Since the cave-dwellers of Lascaux shaped their drawings to conform to the bulges and crannies of their cave walls, improvisation has always been with us. But if there is a moment and a place when improvisation enters the modern lexicon, it is the jazz era in New Orleans.
OK, tip of the hat to the Surrealists. But who gets more hits today, Tristan Tzara (who helped invent Exquisite Corpse) or Louis Armstrong (who invented the jazz solo)?
At the end of New Orleans’s tricentennial year, we will celebrate the birthplace of jazz by contextualizing the art it made famous. “New Orleans’s Gift to the Modern World” will explore “Improvisation across the Arts.”
We kick off the festivities with a session on culinary improvisation (November 30). Culinary improv? Well, it’s like this. In New Orleans when we make a gumbo, we start inevitably with the family recipe. But we then check to see what’s in the cupboard and fridge, or bayou. Life, seasonality—that hambone, those oysters—takes over. Improvisers are masters of bricolage, making a way out of no way, making something out of nothing. What’s a roux?—mere flour and oil that with patience and a kitchen spoon is alchemized into the essence of a good gumbo. Improvisation always has that tension in it, between old and new, form and formlessness, structure and freedom from structure. That’s what the conference will explore.
Alice Waters founded Chez Panisse with hardly a plan except to feed her friends. When she plates a dish, you won’t find tweezered nasturtium blossoms calling attention to the chef’s virtuosity. Hardly careless, nonetheless her plates declare a nonchalance that calls attention not to herself but to the ingredients. Alice will be in dialogue with Peabody and James Beard Award-winning NPR’s Kitchen Sister Davia Nelson (what’s more improvisational than oral history), and farmer/activist Ben Burkett (what’s more improvisational than responding to the weather?). Richard McCarthy, head of Slow Food USA and a native New Orleanian, will moderate.
Improvisers devour the world. Whitman, who virtually invented free verse, said that he did “not doubt but the majesty and beauty of the world are latent in any iota of the world.” Then he demonstrates his all-embracing vision with a catalog that breaks all the rules of good writing: “I do not doubt there is far more in trivialities, insects, vulgar persons, slaves, dwarfs, weeds, rejected refuse, than I have supposed. . . .” 
Here Whitman breaks the rule Strunk and White in their classic Elements of Style will call “the principle, that of parallel construction” which “requires that expressions of similar content and function should be outwardly similar. The likeness of form,” they add, “enables the reader to recognize more readily the likeness of content and function.”
Rather than facilitating recognition, Whitman chooses instead to disconcert, leaping back and forth between broad generalities (“trivialities,” “vulgar persons”) to the minute and concrete (“insects,” “slaves,” “ dwarfs,” “weeds”). Such catalogs should end climactically, but Whitman ends with what I will call a climactic anticlimax. “Rejected refuse” is anticlimactic in its vagueness. At the same time it is climactic: “rejected refuse” is it exactly what “visionary art”—Jung’s term—seeks, by bringing the refuse of life—any iota—to consciousness, finding value where there was none, to alchemize into gold.
A full day of sessions—across the arts—will follow on Saturday: literary improvisation, musical (a confrontation of jazz and classical improv), visual arts (with an accent on Mel Chin’s and Theo Eliezer’s work in augmented reality), long-form theatrical (which means: not comic improv), and the least comic of improvisations: the dark version now running the country. I’ve argued that the spirit of improvisation lies at the heart of democracy: every voice heard; every vote counted. Suddenly we are called to account for this bizarro version that bends toward tyranny. Politico’s cartoonist Matt Wuerker will parse the dark side with Gwen Thompkins, former NPR East Africa correspondent for NPR and now the host of Music Inside Out.
Sessions will be dialogues (not papers). There will be demonstrations. The Saturday lineup can be found here.
Saturday night, The New Orleans Jazz and Heritage Foundation will host a free concert at the George Wein Center: the Courtney Bryan Quartet. Courtney Bryan, Tulane professor and internationally acclaimed composer and pianist, has been hailed by The New York Times as “a pianist and composer of panoramic interests.” She gobbles up the world too.
Sunday will be given to master classes held at NOCCA (the New Orleans Center for the Creative Arts). Deeper model workshops designed to engage audiences in further dialogue and practice. A rare opportunity to get up close with masters: in music: both Jazz and classical improv, theatre, and oral history. Violin in hand, Stephen Nachmanovitch will do a master class, “Improvising is Life” — which I will not attempt to classify but I’m willing to bet will involve some gobbling. Details here.
Late Sunday afternoon (4:00), The Historic New Orleans Collection will present a screening of the silent film Snow White with live musical accompaniment by renowned improviser Paul Goussot, organist of the historic Dom Bédos organ (built 1748) at the Abbey of Sainte-Croix in Bordeaux, France.
The kick-off session and reception are $20; the master classes $25; Saturday sessions and both concerts are free. All sessions will be available online.
The conference is very much a community event with most of the premier New Orleans arts institutions involved: The Historic New Orleans Collection, the New Orleans Jazz Museum, WWOZ, The New Orleans Center for the Creative Arts (NOCCA where Wynton and Terence went to high school and first got their chops), the Louisiana Endowment for the Humanities, Tulane University’s Center for the Gulf South, The Greater New Orleans Foundation, and the New Quorum.
