One of the goals of my research is to initiate a conversation—a search for commonalities—between two ostensibly unrelated contemporary disciplines: Gestalt psychotherapy and jazz improvisation. My underlying assumption is that an examination of each of these activities will reveal something useful and important about the other, and in particular that Gestalt therapy theory, as one approach to the elucidation and optimization of human functioning, provides a useful framework for an exploration of the dynamism and creativity experienced by musical improvisors. But in keeping with the openness to new possibilities that characterizes both disciplines, I do not propose to conduct anything like a precise mapping of points of correspondence, or a rigorous application of the principles of one to the issues or problems of the other. Rather, it is my hope that the discussion initiated here will illustrate how it is possible for a particular set of insights into human experience and creativity to transform and enliven our perception of our own potential in the many generic roles we play as individual and social beings—performers, listeners, students, teachers, saints, sinners, patients, healers, victims, persecutors, followers, leaders, infants, elders, players, dealers and so on—across the spectrum/continuum of ever-changing life.

Improvising musicians, among the many things they may be understood to do, give compelling and immediate expression to this fluctuating continuity of life that we each attempt to navigate. Gestalt therapists, analogously, seek to facilitate optimal contact with or between human beings in the immediacy of their present experience, and are motivated by a similarly pronounced hunger—for the integration, in their case, of aspects of our personalities that have been disowned, discarded, suppressed or otherwise denied the light of awareness. Both disciplines, then, can be seen as vehicles for exploring and engaging, through form and behavior, with the unknown possibilities of what John Dewey referred to as “the living present.” Yet while much of my work focuses on the constitutive principles and techniques that equip each of them for this purpose, I also do my best to model, in my own fashion, what I regard as their distinctive orientation relative to more “analytical” approaches to both art and psychology. In so doing, I am motivated by the belief that finding a way to communicate this unusual orientation directly is at least as important as any conceptual formulation of it; or as Duke Ellington asserted with concise elegance, “It don’t mean a thing if it ain’t got that swing.”

The authors of Gestalt therapy’s seminal text, Gestalt Therapy: Excitement and Growth in the Human Personality, articulate a similar imperative in their own introduction:

Indispensable—both for the writing and the thorough understanding of this book—is an attitude which as a theory actually permeates [its] content and method…. Thus the reader is apparently confronted with an impossible task: to understand the book he must [already] have the “Gestaltist” mentality…. Fortunately, the difficulty is far from being insurmountable, for the authors have not invented such a mentality. On the contrary, we believe that the Gestalt outlook is the original, undistorted, natural approach to life; that is, to man’s thinking, acting, feeling.

This may of course be regarded as a grandiose claim, as it has been in various critiques and constructive revisions since its articulation in 1951; and yet, the investigation (if not the experiential acquisition) of the proposed “mentality,” which has proven increasingly influential in the field of humanistic psychology, turns out to be a fascinating and rewarding pursuit. And to the extent that the “Gestalt outlook” really does constitute an “original, undistorted, natural approach to life,” its occasionally iconoclastic implications for the understanding of art and creative artists are potentially profound. What, then, are the essential attributes of the Gestalt approach, and how are they relevant, in ways obvious or obscure, to the lives and aspirations of musical improvisors? In what sense, moreover, do they represent a compelling alternative to more conventionally musicological analyses of improvisational practice?

Christopher J. Smith, a proponent of one such musicological orientation, proposes a “cultural semiotic” formulation of a “ritual performance context,” allegedly favored by Miles Davis post-1960, that “has proven resistant to conventional identification and analysis,” and that in practice “evoked a centered, focused sensitivity to the enormous creative possibilities of the ever precious, ever fleeting, present moment.” Even without having gone deeply into the constituents of the “Gestaltist mentality” mentioned above, it is apparent that the “ritual context” Smith describes shares with the theory of Gestalt therapy several choice acres of overlapping territory.

Miles wanted a quality of attentive musical flexibility that would lift his players to the level of co-composing interpreters; that would encourage them to respond to the improvisational moment with his own alert flexibility [and] engage with him by interpreting what they thought such communication demanded…. [This was] a profoundly involving and fertile space in which to create performances…. [The] deliberate incompleteness of Miles’s directions was itself the element which, through the attention and response it elicited, enacted the completion of the creative process.

His laconic leadership style notwithstanding, it is evident, I think—Miles Davis having undergone an apprenticeship of his own—that the “alert flexibility” here attributed to Davis didn’t begin with him, but has been a quality of awareness sought after and cultivated by improvising musicians, however idiosyncratically, since the inception of jazz at the very least. Smith’s analysis (which I otherwise see no reason to dispute) thus highlights the extent to which the imperatives and implications of improvisation can and do transcend the activities of specific improvisors in specific genres or fields of human endeavor. And indeed, following the lead of Christopher Small, Smith goes on to observe that

Miles Davis came from an African-American performance tradition which focused on individual expression of communal feeling, empathic interaction among participants, and creative response to shifting contexts. The ritual space that he constructed offered a literal, experiential manifestation of this model [which] Small calls…“that ideal society, those relations between human beings, that can enable each one to feel, in a literal sense, in tune with all the others and with the world.”

David Borgo, in Sync or Swarm: Improvising Music in a Complex Age, has sought to discern a similarly broad dimension of universal relevance in the aspirations and practices of jazz improvisors by initiating “conversations” (my word) between the techniques and challenges of “free improvisation” on one hand and contemporary developments in technology and theoretical science on the other. In contrast to the less schematic template I propose here, he goes about this by pairing cutting-edge concepts from theoretical science with examples of the approaches of specific improvisors, among them the saxophonists Sam Rivers and Evan Parker and the guitarist Derek Bailey (himself the author of a seminal text on improvisation). Of course it stands to reason that contemporary art forms can be demonstrated to mirror developments in the scientific and technological progress of global humanity—the “sniffing out” of impending change, momentous if as yet barely detectable, was regarded by Marshall McLuhan as among the artist’s most crucial functions—and it is in this spirit that Borgo presses the words of his champions of improvisational freedom into the service of neurological and cognitive science, chaos theory and self-organizing systems. In the course of one such analysis he takes up Parker’s comparatively straightforward observation that improvisation is

a bit like juggling…. The best bits of my solo playing, for me, I can’t explain to myself…. [At] a certain speed all kinds of things happen which I’m not consciously controlling. They just come out. It’s as though the instrument comes alive and starts to have a voice of its own.

“Juggling,” Borgo suggests,

or more simply balancing objects in gravity, is a physical sensation we are all familiar with. The delicate skills and inherent risk involved…can be appreciated on a biological level [and also] metaphorically extended…into the conceptual domain: “juggling” options, careers, or responsibilities. The cross-domain mappings have a cultural dimension as well. For instance, risk-taking might be frowned upon in certain societies while in others it is seen as an indispensable tool for survival and success.

The polarity articulated here is an interesting one in light of the perspective I propose, from which it is apparent that the orientation of a society or an individual toward what Borgo calls “risk-taking” or “juggling”—i.e., sustained purposeful spontaneity—is by no means always subject to the luxury of conscious choice, and further, that this absence of choice is a reflection of certain basic conditions of human existence. Dr. James Orbinski, in the opening scene of Triage, a documentary on the Rwandan genocide of 1994, describes the situation at the clinic where he was working on behalf of Doctors Without Borders while one of the worst phases of the conflict was unfolding:

One day, there was intense fighting throughout the city. There were hundreds of casualties that were brought to this hospital. So we basically did a triage of the people that were being brought in. We labeled them “1, 2, 3”—put little pieces of tape on their foreheads—and “1” meant that they should be treated right away, “2” meant that they needed to be treated within twenty-four hours, and a “3” meant that, even though they were alive, they were irretrievable. So we laid the “threes” somewhere over here, and people were made comfortable with blankets, water, etc. With triage, there are moral implications, but it’s a technical decision. I don’t have regrets about the decisions; I have complete outrage about the circumstances that created a situation where that kind of decision had to be made.

I do not introduce such an extreme example lightly, and would like to ensure that my rationale is clearly understood. The existential-humanist perspective that forms the basis for the so-called “Third Force” in psychology (after psychoanalysis and behaviorism), which encompasses Gestalt therapy among a variety of other contemporary psychotherapeutic modalities, advances the following generic description of the human situation irrespective of the relative mildness or severity of a given set of circumstances:

I am on a little island of the clearly known, which is in the sea of the generally known, which is in the ocean of the barely known or but guessed at, which itself swims in the midst of the immensity of the totally unknown. Yet from the farthest galaxy may stream, even at this moment, influences so potent that the whole course of my life can be altered…. I construct a shelter, farm for food, plan my life on my little island. I work within the realm of the known, but I cannot know what storms will brew in the distant parts of the sea…. Even those storms I see on the horizon will not be turned aside by my wishing and will test the strength of my building.

Leaving the metaphor, I am saying that each [of us] lives in the midst of contingency, that even the knownness of day-to-day living is, in a sense, but a phantasy, a wish more than an actuality. I do not know, I cannot know enough to be safe, to predict with complete confidence from one moment to the next. Contingency means that what will become actual is contingent on many influences, many variables, so many that they may well be infinite in number. The fact of contingency means that I can never predict with complete assurance. The experience of contingency means that I live with anxiety….

Yet it is this very situation of contingency, of never knowing enough to be completely sure, that is an essential part of our most cherished, our most God-like gift, that of freedom. There is no freedom when one knows all the determinants of a situation; that which you can predict with perfect accuracy gives you no choice in the matter…. It is clear that we cannot know all the determinants of any given event. It needs to be equally clear that our subjective experience of choice, of action, may become a determinant, not the determinant but a determinant, and sometimes a crucial determinant. Thus is born our responsibility.

Responsibility is the experience of being a determinant of what happens. Responsibility is the affirmation of one’s being as the doer in contrast to the acceptance of the role of the object done to. We fear responsibility as we feel its weight, yet are not able to insure the outcomes of that which we do. Practicing clinicians will recognize how often patients seek to to disavow responsibility, how greatly they fear it. Guilt is closely linked with responsibility…[and our] patients are well aware of that linkage. They are less aware that responsibility is bonded also to opportunity and self-esteem.

From this arises a degree of insight into the tremendous attraction and potential benefit that musical improvisation holds for many practitioners and listeners (as well as, in some cases, its capacity to perplex, intimidate and alienate). The vibraphonist Stefon Harris told an interviewer in a recent issue of Downbeat, “I play music because music saved my life. I love this. It’s not something that’s just interesting to me.” To delve into the sentiments underlying such statements is to realize—with the benefit of a conceptual framework adequate to the task—that life is improvisation, and that voluntary improvisation, undertaken in awareness and with responsibility, is a vehicle for engaging with the sometimes unbearable and often unacknowledged urgency of the human condition.

This brings us to some of the concrete but easily overlooked similarities between improvisation as practiced by jazz musicians and psychotherapy as practiced by Gestaltists. First, both are social, formally bringing together two or more individuals for the intentional co-creation of a series of events whose specific outcome, though presumed to be beneficial or somehow uplifting, cannot be predicted with any degree of precision. It is further understood that these anticipated but unforeseeable effects are—inevitably—a function of the interactions between the individuals involved, and that since our individual responses are themselves at least relatively unpredictable, the results of multiple interpenetrating mutual interactions are likely to be exponentially more so.

Second, while this absence of predictability may be experienced as a liability, it is also accepted and understood in both contexts as an indispensable precondition for spontaneous personal development. What unpredictability entails, among other things, is emotional risk—willing engagement with a spectrum of potential experiences that may include vulnerability, embarrassment, joy, excitement, sexuality, transcendence, love, laughter, awe, amazement, sadness, anger, boredom, perplexity, disappointment, grief, resentment, catharsis, etc. It also entails a reckoning with the recognition that such experiences do not occur in a vacuum but are fundamentally relational; it is the unpremeditated interplay of unique sensibilities that makes possible the discovery of previously uncontemplated possibilities for human life and expression, and the transcendence of formerly limiting habits and tendencies.

Perhaps, pending a more detailed inventory of the theoretical corpus of Gestalt therapy, these somewhat impressionistic remarks will serve to encompass those of its elements most germane to the paradox broached by Evan Parker above, i.e., the notion that his “best playing” (as he puts it) seems to happen by itself, beyond the realm of “conscious control.” Given the potential of improvisational spontaneity to manifest a full spectrum of human behaviors, from the most compulsively mechanical and destructive to the most inspiringly sublime, how is it possible to arrive at a perspective that facilitates transformative insight and a supple responsiveness synchronistically attuned to one’s own inner imperatives and the needs of one’s environment? By formulating the question in this way, I am obviously not suggesting that a given individual’s therapeutic process may be directly applicable to another’s, nor even that Gestalt or any other psychotherapy is the only means of achieving such goals; only that a psychotherapeutic lens is favorably equipped to reveal some of the dynamics of struggle and transformation experienced by individuals who discover within themselves a strong motivation to transcend the limitations of adverse or stultifying conditioning, whether in a personal or a more purely creative context.

The existential psychotherapist James Bugental writes:

Most patients who have a thoroughgoing therapeutic experience come at some point to a juncture that represents a choice as to the whole meaning of their lives. Here one must weigh his very being and make a choice as to how he will be in the world thereafter. Nearly everyone goes through his life on a basis compounded of parental example and teaching, cultural influences, and half-thought-through self-examination. Thoroughgoing psychotherapy raises to consciousness an embracing perspective on one’s own being, and this brings about a crisis. In this crisis the therapist’s acute sensitivity and greatest skill are called for, as well as his most genuine dedication to freedom and choice.

In the domain of improvised music, the transcendence of conditioned response transpires in at least two deceptively distinct dimensions, one stylistic or expressive and the other personal, interpersonal or spiritual. Most aspiring jazz improvisors familiar with the biographies of their heroes are likely to have contemplated the significance of various legendary rubicons connected with, for example, substance addiction and withdrawal, challenging professional opportunities, constructive or destructive humiliations, the deaths of relatives and colleagues, mental illness, incarceration, racial or cultural discrimination, physical injury and recovery, the positive influence of a spouse or benefactor, intense spiritual practice or revelation, expatriation, voluntary withdrawal from the public sphere, celebrated comebacks, reckonings with impending mortality, etc. Each of these corresponds to a universal dimension of human experience confronted personally in some fashion by any individual who chooses to work in a psychotherapeutic context—the latter being, after all, little more than a microcosm of life at large. So it is that a process-oriented psychotherapeutic system developed contemporaneously with the evolution of twentieth-century improvised music turns out to offer provocative insight into the emotional lives of improvisors and the essential nature of their undertakings.