"With a critical skill based on more than forty years of activity as improvisator, TOOP puts its reflection at the service of a genre that constantly challenges the definitions." Thurston Moore.

"Life, like improvised music, is a disturbing conflict between predictability and contingency." David Toop.

What can you have in common the casual meeting between Claude Lévi-Strauss and André Breton on a boat heading to Martinique with a jam that is organized spontaneously in a nightclub after the closing time? In what way can the Art Brut of Dubuffet, the esoteric practices of Gurdjieff, the calligraphies of Henri Michaux, the Taoist principles of the I CHING or the transcripts in a state of hypnotic trance of Robert Uncheck contribute to a theory of improvisation? Like the music that deals with, this book is not developed through a single argumentative line: its form unexpectedly springs when they interlapsed musical and extramusical experiences that boarded fundamental questions about the nature of human freedom and spontaneity in that Critical moment for the arts that took place from the period of interwaring until the end of the 1960s.
In this first installment of what it promises to be a tour in two volumes, David Tooop offers us a panorama that is neither strictly chronological nor exclusively historical of the origins of improvisation. Transnational crossings, contagions with visual arts, folds between popular music bands such as The Beatles, Cream, Pink Floyd and free improvisation groups such as Group Ongaku, MEV, Nuova Cononanza or Amm, the pioneering raids of Art Tatum, Django Reinhardt and Lennie Tristano, the era of post-cageana indeterminacy in the composition or avant-garde breaking of the Free Jazz are revisited and put into dialogue with the aim of throwing light on a practice that seems to have much to tell us about human creativity.
Faced with the growing advancement in our societies of the control, predictability and management techniques, improvisation music subsists as an anomaly, conscience, criticism and shelter. This work proposes a reflection on the subversive potential hidden in these risky exercises of collective spontaneity, which turned their backs on the authority of the composer or the director to descend the Maelström of the unforeseen.