How does Integral Jazz Studies differ from New Jazz Studies, or for that matter Conventional Jazz Studies?
An integral perspective reveals clear and fundamental distinctions.
Whereas conventional Jazz Studies is largely oriented toward third-person, discipline-specific engagement in the training of aspiring jazz musicians, New Jazz Studies, as just examined, concerns itself with application of principles of jazz creativity to creativity across fields.
Integral Jazz Studies, exemplifying the transcend-and-include prem-ise axiomatic of the integral vision, unites the terrain of Conventional Jazz Studies, Conventional Jazz Research, and New Jazz Studies within an expanded approach to musical and extramusical inquiry. Rigorous third-person, discipline-specific grounding coexists with robust second-person creative, and thus intra- and interdisciplinary exploration and deep first-person penetration to the innermost dimensions of consciousness yield both an entirely new template for jazz artistry and creativity-conscious-ness development across fields. Reflecting both horizontal and vertical expansion, the improvisatory foundations of creative development and meditation-based foundations of consciousness development emerge as central facets not only of musical study but overall educational and social practice. Resulting from the jazz-driven shift from confining to self-transcending engagement in a field, where it is realized not as an exterior destination but gateway to inner-outer synthesis, wide-ranging benefits—
including inventiveness, interactivity, and individuation in the creativity realm; and self-realization, diversity awareness, and critical inquiry in that of consciousness—are enjoyed by practitioners in highly disparate disciplines. The divisiveness and alienation that is all too prevalent in contemporary life is replaced by holistic and unifying understanding. Eth-nic, racial, gender, creativity, cultural, ideological, and spiritual differences can begin to be healed. This promotes newfound openness to innovative, consciousness-based approaches to dealing with environmental and other challenges.
Integral Jazz Studies also brings into the educational environment a new kind of inquiry into the Big Questions that is framed through the lens of a nondual understanding of consciousness. This yields openings for scientific, spiritual, philosophical, and other communities to come together and find common ground that otherwise remains elusive. Key is the interplay of parts-to-whole and whole-to-parts approaches. Con-ventional educational discourse is not only driven but also parts-confined, with weak capacities for self-transcending expansion that ultimately fathoms wholeness. In other words, the academic enterprise is largely preoccupied with exterior detail, which is where disciplines appear most different from one another, and thus incapable of connecting with the underlying terrain of consciousness in which all domains unite and originate. If musical style categories such as jazz and classical are riddled by ideological conflict, one can see the intractability of the spirituality-science divide. And because whole-to-parts inquiry, that which begins with this expansive understanding of consciousness and then probes its various differentiated manifestations, is virtually nonexistent, capacities for bridging these divides are further undermined.
Here the importance of the Association for Advancement of Creative Musicians, considered briefly earlier, is noteworthy as among the closest embodiments of the integral jazz paradigm, even if the organization went to great lengths to avoid confinement to that or any label. Launched in the 1960s as a quest to galvanize and empower African American musi-cians in the face of a host of economic, racial, and artistic challenges, the AACM sustained performance programs, a school, and community outreach initiatives in the realization of its vision. Several facets of the vision are distinctly integral. One is its rich process spectrum, spanning a robust exploratory spectrum that placed from the outset great emphasis on originality, grounded in wide-ranging approaches to improvisation and composition, which was complemented by rigorous emulative grounding (which may arguably have been somewhat subordinate in the case of some members in the organization’s early years). The AACM charter also ceded
an important place for spiritual practice and development. Hence, what I have been calling the integral parts-to-whole/whole-to-parts interplay has been well centered.46
Because the musical thrust of the AACM, further embodying inte-gral premises, transcended category, the AACM also carefully considered its use of terminology. Although jazz was clearly an important aspect of the movement, the term, if used at all, was situated within the broader expanse of Great Black Music as the overarching gateway through which its musicians accessed the broader landscape. “We play the blues, we play jazz, rock, Spanish music, gypsy, African, classical music, contemporary European music, voodoo . . . everything that you’ll want,” states AACM cofounder Muhal Richard Abrams. Because in the final analysis, “it’s
‘music’ that we play: we create sound, period.”47
While the impact of the AACM on the evolution of jazz and twenti-eth-century music was highly significant, it is interesting to note, although not surprising, that neither its music or vision has been even marginally embraced in conventional jazz education.
Integral Jazz Studies is directly inspired by the AACM’s self-tran-scending vision that sought connections not only with the broader musi-cal landscape but the overall knowledge base. Accordingly, Integral Jazz Studies not only embodies parts-to-whole and whole-to-parts engagement and inquiry through its musical creative spectrum, it yields a framework for dialogue that can inspire this across fields. Chapter 10 will examine how the parts-to-whole/whole-to-parts interplay provides a basis for an entirely new vision for a twenty-first-century school of music, where the very diversity of scope Abrams notes provides a radically new vision for the field. As already intimated, and to be explored more deeply in the coming chapters, African American music offers extraordinary process and structural tools that promote this kind of exploration and synthesis.
Chapter 11 will take a further step and consider how the parts-to-whole/
whole-to-parts interplay of the integral jazz paradigm can impact change in the broader educational arena. Considered there is a three-tiered model for an entirely new educational conversation that I call Deep Inquiry.
A brief overview of the terrain broached in a Deep Inquiry Group, or DIG, is in order: Three corresponding questions guide the progression of thinking and dialogue along the three tiers, which, consistent with the integral perspective, span the first-second-third-person, or modern, postmodern, and integral spectrum. From a conventional, modernist van-tage point, where education is presently lodged, the prevailing question is largely discipline-specific: What is the nature of knowledge within a given field? From a postmodern vantage point, the question expands to
encompass the entire educational spectrum: What does it mean to be an educated individual in the twenty-first century?
From an integral perspective, the breadth and inclusivity expands further and shifts its locus from outer to inner: What is the nature of the human being who is being educated?
It is here that the integral framework brings to the conversation the nondual relationship between human consciousness and cosmic whole-ness, rendering education a site where the biggest questions imaginable about Ultimate Reality and Meaning are no longer relegated to the periph-ery but placed front and center, providing a backdrop for the extraordi-nary kind of inquiry and experience that is necessary for creativity and consciousness development. It is not just that the integral academy will encourage talk about the Big Questions, it will also deploy diverse episte-mologies that enable an expanded realm of direct experience. Improvisa-tion and creativity across fields, meditaImprovisa-tion, including collective practice to enliven group dynamics of consciousness, a variety of other psychoso-matic methodologies, along with conventional analytical engagement will constitute a vastly overhauled academic environment.
When John Coltrane declared his commitment to awaken in humani-ty a reverence for “the divine in a musical language that transcends words,”48 he laid groundwork for this transdisciplinary, nondual perspective through his intra- and interdisciplinary innovations whereby the boundaries of jazz expanded to the overall musical landscape and beyond. The nondual rela-tionship between individual and cosmos need not be detached from the broader spectrum of knowing and creating; it is inextricably tied to it.
“When you improvise,” reflects John McLaughlin, among the generations of artists who were deeply inspired by Coltrane, “what are you saying/
singing? You sing about your life and your relationships with the beings around you, the Earth and the cosmos itself—the all.”49
The present juncture in human history calls for us to place these considerations front and center if there is reason for optimism about the future. For in this process, newfound understandings about human creativity and consciousness evolution may give rise to new solutions to the problems in the world that otherwise will remain hidden from in the current category-bound and externally oriented thinking that prevails.
The arts in general, and jazz in particular, have important contributions to make to the centering of the farthest dimensions of the integral interior-exterior spectrum.
But if jazz studies is marginalized in musical studies, one might ask, which is marginalized in the academy at large, how will the jazz-inspired educational and societal transformation come about? This may be thought
of in terms of what complex systems theorist Edward Lorenz proposed as the “butterfly effect.”50 A butterfly flapping its wings in Brooklyn can set in motion minute patterns of turbulence which, as James Gleick describes it, gradually build up into “dust devils and squalls and continent-sized eddies which only satellites can see,”51 thereby having the capacity to impact the weather in Bombay. Therefore, crossing the exterior-interior divide in a single field, however localized, establishes a precedent that, because of its paradigmatic significance, may inspire parallel initiatives in other areas.
The jazz-inspired integral musicianship paradigm that becomes the basis for musical studies may thus impact far more than music as it breaks the ice, so to speak, in bringing expanded creativity and, more dramati-cally given the third-person orientation of education at large, conscious-ness studies and its meditative methodologies into the classroom. If this precedent can be set in one academic area, it can take hold, with astute leadership on administrative, faculty, and student levels, across fields. And when the academic world invokes this integral revolution, it is but a small step for it to manifest in the world at large.
Summary
The conservative orientation of jazz education underscores the influence of the Matrix of Materialism and its emphasis on third-person, exterior epistemologies at the expense of second-person creative and first-person interior experience and development. The very orientation in overall musical studies that renders jazz marginalized has, perhaps ironically, but also understandably, been adopted as that which guides jazz education.
We saw that aspects of this orientation shape conventional jazz scholar-ship as well, further indicative of the scope of the prevailing paradigm.
Accordingly, the field falls far short in realizing its integral potential and thus emerging as a transformational catalyst in the broader spheres of music, education, and society.
Compared to any other field in music or overall education, however, jazz studies is most closely situated—or put another way, needs to invoke the least degree of change—to realizing the inherent integral potential within its own boundaries and thus assuming this transformational func-tion. Our next step in gaining an integral understanding of the idiom takes us deep into its two primary creative processes: improvisation and composition.