Playing for Keeps: Improvisation in the Aftermath ed. by Daniel Fischlin and Eric Porter (review)

Playing for Keeps is a recent installment in a book series working with a mandate of exploring the role of music improvisation as a motor for sociopolitical discourse and action. Its underlying ethical agenda is to mobilize popular resistance to the "postindustrial, hyper-technological, corporate self-interest and diminished rights environments" (p. 10) as well as "systemic structures of colonial inequity, racism, economic exploitation, and the radical disregard for equality across gender, ethnicity, and class" (p. 11). This volume tightens focus on improvised responses to arenas of "crisis." There are inherent difficulties in defining improvisation and crisis. Here the first term encompasses anything from specific musical actions to spontaneous human activities of all sorts. Crisis, likewise, can be as vague as the looming specter of "destroyer culture" (p. 3, adopting Leslie Marmon Silko's term from Ceremony [New York: Viking, 1977]) or "various [unspecified] crises brought on by the [Donald] Trump presidency" (p. 5). Or it might be as specific as the theft and vandalism of a Johannesburg cultural center by metal thieves or the posttraumatic stress disorder suffered by a US Air Force drone pilot who had bombed Iraqi civilians (chaps. 2 and 4, respectively). In addition to the editors' introductory essay, a poem, an interview, and a collection of illustrations, the volume contains nine case studies based on specific cultural milieus: South Africa, the Canary Islands, Canada, Lebanon, Egypt, Palestine, Israel, the Hawaiian Islands, and Northern Ireland. Despite its title and cover—the latter showing a profile of Nina Simone singing, and both suggesting musical improvisation—most of the book's authors discuss improvisation in its broader cultural contexts. As such, the volume should be of interest to scholars of ethnomusicology and postcolonial studies.

In their introduction, Fischlin and Porter posit the central trope of "playing for keeps" as an expression (musical and otherwise) of a people's struggle for survival, the will to protect one's society, culture, and power in the face of "systems that rely on disproportionate wealth, modulated forms of enslavement, and technologies of alienation and disempowerment" (p. 2). "Aftermath" in the subtitle refers to the lingering ill effects of war, revolution, colonization, inequality, famine, and the like. Improvisation is proposed as a medium for heterogeneous communities to bond and respond collectively, in spite of internal differences and in the face of drastic power imbalances, to hegemonic structures. Interestingly, both the editors and author Vijay Iyer (in a later interview) point out that the powers-that-be may also employ these very same improvisatory practices toward separate ends. The introduction's polemical tone clearly telegraphs Fischlin's and Porter's ideological sympathies, which some readers may take issue with, but this doesn't preclude a close reading of the ideas underlying the rhetoric or a close analysis of each article on its own merits. More troubling is their suggestion that victims struggling to free themselves from violence must learn to use the tools of creative play "without damaging something, or at least without damaging the wrong thing" (p. 12). What exactly "the wrong thing" might be isn't specified, but this ends-justify-the-means language stands at odds with their concurrent denunciation of violence and injustice. Most troubling of all, it implies there is a "correct" way to understand and deal with these complicated issues.

As if to offer a resounding affirmation to the editors' opening remarks, saxophonist/composer/performance-artist Matana Robert's poem "manifesto" sounds the people's cry of resistance, riffing on the preamble to the US Constitution. For the author, "WE the PEOPLE / Are the growing collective mongrel race /…/ Are most powerful when we come together to battle that shame that ails us," enlisting both improvisation and synchronization to face the destroyer culture and, ironically, "destroy its song" (p. 25...