when is it both jazz and not jazz?

[Kim Cascone <kim@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

> I'm curious Kim, how strongly you correlate "laptop music" with
> improvisation. Does the portability of the tool suggest it? Or would you
> go so far as to disallow the notion of through-composed "laptop music?"
- I'd estimate that ~90 percent of the laptop performances I've seen are
improvised...this is arrived at from watching musicians I share a bill with
and not the musicians I collab with...
as for the notion of tools determining the compositional methodology: that
would take a book or thesis to explore...
but let's just say that there are two (I'm sure there are more but this is
all that comes to mind at 7:30AM before driving my son to school) common
perceptions of this issue:
1) laptops and software improvisation are the lazy man's method  of
composition
2) improvisation creates the spectacle/theater of work taking place during a
performance vs playing a composition which is more akin to 'space-bar music'
for most audience members i.e., acousmatic presentation format...
but no I do not disallow the notion of 'composed' laptop performances...I am
moving more in that direction...but more as one who imposes a fitness
function on an algorithm and not just hitting the DAC~ start button in
Max/MSP

------------------------------