For More Information: Brian Tate, www.briantatemusic.com
Purpose:
To give participants a powerful and positive experience of deep listening, teamwork, diversity, synergy, creativity, and dynamic improvisation in a musical context.
Outcomes:
• Discovery that individuals have hidden talents and abilities
• Diversity is crucial to success; improvisation does not create chaos, but rather creates its own dynamic structure
• Everyone can discover and generate his or her own creativity and self-expression
• Listening is the key to an effective and progressive organization
• Leadership is not about control, but about trust, listening, engagement, and the encouragement of interaction and flow
When to Use:
• When an organization wants to provide a hands-on, musical experience of whole systems in action that is fun, engaging, and energetic
When Not to Use:
• When participants are not attending voluntarily
Number of Participants:
• 20–2,000
Types of Participants:
• Any and all levels of participants, as well as different personality and learning styles
Typical Duration:
• Preparation: 1 day
• Event: 60 minutes–1 day or in shorter modules over time
• Follow-up: Minimal
Brief Example:
A group of participants had previously taken team-building and creativity programs and had understood these concepts in principle. With JazzLab, however, they actually experienced the synergy of diverse groups aligning together through active listening, the group creativity generated by jointly composing a
piece of music, and the practice of working with ambiguity and chaos through musical improvisation
to allow new structures to spontaneously arise. They were able to take skills they discovered through music and apply them back to their organization.
Historical Context:
Created by Brian Tate in 1996. Comes from earlier workshops on creativity and change, and from his career as a musician and facilitator. The effectiveness of group percussion comes from village culture in
Africa, where it is recognized that making music together creates a healthy, interactive, and holistic community.
 Jazz Lab |
