Nomadic improvising and sites of difference

Improvisation is made possible through movement. We extend to improvisation what the philosopher Gilles Deleuze says about music, that it "is lodged on the lines of flight that pass through bodies." Improvisation is the movement of the body joining with the movement of the sonorous materials that intensifies it. It is an interchange of vibratory movements, spontaneously unfolding music in the moment of its creation, passing through time, moving in time. As with the performance of all music, improvisation is caught up in the intensity of musical sound, the changes of energy that give rise to its expressive and affective qualities. Improvisation is driven by bodies interacting with one another. Chris Stover astutely observes that improvising bodies are not only performers but also "musical-objects-as-bodies," always in a state of transition, encountering one another "in affective exchanges of intensities." The self, as much as music, lives in transition, taking on the character of the monad: the itinerancy of the improvision nomad means that it inhabits and identity but never makes identity permanent. This formulation is analogous to Rosi Braidotti's idea that the nomad "never has no passport" or has too many of them." Eugene Holland characterizes improvisational jazz as nomadic in the way that it "foregrounds processes of 'itinerative following' rather than 'iterative reproducing."