Full Transcript for Improvisation: The Hidden Key to Creativity, Consciousness, and Connection. CHP Ep 1 with Ed Sarath

questions that I probably engage in these discussions on a weekly basis with my graduate students. In different fields, these experiences are possible in all fields, as we know. And I think certain fields are more conducive to more consistent experiences like this. think ⁓ music and sports are particularly good examples. Within music, think improvised music is particularly good too. The classical musicians will report something in this direction, pop musicians and all that. But you have jazz and aspects of jazz that really have a very high improvisatory content, and there's perhaps a correlation there. speaker-0: When you talk about improvisation as a little bit different to what most people would think of it as, I think the average person on the street sees improvisation in music as being composing music, but just really quickly doing it on the hoof. But you say that's not accurate, right? speaker-1: Well, I would say that as a very general definition, that's not that far off. So we could go with that. But there's a much bigger story to be told here. Improvisation is often defined, say, in musicology as kind of instantaneous composing, as a subspecies of composing. When my argument is that when you look more closely at the different processes, there are foundational distinctions. is a spontaneous, like we've been much more helpful to say improvisation is spontaneous creativity. In composition, it's creativity that happens in what you might call, we're getting a little technical here, a discontinuous timeframe, whereas where the composer may ⁓ work for an hour or something like that, and then go out and walk the dog or have a cup of tea and then come back and have another episode of composing and maybe a piece will be done. in a matter of weeks or something like that, ⁓ with that kind of process happening on a day-to-day basis, where the improvisation happens once. There's no stopping, there's no going back. The improvisation also, if you're improvising in a group, happening with the input of other musicians, the composer is, as usually, operating alone. So there's a number of criteria, I've got quite an elaborate, ⁓ you might call taxonomy of distinctions. And so, I came to a point where I realized we have to extricate improvisation from a status as a subspecies of composing. They're both marvelous ways of creating. ⁓ They overlap in certain ways, for sure. ⁓ But they also differ in foundational ways. And so you might say we could talk about it kind of in aesthetics of improvisation, where it's just there's something about, you might even say there's certain laws of nature that can be enlivened. in the spontaneity of moment-to-moment creation of that way. So I'm giving you like a snapshot of ⁓ what we need is a whole new musicology to, and I'm working on that, to a consciousness-based musicology to bring out these distinctions. to say, it could be helpful just to think of them as one is a sped-up version of the other. But just think, you know, I

think the time has come where we need a more nuanced account of ⁓ to really appreciate both and how they work together, improvising and composing. Most improvisers are composers. ⁓ Many composers are also improvisers, but the two activities really go together beautifully. Jazz is a great example. speaker-0: say a little bit more about that relationship with time because time is so central to music and you're talking about a different approach to time in terms of improvisation and composition. What else can be said then about the way that time is considered in various different approaches to music? speaker-1: Yeah, this is another great question. I have this framework called nonlinear time dynamics. This is what we do in the academy. come up with these fancy words, nonlinear time dynamics. The basic idea is that, and this actually links to consciousness in a very profound way, that improvising and composing are contrasting pathways to transcendence. ⁓ We're celebrating both processes, but we're also bringing out very deep-rooted distinctions and how consciousness through the two processes lead to transcendent experience. It's through the temporal, the time-based dimension. I'm not going to go too far into this right now, but basically composition happens through a more of a linear experience of time, which is very conducive to the architectural forms. that we find in, say, in classical music, it's not the only composed tradition. Whereas improvised time is more nonlinear, there's more of a heightened sense of the vocalized presence, and that opens up the consciousness in a very different way than the linear time of composition. A couple more things here that may be of interest regarding the relationship of improvising in transcendence and composing in transcendence. As I said, they're, according to my theory, are two contrasting modalities for transcendent experience. When we look at the literature, we look at the composer's experiences of those transcendent moments. They're very different than those of improvisers. This to me is really interesting because it confirms these distinctions, the theoretical distinctions. Composers tend to describe their peak moments in terms of the architectural forms of the compositions. For instance, when we look at the letters of Beethoven and Wagner and Mozart and Brahms and all that, the composers in the European tradition, we hear these descriptions of these moments when the entire, like either huge seconds of the piece or in some cases, entire pieces appear to them ⁓ in an instant, fully formed. Now, This may seem like the, which is a magnificent thing, this may seem like sort of the pinnacle of musical creative expression. The thing is when you look at improvisers accounts of peak experiences, it's much more geared toward the process. There's that wholeness that I was talking about. There was that, I'm thinking of a trombonist named Melba Liston, she put it. We were all. as if we were all one mind, we would breathe together, we would swell together. There's a oneness with the audience, as if the audience is part of the ensemble, there's a deep connection to the, you might even say the laws of nature that are lively at that, in the given performance hall, very dramatic things in that direction. And this is why it's really important to be able to extricate improvisation from classification as a ⁓ an instantaneous form of composing. It's its own thing. And the way I put it is that, because musicians and listeners too, they want to put something on top. And what I'm trying to do is celebrate two very different things that work together beautifully. to put it in more ⁓ realistic terms, if an improviser could would conceive of the entire improvisation at once in an ensemble of five other people, that would be not a very good improvisation because the beauty of it, the power, the spiritual essence of it is in the unfolding, in the union of the creative processes and the consciousnesses of the individuals on a moment-to-moment basis. That's the aesthetic. At the same time, ⁓ could say that the composer, if somebody measured the value of a composition by the connection between the composer and the listeners at the time of the composing process, ⁓ it probably would not be very fruitful because the composers usually hold up in a studio and there are no people listening to it at the time. ⁓ people creating at the time. So there's ⁓ two very different models of, like I said, aesthetic paradigms that have really blossomed, I would say, certainly by the late 20th century, mid-20th century, and that are working together in a fabulous way. And I would just add one more thing here for people who are Maharishi Vedic science aficionados in my model. ⁓ in this nonlinear time dynamics, one of the essential points is that improvisation moves from an object referral to a self-referral modality in a very different way than composition moves from an object referral to a self-referral modality. So both of them culminate and have the capacity to invoke that self-referral transcendent experience, but there are different pathways to that. And so that's just a little theoretical tidbit for there's probably a few people in the audience that might want to learn more about that and you can read my books. speaker-0: I would strongly recommend reading Ed's books. When you were talking earlier about the quote about linking with the audience and feeling at one with the audience and of course feeling at one with your fellow musicians, so there's really an element of collective consciousness when we're talking about improvisation, right? speaker-1: Absolutely. It's huge. We know, those of us involved in ⁓ even meditating with a few other people, feel often a deeper experience. And of course, those of us who, I was in India a few years ago with 10,000 people. ⁓ is, that principle is well known in the TM community and elsewhere actually. Everywhere I look, people are talking about ⁓

collective consciousness in different spiritual circles. And the improvisatory manifestation is just another version of it. It's now creativity is happening collectively, but you still have that intersubjective consciousness that's being enlivened. In this case, not through silence, but through very deep immersion in creativity that's happening collectively. speaker-0: You said everyone's talking about collective consciousness. Let's get into that. Why? speaker-1: I think there's a need of the time to recognize that the human experience is far more vast and interrelated, ⁓ not only across cultures, across individuals, across cultures, across the cosmic regions, than we're typically brought up and educated to think about, and that there are re-amplifications of that. The question is... ⁓ Can we harness the transformative potential of collective consciousness? I think this is really surfacing. I'm involved in contemporary consciousness conversations, Institute of Noetic Sciences. I'm the vice president of the Society for Consciousness Studies, Society for Scientific Exploration. There's all these groups that are dealing with consciousness from different... from through the lens of science, but also the lens of different spiritual traditions. And I love being part of that. And also integral theory. So at an integral conference a couple of years ago in Denver, all the keynote speakers were talking about collective consciousness as kind of like a new wave. I mean, obviously it's an ancient wave, but a new wave in terms of the... current consciousness discourse. And they're taking it, and it's not just a matter of, you know, because you can think about collective consciousness as kind of an emergent property of kind of like a field of consciousness. I like that very much, that is enlivened when people come together, so it's kind of emerging. ⁓ But, you know, of course we know when Maharshi talks about this, it goes way beyond an emergent property is actually a primordial aspect of the cosmos that we're connected to inherently. And so I'm very gratified and inspired to hear like the speakers from these different traditions talking about the universal, the cosmic ⁓ origins of this collectivity. It's actually amazing. speaker-0: And it's getting an increasing amount of interest from science as well. And this is fascinating to me. It's a, it's a big part of what we do here at Maharishi international university. It's what we sort of talk about on this podcast and that relationship between science and spirituality. You might say it's something that you talk about a lot. talk about a. a science spirituality synthesis, which I think many people would agree is necessary. And you talk about jazz as an artistic agent to lead or to help bring about this synthesis between science and spirituality. How does that work? speaker-1: So this ⁓ is a great conversation. I think it's important, but let me say this first. pockets of science are opening up to the collective.

There's still a lot of resistance to the idea of consciousness as anything beyond, say the neurophysiology. although there's definitely a movement away from, and I'm talking about the mainstream academy when people... the science community are dealing with consciousness, there's definitely a retreat from strict reductionism where basically consciousness is kind of explained away. The reductionists will say that consciousness doesn't really exist, it's basically just neurons interacting and firing in certain ways. So there's movement away from that. still strong pockets of that, let's not kid ourselves. Probably the dominant thrust in contemporary consciousness circles in the sciences is through some kind of emergentism or epiphenomenalism where consciousness is regarded as… ⁓ It's still rooted in the physical. Okay, we took some kind of physicalist or materialist ⁓ paradigm. And by the way, Rajaram in his book Consciousness is All There Is goes really amazingly into this in his first few chapters. But it's still in terms of physically transcendent and definitely non-locals, intersubjective collective ⁓ dimensions of consciousness, much of science is not going to go that far. So it's important to realize that. But still, in principle, this idea of spirituality-science nexus is happening. It's got to happen. To me, it's one of most exciting things of our time. It is like the narrative of our times. And so many things are connected to it. mean, you look at the cultural political divides of our country, and I have, you know, this would be maybe another symposium, but it's not a podcast, at least a series of symposia. A lot of this is rooted in science-spirituality division. And as I put it, both of those areas have been hijacked by kinds of extremisms. Now, we're well aware of religious extremism on one hand, and that's kind of hijacked a lot of conservative genuine, you know, we need robust conservatism and robust liberalism among other perspectives. Religious fundamentalism is a form of extremism. Less known is what's sometimes called scientific extremism. And that's hijacked kind of the scientific end of the equation in order to bring these together to get the synthesis. We need ⁓ to address the two kinds of extremism. speaker-0: What does scientific extremism look like? speaker-1: I just mentioned it, a primary example a second ago is reducing experience, reducing consciousness to the neurophysiology. Which is not to say that they're not connected, of course they're connected. And it's not to say that there's not a place for, and I know MIU has been a leader in this, studying neurophysiological correlates to conscious experience all the way up through the higher stages of consciousness. Absolutely. But to take the next step, which is a radical leap of logic to reduce the experience to the neurophysiology is a huge, it's really a catastrophe in terms of both understanding what the experience is and its broader re-applications. also, I mean, there's so many dimensions that are disastrous. And definitely, the cultural polarization is... It's definitely part of that. speaker-0: It makes me think of that saying in science that science progresses one funeral at a time and that people don't change their mind because they are given new evidence and science doesn't change its mind because it responds to new evidence. Science changes because the people who hold the old views die off and a new generation of scientists comes along who are less tethered. less bound to the old ways of thinking. I wonder if there's a way of sort of jumpstarting this science spirituality synthesis without waiting for the funerals. speaker-1: Yeah. Well, you know, that was, you know, that was Max Planck, you know, the, probably the founder of the quantum revolution who said that. He also said, ⁓ you know, a number of the quantum pioneers, they were very interested in Vedanta, Niels Bohr, Heisenberg, Schrodinger. I mean, they, and they were, they went seriously into the spiritual dimensions of Vedanta because of the parallels. that we're becoming evident between that and sort of the new physics, you might say. And it's funny how that's lost in the academy that the academy of course will have people dealing with the quantum dimension. In fact, I was at a talk just a couple of years ago where the guest speaker who actually is also very deep into jazz was drawing a connection I knew from his writing that the physics Vedanta connection was a really good part of his thinking. But in his talk here, I brought my improvisation class to the talk too, I noticed he stopped short of that realm. So I stood up there in the question and answer and I asked him about it. I realized that as soon as the words came out of my mouth that he realized that he had a kind of draw some boundaries in terms of how far he would go into anything that resembled mysticism or anything like that. So it's very serious thing, but it's so interesting. And yes, ⁓ how can we circumvent this pattern before the funerals? And this is where jazz comes in in a way that, for one thing, we have the same tensions in jazz. between sort of arch conservatives and progressives. The arch conservatives are trying to preserve jazz. And of course we have it in classical music and probably even in a bigger way. You probably have it all musical traditions. this is not just a problem with science. We love science. And we love the biggest picture for science. But science is very prominent in terms of the consciousness revolution, in terms of opening up new pathways. But in jazz, know, so in jazz, have these tensions between the conservatives who want to keep jazz the way it was, and are arguing for pure jazz, just like, you know, scientists are arguing for integrity of science. When actually, if they actually look deeper into that, they realize science is a, you know, I'm thinking of Thomas Kuhn's book, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions. ⁓ It's a legacy of revolution.

Jazz is a legacy of revolution. European classical music is a legacy of revolution. And you have people that will fight to the death in the name of preservation of that given tradition, whether science or music or art could be anything. In the name of tradition, when actually a deeper reading of tradition reveals a different story. So the one thing, so going back to, I'm really happy that you picked out this one nugget, I consider it a nugget, in terms of jazz bridging the science and the spiritual. I'm going to say that spiritual art and science, this integral theory, ⁓ it's also Rishi Devata Chandas. Spirituality, art and science, subject, process, object, all those three things. Jazz is a really powerful vehicle because you've got the improvisatory, which would be the Devata thrust. And by the way, linking back to your question about why is the interest in collective consciousness so prominent now, and to me it's the rise of the Devata impulse on a cosmic scale. speaker-0: Just say what we mean by the David Tyin speaker-1: Okay, so it's the process dimension. And so the process dimension would have that intersubjective aspect, the field aspect of consciousness. In jazz, in the musical world, jazz is like devata on just magnified fears. And another part of the devata function is the uniting of the different, in the case of jazz, just uniting of musical traditions, West and East, global. And of course, the improvisatory core of the traditions is something that music schools have a hard time with that. But it's like one of the most glaring aspects and exciting aspects of musical world around us is the improvisatory thread that connects those traditions. And again, ⁓ European classical musician tradition is a tradition of improvisers. Clarice Schumann and Franz Liszt and Chopin and Beethoven. Beethoven is sometimes thought to be like, you know, we don't know because we're not there, but we weren't there, but is often thought to be potentially a greater improviser than a composer even. ⁓ But you go to the music schools and that are teaching the, you know, they're teaching the the chundas value, and I say this place for all, the objective value, the works, the composed works, and they're not teaching the creative processes. So it's very exciting time. The jazz is a real unified force across disciplines. And one of the most exciting things of my work is actually speaking about this in interdisciplinary, or you might say transdisciplinary kind of formats, whether it's Harvard Business School. There was a period they would have me back for several years in a row talking to the MBA students in business negotiation at Harvard about improvisation. there's a wonderful group in the Boston area called the Program on Negotiation, colleagues in business and law, sociology, psychology, all city planning, architecture. And they meet once a month. And they had me, I was actually visiting Harvard at the time and they had me come in the evening, talk about improvisation. was like an amazing discussion on improvisation too. I returned and I told my dean at the University of Michigan, said, I was just involved in the discussion at Harvard and at the Program on Negotiation, Tufts, MIT. Those institutions are part of the network. a discussion, improvisation that dwarfed anything that's happening in most schools of music. And so it's very inspiring to me. speaker-0: So why were people outside of the music world so fascinated and so interested in this idea of improvisation? What does it give to them? What does it provide for them? speaker-1: You know, I've thought a lot about this question because I've seen it, you know, when I speak to medical schools, like one of one of the, like the vice president for medical research here, Tim Johnson, he just passed away, had me come in to his OBGYN class once, which met at 730 in the morning. So the residents would be doing their work all night. And before they went home, they came to this class. A number of the physicians teaching at the university, it's a huge hospital. They came, it was really amazing. I couldn't believe the questions they were asking me. Tim said, and it's the same thing. He said, we don't want you to come in and talk about OBGYN, right? We you to come in as a jazz and improvising musician, talk about what you do. Of course, I frame my work in broad terms that can really be applied. I don't dumb it down. I'm always impressed by even the degree of hectic fluency that is exhibited by people across the sciences and humanities. It's really incredibly inspiring. ⁓ And, you know, so I've experienced this many times. to go to your question, where does that come from? I think it speaks a lot to just the integrity of practitioners who begin to think beyond the boundaries of their discipline. And once we even go a little bit beyond the boundaries of our discipline, we realize we're hitting, and so this is where, you know, we hear this term transdisciplinary as kind of the next step beyond multi or interdisciplinarity. And there's a whole, then a whole new realm when we actually look at transdisciplinarity from the standpoint of consciousness, that opens up like a new realm within the transdisciplinary. ⁓ But even the initial steps in that direction, we realized that there's a lot more that connects our fields than divides our fields. It was a very strong statement because when you think about, you know, I was like, ⁓ the ⁓ drawing parallels to, let's just say, improvisation in business, improvisation in mathematics, improvisation in theoretical physics, improvisation in architecture. Then you go into improvisation in literature, improvisation in sports. And I do some work with athletes and when we're with hockey players, go, all right, we're talking about jazz on ice. ⁓ And then I say, we could also be talking about hockey and sound, and that's not bad. Hockey and sound's not bad. but you cannot beat jazz on ice. And sports like basketball and soccer,

ice hockey, mean, those are football to a fair degree. Those are incredibly improvisatory. ⁓ And so we could use those fields as kind of more dramatic examples of principles that will be also found in, I mean, to go to something like mathematics. Somebody said, well, wait a minute. ⁓ But there's going to be intense improvisation happening in the mathematical process. speaker-0: Say a little more about the sport angle. Why is improvisation so relevant to sport? speaker-1: Well, if you take something like, I used to play ice hockey, so we use that. A way of going into this is that, okay, look at jazz. If you took a snippet of five seconds of jazz, even an ensemble of say three players, the jazz trio, you're gonna come up with a kind of density of information exchange. That's just off the scale. Of course, when we're listening or even playing, there's only so much we can process, but on some level, our consciousness is processing incredibly infinite detail, and there's a lot of it. You take a sport like ice hockey, and in given five seconds, it's the same thing. The sheer extent of information flow, and I always make a joke, if your team is ahead by one goal, and there's five seconds left on the clock, and the face-off is just right outside the goal, ⁓ you're going to be terrified because so much can happen in that five seconds. That five seconds is going to be in eternity in terms of the sheer kind of giving back information exchange. So that's one angle in, and of course, we can process information from different levels of consciousness. If we're operating from a highly conditioned ⁓ mode of functioning, so it's the object referral, we're to be prone to just invoking conditioned responses. And we're not going to be in the moment to nearly the same degree. Now we're going back to nonlinear time dynamics as applied to ice hockey. ⁓ But we can engage in this process from a higher state of consciousness. where the awareness, the mind-body coordination, the awareness is capable of much finer degrees of information processing and exchange. We can make more informed and more spontaneous, more sensitive, improvisatory behaviors. We can invoke these behaviors. So within a given timeframe as measured by the clock, ⁓ there could be more creative decision-making moments that happen. in the practitioner, the artist-athlete, scientist, mathematician who's able to actually invoke the higher level, I call it ⁓ cognitive event cycle frequency. Again, these fancy words for things that, ⁓ I think this is a place for this kind of analysis. ⁓ The practitioner can invoke that kind of functioning is going to prevail over the practitioner that is less capable thereof. So sports conditions is really demanding because everyone likes sports and it's kind of lively framework to kind of look through those things. And so what we're doing is we're penetrating from the turbulence of the ocean to deeper levels. So then we can be, we've been getting in touch with the depths of the

ocean, but still engaged in the surface. And it's through the information, it's through those finer, those more refined and differentiated, you might say, textures of information engagement were not... See, when our awareness is object referral as opposed to self-referral, we're bound by the relationships between events. So it's more frozen. We're not able to adapt as frequently. start to dissolve this and that's where the expanded consciousness comes in. It's where the meditation practices come in because they cultivate those capacities. Then the improvising is assuming a ⁓ new level of functioning. then we open up and this is how the service… Because people are thinking back to the question that came up a second ago. Thinking about meditation happens in silence, what could that have to do with transcendence and activity? but it's the very capacity of consciousness to dissolve those surface boundaries and fathom greater volumes of information and flow, and then create those openings to deeper, more expansive experience. speaker-0: It almost seems like life is improvisation. And that just reminds me of something I read about the notion of creativity in Japan. And this particular article was saying it's slightly different than the notion of creativity that we have in the West, where we tend to think of creativity as originality, as uniqueness, if you like. And this writer was saying that in Japan, the concept of creativity is more about meeting the moment in an appropriate way, because life throws us new situations the entire time. And creativity then is about responding to the world in the most beneficial way for the time. And that just totally links to our conversation about improvisation, does it not? speaker-1: I love this. I was on a doctoral dissertation committee with the student who actually was in New Zealand. I was an external reviewer. One of the things was it was about this in this area. One of the things that crystallized in my mind at that time was that there are basically three major problems in creativity research. One is that the very thing that If something is to be regarded as creative, it's going to be original. And not necessarily. If somebody is creative, it is something that is profound in that given moment. And something could be profoundly creative that has actually been, has happened many, many, many times, even in the work of that particular practitioner. A second thing is the creative process has to give rise to a product. If there's no product, It's not creative. And the thing is, definitely with an improvisatory paradigm, ⁓ the process, it's the process that is ⁓ just a huge part of it. And that's not to say that an improvisatory structure could not be of ⁓ profound beauty, safe, recorded it, reviewed it, or something in retrospect. And then the third one was ⁓ that in the literature, a lot of times it's... bound by or constrained by this idea that something is either creative or something is not creative. Whereas I think much more productive is to actually look at it and visually, everybody has infinite creative potential. And the question is, can we expand our creativity? And of course we can. But it's very interesting. It's very easy, from a consciousness-based perspective, mean, everything is changed on its head. And I love that, as you put it, the Japanese view of creativity is much more inclusive. It's much deeper. speaker-0: There's another side to improvisation, which I came across and started thinking about in a quote from a guy called Del Close, who was a guru in the Chicago, I think improv theater or improv comedy field. And he said that your job as an improviser is not to come up with brilliant lines. Your job as an improviser is to cover up. Or to make your partner's bad line seems good. It's almost like a moral element. speaker-1: I love that. It's interesting because improvised comedy, improvised theater has a lot to offer. From time to time, would tell my students that we have a lot to learn from improvisers and other traditions. And Delcroix, it's like Second City, isn't it? Yeah. it's all in line with it. The deeper our functioning from a standpoint of consciousness, the more profound the improvisation is going to be. And it sort of takes it beyond ⁓ typical markers of profundity, might say. ⁓ But something, just linking back to what we were talking about a second ago, something could be extremely profound in terms of its function. At the time it's articulated, that when you analyze it, say in retrospect, it could be very nondescript. It's like, well, what is that about that? And on the service value, it may be very difficult to actually, I think about this in terms of some of my favorite composers, compositional moments, improvisational moments, even. We stop, we go back and we look at the score. We just listen to that one thing in isolation. Okay, what is that about? Whether it's, know, Chick Corea or Beethoven or Alice Coltrane, what did they do? And you look at that thing. It's like when you're experiencing as part of the flow, it's like life altering. And when you go back and isolate it, there's nothing about it that virtually anybody couldn't do. I mean, so to speak, you know, there's very little about it. It's like, you know, it's like, ⁓ you know, like one of my first year students could have done that. ⁓ so it really does speak to this. It's kind of like that process. that engagement in the moment, the engagement, the enlightenment of the collective. And one of the things I'm very excited about too is that, because you asked this, Joe, you asked this earlier on, does this experience happen with all improvisations? And of course it doesn't. It'll happen to different degrees. the greater the improviser, we might say, the more consistent, that's certainly it'll be. ⁓ But another thing is that, and you find this in sports a lot, where a given player, the game is going on, the performance is going on, and it's kind of in a nothing much

to say about it. It's competent, you might say, ⁓ but it's not peak. And then somebody will do something. can actually just light it up. And again, like in sports, it's very dramatic. Sometimes it's even not even the most ethical kind of thing. You get the teammates stirred up. I'm thinking, I was talking a little bit in this way. But definitely in jazz, mean, somebody will just, all of a sudden, they're able to break through their own creativity and consciousness. And it just is contagious. It just lights up. The players can feel it. The audience can feel it. In some ways, that's even more exceptional, extraordinary than the performance that's really on from the very beginning. Well, that's pretty good too. speaker-0: That is such a great point. I'm wondering if we can expand on that somehow. ⁓ speaker-1: I have a thought here and we're improvising. speaker-0: the speaker-1: A lot of the reason that I believe improvisation is a topic that has been so far grossly understood. mean, everyone has a general idea and that's fine of what it is. But in terms of the deeper dimensions, one of the reasons it's really important to go deep into it is that there is this notion that something that's improvised, particularly in music, This is very prominent in music. Something is improvised cannot be as good as something that has been created over a long period of time. And some compositions are created over weeks, if not months. And it's just, it's like an extremely limiting way of thinking about music and to think about the creative process. Because the thing is there's tremendous value potentially in something just by virtue of. And Marvichi always talked about spontaneity. It's a huge important part of his thinking. It just happens now. And beauty of it, we have access to these two modes of expression, both beautiful. An undergrad professor who said, we're involved in a discussion along these lines. And he said, something improvised can never be as good as something composed. It's kind of a reiteration of something I said, guess, a little bit ago. And that really stuck with me. And I didn't have a rejoinder, you might say. I didn't have response to that. But I tucked it away. I used tell my students to get good at this because I knew that this was going to be pivotal in my life and my work. This was going to be pivotal coming up with a response to that question. And now that the response has fairly well developed, I think it's really clear that Here's a very useful way to put it. There is something that can only happen through improvisation. There's something else that can only happen through composition. That's why we have to differentiate these processes and then we can see how they work together. There are things that composition can do that improvisation can't do. There are things that improvisation could do. composition cannot do. speaker-0: So much of what we're talking about here relates to the relationship of structure and flow. And you have a quote

in your book from Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, and it says, it is difficult to see how a person can be creative without being both traditional and conservative and rebellious and iconoclastic. And usually we think people are one or the other. But you're saying it's a marriage of both, right? speaker-1: I would, yeah, I like that by Jigset Mihai too. I forgot about that. And ⁓ yeah, because these things are polarized and generally the structure typically correlated with the conservative and the flow with the progressive and all that. And we need to definitely need both. there's, you and once that's a huge stride forward in terms of aesthetics, pedagogy. analysis, really grasping the whole thing. ⁓ And then we run into still a lot of confusion about that because kind of a subset of the, once we realize that these things work together, a subset which can be extremely limiting is that, well, first we deal with the structure and then we deal with the flow. In fact, I was just involved in a conversation with some jazz people. just a few days ago at breakfast. And there's another very good jazz program in the state of Michigan. We're competitive, I won't name the institution, but we compete with them with sports and everything like that, and also music. And their program is really, it's very good. ⁓ And it's more structure oriented. And then the idea is that, if you're gonna do exploratory work, This more of the flow-reign, flow-realm. That'll come later. First you deal with structure. And the thing is, this still locks us in. It's like both from really, I mean, cause really this is the cosmos. is structure and flow are inherent in the fabric of the cosmos. Vila. mean, Lila is very primordial, okay, but there are structural dimensions of Lila of play. And there are play dimensions of structure. so, ⁓ it comes to, I'm gonna say like operationalizing this into like a viable program of development. ⁓ think, we see signs of this happening all over. ⁓ Like some of my students, they'll take my improvisation class and they're teaching lessons to little kids. They'll be doing things with improvisation with little kids. The common wisdom is like, well, firstly, especially if you're learning an instrument, mean, you've definitely got to learn structure. You've got to learn the fingering, how to make the embouchure and all that kind of stuff. you can have like relatively early on, you can have improvisatory. games, exercises that actually enhance those structure-oriented activities. That's a huge one. That's a tough one for the Academy to get over because the Academy is always going to err in the direction of structure. speaker-0: Talk a little more about that because you are the founder of the Alliance for the Transformation of Musical Academe. What is the nature of that transformation that you're looking for? speaker-1: Yeah, it's pretty much about what this discussion is about, Atma. And pretty good acronym too, right? The Cosmic Self, the Transcend itself. ⁓ To restore, there's several things here, to restore creativity, particularly improvisatory creativity, to its rightful place at the heart of musical engagement. And it's been marginalized. Two, there's a really... prominent source of improvisatory creativity right out of doorstep. That's in the American musical tradition, at the heart of which is Black American music. A big part of Atma is to champion Black American music. That's not an expense of any other tradition. actually is rendering band, Black American music, and particularly jazz, a gateway. what I call a transcultural gateway that opens up within the American musical scene through the lens of black musical engagement and wisdom, which is infinite ⁓ to European music, indigenous music, folk music traditions, global traditions. It's a all-inclusive, infinite possibilities kind of paradigm. And then the third part of Atma, and this is where jazz, particularly within the black music, Pantheon, you might say, excels, is the consciousness spirituality dimension as directly linked to the improvisatory. And again, I come back to Alice Coltrane, Turiya Sanghitananda, as just a wonderful exemplar of these principles. speaker-0: Say a little more about why Black American music has such a prominent role in your thinking about some of the things we've been talking about. speaker-1: Yeah, and this brings up the absolute necessity to move beyond the labels. So we're talking about, you know, spirituality and science. These are words. These are labels that have been assigned words. And we're talking about reality that's transcendent of language. And so the same thing with, we're talking about the training preparation of today's musicians in America. What we need to look at is ways of musical engagement, of creating a musical being, a musical knowing, wisdom. So we take away, we're taking away the labels of like conventional, you can say European music, African-American, African, indigenous music, these are all labels. We have to put those aside and ask, what do today's musicians need? Today's musicians need deep creative foundations which means improvisation. In other words, creativity. They need consciousness, spirituality foundations. And then there's a whole host of other things that actually could be built upon those foundations. And then we ask as a secondary question, And what are the primary sources of those abilities? And so I have this whole thing, all roads lead to jazz or all roads lead to black music, either one. In terms of preparation of contemporary musicians, all roads lead to black music. by the time the first paragraph, no, by the time the first sentence is finished about what I call the school of music of the future. I teach a graduate summer with that title and it's a chapter in one of my books. As soon as the sickness is finished, if you haven't talked about jazz and black music, you're off track. You're off track. So, and of course there's a social justice, racial justice component of

this, is as the last couple of years, you know, the political climate has made it very difficult to have this kind of conversation, but that'll come back because basically, you know, In the moment after the George Floyd murder, this is not that long ago, it's like six coming up on six or seven years ago. In the moment after that, the wake of that murder, there was a conversation that went beyond partisan lines. Conservative, liberal, Democrat, Republican, there was a conversation, race that our country was having ⁓ that we had not had in a long time. And I'm in conversation with a lot of people of color just to check myself. on this very point. And it was overwhelmingly confirmed, least in my experience, it wasn't that long ago. was a kind of conversation, like some doors were open, some really deep terrain. And I think that's going to come back. speaker-0: In terms of music though, why do old roads lead to black music? speaker-1: because it's the most robust epistemological source for the skills that musicians need today. speaker-0: Say more about that. speaker-1: And when I say skills, I'm talking about not only like in music, generally speaking, when we step back and we look at the trajectories of the leading musicians, the innovators, and this probably, this can go back centuries even, but certainly in our time, we're talking about a very global kind of musical landscape. There's a musical mother tongue. That's one of the musicians will have often creative musicians will have their hands on lot of different kinds of influences, right? but almost always it'll be a mother tongue, a primary source. And the second part of this, that primary source will rise to the forefront when it contains the tools for broader navigation. So with black American music, you have the improvisatory skills. There's a dimension we haven't talked about yet. You have the rhythmic skills. So we look at the connecting threads between, there's two connecting threads between music. We talked about one, the improvisatory and connected across the musical genres in terms of global navigation, at least from the point of departure of the West. Improvisation along the process realm, rhythm, and particularly rhythm that derives from black African drumming traditions. So this thing that ⁓ a theorist has coined, black Atlantic rhythm. It's like a huge wave in the musical ocean, informally. So you would know this from your background in pop music. Informally, musicians will say like time fields, grooves. Okay, those are informal terms, but the thing is when you start to study the ⁓ depths, particularly in consciousness, of what happened, like the relationship of groove-oriented music and consciousness. ⁓ my gosh. You know, have something virtually almost as powerful as the improvisation consciousness, like, because there's like a ⁓ massive transcendent function in the embodied musical engagement with these groove-oriented kinds of music, which call for very different kinds of pedagogy, but ⁓ they are as rigorous. Like to master black and black, like the rhythm is as rigorous as anything found in the European tradition or other traditions. speaker-0: Is this what you mean by an afrological approach to music? speaker-1: It's yeah, and I didn't I didn't coin that term. That's from George Lewis. But ⁓ yeah, absolutely. speaker-0: What is that? speaker-1: So George is a major scholar and an incredible artist that he wrote an essay in the mid 90s called, Um, improvised music since 1950, Colin, Urological and Afrological Perspectives. And so what he did is within the, within the Urological, he positioned John Cage as kind of a major innovator and say, you know, 20th century innovation in music. And then the Afrological Charlie Parker. So Charlie Parker was like the, you know, the icon for the bebop wave. And his basic argument though is that there's two major improvisatory waves that are linked to two major cultural waves. And, but he took it a step further, which I really appreciated, is that, okay, on one hand they've come together, so happens in music. Knowledge systems, as I put it, knowledge systems collide. It happens in spiritual life, it happens in artistic life, it happens in scientific life. Knowledge systems collide. So in the musical world, you had the collision of these two major waves. ⁓ But then he took the, the next step was that. the confluence owes way more to the Afrological than people give it credit to. I think that's a very important part. What I've tried to do is actually give more shape to that thinking by taking it into the realm of epistemology and recognizing that when you have an aesthetic, kind of like an epistemological aesthetic paradigm, we find in Black music, You have the tools for synthesis, or we might say syncretism, a kind of evolutionary melding that does not dilute the integrity of the respective waves, but celebrates the results of what happens when they come together. But you know, it's like, to put it more in simple terms, like in any field, you have landmarks. You have a morass of information and data that is so easy to get swallowed up by. Okay, this is like the dilemma of our life, right? Contemporary life, a morass of data. Oh my gosh, it's becoming worse every day. In this generation of students, I mean, they're hurting. Mental health, we know that. They are hurting, and that's a big part of it. All right, so that's part of reality. You have a mass of information, but then, And this is where the Academy could do a much better job. then you have landmarks that jut up above the sea of data. And we have to know what those landmarks are. So in terms of contemporary musical navigation, do we, how do creative musicians chart creativity, creatively rich, spiritually rich musical pathways? they're navigating via the landmarks. So Black American music is a huge landmark and it contains two constituent landmarks, the improvisatory along the creativity, actually three, The improvisatory

within the creativity line, that's a process within the creativity line, making some links here. The rhythmic, which is a structural dimension of the creativity line. And then within the consciousness line, the meditative. We have precedent for that in black music. It's a major, major landmark. It needs to be positioned as recognized as such. speaker-0: You mentioned the contemporary situation and students today, and I want to bring this back to modern pop. And if you listen to the Spotify top 30, say you will hear a lot of songs where music isn't even being played at all. It's being programmed. Sure, you'll have a singer. But the rest of the sounds, nobody's playing an instrument. It's sequences. It's programmed and not played. And when you're talking about improvisation and playing music, which your life has been both as a performer of music, as a teacher of music, as a writer about these things, I'm just wondering what that means. speaker-1: Well, this is a great question. It's becoming more more pressing. ⁓ It's related to the AI question. Of course, every field is dealing with that. And to what degree can AI actually replicate knowledge? To what degree can AI replicate consciousness even? Is AI capable of spiritual experience? I these are extreme versions of the same question. Is something being sacrificed when we have ultra-programmed music and all that? My feeling is generally, ⁓ stopping short of the really big questions right now, generally speaking, this is all part of the evolutionary flow. Technology has enabled something to happen. But my feeling is that this is the angle I usually take with this and how I link it to improvisation and collective consciousness becomes very important here. That the more things become mechanized, more people are becoming disconnected from subtle realms, you might say subtle laws of nature that come through in the life performance. And my feeling is that people are actually feeling a loss on some level, in that there's increasing awareness of there's something missing. And I'm not casting judgment. think there's a place for everything. like a very highly programmed, they could be a place for that. It's not particularly my interest, I'm trying to bring out a certain thing and everyone's going to have their kind of interests. for me, ⁓ there's something that can happen in improvisatory that directly lights up the data top level. a given time and place. And everyone's consciousness is open to that. And the more we're denied that, the more our lives become mechanized and become disconnected from nature and the natural world. Same thing with music. We're building up, we're creating a vacuum in a way. And I was just telling my improvisers the other day, because we have a joke, that a lot of time, you can completely improvise music. It can be challenging for the listener. It could also be incredibly magical. But there times when there are actually more musicians on stage than there are in the audience. So I tell them, be ready for a time when this shift happens. And I approach this from a consciousness base per second. When this shift happens, we're going to be seeing enormous audiences and opportunities for improvising musicians to go really, really deep. And because of going deep into the music from the spiritual consciousness base, perspective. And you can still have instances of highly programmed uses of technology and all that within that. We can have all these things. But I see the narrative flipped, where the basis, ⁓ we see kind of a reclaiming of the basis of our musical identities. It's an amazing time to be a musician. Challenging, but really exciting. And also a listener. speaker-0: Could AI ever swing? speaker-1: probably already has. ⁓ I don't keep up nearly as as I can, you you can't help but hear things here and there. ⁓ So I would say this, definitely already it's been programmed to replicate to a reasonable degree the surface features of how we would define swing. On a feeling level, I'm not saying that it's replicating the actual feeling, experience, the deeper dimensions of it. And I don't know if it will ever do that. speaker-0: Ed Sarath, it has been fascinating to talk to you. Thanks so much. speaker-1: My pleasure.