When musicians improvise freely together—not following any sort of script, predetermined harmonic structure, or “referent”—to what extent do they understand what they are doing in the same way as each other? And to what extent is their understanding privileged relative to outside listeners with similar levels of performing experience in free improvisation? In this exploratory case study, a saxophonist and a pianist of international renown who knew each other's work but who had never performed together before were recorded while improvising freely for 40 min. Immediately afterwards the performers were interviewed separately about the just-completed improvisation, first from memory and then while listening to two 5 min excerpts of the recording in order to prompt specific and detailed commentary. Two commenting listeners from the same performance community (a saxophonist and drummer) listened to, and were interviewed about, these excerpts. Some months later, all four participants rated the extent to which they endorsed 302 statements that had been extracted from the four interviews and anonymized. The findings demonstrate that these free jazz improvisers characterized the improvisation quite differently, selecting different moments to comment about and with little overlap in the content of their characterizations. The performers were not more likely to endorse statements by their performing partner than by a commenting listener from the same performance community, and their patterns of agreement with each other (endorsing or dissenting with statements) across multiple ratings—their interrater reliability as measured with Cohen's kappa—was only moderate, and not consistently higher than their agreement with the commenting listeners. These performers were more likely to endorse statements about performers' thoughts and actions than statements about the music itself, and more likely to endorse evaluatively positive than negative statements. But these kinds of statements were polarizing; the performers were more likely to agree with each other in their ratings of statements about the music itself and negative statements. As in Schober and Spiro (2014), the evidence supports a view that fully shared understanding is not needed for joint improvisation by professional musicians in this genre and that performing partners can agree with an outside listener more than with each other.

Since the invention of sound reproduction in the late 19th century, studio practices in musical recording evolved in parallel with technological improvements. Recently, digital technology and Internet file sharing led to the delocalization of professional recording studios and the decline of traditional record companies. A direct consequence of this new paradigm is that studio professions found themselves in a transitional phase, needing to be reinvented. To understand the scope of these recent technological advances, we first offer an overview of musical recording culture and history and show how studio recordings became a sophisticated form of musical artwork that differed from concert representations. We then trace the economic evolution of the recording industry through technological advances and present positive and negative impacts of the decline of the traditional business model on studio practices and professions. Finally, we report findings from interviews with six world-renowned record producers reflecting on their recording approaches, the impact of recent technological advances on their careers, and the future of their profession. Interviewees appreciate working on a wider variety of projects than they have in the past, but they all discuss trade-offs between artistic expectations and budget constraints in the current paradigm. Our investigations converge to show that studio professionals have adjusted their working settings to the new economic situation, although they still rely on the same aesthetic approaches as in the traditional business model to produce musical recordings.

Cette enquête sur la pratique de la composition improvisée a été menée auprès de 12 musiciens professionnels vivant à New York et menant une carrière internationale en tant qu’improvisateurs. Ces musiciens ont été sélectionnés pour la puissance et le caractère unique de leur voix artistique, aussi pour représenter autant que possible les diversités culturelles et générationnelles qui caractérisent cette scène. Après une introduction situant leurs pratiques vis à vis de l’improvisation libre et du free jazz tels que définis dans la littérature, l’article est basé sur des citations issues d’entretiens individuels de ces musiciens, suivant un protocole de recueil et d’analyse rigoureux. Les citations sont organisées selon trois thèmes : leur définition de la composition improvisée ; leurs différentes approches artistiques ; et les liens entre leur pratique musicale et leur philosophie de vie, incluant d’éventuelles connexions politiques et/ou spirituelles. Cette analyse est illustrée d’extraits vidéo de ces musiciens à partir d’enregistrements réalisés au sein d’un projet de recherche et création plus large, qui fait appel à plusieurs approches méthodologiques pour analyser la pratique de la composition improvisée à New York. Les entretiens individuels à la base de cet article représentent la première partie de ce projet qui découle de l’expérience de terrain de l’auteure en temps que réalisatrice d’enregistrements musicaux professionnels au sein de la scène musicale étudiée.