Disturbing Jazz Compositional Canons through a Transdisciplinary Improvisational Approach

Abstract

In October of 2024, Oded Ben-Horin (of Western Norway University of Applied Science) and myself experimented with a transdisciplinary and improvisatory approach towards research and education within jazz at the VOW Erasmus+ international training conference. We set out to interrogate modes of valorisation within the jazz sphere, especially given the lack of women composers represented in canonical jazz works. Our format challenged pervasive mechanisms by which particular artists come to occupy spaces of agency and prestige within the jazz world. Given the renewed interest in music’s immediate and material impact upon the body and its perseverance, and especially upon the performatively gendered bodies of jazz’s performance spaces, our presentation adopted a transdisciplinary (TD) approach and redirected this materiality to challenge notions of ownership through creative musical improvisation across musical genres and disciplines. This framework provided space for experimentation with our conscious, in-the-moment understanding of intra-action of disciplines within the Voices of Women project, enabling us to approach the material and discursive in an integral way. Specifically, we aimed to intervene in the existing barriers to canonical status, by drawing attention to under-recognized female jazz agents, especially Lil Hardin Armstrong, and the materials that evidence her many innovations, while also engaging dynamically with the material traces of her career. In our presentation, we gained new insights through musicological and historical analysis of new materials, which we then integrated into our improvisations, sometimes with each other and sometimes in dialogue with Hardin Armstrong’s media. Our TD, improvisatory approach aimed to integrate study and practice of little referenced materials of jazz women to allow various forms of knowledge to collide; through this, we simultaneously argued that, and practiced how, knowledge and insight do not pre-exist those collisions across disciplines. Thus, we exemplify a real-time performative approach to scientific practices which acknowledge that knowing necessarily occurs through the body and by means of direct material engagement with the world, past and present.