Revolutions Are Improvised

"There's something special about improvised music," Ajay Heble, professor of English at the University of Guelph in Ontario, argues, "something about the kind of activist listening it demands, that helps to disrupt orthodox standards of coherence. It encourages us to hear the world anew."

Professor Heble recently received a $2.5M grant from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada to examine the relationship between improvised music and social change. Amazing news. Let's think about the world without Jazz. What would life had been like without the musicians that made that music? Now that we can all feel a chill to even consider that the American people might have been alone during the better part of a century, the depression, two world wars and the civil rights movement, let's consider the CORE beliefs and the fundamentals of improvisation: Active Listening and Fluid Acceptance. 

Where else are we seeing these fundamentals? How could we consciously apply the skills of improvisation to other forms of Art (Are we considering life Art?) so that we might have a more positive impact on the world around us.

** It should be noted that the Author of this blog doesn't need a grant to see the impact of improvisation on human awareness and social change. But if you have $2.5M we could certainly partner to create some change.