As obvious as the difference between this: Follow her down to a bridge by a fountain where rocking horse people eat marshmallow pies.

And this: The contin­uous and (often) collective nature of improvisation elicits a heightened sense of localized present moments and subordination of larger-scale temporal relationships.

For the upcoming semester just finished Ed Sarath’s materials about consciousness and music making in the Oxford Handbook of Critical Improvisation Studies. He writes about the temporality of altered states of improvisation and other dimensions of time. Hard for me to put on a serious student hat and wade through not because I disagree with his findings, but using intellectual academic language to describe this is like trying to academize making a painting, making hummus or making whoopee. Using words to describe it doesn’t. Inverting the situation would be more amusing. Ed digesting psychedelic mind altering drugs then writing about the altered states of music, would be closer to accurate.