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When Charlie Parker stated that “if you don’t live it, it won’t come out of your horn,” he conveyed, in his inimitable way, the capacity of improvisation to serve as a vehicle for integrating the totality of influences that shape personal and social identity. From class, culture, economics, and ecology to gender, race, sexuality, and spirituality; improvising musicians spontaneously meld these and other aspects of their being in expressions that serve as both profound personal and collective commentaries. In an era in which unprecedented levels of superficiality, alienation, and violence often overshadow a growing interest in creative and transpersonal development, and where an ever escalating morass of data threatens to engulf a genuine cross-fertilization between disciplines and cultures; the importance of a creative vehicle for accessing and expressing one’s inner and outer worlds has never been greater.

Improvisation not only excels in this regard, it also—through the very moment-to-moment decision making sequences that require individuals to penetrate beyond ordinary patterns of behavior—may exemplify the dissolution of provincial and nationalistic tendencies that divide communities and countries in our politically fragile world. Improvisation, in fact, may be the ultimate lens through which the quest for self and community is revealed to be as much a collective as a personal endeavor.

The International Society for Improvised Music presents performances, workshops, and papers based on this theme for its third international conference.

In cooperation with the International Society for Improvised Music, with the generous support of Porter College Festival Funding at UCSC, and additional support from UCSC Music Department, the IAA and AAI, we will host a co-sponsored festival & conference of improvised, cross-cultural and interdisciplinary music and arts festival/conference. This is continuation of the Global African Music Festival series and a recent collaboration with International Society of Improvising Musicians that has grown out of 2007 and 2008 ISIM conferences.

The primary objectives and purpose of the UCSC Improvising Artists Festival and Conference (IAFC) is to host a collaborative set of joint events under the co-sponsorship of the annual International Society for Improvised Music Conference (ISIM) and a UCSC festival aimed at an ongoing effort entitled, “Rebuilding Global Community through the Arts.” Thus, the focus of the festival/conference is on creating an environment and infrastructure where people from different creative genres and disciplines can come together for a weekend to explore and imagine new avenues of interdisciplinary, cross-cultural discourse and interaction focused upon 21st century improvisation, diversity and change.

Event Description
The conference will contain approximately forty events within four days. All events will feature members of ISIM, invited guest performers and scholars, with a special emphasis on UCSC students, invited guests, and faculty presentation and participation. The first two days of the conference will have one keynote speaker in the morning and keynote artists in the evening, for a total of four keynotes. Each full day will also be jam packed innovative presentations, concerts, films, workshops, and panel discussions with guests from around the globe.

Time: December 3, 2009 at 3pm to December 6, 2009 at 5pm
Location: University of California Santa Cruz