{"id":457,"date":"2007-02-07T08:08:29","date_gmt":"2007-02-07T08:08:29","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/oook.info\/blog\/?p=457"},"modified":"2014-03-07T17:28:33","modified_gmt":"2014-03-07T22:28:33","slug":"the-jazz-age","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/oook.info\/blog\/?p=457","title":{"rendered":"The Jazz Age"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Dan Visel has an interesting meditation on collaboration-and-design over at <a href=\"http:\/\/www.futureofthebook.org\/sidebar\/2007\/02\/the_jazz_age.html\">sidebar<\/a> (&#8220;the back porch of the Institute for the Future of the Book&#8221;). It&#8217;s all worth a thoughtful read, but for me the money quotes are near the end, where the title of the piece (&#8220;the jazz age&#8221;) earns its keep:<\/p>\n<blockquote><p>I&#8217;m not arguing that collaboration can&#8217;t create something as grand as a symphony. It certainly can. But the things that collaboration can create are qualitatively <i>different<\/i>, and should be understood as such. (Bernard Rudofsky&#8217;s <a href=\"http:\/\/www.amazon.com\/Architecture-Without-Architects-Introduction-Non-Pedigreed\/dp\/0826310044\"><b>Architecture without Architects<\/b><\/a> could be brought in here, though that&#8217;s been explored before.) When we think of collaboration in music, we don&#8217;t think of the classical tradition; we think about jazz. I think that&#8217;s a useful reference point: collaborators on networked books could be like jazz musicians, not having a score, but knowing how to improvise within predefined structures like twelve-bar blues. Even free jazz isn&#8217;t free, though: when you listen to those old Ornette Coleman records now, the first thing you notice is how carefully structured they seem.<br \/>\n(There&#8217;s something interesting about jazz becoming culturally dominant at the height of modernism; perhaps this is a natural response. Around the same time, the Surrealists were denigrating the novel as a form because it was too planned, too rational. They declared a similar preference for the improvised: automatic writing or drawing for example. There&#8217;s an enormous amount of Surrealist poetry; a near-complete count of Surrealist novels could be made on two hands. [hmmm? take a look at <a href=\"http:\/\/www.citylights.com\/CLDS.html\">City Lights offerings<\/a>])<br \/>\n<b>What we need to be thinking about is how jazz players learn to be jazz players<\/b>. You can&#8217;t stick a classically trained trumpeter in a jazz combo and expect he&#8217;ll do a fine job: he won&#8217;t. But that&#8217;s essentially what we&#8217;re trying to do.<br \/>\nAnd: we need to be looking at how jazz is designed: what sort of structures lend themselves to improvisation and collaboration? <\/p><\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Dan Visel has an interesting meditation on collaboration-and-design over at sidebar (&#8220;the back porch of the Institute for the Future of the Book&#8221;). It&#8217;s all worth a thoughtful read, but for me the money quotes are near the end, where the title of the piece (&#8220;the jazz age&#8221;) earns its keep: I&#8217;m not arguing that [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-457","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-musics"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/oook.info\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/457","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/oook.info\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/oook.info\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/oook.info\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/oook.info\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=457"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/oook.info\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/457\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2759,"href":"https:\/\/oook.info\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/457\/revisions\/2759"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/oook.info\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=457"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/oook.info\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=457"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/oook.info\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=457"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}