Sven Bjerstedt

Stealing Knowledge in a Landscape of Learning: Conceptualizations of Jazz Education.

Theoretical approaches to learning in practice-based jazz improvisation contexts include situated learning and ecological perspectives. This article focuses on how interest-driven, self-sustaining jazz learning activities can be matched against the concepts of stolen knowledge (Brown & Duguid, 1996) and landscape of learning (Bjerstedt, 2014). Based on an extensive interview study with Swedish professional jazz musicians, it argues that the multidirectedness involved in jazz improvisational practice calls for a rich learning ecology framework including several didactic loci.

Landscapes of musical metaphor and musical learning: The example of jazz education

Theoretical approaches to learning in practice-based jazz improvisation contexts include situated learning and ecological perspectives. This article focuses on how interest-driven, self-sustaining jazz learning activities can be matched against the results of a recent Swedish investigation based on extensive qualitative interviews with jazz musicians regarding their views on the metaphor ‘storytelling’ and its relevance in the field of jazz improvisation. In order to visualise and discuss the educational implications of the results of this study, the notions of a landscape of musical metaphor and a corresponding landscape of musical learning are presented and discussed.

Qualitative inquiry, reflective practice and jazz improvisation

This paper, based on my PhD empirical study, suggests that qualitative investigations, seen as reflective practices, have much in common with – and probably much to learn from – jazz improvisational practices. The complex processes of hermeneutic understanding include laying bare the researcher’s pre-understanding as well as, in the interpretation of statements, the dynamics between their holistic coherence and the agent’s intentions. Through interview excerpts, the important phenomenon of breaks in the conversational flow is shown to have great significance to qualitative inquiry as a reflective practice, pointing to improvisational practices as relevant providers of solutions to the problematic dynamics of understanding, pre-understanding, self-understanding and misunderstanding.

Swedish Stories? Culturally Dependent Perspectives on Jazz Improvisation as Storytelling

Abstract This article is based on my Ph.D. empirical study which includes extensive qualitative interviews with fifteen Swedish jazz improvisers regarding their views on the term ‘storytelling’ as a metaphor in the field of jazz improvisation. Through comparisons with American literature on jazz music, this article points to a number of interesting relations between “American” and “Swedish” storytelling in jazz. While the notion of authenticity emerges as central to both American and Swedish jazz, the results from the Swedish interviews point to interesting interrelations between two aspects of authenticity: tradition-authenticity and self-authenticity.