teacher
who requested that students who were not drummers play
drums told me,
I used to do this with guitar players. I used to have them
play only on one string, solo only on one string. Things
like that. Or saxophone players—only solo with the left
hand or only solo with the lower three buttons. Things
like that. Just do something you never did before. Just
things like that. Limit yourself—and that was what it
was all about. I used to have these guitar players solo
only on one string, or playing with two fingers.
All of these tactics are based on the same principle of
defamiliarizing the physical aspect of playing such that the
“certainty of pre-prepared movements,” to invoke Mauss’s
discussion about “techniques of the body” again (1973:86),
becomes uncertain. In the economy of agency that involves
the eye, ear, and fingers, such an action neutralizes the fin-
gers as conditioned by the eye so that the ear can take
hold and guide them. It amounts to a kind of coup against
what jazz educators consider the tyranny of the eye within
postsecondary jazz education and a restoration of the ear’s
sovereignty. In this respect, such instances of reconfigura-
tion should not be thought of in terms of simply adding
skills to one’s improvisation tool kit. The generation of new
habits is achieved by bringing old habits into awareness via
 American Ethnologist
their disruption. Invoking the image of the boxer, which, in-
cidentally, Bourdieu (1977:11) mobilized, following George
H. Mead, to demonstrate his notion of practice as impro-
visation, I would argue that these instances are not about
a boxer who simply learns a new move but, rather, a boxer
who learns a new move by unlearning an old one.
Let me discuss a different version of the same princi-
ple that is mobilized by jazz teachers when they try to re-
configure their students’ playing bodies. A teacher in a per-
formance ear training class at Commonwealth School fre-
quently pulled the curtains over the windows at the begin-
ning of class and then turned off the lights. Only after these
preparations did he begin teaching, usually playing musi-
cal phrases and chords on the piano that the students had
to match on their own instruments. In an interview, he ex-
plained to me the rationale behind this mode of teaching:
You guys get that [referring to me as a trumpet player].
See, I find it’s different with people who produce the
sound. Like you guys, who have to make your own
sound, you have to hear it so your body—you become
part of that sound that you make. That happens less
with us [the teacher is a piano player], because we can
just press down a key and know that we will get the right
sound. We don’t actually have to hear it a lot. And I find
that any instrument where you can actually see the—
it’s laid out for you in that sort of way—that happens.
Whereas trombone—who knows what this [mimick-
ing a trombone player] is gonna do, but yet they do—
before you play you have to know what sound you’re
going to play. If you don’t hear the sound you’ll never
get the note, right? So what I always tell them [the stu-
dents] to do—one of the things that I learned about
was practicing in the dark for improvising. When I was
a kid I discovered it by accident that it became about
the sound, that it was less about what the keys were be-
cause I couldn’t see the keys. It worked great for me be-
cause I know now when I’m improvising, I’m really—
especially if I’m really feeling comfortable and I’m re-
ally in that zone—I never look at my hands. I’m just like
thinking of sound. It’s like composing and listening to
yourself and responding in the moment. So that’s one
of those things that I think—I like to see them get—
hearing an idea and kind of know where it is. You might
not be right every time, but the more you start to get
that sound of where your hand goes to where you think
that sound is—I think that’s the skill that—it takes a lot
of time, obviously.
The self-imposed darkness, then, is another means
of suppressing the embodied playing habits that are the
product of visually mediated musical training so as to al-
low for an aurally mediated musical production to take
place, which, according to the epistemological hierarchy,
is deemed to be more conducive to intentional and cre-
ative musicality. Here, again, the matter of concern is not
575
American Ethnologist  Volume 37 Number 3 August 2010
imperfect bodily mastery. Indeed, teachers realize that visu-
ally mediated musical training may result in flawless tech-
nique. Rather, the problem is absence of intentionality and
creative improvisation.
One teacher who deliberately avoided the use of tex-
tual artifacts in his class and, instead, insisted on teaching
the students “in the old style” by playing a tune’s melody
time and again until they could play it on their instruments,
explained to me the rationale behind his decision in these
words:
I think the benefit is that it’s a different side of the brain.
Learning by ear you’re learning on the abstract, mys-
tical, emotional part of the brain, and you don’t re-
ally see the notes on the paper. You don’t see the lines,
you don’t see the mathematics of it. Hopefully you’re
just hearing melodies which are abstract. . . . Because it’s
easy to read. You can learn how to read. Anyone can
learn how to read music. But whether you can hear it
or not is another question.
These words make it clear why the image of the classically
trained piano player, which a number of anthropologists
have mobilized as a model of embodied practical mastery, is
of little use for understanding the creative embodied prac-
tice of jazz music in this specific pedagogical context, and
why it is culturally specific and partial. The teacher puts a
lot of effort in dichotomizing practical mastery that is visu-
ally mediated from that which is aurally mediated. He as-
sociates the danger of mechanical playing with the former
form of music production by invoking such terms as mathe-
matics, analytical, and the lines (i.e., the stave). By contrast,
he uses the adjectives mystical and emotional to denote the
creative experience that is the added value of aurally me-
diated musical training and production within this specific
epistemological hierarchy. It is the restoration of the lat-
ter that is the key to overcoming mass-mediated embodied
playing habits and producing stylistic differentiation.
Notice, too, the way in which the teacher who com-
mented on the pedagogical value of darkness superimposes
this specific epistemological hierarchy on what I call “an in-
strumental hierarchy.” At the bottom of the instrumental hi-
erarchy are those instruments that allow for visually medi-
ated playing to a relatively great extent, as opposed to those
instruments in which the visual is of little use. The guitar
and the piano belong to the former, whereas the trombone
and the trumpet belong to the latter. The teacher explains
that the piano player has all the keys in front of him or her
and thus can produce sounds mechanically without nec-
essarily hearing the sounds prior to producing them. The
trumpet player, by contrast, has only three valves at his or
her disposal and thus must rely on subtle bodily actions
(pushing a specific piston, using a specific amount of air,
manipulating the embouchure in a certain way) that require
synchronization through inner hearing. Note, finally, that,
576
in the darkness, piano players and players of other “sus-
pect” instruments surely orient themselves on their instru-
ments by tactile and propriocentric means and not by re-
lying “purely” on their ears (a modality that probably does
not exist at all), yet such means of orientation are consid-
ered acceptable in this culture when they are conditioned
and guided by the ear.
I argue, then, that embodied practical mastery might
consist of techniques of generating temporary bodily habits
in addition to specific bodily practices that ought to be
honed and perfected as a normative axis by all who prac-
tice a given form. Although jazz educators inculcate their
students with the idiom of jazz, which, indeed, entails nor-
mative well-defined bodily practices, they also teach them
techniques of generating shifting bodily practices. The ma-
nipulation of the body during the attempted intentional
modification that is supposed to mitigate the threat of stan-
dardization is meant to be temporary. The student who
plays the piano is not supposed to continue to play indef-
initely only with his thumb and little finger. Rather, doing
so is a means of generating new musical ideas that ideally
will culminate in new bodily practices in the sense of the
embodied capacity and inclination to execute these ideas
in the real-time of improvisation. These newly incorporated
musical ideas are good as long as they do not become stan-
dardized and are not played by too many students. When
they do become standardized, the student ought to revert
again to some technique of generating new bodily practices
through reconfiguration of his or her playing body. In this
specific conception of an embodied practical mastery that
is characterized by the dialectic of learned ignorance and
learned awareness, the constant problematization of em-
bodied practical mastery is a condition of possibility for ac-
quiring such mastery.
Conclusion: Modern creativity, creative
modernity
Scholars have argued that institutionalized art education is
a contradiction in terms because creative thinking cannot
be cultivated within the institutional environment of mod-
ern schooling (Adler 1979; Elkins 2001). The view of West-
ern schooling as disenchanted, devoid of creativity, and
suitable merely for rote memorization and replication has
been given clear expression in a recent study of appren-
ticeship into bağlama, an improvised musical practice in
Turkey (Bryant 2005). Rebecca Bryant argues that in this
tradition of improvised music, “each player must find his
or her own style, his or her own manner of ornamenta-
tion. At the same time . . . players must be able to ‘hear’
folk music in a way that tells them what sounds ‘right’”
(2005:228). Within this tradition, the solution to this tension
comes in the form of exposure to as many folk songs as pos-
sible until one embodies and “empersons” the aesthetics
 Modernity, creativity, and embodied practice
within which a good improvisation is evaluated. That is, one
learns aesthetics within a process of learning to become a
certain person, which involves immersion in the art form
and the social context within which it is practiced. Bryant
adds, “Hence, the contradiction of trying to teach bağlama
in lessons modeled after what is considered to be ‘modern,’
that is, ‘Western’ music learning: Doing so would be very
much like teaching someone how to think by offering him
or her a set of instructions” (2005:228).
Bryant’s emphasis on the notion of “empersonment” of
a certain aesthetic tradition is an important point. However,
the ability of jazz educators to help students cope with the
threat of standardization produced by the mass-mediated
nature of jazz education problematizes her negative assess-
ment of modern schooling. Indeed, jazz educators are able
to do so precisely by inculcating their students with formal-
ized procedural means for opening up creative spaces in
their embodied playing habits within which they can think
creatively. As the teacher who orchestrated the “metaphor-
ical amputation” on his student put it, “Now you have to
think simple!” “Thinking simple” in that specific example
means thinking creatively and intentionally with one’s ears.
In pointing to the possibility of the procedural gen-
eration of creativity within the bureaucratic institutional
environment of the modern school, I am following re-
cent studies that have argued for the enchanted, affective,
and creative aspects of modernity and its institutions. As
William Mazzarella points out,
The just-so story we too often tell ourselves about the
origins of modernity takes disenchantment as its cen-
tral theme. In this denuded fairy-tale, affect is pro-
gressively evacuated from an increasingly rational-
ized bourgeois world. . . . The legitimacy of bourgeois
modernity seems here to depend upon processes of ab-
straction that are at once universalizing and vampiric.
The inevitable end point is Max Weber’s “iron cage,”
an arrogantly soulless bureaucratic “nullity” ruled by
“specialists without spirit, sensualists without heart.”
[2009:294]
A number of foundational scholars aside from Weber
have contributed to this narrative, among them, Jürgen
Habermas, through the notion of the centrality to moder-
nity of an increasingly rational public sphere, and Foucault,
via his description of a shift in the normative forms
of European sovereignty “from spectacular theatricality
to rationalized, affect-evacuated technicism” (Mazzarella
2009:295). Mazarella argues that modernity “is and has al-
ways been structurally affective” (2009:298) and that af-
fect is an inherent part of any social project—indeed, it
is a condition of possibility of such projects. In so argu-
ing, Mazzarella echoes Asad who, in his problematization of
the secularization thesis—so central to the idea of rational
modernity—pointed out that “the public sphere is not an
 American Ethnologist
empty space for carrying out debates. It is constituted by the
sensibilities—memories and aspirations, fears and hopes—
of speakers and listeners” (2003:185; see also Connolly 2002;
Schmitt 1985).
The view of the modern public sphere as never
truly disenchanted has informed a number of recent
important ethnographies of the affective and embodied
structural dimension of political action, such as Charles
Hirschkind’s (2006) study of cassette sermons in modern
Egypt. Hirschkind’s study is important for my discussion
here because he attempts to unearth the auditory dimen-
sion of modernity against the background of dominant oc-
cularcentric modernist narratives. As Hirschkind argues,
modernity has usually been defined and understood in
terms of “masculine spectatorial consciousness” (2006:13)
as the locus of critical and rational engagement with the
world. In this framework, the ear is considered to be an
unreliable source of knowledge and reason because it en-
tails proximity to and fusion with the object of knowledge
and, therefore, the absence of impartial objectivity and
critical distance. In addition, hearing is perceived to be a
passive act of perception that is conducive to rote mem-
orization, dogmatic replication, and manipulation by per-
suasion. Hirschkind theorizes the practice of listening to
cassette sermons as political through and through, argu-
ing that “any inquiry into the sensorium as historical arti-
fact must begin with the historically specific categories and
symbols that organize experience, that shape the percep-
tual skills by which culturally sanctioned modes of discrim-
ination are learned and practiced” (2006:29).
My discussion of the emphasis jazz educators put on
the ear as a preferable mode of knowledge production and
the means they come up with to help their students culti-
vate it should be considered an extension of the theoreti-
cal focus on the cultural patterning of the sensorium and
the place of audition within modernity. However, inasmuch
as my study is concerned with the cultivation of creativ-
ity within a modern organizational setting and by means
of formalized procedures, it provides a more radical exam-
ple of the conflation of affect or creativity and modernity.
Indeed, it is more in line with recent studies that have ar-
gued that, although modernity has always been enchanted
in one way or another, the affective investment of moder-
nity and its institutions at the present historical moment
seems to be intensifying in a very specific form. Against
the background of market deregulation, the privatization of
civic functions, and economic instability, increasing num-
bers of religious and ethnic movements have begun to op-
erate in modern organizational forms—structures that are
as integral to modernity’s identity as politics and the pub-
lic sphere are—that assume various civic responsibilities,
thereby confounding a number of dichotomies, such as the
sacred–profane (Comaroff 2008; Comaroff and Comaroff
2009). Such transformations, then, are not merely about
577
American Ethnologist  Volume 37 Number 3 August 2010
the appropriation of modern mass-mediated communica-
tion technologies for enchanted purposes, as is the case of
the cassette sermons that Hirschkind studies, but also the
adoption of modern institutionalized cognitive schemata
and organizational models of action (Powell and DiMaggio
1991). It is a more radical intertwining of modernity and cre-
ativity that seems to me to have significant implications.
In the case of postsecondary jazz education, I would ar-
gue that this entanglement concerns the paradox of the
bureaucratic mechanical reproduction of aura, to invoke
Benjamin again, or a modern form of “charismatic educa-
tion” as part of the routinization of charisma (Weber 1978b).
The metaphorical amputation that jazz educators orches-
trate on their students amounts to the production of auratic
uniqueness in formalized procedural means, the challenge
of negotiating the tension between formalization and cre-
ativity as invested in the body.
Let me conclude by adding that such a radical confla-
tion of the institutional bureaucratic–organizational infras-
tructure of modernity and creativity takes place in other
forms in the present historical moment: in attempts to in-
fuse the formalized bureaucratic organization with auratic
creativity. Scholars and practitioners of organizational re-
search have, in fact, recently turned to jazz music in an
attempt to find organizational models that would be bet-
ter suited to the fluctuating and changing conditions of
the postindustrial marketplace, which require an impro-
visatory approach to decision making. This is how one of
these scholars starts an article titled “Creativity and Impro-
visation in Jazz and Organizations: Implications for Organi-
zational Learning,” published in 1998 in the journal Orga-
nization Science, in a special issue titled “Jazz Improvisation
and Organizing”:
At the dawn of the twenty-first century, we are in the
midst of a revolution that has been called variously
the post-industrial society, the third wave, the infor-
mation revolution, and the post-capitalist society. We
do not yet perceive the entire scope of the transfor-
mation occurring, but we know that it is global, that
it is based on unprecedented access to information,
and that since more people have access to information
than ever before, that it is potentially a democratic rev-
olution. . . . Given the unprecedented scope of changes
that organizations face and the need for members at all
levels to be able to think, plan, innovate, and process
information, new models and metaphors are needed
for organizing. Drucker has suggested that the twenty-
first century leader will be like an orchestra conduc-
tor. However, an orchestral metaphor—connoting pre-
scripted musical scores, single conductor as leader—
is limited, given the ambiguity and high turbulence
that many managers experience. Weick has suggested
the jazz band as a prototype organization. This paper
follows Weick’s suggestion and explores the jazz band
578
and jazz improvising as an example of an organiza-
tion designed for maximizing learning and innovation.
[Barrett 1998:605]
Thus, whereas the jazz program is an example of the
bureaucratic cultivation of creativity, the turn to jazz in the
search for organizational models is an example of the cre-
ative cultivation of bureaucracy (see another example in
Sawyer 2007). The first is about what I would metaphori-
cally call “modern creativity,” and the second is about “cre-
ative modernity.” I argue that open-ended and regenerative
embodied practical mastery is a crucial modality in which
such instances of coproduction and cotranslation between
modernity and creativity take place in the present historical
moment and that scholars have much to gain from provid-
ing ethnographically based explorations of this modality.
Notes
Acknowledgments. I would like to thank Michael Silverstein, Jean
Comaroff, Ingrid Monson, and Karin Knorr Cetina for providing de-
tailed comments on earlier versions of this article. I owe special
thanks to John Kelly, who served as a discussant when I presented
this material at the Medicine, Body and Practice workshop at the
University of Chicago, and to workshop participants. I also thank
the reviewers for American Ethnologist for their useful comments
as well as Linda Forman for her careful editing of the text. Any re-
maining shortcomings, of course, are my own. This research was
supported by a University of Chicago Century Fellowship, a Dan
David Prize, the Josephine de Kármán Fellowship, and a Mellon
Foundation Dissertation Year Fellowship. Finally, this article would
not have been possible without the generosity of my interlocutors
in the field of American postsecondary jazz education.
1. This is a pseudonym. My larger research project is based on
fieldwork I conducted in this and an additional jazz school on the
East Coast, “Midtown School,” from July 2006 to June 2008.
2. According to Weber, routinization of charisma emerges from
“the desire to transform charisma and charismatic blessing from a
unique, transitory gift or grace of extraordinary times and persons
into a permanent possession of everyday life” (1978b:1121) and
may occur through “charismatic education” (Weber 1978b:1143–
1145). Weber argues that “the transition between charismatic and
rational specialized training is of course fluid,” although “genuine
charismatic education is the radical opposite of specialized profes-
sional training as it is espoused by bureaucracy” in that the latter
retains hardly any of “the original irrational means of charismatic
education” (1978b:1143–1144).
3. The term jazz music refers here to a fluctuating entity that is
constantly being negotiated by critics, music producers, musicians,
teachers, collectors, and other actors within the jazz art world.
Broadly defined, jazz music is a prototypical set of formal aspects
that include distinct patterns of improvisation, harmony, rhythm,
orchestration and voicing, execution (e.g., phrasing, timbre manip-
ulation) (Berliner 1994; Jackson 2002), and modes of interaction
between performers (Monson 1996), to name but a few factors. In
addition, it is informed by a canon of repertoire and great perform-
ers, a historical narrative, and various ideologies (DeVeaux 1991;
Genarri 1991) that pertain to the music’s “meaning” for experi-
enced and inexperienced listeners and for practitioners (Townsend
2000).
 Modernity, creativity, and embodied practice
4. That being said, the suspicion toward the music has persisted
in many music schools to the present day—see Nettl 1995 and
Kingsbury 1988.
5. Since the late 1950s, and increasingly so in the following
decades, jazz music has faced a growing competition from other
musical genres, such as rhythm and blues, country, and, especially,
rock music. This competition has decreased jazz’s popularity both
within and outside of African American communities in urban cen-
ters, which had been the main sources of innovation and new jazz
musicians up to that point in time (Chevigny 2005:51–52; Rosenthal
1992:170–173). At the same time, jazz started to be defined by new
styles, such as bebop, which were no longer geared toward dancing.
As a result, jazz became less palatable as a leisure activity. These
changes in taste and style were accompanied by increasing gen-
trification and rising costs of real estate in urban centers, which
rendered jazz clubs and venues financially nonviable (Chevigny
2005:52). Noise complaints also became a recurrent issue. Perfor-
mance venues became scarcer, and those that survived maintained
a policy of shorter playing hours. Whereas most of the major U.S.
cities once had thriving jazz scenes, such scenes were disappearing
at a growing rate from the 1950s on, except for a few enclaves, such
as in New York City.
6. The expansion of postsecondary jazz education has been dra-
matic. Whereas in 1972 there were only 15 U.S. institutions of
higher education offering degrees in music with a major or mi-
nor in jazz studies, by 1982 the number had grown to 72, by 1994
it had grown to 120 (Murphy 1994), and by 2006, according to
the JazzTimes Education Supplement, it had reached nearly 300.
The number of colleges offering individual jazz-related courses for
credit is far greater. In 2006, 37,866 music faculty members were
registered in the College Music Society Directory, of whom 8.5 per-
cent, or 2,635, were listed as Jazz Faculty.
7. The academization of jazz training has also contributed to
changes in the ethnic and socioeconomic composition of jazz
players. Jazz programs have trained increasing numbers of white,
middle-class players and thus changed a jazz scene that was once
predominated by, and whose role models were predominantly,
black players of working-class background. Postsecondary jazz ed-
ucation has also contributed to the globalization of jazz education.
Many of the jazz students in the major programs are of foreign na-
tionalities. In addition, U.S. jazz programs maintain different kinds
of cooperation agreements and exchange arrangements with for-
eign jazz programs.
8. This mode of learning has been part of the socialization into
jazz since the production of the first jazz records in the beginning
of the 20th century.
9. In this article I do not “normalize” jazz educators’ words into
“standard” English.
10. Recent studies in music cognition have problematized such
a neat division between body and intellect in music execution. See,
for example, Vijay 1998.
11. The term turn-around refers to conventional harmonic
progressions.
12. The length of a note can be divided in a number of ways. For
example, in Western music notation, notes may have the lengths
of whole, half, quarter, eighth, sixteenth, and so on, in which each
value is half of the preceding one. A half note is a relatively long
note.
13. A dominant chord is a chord that is typically based on
the fifth degree of the major scale. Intervals between adjacent
degrees in diminished scales alternate between half and whole
tones.
14. Jazz educators argue that standardization is evident also
within the frame of each student’s playing, in the sense that it is
 American Ethnologist
highly monotonous and lacking in variety. In this article, I do not
engage with this aspect.
15. For the most part, mass production has evoked fears and
anxieties that concern both the process of production and the ob-
jects produced. In an echo of Karl Marx’s criticism of industrial-
ization, mass production was attacked early on for dehumaniz-
ing workers, in that it subjected them to ever more specialized
tasks and machinery. Movies such as Charlie Chaplin’s Modern
Times (1936) addressed these fears (in Germany, it was Fritz Lang’s
Metropolis [1927]). Anxieties resulting from the influx of mechani-
cally mass-produced objects focused on a fear of loss of authentic-
ity, humaneness, and autonomy. Aldous Huxley, in his book Brave
New World (1932), portrayed a society pervaded by the ethos of
mass production, whose inhabitants are standardized, emotion-
less, loveless, and conformist. They subject themselves to scien-
tific principles of management and worship Henry Ford as God,
marking the sign T on their bodies during prayer to designate the
Ford Model T car. At the same time, however, mass production,
as mediated by the machine, was also heralded as a revolutionary
and extremely efficient mode of production that was capable of in-
creasing the quantity of useful things in the world, decreasing their
cost, and thus providing workers with greater buying power and
leisure.
16. Theodor Adorno’s (1982) critique of the fetish character of
music under the “culture industry” is perhaps the best-known anal-
ysis of the production and reception of music under increased stan-
dardization and commodification. Adorno argues that under the
culture industry, people experience constitutive changes in their
capacities for perceiving music—they become “regressive” listen-
ers. Indeed, Adorno devotes a large part of his critique of jazz in
this and other pieces (e.g., Adorno 1989) to a study of forms of jazz
as standardized commodity. Yet jazz stands in his writings as one
example of commodified music among others, including classical
music. His analysis of jazz lacks specificity. Furthermore, Adorno
relies heavily on recorded jazz as data. Much of his analysis is not
based on direct contact with the performance and production con-
texts of the music, which accounts for the multiple problems that
emerge when he does advance arguments that concern jazz as a
specific form. The merits of his analysis reside more in the general
outline of the commodification of culture under the culture indus-
try than in the case-specific examples he provides to illustrate his
points (see Jay 1996:185–193).
17. See subsequent discussion in the text for an explanation of
chord-scale theory.
18. Jazz cultures have always been gig-oriented cultures. Jazz
music has been embedded in the marketplace for most of its his-
tory. It is only recently, with the introduction of jazz into the aca-
demic and nonprofit sectors, that a subtle decoupling of jazz from
the market has been perceivable. Within the jazz programs that I
attended, the gig as a trope for success was ubiquitous. It emerged
in classes and informal conversations among students against the
background of an awareness of the paucity of paid performing op-
portunities. Indeed, some students joked that I, as a researcher, was
the only one who had managed to secure a gig from jazz music. This
suggests that instead of speaking about a single notion of person-
hood that predominates in a jazz culture, it would be more accu-
rate to argue that multiple notions of the jazz-improvising person
emerge from the different social configurations within which jazz
music is practiced and performed.
19. The conference was organized by the trade magazine JazzIm-
prov in New York City in October 2007.
20. That this notion of “product differentiation” resonates with
Romantic ideologies of creativity becomes clear when the panelist’s
remarks are compared with the opening lines of the Confessions by
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American Ethnologist  Volume 37 Number 3 August 2010
Jean-Jacques Rousseau, one of the main prophets of the Romantic
pursuit of the unique self:
I am resolved on an undertaking that has no model and will
have no imitator. I want to show my fellow-men a man in all
the truth of nature; and this man is to be myself. Myself alone.
I feel my heart and I know men. I am not made like any that
I have seen; I venture to believe that I am not made like any
that exist. If I am not more deserving, at least I am different.
[2000:5]
With these words, Rousseau, too, condones personal defects be-
cause of their potential to produce difference and because they are
what makes each person unique.
21. Pierre Bourdieu (1980, 1993) argues that the field of cultural
production and consumption is based on a somewhat similar logic
of differentiation. However, for Bourdieu, individuals’ capacities
for differentiating themselves from one another, whether as con-
sumers or producers, are severely limited by their position—in its
embodied form as habitus—within the social structure. Differenti-
ation in Bourdieu’s schema, then, is highly “impure” and overde-
termined. Although I do not wish to argue that the differentiation I
point to is entirely “pure,” I do argue that the processes I describe
are less overdetermined than cultural production and consump-
tion in Bourdieu’s schema.
22. The confluence of Romantic sensibilities and the market-
place has been documented elsewhere. For example, Colin Camp-
bell, in The Romantic Ethic and the Spirit of Modern Consumerism
(1987), has suggested that, in response to the erosion of meaning
due to the overproduction of standardized objects, the Romantic
self has become a key source of authenticity and meaning in mod-
ern consumer culture.
23. The historical specificity of these words should be empha-
sized, for there were moments in jazz history in which the ear was
the much-lamented source of standardization. During the 1940s
and 1950s, alto-saxophonist Charlie Parker’s recorded and live im-
provisations were avidly studied by other musicians in an effort
to learn the new style, known as bebop, that he and a coterie
of other musicians introduced into the jazz scene. Soon enough,
as a number of critics noted, “everyone” was imitating Parker.
Lennie Tristano, a pianist who played with Parker, was one of
the critics who attacked what he perceived as an already danger-
ous trend in 1951 when he stated, half-jokingly, that “if Charlie
Parker wanted to invoke plagiarism laws he could sue almost ev-
erybody who’s made a record in the last 10 years. If I were Bird, I’d
have all the best boppers in the country thrown into jail!” (Shim
2007:75).
24. Indeed, Commonwealth School has been one of the major
players in this process of codification. The large role that this body
of conceptual knowledge plays in the identity of the school is evi-
dent in its publication of books in which jazz theory and methods
are branded with the school’s name.
25. The notion of “developable motifs” pertains to jazz edu-
cators’ efforts to teach their students to think beyond the indi-
vidual chord and the scale that matches it in a harmonic pro-
gression and to consider, instead, the harmonic progression as a
unit across which a single musical figure can be developed, thus
resulting in “organically” organized improvisations. “Memorable
rhythmic figures” in this example pertain to figures that do not
consist of the standardized succession of eighth and sixteenth
notes.
26. David Sudnow (2001) explored this phenomenological basis
in his own process of learning to play the piano, in general, and jazz
improvisation, in particular.
580
27. Of course, Merleau-Ponty (2002:90–94) was aware of the pos-
sibility of persistence of body schemata despite such changes, as is
evident from his analysis of the phenomenon of phantom limbs.
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