Spur of the moment7/13/2023 ![]() We will look at the debate that has grown up, and we will argue that jazz improvisation is a focus case in which an entanglement between mindful and mindless processes is particularly clear. However, critical pressure has been put on this idea of skilled “ego-lessness” in fluent skilled activity from many quarters. As is well known, Dreyfus considered the skills of the expert practitioner to exemplify a form of fluent, embodied, “absorbed coping” where mindful attention to the prescriptive rules or canons governing that field had dropped away. For Dreyfus it was a specific case to illustrate his wider concerns with skilled activity in general. Dreyfus’s interest in Sudnow’s description of his journey from novice to expert improviser holds a particular interest in this regard. The second group of issues takes jazz piano as a special example of a particular core element of enactive theory as such: skilled proficiency. We argue that reflective study of jazz improvisation will provide insights into how we improvise our way through life and this in turn will provide a significant new perspective on embodied cognition and agency. We examine a variety of facets of improvisation, in the context of the thought of Dreyfus and of enactive approaches. Greater attention to it is, in our view, long overdue. ![]() Improvisation turns out to be a key phenomenon, ubiquitous in our lives. The first group of issues concerns how the experience of jazz sheds light on the role of improvisation generally-not just in music or art, but in our day to day activities. present in the moment) improviser enacting spontaneous expressions of herself, in music or in life. Our account thus supplants Dreyfus’s idea of the ego-less absorbed expert by that of a mindful (i.e. At the heart of an improviser’s expertise (and of day-to-day living), we propose, lies a form of “higher-level inner sense-making” that spontaneously creates novel forms of agentive goal-directedness in the moment. We see expert improvisers, in music and in life, as walking on a path of open-ended expansion of their mindful experiential relation with their doing. At the same time, however, we see improvisation also as suggesting an extension of enactivist theory. We argue that enactivist and 4E accounts provide a rich source of insights on improvisation that go beyond Dreyfus’s notion of skilled coping, for example, through the central enactivist notion of “sense-making”. We explore the activity of the jazz improviser against the theoretical backdrop of Dreyfus’s account of expertise as well as of enactivist and 4E accounts of cognition and action. In the current paper, we take the case of jazz improvisation as a rich model domain from which to explore the nature of improvisation and expertise more generally. It deserves, we suggest, to occupy a more central role in cognitive science.
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