Preface 3

an arena of conduct of the most elaborate dimensions, an espe-cially apt place for portraying one of our distinctive organsways of assembling orderly activity.

The aim isnt explanatory but descriptive, a phenomenologi-cal account of handwork as its known to a performing musi-cian, without consulting the expert opinions of otherpractitioners, analysts of practitioners, or other professionalstudents of conduct. The goal is to describe jazz from a playersperspective (without which it wouldnt exist), the player reflect-ing on his skills with no one but himself to consult, to quotephilosopher Maurice Merleau-Ponty.5

Ive found that thus far unanalyzed aspects of the bodys wayscan be closely depicted, for all to see, by the performer, and per-haps no one but the performer, especially one who self-con-sciously takes up a complex activity with as strong an intentionto master its accomplishment as to try to reflect rigorously uponthe experiences of doing so. Guided by neither an introspective,mentalistically inclined consciousness nor the methods of ana-lytic science but only by the concrete particular problems facedin the course of learning jazz piano, Ive pointed to various crit-ical tasks faced when sustaining orderly articulated movements.

Such a production account might lead to the precise looks ofthings, eventually contributing to a differently grounded modal-ity of rigorous inquiry, only if the finest of details are sought.6

Ive tried to make the account both accessible and minute,building a specialized language, where needed, to bring intorelief some features for mapping an uncharted territory.

Following the report will be substantially easier if the readeris willing to take just a bit of time to roughly emulate theessence of critical keyboard examples by, say, using ones handson a tabletop. This will quite sufficiently concretize the account,and one with no formal or other musical background will thusfind it all manageable.