https://www.press.uchicago.edu/ucp/books/book/chicago/C/bo34094110.html
Interview by Ilana Gershon
Ilana Gershon: You describe how, when you explained your previous work on regimented jazz instruction to someone also attending a business innovation workshop, he asked you how you managed to get metaphorically from a famous jazz club in New York City, the Village Vanguard, to these workshops. You point out that the similar tensions in both sites exist because people are using rule-bound and structured pedagogical techniques which are meant to lead to creative improvisation that in earlier decades was believed to emerge more organically. How do you think the business innovation workshops you attended differed from the jazz classes in the ways rules and creativity were understood?
Eitan Wilf: My interlocutors in academic jazz programs and business innovation workshops did not approach rules for generating creative results in the same way due to the historical specificity of each context. Most of my interlocutors in academic jazz programs—students, teachers, and administrators, as well as the wider public—understood the academic jazz program as a pale shadow of the vibrant urban jazz scenes of the mid-20th century, which gave rise to the masterpieces of this genre. The apprenticeship system, in which neophyte musicians learn from more experienced musicians in live performance settings, was the prevalent form of jazz training in those scenes. With the gradual disappearance of clubs and their replacement with academic programs, jazz training became more standardized, abstract, and text-mediated. Due to this history, my interlocutors in academic jazz programs viewed the structured pedagogical techniques taught in such programs as always already problematic, a form of training that indexed the music’s and their own fall from grace and the realization that, at best, such techniques can give them a glimpse of what genuine creativity in jazz is all about. In contrast, my interlocutors in business innovation workshops did not have the idea that they were born after a past golden age of creativity in the business world in relation to which their own practice could be negatively compared. Because creativity has never been a defining dimension of their ideal-typical practice, they approached the structured techniques for generating creative results that they were taught in innovation workshops with much more enthusiasm, hope, and curiosity. If they experienced any ambivalence toward those techniques, it was due to the fact that in western modernity in general creativity and rules are understood to be antithetical to one another.
CaMP Anthropology 