Free Will and Jazz (Soul Spaces)
I like to think that the basis for playing music is always "spiritual", meaning your performances are always the output of the "buffer zone"--the gap that controls what you'll play. You can blame bad playing both on the lack of free will to hone chops, but also on lapses of attention to what's happening in real time in the music.
Jazz and other genres (including actor improv) that allow for free playing tap into these phenomena. This is what comprises "spirit" or "soul". Scored music doesn't for the most part; the player is the marionette controlled by the conductor (engineer) using the composer's (architect's) plans. Composition also doesn't play in the gap, unless decisions on key centers and tempo really matter on the page. Bb minor won't make the players better, especially if they can't play in the key. Perhaps that's the point--to make bad players out of everyone to level the field. Everyone is lost at the same time.
Long jazz improvisations tend to bore audiences but they are really "musical imaging studies" of a group of humans (and their "souls") being pushed around at the mercy of their neurons. Check out any free jazz performance and you'll hear the MRI (Music Response Imaging), full of mistakes and random firing, but also revealing of what we perceive as "soul".
Cells that fire together wire together. (Hebbian Theory)
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