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Whether
they take the form of LPs or CDs, records usually come with a cover
that supplies some basic information about the music, starting with
who is playing and what is being played. This information is part
of the records' paratext (paradisc?), more precisely, of what Gérard
Genette calls the "publisher's epitext" (Seuils 20): the
"uncertain zone" that comes between the text and the context,
admitting-in the case of a record's front cover-such items as the
name of the artist(s), the title of the album, and the name of the
label (to which a serial number is usually added). My purpose is
to contribute to the "poetics" of jazz (defined as the
study of the rules, codes, and conventions that shape discourses
about jazz) by examining the covers of some celebrated records:
the albums released by the company Blue Note between 1939 and 1976.
Those covers are well known because of their graphic design, especially
their photographs, which have been anthologized in attractive picture
books like Graham Marsh's Blue Note: The Album Cover Art and Michael
Cuscuna's The Blue Note Years: The Jazz Photography of Francis Wolff.
I touch later upon the role of this iconography, but my main objective
is to examine another component of Blue Note album covers, namely,
their titles. For those titles, though admittedly less glamorous
than Francis Wolff's photographs, are integral to the "poetics"
of jazz; they offer several imaginative solutions to the problem
of naming an album, that is, of distinguishing it from other albums,
telling about its content, and attracting potential listeners.
Most studies of titles thus far have concerned literature (Hoek),
or such specialized domains as film (group Mu), painting (Fisher),
advertising (Calbris), newspaper articles (Dubois), and scholarly
essays (Carrard). Titles of music albums, however, have not been
scrutinized to the same extent. In the area of jazz, critics have
mostly focused on the titles of individual pieces. Frank Kofsky,
in his thorough study of the jazz "revolution" of the
1960s, has thus pointed out that many compositions of this period
have names that evoke African and African-American cultures: "Dakar,"
"Bantu," "Dahomey Dance," "Message from
Kenya," "The Sermon," "Home Cookin'," "Them
Dirty Blues," "Wednesday Night Prayer Meeting," etc.
Yet Kofsky does not ask how these names are related to their co-texts
(i.e., the other texts that figure on the jackets), for example,
whether a title like "Dakar" also designates the album
on which it appears (it does in the instance of John Coltrane's
Dakar), and whether that album contains other numbers whose titles
refer to Africa. Such questions are important, though, because jazz
records are mostly known by their titles and usually include not
just one piece but several. In this respect, titles of jazz albums
are comparable to titles of collections of poems or short stories.
All make parts into a whole, in the case of poems and short stories
by highlighting features which those parts have in common on the
thematic level (Charles Baudelaire's Les Fleurs du mal), on the
generic level (Ernest Hemingway's The Short Stories), or even on
the level of both genre and theme (Paul Verlaine's Les Poèmes
saturniens).
Issues concerning titles of jazz records are many, and I deal here
with very few of them. Thus, although the problem is important from
a historical standpoint, I do not take up the question of knowing--to
use Jacques Derrida's pun--who had the "title" to coin
the titles of the Blue Note records (7). Were those phrases suggested
by the musicians? Did they originate with the talented graphic artists
(Gil Melle, Reid Miles, etc.) who were reponsible for designing
the album jackets? Were they devised by the label's owners, Francis
Wolff and Alfred Lion, who until 1965 (when they sold Blue Note
to Liberty Records) were deeply involved in the production of the
records that they released? Or were titles picked during a brain-storming
session, to which the above parties contributed in various ways?
Being unaware of any research on this subject, I assume that the
titles I examine were conceived by an editorial authority that included
one, two, or all the groups I have just mentioned. As far as grammar
is concerned, I don't investigate the syntactic structure of the
titles under review. Leo H. Hoek has treated this subject with regard
to literary works, and I take for granted that his analyses also
apply to music albums: most utterances that make up titles are semi-grammatical,
more precisely, "verbless" and "elliptical"
(Hoek 54). Leaving historical and stylistic questions aside, I consider
the titles of the Blue Note records from the perspective of the
information that they provide. I first establish a typology, asking
what those titles are telling about the musical content of the albums
that they earmark. Then I take up some of the issues that titling
a record raises for the poetics of jazz, that is, not for the music
itself, but for the study of the discourses that pertain to it.
Viewed from the standpoint of the data that they furnish, the titles
that figure on the cover of Blue Note records can be distributed
into three basic categories: denotative, connotative, and index
titles.
1.
Denotative titles. Such titles "inform correctly" about
the content of the album on which they figure and do not have to
be "interpreted" by prospective listeners (Hoek 171),
at least not by competent ones. They usually list a fact, or a series
of facts, which are regarded as relevant to a jazz record. Those
facts may include:
1.1
The name of the artist and/or the group he is leading: Sonny Rollins,
Sonny Rollins; Tal Farlow, Tal Farlow Quartet; Lou Donaldson, Lou
Donaldson Sextet; Hank Mobley, Hank Mobley and His All_Stars. The
information may be limited to the artist's first name and/or include
an evaluation, often in the form of an adjective qualifying the
artist: Andrew Hill, Andrew; Bud Powell, Bud!; Fats Navarro, The
Fabulous Fats Navarro; J.J. Johnson, The Eminent J.J. Johnson; Herbie
Nichols, The Prophetic Herbie Nichols; Thad Jones, The Magnificent
Thad Jones; Jimmy Smith, The Incredible Jimmy Smith at the Organ
(the adjective "incredible" recurs on several albums by
Jimmy Smith, suggesting that Smith's use of the organ is "beyond
belief"). Insofar as they repeat the name/s of the artist/s
already supplied on the cover, these titles answer in redundant
manner the question that probably is the most significant in jazz:
Who is playing? For jazz, unlike classical music, emphasizes interpreters
and pays less attention to composers. In fact, my corpus includes
only two titles that foreground the authors of the music on the
albums: Horace Silver, Six Pieces of Silver, and Jimmy Smith, Jimmy
Smith Plays Fats Waller. Yet Silver and his group are also the interpreters
of Six Pieces, and the album featuring Waller's music is intriguing
because that music is played by Smith (encounters of this type of
course are frequently staged on classical records, leading to a
profusion of titles of the type "X Plays/Sings Z").
1.2 The genre of the music: Albert Ammons, Boogie-Woogie Classics;
Ike Quebec, Heavy Soul; Kenny Dorham, Afro-Cuban; Art Hodes, Dixieland
Jubilee; George Lewis, Echoes of New-Orleans; Charlie Rouse, Bossa
Nova Bacchanal; Grant Green, The Latin Bit. These titles situate
the album on the map of the types of jazz that are practiced at
the time of the album's release. They may confirm what we know about
the featured artist: Ammons is a specialist of boogie-woogie piano
playing; Hodes, of Dixieland as practiced in Chicago; and Lewis,
of the New-Orleans style as it has survived in its place of birth.
But titles of this type may also signal that the artist is doing
something that for him is unusual: Dorham is not known for his forays
into Afro-Cuban; Rouse, unlike Stan Getz, did not convert convert
to bossa nova; and Green was a hard bopper at the time of the Latin
Bit's release (1962). In other words, titles like Bossa Nova Bacchanal
and The Latin Bit do not just inform about the content of the album,
showing Blue Note's eagerness to diversify beyond "just jazz."
They also set up a confrontation between the music and its interpreters,
positing knowledgeable listeners who are curious to hear how such
artists as Rouse and Green handle fashionable South-American rhythms.
Similar remarks apply to titles that in themselves are inconspicuous
but become attractive when they are read in conjunction with with
the name of the artist, like Horace Silver, The Trio Sides. Indeed,
Silver has worked mostly with a quintet or a sextet. The information
"the trio sides" is thus noteworthy for competent listeners,
the definite article "the," which shows that all those
sides are gathered on the album, being especially appealing to the
"completists" who make up a sizeable part of the jazz
collectors community.
1.3.
The circumstances surrounding the production of the album: Clifford
Brown, Memorial Album (i.e., Brown had recently died); Kenny Burrell,
Introducing Kenny Burrell (i.e., this was Burrell's first album
for Blue Note); Art Blakey, A Night at Birdland (i.e., the music
was recorded live at the club "Birdland"); Freddie Redd,
The Music from The Connection (the numbers on the album were composed
for the play The Connection); Dexter Gordon, Our Man in Paris (the
music was recorded in Paris); Clifford Jordan and Don Gilmore, Blowing
in from Chicago (both saxophonists went to Chicago's Southside famous
DuSable High School, which trained other outstanding jazz musicians
like Richard Davis, Johnny Griffin, and John Jenkins). Some of these
"circumstances" seem to be more memorable than others.
Thus, besides the Burrell album mentioned above, several titles
indicate that the record is a "first" for the label (e.g.,
Introducing Johnny Griffin, Here Comes Louis Smith), emphasizing
Blue Note's willingness to sign new artists or hire them away from
other companies. But the most frequently used titles in this category
are those identifying the place, especially the club, where the
music was recorded: Jutta Hipp, At the Hickory House; Kenny Dorham,
'Round Midnight at the Café Bohemia; Sonny Rollins, A Night
at the Village Vanguard; Jimmy Smith, Groovin' at Small's Paradise;
Donald Byrd, At the Half Note Café; Stanley Turrentine, Up
at Minton's. Such titles draw on name recognition, transporting
listeners to famous places that they probably know but cannot visit
very often unless they live in New York. The information "recorded
live" also includes a promise of authenticity, grounded in
the widely held belief that the "best," most "genuine"
jazz is played in clubs, not in the unnatural, spontaneity-killing
environment of a studio.
2.
Connotative titles. Such titles do not "inform correctly"
(in the sense of "literally") about the content of the
album (Hoek 171). Admitting one or several connotations, they have
to be "interpreted" by potential listeners on the basis
of shared cultural codes. Those connotations may concern:
2.1
The "mood" of the music: Jack Wilson, Easterly Winds;
The Three Sounds, Feelin' Good; Stanley Turrentine, Blue Hour; Erroll
Garner, Overture to Dawn; Ornette Coleman, Love Call. Obviously,
a title like "Easterly Winds" cannot be taken at face
value: the album does not offer recordings of winds, blowing from
the East or from elsewhere, although such recordings exist for the
pleasure of both audiophiles and ecologists. The phrase "easterly
winds" is used here in its connotative meaning ("softness")
to describe Wilson's quiet, nonaggressive music.
("Easterly Winds" is also one of the song titles, which
comes to designate the whole album in synecdochic manner.) Similarly,
the sadness that "blue" suggests accords culturally with
the slow tunes on Blue Hour, as the idea of "happiness"
is inscribed in the fast, bouncing numbers that make up Feelin'
Good. As for Love Call, it draws on the associations with "primitivism"
that jazz often uses--associations that are justified in this case
given the violence and disruptiveness of Coleman's music.
2.2 The genre of the music: Freddie Roach, Mo' Greens Please; Horace
Parlan, Headin' South; Jackie McLean, Destination Out. Whereas titles
like Boogie-Woogie Classics and Afro-Cuban give direct information
about genre, Mo' Greens Please and Destination Out proceed by way
of association. In fact, those last titles point to two of the main
trends of the 1960s that are abundantly represented in the Blue
Note catalog. "Greens" designates metonymically the "funk-soul"
style, which is alluded to in several other titles: George Braith,
Soul Stream; Lou Donaldson, Gravy Train; Hank Mobley, Soul Station;
Jimmy Smith, The Sermon; Don Wilkerson, Preach Brother Preach. As
for "Out" in McLean's title, it stands for a "new,"
"free," "out" kind of jazz (though not for radical
"free jazz" in the Albert Ayler-Archie Shepp mold), to
which other titles refer in the same oblique fashion: Donald Byrd,
Free Form; Joe Henderson, In 'n 'Out; Andrew Hill, Point of Departure;
Grachan Moncur, Evolution; Sam Rivers, A New Conception; and especially
Jackie McLean, It's Time, Let Freedom Ring, New Soil, One Step Beyond,
and Right Now. Connotations, of course, are sometimes ambiguous.
"Spring" can thus suggest "freshness," as it
is supposed to do when brands of shampoo, perfume, or deodorant
are named after this season. But it can also mean "turn"
and "reshaping," as it certainly does on Anthony Williams's
Spring, a record that features the "new" music of the
mid-1960s. More serious ambiguities characterize the titles of McLean's
albums. If "it's time," is it "time" for musicians
to start playing "out" of the traditional chord structure
of the blues and the 32-bar, AABA standard? Is it "time"
for all African-Americans to finally obtain their due in such areas
as civil rights, jobs, and housing? And can't the two meanings be
superposed, "right now" telling when the changes that
are required in both the artistic and the social spheres must take
place? I shall return to these questions in my conclusion, when
I address the subject of the "meaning" that can be conferred
upon music.
2.3.
The relationship of the artist to the album: Art Blakey, Buhaina's
Delight; Paul Chambers, The Whims of Chambers; Walter Davis, Davis
Cup; Herbie Hancock, My Point of View; Joe Henderson, Our Thing;
Jackie McLean, Jackie's Bag; Horace Parlan, Speakin' My Piece; Freddie
Redd, Shades of Redd; McCoy Tyner, The Real McCoy. Titles of this
type assert that the artist enjoys the music he is playing on the
record, even that he "delights" in it. They also certify
that the artist is doing "his thing," that is, playing
what he wants, without compromising his standards. By way of pun,
finally, they state that the music offered on the record reveals
the artist's true personality, or at least that it provides "shades"
of it. Such titles, of course, are meant to answer charges that
are frequently leveled at records, e.g., "the artists obviously
have no pleasure," "the producer must have imposed the
songs," or "the whole endeavor is clearly commercial."
But the plays on "cup," "bag," and "real"
also testify to the ideology of "authenticity" and "expressiveness"
that permeates discourses about music in general, jazz in particular.
The assumption, which I already described while discussing live
recordings, is that musicians have a true self. It is also that
the best records are those on which they are allowed to express
that self, to do "their thing" with as few constraints
as possible.
3.
Index titles. Such titles do not refer to the music in any immediate
manner. They merely "index" the record, distinguishing
it from other records in bins, in catalogs, as well as on the shelf
on which its buyer has finally put it. To be sure, all titles serve
as "indexes." But some of them seem to fulfill mainly
(only?) that latter function, insofar as they could hardly characterize
the music and/or the musicians. Titles in this category may include:
3.1.
A catchy phrase, usually of the ready-made kind: Lou Donaldson,
Sunny Side Up; Kenny Drew, Undercurrent; Freddie Hubbard, Open Sesame;
Hank Mobley, Roll Call; Lee Morgan, Indeed; Stanley Turrentine,
Look Out; The Three Sounds, Good Deal; and especially Wayne Shorter,
Night Dreamer, Speak No Evil, and The All Seeing Eye. It goes without
saying that some of these titles can be viewed as including a connotation:
the songs on Donaldson's album establish a "sunny" mood;
Drew's music is atypical-it belongs to an "undercurrent";
it is "indeed" Morgan playing here (who else could it
be?); Shorter's music has a "dream-like" quality; it is
also challenging, but listeners should make an effort and "speak
no evil" about it. Yet other titles in this categoy seem to
resist interpretative recuperation and function strictly as indexes.
Am I supposed, for example, to be on the "lookout" for
Turrentine's Look Out? And should I buy The Three Sounds' Good Deal
because it is a "good deal?" Coming from a classy label
like Blue Note, these invitations and promises are too crass to
be taken literally. But if "look out" and "good deal"
mean something else, how can I select among the many figurative
senses which those phrases suggest? Similar problems arise when
we try to make sense of Shorter's The All Seeing Eye, since the
phrase "all seeing eye" can apply neither to the music,
nor to some known aspect of Shorter's personality. These last titles
can thus be viewed as pure "index titles," although I
am confident that skilled literary critics could come up with plausible
interpretations for them, as they do for the most hermetic pieces
of poetry.
3.2
A pun on the name (or the nickname) of the artist: John Coltrane,
Blue Train; Grant Green, Green Street, Grant Stand; Freddie Hubbard,
Hub Cap, Hub Tones; Clifford Jordan, Cliff Craft; Duke Jordan, Flight
to Jordan; Lee Morgan, Lee-Way, Delightfulee; Louis Smith, Smithville.
Some of these titles could figure in the "relationship to the
artist" category, as they state that the musicians were able
to play what they wanted (Lee-Way), and that the record reflects
their true selves (Smithville). The pun in Grant Stand serves the
same function, but it also contains an antiphrasis: Green cannot
be "grandstanding," unless we admit that his "stand"
consists precisely of a "grandstand"--a version that the
Blue Note braintrust probably did not have in mind when they picked
this title. The index function of titles punning on the name of
the artist is most visible in the case of Coltrane's Blue Train,
since the music played by "Trane" on this celebrated album
is not particularly "blue," in the sense of "slow
and melancholic" (as it is on Turrentine's Blue Hour). "Blue"
possibly was selected here because it accords well with "train"
phonetically (try "orange" or "yellow train"),
just like "street" was selected for Green Street because
it accords (even better) with "Green" (try "green
road" or "green path"). For that matter, most titles
in this category include what Yvan Fónagy calls "figures
of sound" (140), insofar as they combine puns with alliterations
(Cliff Craft), with assonances (Smithville), and even with both
figures in the same word (Delightfulee).
3.3
A phrase that links the name of the artist with the cover art, sometimes
in the form of a pun: Donald Byrd, Byrd in Flight (the jacket shows
a bird flying over its nest), Byrd in Hand (the cover shows Byrd
standing with his hands loosely clasped); Sonny Clark, Dial S for
Sonny (the cover shows a photograph of Clark and a large telephone
receiver); Lou Donaldson, Lou Takes Off (the cover shows a missile
taking off); Horace Silver, Horace Scope (the cover shows the signs
of the zodiac arranged in a circle); Baby Face Willette, Face to
Face (the cover shows Willette's face, and the phrase "face
to face" is also spelled both normally and with inverted typeset,
the words "face," "to," and "face"
literally facing each other).
3.4
A phrase that is linked with the cover art, although it does not
play with/on the name of the artist: Donald Byrd, Royal Flush (the
cover shows Byrd holding five cards, though toward himself, making
it impossible to know whether he actually has a "royal flush");
Sonny Clark, Cool Struttin' (the cover shows a woman stylishly pacing
the streets); Lou Donaldson, Blues Walk (the cover shows Donaldson
walking); Gil Melle, Patterns in Jazz (the cover shows color patterns--drawn
by Melle himself, who at the time was employed by Blue Note both
as a musician and a graphic artist); Jimmy Smith, Crazy! Baby (the
cover shows a woman in flashy clothes posing next to a luxury sportscar--a
Jaguar). Like Good Deal and The All Seeing Eye, titles in 3.3 and
3.4 come as close as possible to being pure "index titles."
True, metaphors of height on Byrd in Flight and Lou Takes Off suggest
that the quality of the music offered on these records is particularly
"elevated." But such worn figures are less likely to attract
prospective listeners than the whole concept, which associates verbal
and iconographic messages in an engaging manner. Some titles in
this category are even misleading, as "cool" in Cool Struttin'
(like "blue" in Blue Train) does not describe correctly
Clark's music (though the adjective certainly fits the woman's stride),
and only two out of the six numbers on Blues Walk are "blues"
in the technical sense of the term (a 12-bar structure that follows
a specific chord progression). In these instances, too, the point
seems to lure potential buyers by combining a catchy title with
a high-quality picture, not to supply precise information about
the content of the album. Such information, on the Blue Note records,
is provided by lengthy, well-documented liner notes, to which inquisitive
customers can turn if they want more details concerning the performance.
As
I said from the outset, my main purpose here is to establish a typology
of the Blue Note titles, not to explain where those titles originated
or why they took on the forms I have inventoried. I will thus limit
my conclusion to three brief remarks, which should help to contextualize
the phenomena I have examined and to situate my analysis within
the more general "poetics" of jazz.
I first must emphasize more than I have done so far that titling
jazz records (but also other cultural objects like books and paintings)
must comply with commercial exigencies. Competition is fierce in
the music business, and the way an album is titled can contribute
to that album's success or failure. Economic considerations, therefore,
certainly account for Blue Note's use of such devices as hyperbolic
assertions (The Fabulous Fats Navarro), easily decodable metonymies
(Gravy Train), and no less easily understandable puns (Byrd in Flight).
But the requirements of marketing may also explain the high number
of index titles, whose sole function is to set a record apart from
other records, making it stand out in stores, catalogs, and magazine
advertisements. Whether such schemes are effective or not is of
course open to question. I am not aware of any empirical survey
in which listeners were asked, among other things, whether they
decided to buy or not to buy a record because of its title. As for
sales figures, provided that we could obtain them, they depend on
so many elements (the price of the record, its format, its availability,
etc.), that it would be difficult to establish direct correlations
between the number of copies an album sold and the way it was titled.
At the very most, we collectors can attest that the Blue Note records
are sought after not just for musical reasons, but because of what
we regard as the attractiveness of their jackets (of which titles
of course are major components). Thus, we may have acquired Donald
Byrd's Royal Flush simply because we liked the game played on this
disc's cover between verbal and iconographic messages. Those of
us who are most enamored of graphics may even have bought Bud Powell's
Bud! because of the title's design, in this case, because the letters
forming the word "Bud" are brightly lit against the dark,
claustrophobic background of the picture. (The same contrast is
found on several other Blue Note covers.) The fact that the Blue
Note jackets have been anthologized is relevant in this regard,
confirming those jackets' desirability as aesthetic objects that
have become independent from the product they are supposed to promote
and describe. Blue Note, for that matter, is the only jazz label
to which an exclusive picture book is devoted; other anthologies
gather the jackets of diverse companies according to those companies'
location (e.g., Marsh's California Cool and New York Hot), or they
are focused on the production of one designer (e.g., Manek Daver's
Jazz Graphics, which collects the jackets drawn by David Stone Martin).
While the titles of the Blue Note records are indicative of the
economic requirements involved in producing an album, they also
point to the contractual aspects of the information offered on that
album's cover. Philippe Lejeune and other literary theorists have
described this side of a book's paratext, arguing that such a generic
subtitle as "autobiography" establishes a "pact"
between a text and its readers; in this instance, the text's author,
narrator, and main character are the same "person," who
is committed to providing a truthful narrative of his/her life (Lejeune
26). In my sample, the contractual nature of the items that figure
on a record's front cover is particularly noticeable in denotative
titles: Sonny Rollins's Sonny Rollins must feature Rollins; Albert
Ammons's Boogie-Woogie Classics must consist of boogie-woogies;
Kenny Dorham's 'Round Midnight at the Café Bohemia must have
been recorded at the Café Bohemia; and Introducing Johnny
Griffin must "really" be Griffin's first album for Blue
Note. Listeners would feel betrayed if they did not get what the
titles say they are getting, for instance, if it turned out that
Rollins only plays on one number on Sonny Rollins, that Ammons has
abandoned boogie-woogie, or that Dorham's disc was in fact recorded
in a studio, background noises and applause being added to create
the illusion of a club date. (We have all been frustrated upon discovering
that the music on a pirate or supermarket label did not match the
information supplied on the record's cover.) But the same constraints
also apply to connotative and index titles, showing how the (sometimes)
conflicting demands of marketing and truth in advertising are the
objects of a negociation. Thus, a title like Easterly Winds can
only designate soft music (though not necessarily Wilson's music),
and it could not be used as the title of, say, one of the McLean's
albums of the early 1960s. Such a use would clash with the shared
cultural code that associates "easterly winds" with "softness,"
breaking the contract which is grounded in that code. Conversely,
Free Form could hardly become the title of a conservative, "commercial"
record, like Turrentine's Dearly Beloved. As for the titles I have
labeled ambiguous (Spring) or misleading (Cool Struttin'), they
do not really jeopardize the pact with prospective buyers that the
information on an album's cover establishes. Rather, they posit
an informed audience, which knows that "spring" on a Tony
Williams album can only mean "renewal," and that Sonny
Clark's music does not fall under the "cool" style developed
by Stan Getz and others in the late 1940s (though it certainly can
be described as "cool" in the sense of ""chic"
or "fashionable"). Irony, in short, is not found in the
titles of the Blue Note albums, and the occasional games that are
played on those albums' covers remain most subdued. My corpus, at
any rate, reveals none of the prankish frauds that are sometimes
committed in literature, such as Boris Vian's titling L'Automne
à Pékin a novel that takes place neither in the fall
nor in Beijing, Eugène Ionesco's calling La Cantatrice chauve
a play that includes no bald singer among its characters, or Mathieu
Bénézet's naming L'Histoire de la peinture en trois
volumes a collection of poems that do not concern painting and are
gathered in one 116 page-long volume. The Blue Note catalog, at
this point, does not offer a Saxophone Summit to which no saxophonists
have been invited, and I am not sure whether the jazz audience is
ready for this kind of ludic deception.
Last, but not least, the titles of the Blue Note records point to
the larger issue of knowing whether music has a "semantic level"
(or a "content plane") and where that level is located
(Eco 11). To pose the problem in a somewhat simplistic manner: Do
musical signs only refer to other musical signs, according to such
relations as "equivalence, contrast, symmetry, and complication"
(Nattiez 138)? Or can they can refer to the world outside music,
for instance, to "concepts, actions, and emotions" (Nattiez
132)? I am not competent to intervene into a discussion that has
involved semioticians, philosophers, and musicologists, pitching
the "absolutists," for whom "one musical event...
has meaning because it points to and makes us expect another musical
event" (Meyer 35), against the "referentialists,"
for whom "musical meaning... lies in the relationship between
a musical symbol or sign and the extra-musical thing which it designates"
(33). (These issues are comprehensively discussed, for example,
in the essays collected in Scher.) Thus, I will only observe that
the titles of the Blue Note records offer different answers to these
questions--albeit unintentionally. A few among those titles sidestep
the issue altogether. A phrase like A Night at Birdland, for example,
involves no theory of musical meaning; it does not claim that the
pieces on the record picture the Birdland, only stating that the
disc contains (some of) the sounds that were produced there on a
certain night. Similarly, Green Street does not assert that the
music on the record describes a street or any green object; this
title, as I argued earlier, functions strictly as an index, serving
to distinguish the album from Green's previous records. Other titles,
however, illustrate Meyer's "absolutist" position. Thus,
Dixieland Jubilee and Afro-Cuban imply that musical events have
meaning in relation to other events in the same semiotic category;
proceeding by symmetry and contrast, they describe what the music
on these albums is ("dixieland," "Afro-Cuban"),
and also what it is not, or not quite ("dixieland" is
not truly "New-Orleans" and "Afro-Cuban" not
exactly "latin" nor "be-bop"). Finally, such
titles as Blue Hour and Feelin' Good exemplify Meyer's "referentialist"
position. Indeed, they indicate that musical signs can designate
extra-musical "things," just like linguistic signs can
designate extra-linguistic objects, actions, and emotions. In these
cases, as I surmised while discussing connotative titles, the recordings
(specifically the music's tempi) refer conventionally to a certain
"mood," which the adjectives "blue" and "good"
describe by way of a metaphor ("blue") and a direct qualification
("good").
The Blue Note titles bearing on the "avant-garde" jazz
of the early 1960s best pose the problem of the "aboutness"
of music. To reframe the question I already asked while examining
those titles: Do such phrases as Evolution, It's Time, Right Now,
Let Freedom Ring, and A New Conception refer to music, describing
the "new," "free" kind of jazz that was developing
at the time? Do they refer to the social context, calling for changes
in the situation of African-Americans? And, most importantly, does
the music on these albums have in itself a social meaning? Kofsky,
in the study I quoted earlier, rehearses the familiar thesis that
aesthetic and social "revolutions" cannot be separated.
According to him, the major transformations that jazz underwent
in the 1960s were "responses" to a "massive constellation
of social and economic forces," such as the "increased
technological unemployment of unskilled Negro laborers," the
"consolidation of Afro-American determination to remove, and
the white insistence on maintaining, the chains of second-class
citizenship," the "movement for African independence,"
and the "growth of explicit black-nationalist sentiment"
(263). Yet Kofsky does not ask whether Rivers's or Coltrane's music
can be "about" these phenomena, as a novel, a poem, or
a painting can be "about" them. Thus, when he states that
the title "It's Time" means "it's time for liberation"
(75), he merely interprets the phrase in light of some aspects of
the social context; he does not claim that the music on the record
actually describes that context, picturing such things as ghetto
unemployment or the growth of black-nationalist awareness. Whether
music can represent this kind of extra-musical content or not, however,
is precisely the issue that the titles under review permit us to
raise. If we take the "It's Time" that Kofsky mentions
to be McLean's It's Time, numerous musical signs on this record
inscribe a "liberation" in areas like song structure (most
pieces on the record no longer fall under the 32-bar, AABA pattern),
rhythm (the usual 4/4 is frequently broken), and instrumentental
range (McLean's saxophone deploys harmonics and shrieks). But this
"liberation" is from the conventions of hard-bop, that
is, specifically musical (revealingly, the first piece on It's Time
is titled "Cancellation"). To extend it to the social
sphere, we need a code that tells us how to translate musical signs
into social signs, more precisely, how to assign a social signified
to a musical signifying like the modal structure that McLean is
using in three out of the six numbers on It's Time. Does such a
code exist? If it does, is it structured like the linguistic code
(as I have assumed by speaking of a "signifying" and a
"signified")? And can we learn it, as we learn, besides
language, the codes of such components of our social universe as
fashion and advertising? The titles of the Blue Note records do
not answer these questions in direct, explicit manner. But they
they make it possible to pose them, and, in this respect, they contribute
to the conversation.
Titles cited
The
dates are the recordings', as given in Cuscuna's and Jazz Magazine's
discographies. Neither Cuscuna nor Jazz Magazine provides information
about the year of an album's issue, and that information usually
does not appear on the album itself (with the exception of a few
reissues, e.g., Horace Silver, The Trio Sides).
Ammons,
Albert. Boogie-Woogie Classics. Blue Note, 1939.
Baudelaire, Charles. Les Fleurs du mal. Paris: Garnier, 1961 (1857).
.
Bénézet, Mathieu. L'Histoire de la peinture en trois
volumes. Poèmes. Paris: Gallimard, 1968.
Blakey, Art. A Night at Birdland with Art Blakey Quintet. Blue Note,
1954.
---. Buhaina's Delight. Blue Note, 1961.
Braith, George. Soul Stream. Blue Note, 1963.
Brown, Clifford. Memorial Album. Blue Note, 1953.
Burrell, Kenny. Introducing Kenny Burrell. Blue Note, 1956.
Byrd, Donald. At the Half Note Cafe. Blue Note, 1960.
---. Byrd in Flight. Blue Note, 1960.
---. Byrd in Hand. Blue Note, 1959.
---. Free Form. Blue Note, 1961.
---. Royal Flush. Blue Note, 1961.
Chambers, Paul. Whims of Chambers. Blue Note, 1956.
Clark, Sonny. Cool Struttin'. Blue Note, 1958.
---. Dial S for Sonny. Blue Note, 1957.
Coleman, Ornette. Love Call. Blue Note, 1968.
Coltrane, John. Blue Train. Blue Note, 1957.
---. Dakar. Prestige, 1957.
Davis, Walter. Davis Cup. Blue Note, 1959.
Donaldson, Lou. Blues Walk. Blue Note, 1958.
---. Gravy Train. Blue Note, 1961.
---. Lou Donaldson Sextet. New York: Blue Note, 1954.
---. Lou Takes Off. Blue Note, 1957.
---. Sunny Side Up. Blue Note, 1960.
Dorham, Kenny. Afro-Cuban. Blue Note, 1955.
---. 'Round Midnight at the Cafe Bohemia. Blue Note, 1956.
Drew, Kenny. Undercurrent. Blue Note, 1960.
Farlow, Tal. Tal Farlow Quartet. Blue Note, 1954.
Garner, Erroll. Overture to Dawn. Blue Note, 1944.
Gordon, Dexter. Dexter Calling. Blue Note, 1961.
---. Our Man in Paris. Blue Note, 1963.
Green, Grant. Grant Stand. Blue Note, 1961.
---. Green Street. Blue Note, 1961.
---. The Latin Bit. Blue Note, 1962.
Griffin, Johnny. Introducing Johnny Griffin. Blue Note, 1956.
Hancock, Herbie. My Point of View. Blue Note, 1963.
Hemingway, Ernest. The Short Stories. New York: Simon and Schuster,
1995.
Henderson, Joe. In 'n Out. Blue Note, 1964.
---. Our Thing. Blue Note, 1963.
Hill, Andrew. Andrew. Blue Note, 1964.
---. Point of Departure. Blue Note, 1964.
Hipp, Jutta. Jutta Hipp at the Hickory House. Blue Note, 1956.
Hodes, Art. Dixieland Jubilee. Blue Note, 1944.
Hubbard, Freddie. Hub Cap. Blue Note, 1961.
---. Hub Tones. Blue Note, 1962.
---. Open Sesame. Blue Note, 1960.
Ionesco, Eugène. La Cantatrice chauve. Paris: Gallimard,
1950.
Johnson, J.J. The Eminent J.J. Johnson. Blue Note, 1953,
Jones, Thad. The Magnificent Thad Jones. Blue Note, 1956.
Jordan, Clifford. Cliff Craft. Blue Note, 1957.
Jordan, Clifford, and Don Gilmore. Blowing In From Chicago. Blue
Note, 1957.
Jordan, Duke. Flight from Jordan. Blue Note, 1960.
Lewis, George. Echoes of New-Orleans. Blue Note, 1943.
McLean, Jackie. Destination Out. Blue Note, 1963.
---. It's Time. Blue Note, 1964.
---. Jackie's Bag. Blue Note, 1959.
---. Let Freedom Ring. Blue Note, 1962.
---. New Soil. Blue Note, 1959.
---. One Step Beyond. Blue Note, 1963.
---. Right Now. Blue Note, 1965.
Melle, Gil. Patterns in Jazz. Blue Note, 1956.
Mobley, Hank. Hank Mobley and His All-Stars. Blue Note, 1957.
---. Roll Call. Blue Note, 1960.
---. Soul Station. Blue Note, 1960.
Moncur, Grachan. Evolution. Blue Note, 1963.
Monk, Thelonious. Genius of Modern Music. Blue Note, 1947.
Morgan, Lee. Delightfulee. Blue Note, 1966.
---. Indeed. Blue Note, 1956.
---. Lee-Way. Blue Note, 1960.
Navarro, Fats. The Fabulous Fats Navarro. Blue Note, 1947.
Nichols, Herbie. The Prophetic Herbie Nichols. Blue Note, 1955.
Parlan, Horace. Headin' South. Blue Note, 1960.
---. Speakin' My Piece. Blue Note, 1960.
Powell, Bud. Bud! Blue Note, 1957.
Quebec, Ike. Heavy Soul. Blue Note, 1961.
Redd, Freddie. Shades of Redd. Blue Note, 1960
---. The Music from the Connection. Blue Note, 1960.
Rivers, Sam. A New Conception. Blue Note, 1966.
Roach, Freddie. Mo' Grease Please. Blue Note, 1963.
Rollins, Sonny. A Night at the Village Vanguard. Blue Note, 1957.
---. Sonny Rollins. Blue Note, 1956.
Rouse, Charlie. Bossa Nova Bacchanal. Blue Note, 1962.
Shorter, Wayne. Night Dreamer. Blue Note, 1964.
---. Speak No Evil. Blue Note, 1964.
---. The All Seeing Eye. Blue Note, 1965.
Silver, Horace. Horace-Scope. Blue Note, 1960.
---. Six Pieces of Silver. Blue Note, 1956.
---. The Trio Sides. Blue Note, 1976.
Smith, Jimmie. Crazy! Baby. Blue Note, 1960.
---. Groovin' at Small's Paradise. Blue Note, 1957.
---. Plays Fats Waller. Blue Note, 1962.
---. The Incredible Jimmy Smith at the Organ. Blue Note, 1956.
---. The Sermon. Blue Note, 1957.
Smith, Louis. Here Comes Louis Smith. Blue Note, 1958.
---. Smithville. Blue Note, 1958.
The Three Sounds. Good Deal. Blue Note, 1959.
---. Feelin' Good. Blue Note, 1960.
Turrentine, Stanley. Blue Hour. Blue Note, 1960.
---. Dearly Beloved. Blue Note, 1961.
---. Look Out. Blue Note, 1960.
---. Up at Minton's. Blue Note, 1961.
Tyner, McCoy. The Real McCoy. Blue Note, 1967.
Verlaine, Paul. Les Poèmes saturniens. Paris: Nizet, 1967
(1866).
Vian, Boris. L'Automne à Pékin. Paris: Minuit, 1956.
Wilkerson, Don. Preach Brother. Blue Note, 1962.
Willette, "Baby Face." Face to Face. Blue Note, 1961.
Williams, Anthony. Spring. Blue Note, 1965.
Wilson, Jack. Easterly Winds. Blue Note, 1967.
Works cited
Calbris,
Geneviève. "Structure des titres et enseignes."
Le Français dans le monde 166 (1982): 26-54.
Carby, Hazel. Race Men. Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 1998.
Carrard, Philippe. "Part of the Way with Verbal Play: The Ludic
Mode in Scholarly Titling." Style 30 (1996): 566-83.
Complete Blue Note Book (The): Tribute to Alfred Lion. Jazz Critique
2 (1987). Special edition.
Cuscuna, Michael, Charlie Lourie, and Oscar Schnider, eds. The Blue
Note Years: The Jazz Photography of Francis Wolff. New York: Rizzoli,
1995.
Cuscuna, Michel, and Michael Ruppli. The Blue Note Label: A Discography.
Greenport, CT: Greenwood P, 1988.
Daver, Marek. Jazz Graphics. Tokyo: Graphic-sha Publishing, 1991.
Derrida, Jacques. "Title (to be specified)." Sub-Stance.
31 (1981): 5-22.
Dubois, Jacques. "La métataxe dans les titres de presse."
Rhétorique générale. Paris: Larousse, 1970.
86-90.
Eco, Umberto. A Theory of Semiotics. Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1976.
Fisher, John. "Entitling." Critical Inquiry 11 (1984):
286-98.
Fonagy, Yvan. "La poésie des titres." Semiosis:
Semiotics and the History of Culture. In Honorem Georgii Lotman.
Ed. Morris Halle, Krystyna Pomorska, Ladislav Matejka, and Boris
Uspenskij. Ann Arbor: Michigan Slavic Publications, 1984. 139-56.
Genette Gérard. Seuils. Paris: Seuil, 1987.
Groupe Mu. "Titres de films." Communications 16 (1970):
94-102.
Hoek, Leo. H. La Marque du titre: Dispositifs sémiotiques
d'une pratique textuelle. The Hague: Mouton, 1981.
Kofsky, Frank. John Coltrane and the Jazz Revolution of the 1960s.
New York: Pathfinder, 1998.
Lejeune, Philippe. Le Pacte autobiographique. Paris: Seuil, 1975.
Marsh, Graham, and Glyn Callingham, eds. Blue Note: The Album Cover
Art. San Francisco: Chronicle Books, 1997.
---. California Cool: West Coast Jazz of the 50s and 60s, The Album
Cover Art. San Francisco: Chronicle Books, 1992.
---. New York Hot: East Coast Jazz of the 50s and 60s, The Album
Cover Art. San Francisco: Chronicle Books, 1993.
McClary, Susan. "The Impromptu that Trod on the Loaf: or, How
Music tells Stories." Narrative 5, 1(1997), 20-35.
Meyer, Leonard. Emotion and Meaning in Music. Chicago: U of Chicago
P, 1956.
Nattiez, Jean-Jacques. Fondements d'une sémiologie de la
musique. Paris: Union Générale d'Editions, 1975.
Scher, Steven Paul, ed. Music and Text: Critical Inquiries. Cambridge:
Cambridge UP, 1992.
Notes
1 I
am using the masculine "he" advisedly. To my knowledge,
no Blue Note album is led by a woman (the label employed very few
singers).
2 Some labels grant more importance to composers than Blue Note
does. In the 1950s and 1960s, for example, Verve released several
"Songbooks" that featured Ella Fitzgerald performing the
music of famous American composers (Porter, Gershwin, etc.). These
albums were aimed at a cross-over audience that potentially was
interested in the music of the composer as well as in the way a
jazz singer interpreted songs that in themselves were not "jazzy."
3 A similar game is played on the cover of Dexter Gordon, Dexter
Callin', which shows Gordon calling from a telephone booth.
4 On the subject of the structure of the pieces on It's Time, see
the liner notes that Nat Hentoff wrote for the album on the basis
of information provided by the musicians.
5 For a provocative illustration of the referentialist position,
see for instance the chapter that Hazel Carby devotes to Miles Davis
in Race Men. Adopting Susan McClary's view of instrumental pieces
as "cultural texts" which must be read in terms of not
only their "formal properties" but their "content"
(21), Carby argues that Davis's music is about the "contradictory
sexual politics" of the "different historical moments"
through which Davis lived and produced (165). Specifically, she
seeks to demonstrate that Davis's music underwent a significant
change, moving from the "phallocentricity" that Milestones
still displays to the "refusal to resolve the tension through
any single climax in the album" that characterizes Kind of
Blue (164). Carby, though, does not consider the theoretical issue
of determining how a semiotic code can be transposed into another,
in this instance, how a musical convention (a piece's or an album's
"climax") can be "translated" into a sexual
attitude ("phallocentricity"). Neither does she consider
whether her interpretation is grounded in a shared code, that is,
whether any competent listener should be able to realize that "So
What" is about sexual politics, as any competent reader is
able to realize that, for example, Duras's L'Amant is about that
same subject.
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