Freedom Dreams Nested Within the Small Stories of Improvisational Jazz Artists

• In Event: Vice-Presidential Session. Consequential Futures: The Contested Pursuit of Truth in Freedom Dreaming

Abstract

Creative artists and musicians are important contributors to both envisioning elsewheres and enacting thriving societies; however, experts in creative fields rarely mention schools as sites for developing expertise (Csikszentmihalyi & Wolfe, 2014). This raises an important question: where and with whom do creative artists develop their skills and capabilities (i.e., expertise)? In addition, these tensions point to how the arts serve as a nexus for social, political, and ethical discourses, particularly in regard to education. Take for example the everyday experiences and performances of many artists whose music has been historically been tied to larger political and ethical movements. John Coltrane, Joy Harjo, Thelonious Monk, and Nina Simone are just four examples; there are many others who could also be named. As Kelley (2002) points out, dreams of freedom and liberation are deeply connected to artistic expression. Moreover, freedom dreams often germinate in collaborative and improvisational contexts.

In this paper we draw on data from a participatory design research project that invited a collective of five Chicago-based improvisational jazz artists and musicians that routinely perform together and apart in various combinations of ensembles to use the tools of research to engage in and reflect upon their routine activities. More specifically, these artists were invited to co-design (Ishimaru et al., 2018) activities that are consequential within their own discipline – conversational concerts and listening sessions. We examine transcripts from co-design meetings with these artists to answer the following questions: How does the act of co-designing generate conditions for social dreaming? What freedom dreams do these artists share within the co-design space?

Drawing on narrative inquiry we select small stories (Georgakopoulou, 2015) told by the artists in order to consider the organizational and pedagogical conditions that support freedom dreaming. We are finding that jazz musicians' small stories about the development of their capabilities as artists and the sources that feed their creative process within collaborations stretch across time and place. To this point, artists historicize (Gutiérrez & Vossoughi, 2010) their own embodied and geographical stories of artistic improvisation, creation, and expressions to both reflect on the past and dream of future possibilities for their disciplinary practices. In addition, artists’ relationships with teachers, including those who are present and those who have passed on, shape sociopolitical sensibilities, values, and beliefs about the world as it is and could be. Finally, during co-design sessions genealogy and kinship (Janke & Gilles, 2012) were evoked to create contexts for participants to mobilize research toward their own desired ends and dream of worlds where the arts are an integral aspect of education.

Authors

• Ananda M. Marin, University of California - Los Angeles
  Presenting Author

• Lindsay E. Lindberg, University of California - Los Angeles
  Presenting Author

• Brenda Y. Lopez, University of California - Los Angeles
  Presenting Author