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`Current Musicology 107 (Fall 2020) 
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Reviewed by Mike Ford 

 
I requested to review this book in December 2019, blissfully unaware of the series 
of crises and aftermaths that the year 2020 would bring. Neither the editors nor 
the contributors of this volume could have imagined how well-timed Playing for 
Keeps: Improvisation in the Aftermath would be in a year roiled by a global 
pandemic, economic devastation, as well as a tumultuous and long-overdue 
reckoning with racism and racial inequality. While none of the essays in the 
collection deal with economic or public health crises, the authors all show how 
improvisation is a critical tactic for dealing with multiple crises unfolding and 
lingering at the same time. Improvisation in the Aftermath clearly demonstrates 
that improvisation, both as a musical and a nonmusical practice, provides 
individuals and communities with ways to resist the violence and disruption 
caused by world-rending crises, as well as to heal the damage left in their 
aftermaths. Claudio Ciborra argues that “the power of bricolage, improvisation, 
and hacking is that these activities are highly situated; they exploit, in full, the 
local context and resources at hand […]. The smart bricolage or the good hack, 
cannot be easily replicated outside the cultural bed from which it has emerged” 
(2002, 50, italics original). The contributors in this volume each provide a 
snapshot of a particular improvisatory moment in a particular place; however, 
when these snapshots are placed over each other, shared patterns and strategies 
begin to emerge, transcending these local contexts.  

The book is part of the Improvisation, Community, and Social Practice 
(ICASP) series, which aims to advance the notion that musical improvisation is 
“a crucial model for political, cultural, and ethical dialogue in action—for 
imagining and creating alternative ways of knowing and being in the world” (iii). 
This broadening beyond a single improvisational form is a vital part of the 
burgeoning discipline of critical improvisation studies, as can be seen in the 
multitude of improvisatory domains with which the contributors to the Oxford 
Handbook of Critical Improvisation Studies (George Lewis and Benjamin Piekut, 
eds. 2016) grapple. Indeed, the essays in the current volume all use an 
improvisatory music as a starting point and then proceed to argue that the 
musical improvisation can, in one regard or another, be seen as a microcosm of 



 

 
 

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the environment in which it is found, by which it is shaped, and which it shapes 
in turn.  

The collection is commendable for its insistence on a broad range of musical 
practices, geographic areas, and, perhaps most significantly, a diversity of literary 
genres employed. In addition to academic articles, we also find a poem, a series 
of drawings, and three interviews. While such a variety of genres is certainly a 
breath of fresh air, it should be noted that the non-standard genres all pertain to 
United States topics, with the exception of one on Palestine; and the non-US 
musical styles and locales receive traditional scholarly treatment. A subsequent 
book in the series would benefit from a more intersectional approach to non-
standard literary and musical genres.  

My review groups together essays based on the type of crisis and/or aftermath 
in which the musical and non-musical improvisations take place. After outlining 
the editors’ introduction and commenting on three alternate-genre chapters, I 
discuss the three essays that deal with the lasting effects of settler-colonialism (in 
the Canary Islands, Canada, and Hawai’i respectively). I then turn to four 
chapters that focus on improvisation in response to more recent violent 
outbursts: the vandalism of an arts center in South Africa, the Egyptian 
revolution of 2011, the recurring civil war in Lebanon, and the ongoing Israel-
Palestine conflict. The remaining two essays deal with the aftermaths that result 
from lingering inter-denominational strife in Israel and Northern Ireland.  

The editors Daniel Fischlin and Eric Porter lay the foundation for the 
collection in the volume’s introduction, emphasizing several points rehearsed 
above, including the transferability of the tenets of musical improvisation to 
non-musical domains, the situatedness of improvisatory response, and the 
potential utility of improvisation during and following crises: “in the aftermath 
of chaos and trauma, improvisatory modes of being provide generative 
alternatives based on risk taking and nonconformity rooted in cocreative 
connections” (2). However, they also maintain that improvisation is not merely 
a contingency method, but can reveal underlying factors that contribute to the 
advent of crises and extend the tail of their aftermaths. The introduction is a 
masterful summary of the theoretical basis on which the subsequent chapters 
rest.  

In a later chapter, the editors converse with Vijay Iyer about a recent 
improvisatory project. Iyer’s project is the third in a series on the War on Terror 
and its influence on Black and Brown communities: the first deals with airport 
security; the second confronts the 24-hour availability of information about the 
war, made possible by digital technology; the third focuses on veterans, their 



 

 
 

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experiences, and the ways in which they deal with the traumas that result from 
serving in the Middle East. Iyer emphasizes the transformative therapeutic effect 
that improvising in these performances had on the veterans. However, he also 
points out the underside of improvisation—“the sort of improvisation associated 
with evil” (89). This admission is one of the very few places in the book where 
the author acknowledges that improvisation is not always a force for good, the 
rose-tinted way ICASP often likes to present it. Iyer’s project recognizes both the 
destructive improvisations that lead to and follow the War on Terror and the 
constructive, co-constructive, and reconstructive potential of improvisation for 
Black and Brown communities in America.  

In her poem, “manifesto,” Matana Roberts improvises on the Preamble to the 
Constitution of the United States. Through embellishment and reinterpretation, 
key terms from the Preamble (such as “Union” and “Blessings of Liberty”) are 
recontextualized in terms of an updated understanding of “We the people” as 
“the ever-growing collective mongrel race,” in which difference is celebrated and 
intertwined: “We are improvised, yet we should synchronize to bring the best of 
ourselves to fore” (28). Throughout the poem, Roberts repeats the refrain:  

United States of America  
United States of Hysteric-a 
United States of  
America.  

drawing readers’ attention to the fact that, while the United States is now plunged 
into a particularly deep hysteria, the Union has always induced hysteria in some 
of its people.  

In the other artistic chapter, Randy DuBurke presents eight drawings that 
illustrate Nina Simone’s political critique and her contributions to the civil rights 
movement, another historical moment met with heightened “hysteric-a.” In the 
introduction, the editors note that “the stunning visual imagery evokes both 
direct acts of violence and the ever-present threat of violence, both state and 
vigilante, that haunted and inspired civil rights activists” (16). DuBurke depicts 
this direct violence through dynamic scenes of police clubbing and chokeholds—
resonating deeply in the aftermath of a surge in anti-Black police brutality in the 
United States at the time of writing this review. The artist blends context-specific 
imagery, personas like Malcolm X and Martin Luther King Jr., and placard 
slogans like “EVERS DIED for YOU//Join NAACP FOR HIM!” with broader 
calls to “STOP RACISM NOW” and “WE DEMAND EQUAL RIGHTS NOW” 
and lamentably omnipresent specters in KKK garb (124). The series of drawings 
culminates in a rendition of “Mississipi Goddam” (1964), Simone’s musical 



 

 
 

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response to the horrific bombing of the 16th Street Baptist Church in 
Birmingham, AL and the deaths of four Black girls in the blast. With the 
exception of one mournful stance next to photo cut-outs of the four girls, 
DuBurke depicts Simone in concert—voicing her demands for equal rights and 
her vehement opposition to state-sanctioned violence against Black bodies.  

In his chapter on Afro/Canarian jazz, Mark Lomanno notes the centuries-
long state-sanctioned violence perpetuated by colonizers against the 
autochthonous inhabitants of the Canary Islands, a Spanish territory since the 
fifteenth century. In addition to physical violence, the Spanish quashed—and 
continue to quash—Canarians’ sense of identification with ancestral and cultural 
roots on the African continent. Lomanno maintains that the linguistic 
impositions of settler-colonialism have stripped Afro/Canarians of their ability 
to articulate their complex identities; he positions musical improvisation as a 
way to cross the critical divide between the expression of identity and using 
language as the sonic means to do so. While demonstrating that “Afro/Canarians 
are filling in the historiographical gaps and breaks, creativity and 
deconstructively rewriting las Islas’s multiple histories, thus re-envisioning their 
present and future through collaborative sonic performance,” some of 
Lomanno’s musical arguments come across as simplistic elisions of musical 
plurality and cultural plurality (61). However, his meta-argument on the 
exclusion of the Canary Islands and afrocanariedad from transatlantic 
scholarship due to the hybridity of its many local identities—seen simultaneously 
as not European enough, not Caribbean enough, not African enough—is 
convincing and points out an area in dire need of redress.  

Just as Lomanno illustrates the reclamation of traditional and ancestral 
cultural expressions through music in a neglected geographical space, Kate 
Galloway shows the ways in which Inuit throat singer Tanya Tagaq and her 
collaborators reclaim perceptions of the First Nations and the Canadian North. 
Galloway provides thorough discussions of three collaborations, detailing how 
the artists work together and adapt their disparate musical practices around each 
other. This is in part to show the importance of partnership and collaboration 
for the survival of First Nations cultures, but also to clarify, by detailing the 
innovative engagement with novel musical forms and technologies, that these 
cultures are not static or primitive, as they are frequently portrayed in settler-
colonial media and discourse. Galloway deftly argues that “throat singers, like 
Tagaq, embrace Indigenous modernity, a process of adaptions where traditional 
Indigenous practices are revised for contemporary use and community 
expression” (98). By combining past and present practices, then, Indigenous 



 

 
 

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musicians can counter oppressive stereotypes, voicing their own identities, 
rather than having identities imposed on them by settler-colonists.  

Kevin Fellezs continues much of the argument of Galloway and Lomanno in 
his chapter on Hawaiian slack key guitar and its complex history with 
colonialism. He presents three moments: the first is the early development of the 
musical practice; the second is a resurgence of slack guitar and its aesthetics of 
softness and sweetness that played into the tourism industry’s essentialization of 
Hawai’i; and the third outlines the native Hawaiian response to a non-Hawaiian 
winning a Grammy for Hawaiian music. Fellezs links them to improvisatory 
musical behavior:  

Each moment involves improvising—not in the sense of performing a completely 
spontaneous composition or unleashing unrestricted, uninhibited expression but in 
the sense of adjusting to a momentary finger flub that proves fortuitous (the first 
moment, with its series of historical happenstance), extemporizing on a melodic line 
(the second moment, with its active resuscitation of older musical aesthetics), or 
allowing for another musician’s phrasing to dictate the flow or rhythmic emphasis in a 
given performance (the third movement, in which Hawaiian slack key guitarists 
become involved with powerful music industry interests). (278) 

Fellezs differs from Galloway and Lomanno in viewing improvisation simply as 
a method for the marginalized to resist oppression and as a means of healing 
individuals and communities after centuries of colonial domination. Rather, he 
echoes Iyer, admitting that “on the one hand, musical improvisation can be seen 
as the acts of agentive subalterns in negotiating, even challenging, hegemonic 
standards of musical evaluation and aesthetics. […] On the other hand, 
improvisational skill does not necessarily mitigate the downsides of participation 
with, in the case of Hawai’i, the settler-colonialists’ desire to incorporate 
subaltern communities into their social order […] Improvisation as a 
methodology and a technology manages to cut both ways” (279, italics original). 
The three essays on the legacy of colonialism all aptly demonstrate the long 
aftermaths left behind by centuries of physical violence and nefarious reshapings 
of Indigenous identities, as well as the ways in which music is used in each of 
these locales as a way for Indigenous peoples to incorporate past identities into 
changing presents in order to (co-)create alternative futures.  

This broad improvisatory potential holds for more recent violence as well. 
Stephanie Vos’s chapter is a tour de force using a film, The Exhibition of 
Vandalizim (2010), as the starting point; and through elegant argument, she 
theorizes improvisation through ritual, community, and politics to arrive at the 
conclusion that musical improvisation reflects non-musical improvisation and 



 

 
 

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the negation of basic recognition of humanity that often necessitates it. The film 
by Aryan Kaganoff follows Zim Ngqawana and Kyle Shepherd as they improvise 
on broken instruments and found objects while they make their way through the 
Zimology Institute, freshly vandalized by scrap metal thieves. Invoking Frederic 
Rzewski’s (1999) notion that improvisation starts with an original “error” to 
which improvisation responds through “recovery,” which in turn becomes the 
next “error,” Vos generates a teleology, per her case study of the Zimology 
Institute near Johannesburg, that poverty begat desperation begat theft and 
vandalism begat musical improvisation, etc. However, she invokes another, 
contradictory construal: improvisation as a healing ritual, in which “the past is 
invoked to heal the present” (40) (in Rzewski’s exegesis, by contrast, the present 
is invoked to remedy the past). Perhaps it is exactly improvisation’s capacity to 
do both of these things—using the past to heal the present and using the present 
to heal the past—that makes it a valuable practice for dealing with the aftermaths 
in which both present crises and past calamities have to be processed 
simultaneously. 

Drawing on the practices of ṭarab aesthetics, Darci Sprengel theorizes what 
she calls an “affective politics” that promotes solidarity through egalitarian 
encounters with the other. Ṭarab musical culture provides a model for such a 
politics in that it is driven by “the unique affective interaction between performer 
and audience in each specific time and place” (163). Sprengel provides a 
technological, political, and economic history of listening practices in Egypt, 
highlighting changes, particularly in composer-performer-listener relations, 
over the past century in order to demonstrate why the improvisations of the Mini 
Mobile Concerts collective in the aftermath of the 2011 revolution are so 
innovative. They had to improvise concert logistics in order to avoid both violent 
state-sanctioned opposition to the use of public spaces for art-making activity 
(or any other gathering, for that matter) and intra-community neighbor-
policing. The collective’s approach to musicking is based on the improvisatory 
interaction between musician and audience member(s) “that ideally resulted in 
affective transformation” (161). Sprengel’s conclusion that “it is not the presence 
of music that ‘reduces wars’ but the presence of certain types of listeners” is 
particularly inspiring and makes it clear how musical improvisation has a place 
not only in the aftermaths of violent conflict, but also before, in that it forces each 
improvising participant to hear the other (181, italics original). 

The free improvisation scene in Beirut showcases such an instance of 
communal listening patterns, as Rana El Kadi’s chapter shows. El Kadi provides 
a fascinating history of musical practices in Lebanon, showing how they have 



 

 
 

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been influenced by the various political regimes that oversaw (and brutalized) 
the region from the fifteenth century to the 2010s. The essay focuses on the 
aftermath of the civil war (1975-1991) and the integration of West and East 
Beirut, characterized by opposing Muslim and Christian religious and cultural 
identities, through free improvised music. She argues that Lebanese musicians 
“use free improvisation to engage with cultural and religious differences, 
negotiate the lingering violence and uncertainty, engage with collective memory 
of civil war, and communicate critical alternatives for national politics and 
intersectarian social relations” (130). By using sonic found objects like audio and 
video samples from civil-war-era television and radio media, musicians aim to 
bring free improvisation to a broad audience. However, such improvisations also 
produce personal benefits to the musicians: El Kadi describes an improvisation 
by trumpeter Mazen Kerbaj, “duetting” with explosions during Israeli air raids 
in 2006, and argues that the performance “allowed Kerbaj to psychologically 
face—and sonically grapple with—some of this childhood demons,” and 
continues that “this demonstrates the role of improvisation in addressing war 
trauma on the individual level” (145). The tension between community, 
ensemble-level, and individual experience, however, remains unresolved; El 
Kadi cautions that, even though free improvisation may involve powerful 
individual expressions, collective expressions are not always so well-integrated. 

In his essay preceding two interviews, Daniel Fischlin reflects on his time in 
Israel/Palestine, the need for healing, and how improvisation, as a dialogic 
practice, is a key factor in that process of healing. He recounts his time spent with 
Al-Mada, a music therapy NGO, and the impact of cocreative, improvisatory 
musicking that Al-Mada uses to improve the psychological and social conditions 
of hundreds of destitute Palestinians. He constructs a powerful narrative, 
interspersed with fragments of interviews, passages from UN reports, and photos 
of pictures and messages painted on street and state walls. Fischlin’s 
interviewees, Odeh Turjman and Reem Abdul Hadi, talk about the challenges 
they faced in creating and managing the Al-Mada and outline specific examples 
—often quite upsetting to read—of Palestinians’ trauma, noting how they have 
been helped by improvisatory music therapy. While Fischlin’s understanding of 
improvisation sometimes comes off as idealistic, he does demonstrate its 
transformative capabilities:  

The improvised music I hear in Palestine in humble cinder-block buildings has no 
commodity value, no obvious commercial value—no presence, except for its fleeting 
appearing in passing encounters. […] such music is fragile and evanescent, but somehow 
aloft, powerful and resonant in unexpected ways. It expresses a grounded humanity that lies 



 

 
 

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at the core of what it means to be in contingent relation to others, respectful of the cocreative 
impulses at the heart of improvisatory practices can be in the fact of violent, dysfunctional 
realities. (210) 

This chapter presents the most real, harrowing illustration of how musical 
improvisation is actively deployed as a strategy that truly improves the 
conditions—mental health, personal identities, and community identity—of 
those most affected by multiple aftermaths that are constantly reinvigorated by 
new waves of violent crisis.  

The other side of the West Bank barrier is not without internal strife, albeit 
far less violent than the trans-wall conflict. Moshe Morad describes the tension 
between the musical preferences, particularly in popular music, of the Ashkenazi 
Jews (of European descent) and Sephardic Jews (of Arabic descent) in Israel. He 
focuses on the use of silsulim, a technique characterized by improvised 
microtonal and durational ornamentation, or “curls.” In addition to social and 
ethnic disparaging of mesulselet (“curled”) music, its improvisatory aspects have 
been a point of othering by the dominant Ashkenazi group; Morad maintains 
that the “different approach toward improvisation in the Eastern musical world 
(as being a continuum of composition) versus the Western musical world (as 
being the opposite of composition), and the traditional high regard for creative 
improvisation in the East, as opposed to the traditional dismissal of 
improvisation as ‘primitive,’ ‘untutored,’ and ‘impulsive,’ is mirrored in the 
mesulselet/Mizraḥi (Eastern) versus non-mesulselet/Ashkenazi (Western) 
aesthetico-political conflict in Israeli music” (255). Unsurprisingly, this conflict 
also spills beyond the borders of Israel. While mesulselet was popular in Palestine 
between the two Intifadas, the music soon came to fall into the liminal space in 
which is viewed as “the music of the enemy” both by Palestinians, for being too 
Israeli, and by the dominant Ashkenazi population, for being too Arabic. Yet 
Morad muses that, perhaps, this music, with its Arabic and Jewish components, 
might serve as a bridge that enhances cultural understanding between the 
warring sides.  

In a rare gambit for improvisation studies, Sara Ramshaw & Paul Stapleton 
promote the act of strategically not listening in certain contexts, such as post-
Good-Friday Northern Ireland. They argue that “attentive (non)listening, as an 
ethical practice that endeavors to both listen and not listen to the voices and 
sounds of the ‘other,’ may actually be a productive skill to nurture and encourage 
in a society enduringly beset by division and conflict” (301, italics original). They 
give a short overview of the improvised music scene in Belfast, noting that it is 
largely incoherent, but that such a lack of congelation provides the opportunity 



 

 
 

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for musicians and audiences to listen for difference—or not to listen for it—in a 
society that has been divided by difference. While the theorization of attentive 
(non)listening is an interesting feature, the application of the concept to either 
musical or nonmusical improvisation seems, at times, a little thinly drawn out. 
However, this might only be because this chapter is the last in a collection of very 
thoroughly theorized and well-argued essays.  

It should be noted that some of the chapters in this book make for heavy 
emotional reading. Extreme examples haunted me for weeks after I put down the 
book: Fischlin’s chapter details the violent traumas of children whose only 
existence has been in a war zone and Sprengel’s notes heinous practices of public 
sexual violence. An admission of the horrors to come—or better, a trigger 
warning—in the introduction would better prepare the reader.  

This nicety aside, Improvisation in the Aftermath is a beacon of hope in times 
of crisis and will continue to be a reference point as the aftermaths of current 
crises persist in the years to come. The authors all outline ways in which 
improvisatory musics—and, more fundamentally, improvisation itself—can 
help those who suffer through and navigate crises and, afterward, salve the 
psychological wounds of the survivors. I heartily recommend this remarkable 
book not only to those interested in improvisatory musical traditions from 
around the world, but also to anyone who seeks to imagine an alternate way of 
approaching and dealing with difference, conflict, and the aftermaths of violence. 
I certainly look forward to seeing further real-world applications of the concepts 
of listening, dialoguing, and cocreating discussed in this book. Indeed, this 
volume provides a compelling framework for reshaping violent pasts and volatile 
presents into better futures through individual and community improvisation.  
 
References 

Ciborra, Claudio U. 2002. Labyrinths of Information: Challenging the Wisdom of Systems. 
 Oxford: Oxford University Press.  
Lewis, George E. and Benjamin Piekut (eds). 2016. The Oxford Handbook of Critical 
 Improvisation Studies, vols 1 & 2. Oxford: Oxford University Press.   
Rzewski, Frederic. 1999. “Little Bangs: A Nihilist Theory of Improvisation.” Current 
 Musicology 67/68: 377–386.