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Improvisation
in Jazz Writing |
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First I'll offer brief comments on the talks by Professors DeShong, Stein, and Beidler, and then improvise-using only my lead sheet, of course-some further comments on improvisation in music and writing. I. Identities and Improvisation 1.
Scott DeShong writes (1): "The improvising voice . . . in jazz
can disrupt musical normality in the same way that racialized identity
can thwart naturalizations that have produced (and which are circularly
based on) the identity." This formulation dovetails to some
degree with Prof. Beidler's argument that Baraka's Black art disrupts
the "whiteness," or arbitrariness, of the sign. That is,
"whiteness" has become naturalized as the meaning of all
signs; thus Blackness may defer or unsettle that association. A.
A question arises: what is "musical normality" in the
context of jazz, since, according to many critics, improvisation
constitutes the very definition (or at least a necessary element)
of jazz? Does improvisation become normalized, just as "blackness"
can be normalized, and hence no longer function to disrupt? B.
Similar (p. 3) is the idea that "jazz performance is paradigmatic
of a deconstructive moment of identification, where what's outside
the contextual framework is revealed as intervening on the frame."
What happens if improvisation itself is the frame? C.
Third, does this definition limit improvisation and, by extension,
jazz to merely that which "disrupts" and thereby relegate
them to marginal or parasitic roles? A.
This point echoes Ingrid Monson, who in her book Saying Something
demonstrates how musical improvisation responds to and shapes a
shifting set of social relationships: it shapes and is shaped by
the play of communication within an ensemble. B.
Prof. DeShong extends this proposition to describe identities, which,
he suggests, both form and are formed by dynamic, unfixed relations.
Here DeShong and Stein agree: writing about jazz autobiography,
Stein demonstrates how these works render "the autobiographical
self unstable and shifting, improvised and performed, [as] musical
improvisation is translated into autobiographical narration through
the invention of a self that cannot be pinned down" (2). C. Stein also notes (10) how jazz performance constantly "rephrases" identity, and proposes that the performativity of jazz autobiographies mimics musical improvisation by "constantly inventing new layers and eclectic versions of self" (12). 3.
However, the papers differ in some regards. For example, Prof. DeShong
states that "Improvisation . . . engages the dimension of the
unforeseen" (3) 4.
Moving to more specifically racialized identities: a.
DeShong wisely suggests how improvisation as double-consciousness
may be characterized as an omnipresent "sociocultural play
in which the subject improvises his or her position." He further
notes how improvised identities are those forever under construction.
They thus fit Stuart Hall's description, cited on p. 5, of "blackness,"
as something "continually developed, always in process, involving
ambivalence and entailing a splitting" of the subject. Stein
offers examples of this idea when he demonstrates how jazz autobiographies
narrate myths and counter-myths at the same time (6), and thereby
continually trouble and undermine the self presented in the narrative
(6). Hence, I'd argue, Mezz Mezzrow could never convincingly create
himself as black on the page because he reified blackness into a
single trope of authenticity (Stein 16). B.
Here, then, is where DeShong and Beidler part company. According
to Prof. Beidler, Baraka's re-attachment of the sign "jazz"
to Black history disables the arbitariness/whiteness association
(10). But in so doing, does it not also reify Blackness? That is,
does it anchor Blackness-and jazz-to a one-dimensional, reductive
ideal? C.
In contrast, for DeShong "blackness" refers to non-reified
identities of all hues-and thus implies a critique of both the "mythic,"
allegedly colorless "whiteness" of the dominant ideology,
and of the reified "blackness" of Baraka who, for example,
reads Coltrane's music as "murdering" or demolishing "weak"
popular forms, and thereby reduces jazz to a kind of musical terrorism
or anarchism and blackness to a trope of violence or violation.
In short, does not Baraka's definition of "blackness"
in fact reinforce the racialized discourse that privileges whiteness
and thereby actually enable (not disable) the whiteness/arbitrariness
association? In this sense the "place for black art" that
Baraka makes will still be a secondary one, will it not? D.
Thus, perhaps, these definitions (both of blackness and of improvisation)
risk becoming "doubly metaphoric and self-undermining"
(7). That is, whereas in Baraka the terms are anchored (and, one
might say, drowned) through attachment to a specific history of
suffering, in DeShong's formulation the terms risk becoming indistinguishable
from fashionable notions of American identity-the kind that militate
against regimentation, reification, essentialism and the other betes
noires of current critical theory. +++++++ II. Writing and Improvisation 1. The larger question, though, is what all of this has to do w/ musical improvisation. Stein shows how Armstrong, Mezzrow, Mingus, Billie Holiday and Ellington generate shifting personae in their written stories. But can one really say that they are "improvised" in the way that, say, Armstrong's solos were improvised? Hence we arrive at the question that the title of this panel begs: is true "improvisation" possible in writing? Does the term have any value? At first blush it would seem, in fact, that the frozenness of the written page, the fact that it does not exist in time, precludes true improvisation: that is, we may first improvise, but we usually revise. In this respect one recalls that improvisations are not copywrightable! They are "composerless" in legal terms. 2.
Michael Jarrett notes that much jazz writing wants to be jazz; it
aspires to the condition of improvisation" (338), and he proposes
that "'Improvisation'" is thinkable only in terms that
oppose it to 'composition'" (339). He concludes (341): "'Improvisation'
"becomes the emblem of a problem, an enigma useful for writing,
not the emblem of a solution." (He prefers "obbligato,"
which has changed its meaning from "obligatory" to "decorative"
and hence "dispensable" over the centuries.) 4. In contrast, Julian Cowley links post-modern avant-garde fiction writers' practices w/ jazz improvisation. The work of writers like Sukenick, Sorrentino, Barthelme, is he claims, "predicated upon acceptance of contingency and uncertainty" (196), and he links the collage-as in tunes like Charlie Parker's "Klactoveedsedstene"-with the nonsense and playfulness of writers like Steve Katz. 5. But the problem remains: are these playful writers really "jazzy"? If we define the word so broadly, then, as Julian Cowley notes (quoting Raymond Federman), Rabelais was "the first major jazz fictioneer" (201). The word "jazz" would come to signify any style or set of practices that plays with the norms or rules of a genre. Although one may approve of such practices, the theory has the effect of blurring the specific relevance of twentieth-century musical forms to writing. III. Jazz Improvisation I would submit, then, that if we wish to retain the value of "improvisation" as a critical principle, a mode of being and an artistic practice, we must monitor its use and honor the way improvisation works in jazz. For one of the pitfalls of all writing using jazz paradigms (and this is a danger to which most interdisciplinary inquiry is subject) is that of adopting technical terms in a vaguely metaphorical way that allows them to mean whatever the writer wishes them to mean. In such cases, the terms lose whatever explanatory or illustrative value they may have had. Thus, for example, does "improvisation" come to be indistinguishable from "creativity" or "flexibility," or merely "fabrication" (as it seems to do when Stein writes that Billie Holiday "improvises" false stories about her origins [20]. Let
me, in the spirit of jazz, offer some notes toward a definition
of improvisation. A.
It takes place in "real time," at a moment's notice, ad
libitum (after, paradoxically, many hours of carefully disciplined
preparation), and is not to be reiterated verbatim; B. It questions, even undermines tradition, but also remains aware of its inextricable location within the tradition (this is what Monson calls "intermusicality"): for example, tunes such as "Hot House," "KoKo" or "Ornithology" came about when new melodies were improvised (and then written down) to standard changes. This tenet also acknowledges the practice of "citing" standard melodies during improvisations. Thus, John Corbett argues, improvisation repositions knowledge in relation to the musician and to history. 2.
Elasticity. A.
It may exist within a frame but also stretches the limits of frames:
improv sometimes uses harmonic and rhythmic structures as a trellis,
but sometimes the frame is barely there (as in "New Thing"
or Free Jazz). B. Dick Hebdige uses Alan Watts's "Beat Zen, Square Zen and Zen" to suggest a set of practices and ideas revolving around the notion of frame. What defines the artwork, for Watts, is the frame: whatever is framed becomes a work (338-9). To the degree to which improvisation cannot be framed, then, it may be incompatible with the ideal of finished artwork. Nonetheless, improvisation can itself become the frame within which creativity operates. 3.
Sociability. It occurs within a myriad of shifting social relationships, at once responding to and inviting interaction between musicians and between musicians and audiences. Thus Monson 84: "Good jazz improvisation is sociable and interactive just like a conversation" 4.
Expressivity. Improvisation is not "noodling": it must "say something"--express a musician's or an ensemble's emotional and intellectual being, in relation with others. 5.
Risk. As
Corbett (222) notes, improvisation both raises and renders irrelevant
the question of risk because: a) it is always subject to the risk
of failure-both minimal ("clams" or wrong notes) and maximal
(the trainwreck, discord): that is, improvisation involves risk
because one can't know in advance what to play; b) on the other
hand, improvisation eliminates risk because there is no error: i.e.,
no written score. [For the record: I disagree with this claim].
Corbett quotes Free Jazz saxophonist Evan Parker about other risks
(223): the Risk of Stagnation; Risk of Insanity (losing one's way);
Risk of Completion (a work becomes too finished). Here, Parker raises
the issue of novelty, which I address below. 6.
Contingency. It
resides in the shifting space between planning and acting beyond
one's knowing. Guitarist Joe Beck recently claimed that "the
essence of playing any instrument [is] not being surprised by what
you play. It should be no more surprising than something you would
sing." Obviously Beck is right in one sense: you must gain
an intimate knowledge of your instrument so that what you think
you can play. But improvisation must also carry the potential for
surprise, so that it becomes a constant dialogue between expectation
and surprise, control and its loss. Thus
Hebdige 340: We gain mastery of materials "through the paradoxical
act . . . of letting go." Hebdige finds in this a strategy
(the paradox of "deliberate spontaneity") a model for
improvisation and perhaps for inspiration itself. For him, (342)
"the master wrestles with contingency neither by submitting
nor resisting but by playing (with and into) it, producing in the
process . . . what Alan Watts referred to as Zen's art of 'controlled
accidents.'" Thus one is free not to think; but "to think that not to think ahead might operate in practice as a virtue . . . flies directly in the face of most of the theoretical proscriptions currently in place in arts-related discourse" (351). 7.
Novelty. No
two improvisations, by definition, can be alike. And yet when one
considers the others, it is possible that novelty is not a cause
but an effect of the synthesis and shifting dialectical relationships
among temporality, elasticity, sociability, expressivity, risk,
and contingency. We may wish to offer novelty as a process not a
goal. Similarly, as the above principles suggest, improvisation is a term that slips through one's grasp: it is a process, not a thing. In this regard, I approve of the definition of jazz offered recently by Pat Metheny: it's not a noun but a verb. Improvisation
is one of many lexical spaces in which jazz writing plays. We should
resist the impulse to freeze it into a single shape or set of shapes.
But when investigating the relations between jazz and writing, we
should also resist straying too far from the disciplinary-specific
meaning of such terms. For only by adhering to a more rigorous definition
of such terms, I argue, can we answer Ingrid Monson's call "for
a more cultural music theory and a more musical cultural theory"
(3). Beck,
Joe. "Masterclass." Downbeat 70.7 (July 2003): 64. Corbett,
John. "Ephemera Underscored: Writing Around Free Improvisation."
Krin Gabbard, ed. Jazz Among the Discourses. Durham: Duke UP, 1995.
217-40. Cowley,
Julian. "The Art of the Improvisers-Jazz and Fiction in the
Post-Bebop Age." New Comparison 6 (1988): 194-204. Hebdige,
Dick. "Even unto Death: Improvisation, Edging, and Enframement."
Critical Inquiry 27.2 (2001): 333-53. Jarrett,
Michael. "Four Choruses on the Tropes of Jazz Writing."
American Literary History 6.2 (Summer 1994): 336-53. Munton,
Alan. "Misreading Morrison, Mishearing Jazz: A Response to
Toni Morrison's Jazz Critics." Journal of American Studies
31.2 (August 1997): 235-51.
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