Listening

In an interview about his book A Listener’s Guide to Free Improvisation, author John Corbett remarked:

“What sets freely improvised music apart from many other kinds of music is the degree to which it is reliant on musicians listening and responding to one another. […] In free improvisation the players don’t have anything else to pay attention to, no scores to be mindful of, no chord changes to worry about, no strict rhythms to adhere to, so in order to do anything they have to listen to one another and decide how they are going to interact.”

As I wrote in connection with my collection Immersed, I attended numerous free jazz and improvised music concerts. At some point, I began to notice the musicians on stage not only while they were playing, but also during the moments when they paused—simply listening and absorbing what was happening around them, waiting to rejoin the music and respond to what they heard. These moments often felt just as intense to me as when the musicians were in the midst of an extended solo. I began to seek out and photograph these quiet, attentive instances. That’s how my collection Listening came into being.