From The Companion Series
Jazz has accompanied my work for years—not as background music but as a way of sensing. In the long hours of writing, walking, or arranging fragments, its syncopated pulse has shaped how I think and move. The improvisations of New Orleans jazz, in particular, taught me that method can be rhythm: an ongoing negotiation between structure and surprise, repetition and invention. Early ensembles in Storyville or on Basin Street performed without scripts, relying on listening, responsiveness, and shared timing—a form of situated collaboration that ethnography understands well. As Ted Gioia reminds us in The History of Jazz (2021 [1997]), New Orleans musicians played “in motion, not in plan,” inventing collective composition as both necessity and art. That ethic of improvisation—communal, experimental, and alive—remains a living pedagogy for fieldwork: to play with what emerges, to let the scene lead, to trust that the unexpected has form.
The essence of jazz lies in call-and-response—a conversation carried through sound, gesture, and timing. Each instrument listens before it answers; each voice holds space for the others. This is not coordination by plan but by presence. As Ingrid Monson shows in Saying Something: Jazz Improvisation and Interaction (1996), improvisation depends less on mastery than on mutual attunement. This social and sonic listening continuously redefines what a piece can become. In ethnography, too, knowledge arises from the spaces between notes: the pauses, hesitations, and feedback that bind researcher and world. Listening becomes a methodological virtue. To learn from jazz is to practice attention that is both disciplined and flexible—to improvise while remaining attuned to the ensemble. Field encounters, like jam sessions, thrive on contingency: they depend on rhythm rather than control, on the capacity to keep playing when the pattern shifts.
New Orleans jazz also teaches the value of vitality and imperfection. A note bent too far, a breath out of time, a phrase that stumbles—all become part of the piece. Paul Berliner, in Thinking in Jazz: The Infinite Art of Improvisation (1994), calls these “moments of divergence”—the sites where creativity happens. Jazz makes room for error, and in that room, creation breathes. This ethos of imperfection has accompanied much of my studio work. In Tarde: A Handbook of Minimal and Irrelevant Urban Entanglements (Orrego 2023), the fragment replaces the complete piece; the incomplete phrase becomes rhythm. In Tin Ethnography, improvisation occurs through the assembly of objects and words guided by intuition rather than plan. Even my ongoing fragmentography draws from this sense of improvisation: a montage of residues that never seeks harmony, only resonant dissonance. Jazz affirms that to improvise is not to drift without form, but to find coherence in motion.
Beyond sound, jazz is a politics of relation. Emerging from Black New Orleans, it carries histories of displacement, resilience, and invention. Its method is inseparable from its context: collective creation in the face of constraint. Lewis Porter’s Jazz: A Century of Change (1999) reminds us that jazz evolved through everyday acts of resistance—musicians composing freedom within and against the structures that confined them. To play jazz is to recompose the world from what one has—to make possibility out of repetition, solidarity out of noise. This lesson extends into ethnography, where method is also improvised within limits: institutional, ethical, and material. Jazz insists that freedom is not the absence of structure but the transformation of it through relation. In my own practice, this means staying close to rhythm—to the tempo of places, the tonalities of materials, the beats of everyday life—and composing ethnography as a living, collective performance.
To learn from jazz is to remember that method, like music, lives in time. Ethnographic writing, fieldwork, and design all rely on timing—when to enter, when to hold back, when to let silence speak. Jazz teaches that timing is ethical: it requires responsiveness, humility, and care. The field, like an ensemble, only works when one listens as much as one plays. To write ethnography with jazz in the background is to accept that research is never solo work—it is always improvisation in the company of others, a continuous tuning with the world. In this sense, my Studio Ethnography learns from the Hot Five and Hot Seven sessions of Louis Armstrong (Columbia/Legacy 2000) as much as from theory: those early recordings remind me that rhythm is not ornament—it is structure, relation, method.
Hands-on exercise: The Ethnographic Jam
Listen to a New Orleans jazz ensemble—Louis Armstrong’s Hot Five, King Oliver, or the Preservation Hall Jazz Band. While listening, sketch or write freely for the duration of one song. Do not pause or edit. Let rhythm guide your syntax. When the song ends, read what emerged. What did rhythm do to perception, to line, to attention?
References
- Armstrong, Louis. The Complete Hot Five and Hot Seven Recordings. Columbia/Legacy, 2000.
- Berliner, Paul F. 1994. Thinking in Jazz: The Infinite Art of Improvisation. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
- Gioia, Ted. 2021 [1997]. The History of Jazz. New York: Oxford University Press.
- Monson, Ingrid. 1996. Saying Something: Jazz Improvisation and Interaction. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
- Porter, Lewis. 1999. Jazz: A Century of Change. New York: Schirmer Books.
- Orrego, Santiago. 2023. Tarde: A Handbook of Minimal and Irrelevant Urban Entanglements. Berlin: Self-published.