Flow, Gesture, and Spaces in Free Jazz [electronic resource] : Towards a Theory of Collaboration / by Guerino B. Mazzola, Paul B. Cherlin.

Getting off Ground -- What Is Free Jazz? -- Jazz in Transition -- The Landscape of Free Jazz -- Out of this World -- The Art of Collaboration -- Collaborative Spaces in Free Jazz -- Which Collaboratories? -- The Innards of Time -- Gestural Creativity -- Gestures: From Philosophy to Thought Experiments -- Geometry of Gestures -- The Escher Theorem and Gestural Creativity in Free Jazz -- What Group Flow Generates -- What Is Flow? -- The Symbolic Axis of Distributed Identity -- Epilogue -- From Pre-to Postproduction: The Infinite Listening -- Global Strategies for Free Jazz -- The Future of Free Jazz.

The scientific approach of this book transcends the limits of art literature in that it also develops geometric theories of gestures and distributed identities, also known as swarm intelligence. We exemplify this approach in the framework of free jazz, which is a prototypical creative and collaborative art form. Leader artists such as John Coltrane, Pharoah Sanders, Cecil Taylor, Sun Ra, The Art Ensemble of Chicago, Albert Ayler, Don Cherry, and Archie Shepp are presented in their strongest works and theories. The pillars of our theory of collaboration are built from psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi’s flow, physicist Gilles Châtelet’s gestures, and computer scientist Bill Wulf's collaboratories.