Jamming for research

Musicians from Mali, Mexico, Canada and the U.S. will meet for the first time later this week to make music together. Their improvisational performance, part of an annual jazz festival, is also the jumping-off point for a multimillion-dollar research project that seeks to understand what happens when a group of people make off-the-cuff music together. Eric Lewis, a McGill philosophy professor and member of the research team, will look at improvisation and its implications for intellectual property law -- a hot issue with the rising use of sampling in music.