Improvise!™: Jazz Consultancy and the Aesthetics of Neoliberalism

Abstract

Group musical improvisation represents a profoundly collaborative creative process. The improvised framework demands that musicians collectively and spontaneously negotiate a set of dynamic musical and non-musical challenges. Similarly, in the post-fordist global marketplace, unexpected challenges have become a quotidian part of the business experience. Just as a group of musical improvisers must negotiate sudden musical changes, unanticipated changes in the marketplace demand a collaborative creative response. Since the early 2000s a wide variety of corporations have begun looking to group musical improvisation as a model for corporate design. Corporations ranging from Starbucks to Procter & Gamble to Research In Motion have hired improvising musicians to run seminars and workshops in order to develop more improvisatory – and more profitable – business practices. Complicating this narrative, however, is the ethic that is commonly attached to improvised musical practice: as numerous scholars have suggested, improvised musics frequently emerge from marginalized communities around the world, and often represent kinds of musicking that purposefully challenge the logics of the free market economy, especially in its present neoliberal guise. In this article, I suggest that this species of arts-based consultancy - together with a huge and ever-expanding body of writing on "creativity" - operates to provide an aesthetic aspect to "creative" and "knowledge-based" labour in the postindustrial North American "knowledge economy," and by extension, to neoliberalism itself. I argue that this aestheticization of neoliberal economics threatens to occlude the profoundly socially destructive impact of the laissez-faire neoliberal regulatory regime that has taken hold of economic and social policy on an increasingly global scale over the last three decades. Finally, however, I explore how the lessons of improvisation studies might intervene in the corporate appropriation of improvisation.