Improviser ensemble. De l’interaction à l’écologie sonore

Abstract

This article focuses on improvisation as a musical practice, as observed during my ethnographic fieldwork with some famous musicians of international « jazz » and « improvised music » scenes. I will mainly consider improvisation as a collective activity, and will first analyze its mechanism in musical interaction properly, trying to evaluate how much it is used and how it can be articulated with other ways of playing (instructions, scores, etc). The analytical matrix thus elaborated, going back and forth between fieldwork details and general anthropology notions, will help me to consider subsequently two other kinds of improvised interactions : the ones that associate those very musicians and artists of other fields, the ones in which the same musicians deal with unstable characteristics of the environment which frames their activity on stage.

Keywords

• jazz
• improvised music
• interaction
• secondary orality
• ecology