The ensemble as plural subject

Group jazz improvisation at the highest levels can achieve a kind of cooperative creativity that rises above the sum total of the contributions of the individuals. This phenomenon is widely recognized, but has resisted description beyond metaphors that refer to ‘special chemistry’ and the like. Some recent work in the philosophy of social action, on collective intention and group cognition, and on what has been helpfully called a ‘plural subject’, is brought together in this chapter with a close listening to the Stan Getz Quartet’s performance of the classic standard ‘On Green Dolphin Street’. As with discussions of group action in recent philosophical writings, here it emerges that qualities of the improvised performance are not reducible to individuated intentional content, and the notion of the plural subject provides both an analysis of it and the language for it.