Velocity Of Celebration

Velocity of Celebration: Jazz and Semiotics Essay by: Sean Singer Jazz Competence Lévi-Strauss described "bundles of relations" in myths, which recall all the existing versions of a myth. All the versions of relations breathe through whatever particular version is being used at any particular time. This interaction between the previous forms of precomposed units within the current units is a kind of revisitation of a langue within the specific, time-restricted parole. Hawkes compares this idea to that of listening to a jazz soloist, where the listener "infers from his solo performance the original sequence of chords; the 'tune' from which it derives, and on which it contributes a tonal commentary" (Hawkes 44-45). Piaget has a conception of the structure of language as being selfregulating (Piaget, 5-16). Structure is governed by laws which act not only to make it structured, but structuring. Jazz, like speaking, refers to a pattern or a grammar of selfcreating, self-sufficient, and internal rules. It regulates itself by referring to the entire tradition of black music. Musicians have cited a direct line of reference from the past, such as Lévi-Strauss' bundling effect, as informing their conception of improvisation: "It all goes from imitation to assimilation to innovation. You move from the imitation stage to the assimilation stage when you take little bits of things from different people and weld them into an identifiable style---creating your own style. Once you've created your own sound and you have a good sense of the history of the music, then you think of where the music hasn't gone and where it can go---and that's innovation" (Walter Bishop, Jr., as cited in Berliner, 120). This self-regulating act is not often verbalized by musicians in this way but in a more conspicuous musical way, such as Rahsaan Roland Kirk, who mastered every reed instrument, and would play extended solos imitating early New Orleans-style jazz on a clarinet at the beginning and subsequently move through every major phase of evolution in jazz music until he arrived at atonal free jazz at the end of the solo . Thus, his solos would encompass the entire history of jazz at the time. Paul Berliner described the self-regulating process as being especially evident in beginners who "select as their exclusive idol one major figure in jazz. They copy that idol's precise vocabulary, vocabulary usage, and tune treatment, striving to improvise in the idol's precise style" (120). Piaget's idea of wholeness or "the sense of internal coherence" in language occurs in jazz, where syncopation, rhythm, tone color, percussion, harmony, and joy of feeling are used during the interplay of communication between the rhythm section and the soloist. The wholeness comes up all the time in jazz musician's lives, the way the practice, and especially in the way they learn from older musicians. Miles Davis described how, when he was beginning to play the trumpet he would really study: "If a door squeaked we would call out the exact pitch. And every time I heard the chord of G, for example, my fingers automatically took the position of C# on the horn --- the flatted fifth --- whether I was playing or not" (Davis, as cited in Berliner, 165). The musician's reference in improvisation to music or musicians from earlier in the history is called "quotation," and

can take on many times an obvious meaning. For example, Charlie Parker once reportedly played "The Last Time I Was In Paris" in various different keys, and the improvisation was so affective, a musician asked him afterwards what happened "the last time he was in Paris." If, while Parker was improvising, and in the middle of a chorus saw an attractive woman walk into the club, he would spontaneously play "A Pretty Girl Is Like A Melody." Other instances of meaning in quotation have been well documented by Berliner: "In response to an abusive audience member who 'got up to walk out' on a performance of Charles Mingus's band, Clark Terry once manipulated his trumpet and plunger mute so skillfully that he clearly pronounced the retort, 'Go on home! Go on home!' causing the audience to burst into laughter" (Lonnie Hillyer, as cited in Berliner, 257). The entire langue of jazz from anything that had been played before in jazz can be used within any current improvisation. It is parallel to Lévi-Strauss' idea of the bundle concept: "Veterans refer to the discrete patterns in their repertory storehouses as vocabulary, ideas, licks, tricks, pet patterns, crips, clichés, and, in the most functional language, things you can do. As a basic musical utterance, a thing you can do commonly involves a one-measure to four-measure phrase....The vocabulary that students acquire from the improvisations of their mentors varies in origin and in character. Some derive from the common language of jazz. As the 'kinds of things that everybody plays,' they include short melodic phrases like traditional blues licks and repeated riffs known as shout patterns. Such figures were once associated with particular soloists or repertory genres like the blues but have since been passed anonymously from generation to generation and put to more general use" (Berliner, 102). I have often heard soloists recite in just a few measures within a chorus anything from Thelonious Monk's "Well You Needn't" to Scott Joplin's "The Entertainer" to a familiar line from the Broadway tune "Gonna Wash That Man Right Outta My Hair." Thad Jones once quoted "Pop Goes The Weasel" in a solo on "April In Paris." The tone color, phrasing, and energy can be detected by certain members of the audience who general shout, applaud, or laugh. There is some recognition by the audience during the performance, which I will explore later. Quotation in jazz is similar to a modern painter, for example, who may use a brushstroke or some visual clue that a person well-versed in visual art would recognize as being "like Vermeer's Girl Reading A Letter" or "similar to Paul Klee's Angel Serving A Small Breakfast;" or to allusion in poetry, where one may, for example, recognize strains of Walt Whitman in Allen Ginsberg's work or of William Butler Yeats in Seamus Heaney's work. The question of competence in music is important to social life within the AfricanAmerican community. There is a sense of the oral tradition of black music as serving the same functions as written histories or myths in a Western literary tradition. In any case, the Western preoccupation with art as being non-functional (that is, solely having aesthetic value) is not the same as an oral culture such as the African-American culture, where one's knowledge of music can influence the level of competence in the culture generally. Ingrid Monson describes the reification of music as an autonomous thing that many poststructuralist ethnomusicologists have criticized as being completely separate from the highly technical, difficultly emotional musical knowledge among jazz musicians. Just because ethnomusicologists and critics write about jazz, they do not really understand "the music":

"Various types of intermusical relationships depend on the ability of musicians and audience members to understand the discursive importance of musical events. The social understanding of these intermusical events stresses music as process, not product. The centrality of the metaphor of 'conversion' as used by musicians underscores this discursive aspect not as text but as a socially interactive process of communication. Applying the African-American notion of discursive Signifyin(g) in the context of jazz music communities...is not simply a clever metaphor" (Monson 1994, 310). The text of jazz is a an event that stresses the importance of imagination. A jazz musician's job, in semiotic terms, is to create the signification for the listener, who in turn derives an unspecified meaning of joy, sorrow, etc. from that signification. Jazz is a purely American art form, it is a democracy in which the soloist (a temporary leader) leads the performance with the advice and consent of the other members of the group (Rinzler, 160). This is especially true in free jazz (sometimes labeled "the avant-garde" or "the new thing") which has no surface-level perceivable melody, no chord progressions in the traditional sense, and no keys. It is collectively improvised, independent of pre-set patterns, is cocreative, and very democratic. Ekkehard Jost described how in free jazz, "the accompanying function of the rhythm group has been increasingly eliminated in favour of interaction between all the musicians in a group" (Jost, 16). R. Keith Sawyer compares the function of free jazz to Bakhtin's conception of the novel in structural terms, that "it is a 'meta-genre' within which musicians can inhabit multiple voices simultaneously or sequentially. These 'voices' can be as specific as quoting a known musician's style, or they may be more general stylistic periods or genres" (Sawyer, 296). The meta-genre in free jazz sounds alienating (such as John Coltrane's major large ensemble work Ascension (1965) and Ornette Coleman's double quartet and the source of the term, Free Jazz (1960) ). Free jazz, like speaking, Sawyer and Monson have argued, must be viewed as in play during interaction. Peirce's concept of indexicality can provide the foundation for this view, where the association between the sign and the object is perceived during the performance, fundamentally during the process of improvisation. It is an index that is also metapragmatic, where in spontaneous collective improvisation there is communicative negotiation. Bauman and Briggs also discuss contextualization in terms where the context itself is subject to reflexive metapragmatic negotiation. Jazz utterances determine or influence whatever prior segment of the interaction occurred. The structure in jazz, even at a minimalistic or pragmatic level in free jazz, operates within the performance. Sawyer's notion of this event is this: "In improvisational genres, each performer is expected to contribute something original to the evolving emergent in each act, through the process of indexical entailment. In the choice of indexical entailment, performers are subject to the constraints of the emergent. In response to the performer's action, the other participants evaluate the act, and the subsequent interaction determines to what extent the indexical entailment resulting from the act affects the (still / always evolving) emergent. This 'evaluation' is often immediate and often not consciously goal-directed. A more skillful indexical entailment is more likely to enter the emergent, thus operating with more force on subsequent performance acts" (Sawyer, 279).

The "more skillful indexical entailment...operating with more force" is linked to a structure of a time-continuum. Ben Sidran opposes a Western categorization of temporal events with an tendency in black culture to have "larger oral outlook toward time and the subsequent emotional involvement with events as they happen" (Sidran, 18). This mimics somewhat everyday speech patterns, where the listener must accept meanings from sound as they come in the vocal current. This vocalization based on a more spontaneous coherence rather than an intricate syntactical structure has, in Sidran's argument, "made the black man flexible and helped him to improvise" and has "aided the survival of black culture" (18). Perhaps the spontaneity inherent in the time-continuum of black language and music is linked to what Monson calls irony. When jazz musicians reinterpret a popular song from white America (called "a standard") such as John Coltrane's version of the Broadway musical "My Favorite Things," there is irony in a presumption of racism in the original piece and that jazz versions of standards upstage hegemonic quality of the EuropeanAmerican original in musical "superiority." There is an oral approach to rhythm in black speech and in black music which allows for a "cyclical relationship" between a concept of time and an application of rhythm. Competence in jazz is about knowing what to play and when. It is an art of subtlety and grace. It changes even within the solos of the most divine musicians. John Coltrane, who is arguably the finest musician America has ever produced, would sometimes play solo that lasted for forty choruses, whereas someone like Charlie Parker would only play for two. In one such instance after Coltrane took an extended solo when he was in Miles Davis' band, he apologized to Miles, adding, "I just don't know when to stop." Miles looked at him and replied: "Take the horn out of your mouth." All of this involves a performance, which is, after all, the jazz's musicians métier. A jazz performance is a happy thing. Albert Murray calls it "the velocity of celebration." It is a democracy in which everyone is important, and the group participates together to create beauty. LeRoi Jones said of jazz, "New Black Music is this: Find the self, then kill it." In jazz, one hears rhythms which imitate human life. Jazz Performance Performance in jazz has meaning. The meaning is not inherent in the way language is, but the meaning of jazz comes in accumulation, at a more primal emotional level. Charles Briggs describes this process as involving an utterance of the text (in this case, the notes of the improvisation) as signaling "an anticipatory state of those members of the audience who are familiar with the genre" (Briggs, 130). There are changes, as in speech, of pitch, tone, volume, speed, etc. which are interpreted by audience members. There are those who understand what is happening in the jazz performance, and as Briggs described how listeners in verbal communication, "are listening but cannot understand the performance often change their facial expression to a look of confusion or even slight discomfort after the text is uttered, especially if the performance has been staged for their benefit" (130). Traditionally among jazz connoisseurs and aficionados, there are audience members who are "hip" and those who are "square." More technically, this dichotomy is between those who have some level of competence within the performance and those who have little or none.

Alan M. Perlman and Daniel Greenblatt also described the notion of competence as applied to those who listen to jazz involving those who understand the system of use and those who do not: "There is an important distinction between an 'inside audience' and an 'outside audience.' The inside audience is made up primarily of musicians --- of people who know how to improvise themselves or are trying to learn something about improvisation. They have improvisational competence, in the sense that they can 'hear' or 'understand' an improvised solo. They attend closely to the solos, note by note and phrase by phrase, and they comprehend what is happening, both structurally and historically. When we say that the inside audience has structural competence, we mean that they can recognize basic elements in what is being played as it is being played; scales arpeggios, the A-A-B-A form of thousands of thirty-two-bar popular songs, the repeated twelve-bar structure of the blues....The inside audience may also include nonmusicians. These individuals are analogous to people who, because they have lived in a foreign country or because their parents speak the language of the old country between themselves, understand a language that they cannot speak. They usually know nothing about structure, or at least nothing consciously, but that does not stop the solo from meaning something to them, since they may recognize licks, quotes, and other stylistic nuances" (Perlman and Greenblatt, 181). This is one of the more interesting aspects to the art of improvisation, because higher levels of competence, or "thinking in jazz," yield more powerful results in feeling and meaning. Lesser levels of competence may mean that the performance as whole has meaning but more specific repetitions, harmonic patterns, structural, and historical meanings are lost. Just as in verbal communication, a wider vocabulary will mean that the listener or reader will understand what has just been said in a clearer and wider manner. Similarly, if, for example, there are two readers of Othello, one who has a background in Shakespeare, and who has been involved in an interracial relationship will derive different, stronger, and more personal meaning from reading it than someone who is unfamiliar with Shakespeare, Elizabethan English, and the effects of racism. Although both readers will find the play overwhelmingly tragic in the end, the varying levels of competence in the two readers will change their interpretations overall. Briggs describes that performance is an active, interpretive process where the performer's competence influences the listener's competence and that there is a vast amount of knowledge that influences communicative competence between the speaker and the hearer: "Performers do not simply 'reflect' the natural and cultural world around them, unconsciously replicating structures of which they have no understanding. The materials of performance, including traditions, texts, and settings are not presented to the performer in predigested form. The performer draws on these resources as needed, selecting those elements that prove relevant to the purpose at hand. These are then interpreted by the performer and thereby provided with a meaning that is responsive both to shared beliefs and values and to the individual's own perspective. The performer's concern is both with the vast array of meanings that each component holds and with the production of a whole in which each part is consonant with the others" (Briggs, 18).

Although there is certainly a shared interaction between current soloist and other musicians playing behind him (called "comping," short for "accompaniment") the role of interactive communication between the musicians as a group and the audience as a group is not as clear. The same background information is not shared by both the musicians and the listeners. When I listen to Lee Morgan solo, he has knowledge about what he is playing that it would be impossible for me to have. Even when other musicians hear each other, they do not completely share knowledge. Musicians as important as Coleman Hawkins and John Coltrane even questioned Thelonious Monk during one recording session, because the background information about how they were supposed to play such avant-garde music was not the same as Monk's information. He told musicians who questioned their ability to play his compositions "you have an instrument, don't you? Either play it or throw it away." Then they were able to play it. Briggs' principle is that "performers embed interpretations of the meaning of their utterances in the form of the discourse itself" (19). The metacommunicative interaction with the listener works in this way. The interpretations of the meaning of utterances that jazz performers embed are most obvious in a visual sense. In a rare film of Charlie Parker and Dizzy Gillespie playing "Koko" on television, this becomes clear. Parker and Gillespie were given awards in a Down Beat critics' poll that year and the white announcers on the television broadcast were overtly racist in their presentation of the awards (apparent from insults, gestures, and comments) after which they asked Parker say a few words about winning the award. He said "we will speak through the music." They proceeded to play solos that clearly voiced their anger and resentment . Berliner describes how "a soloist's most salient experiences in the heat of performance involve poetic leaps of imagination to phrases that are unrelated, or only minimally related, to the storehouse, as when the identities of formerly mastered patterns melt away entirely within new recombinant shapes" (Berliner, 217). The process involves rethinking, revision, and extraordinary concentration. The metaphor of dialogue or monologue is very common in musicians' own explanations of improvisation. Max Roach uses language metaphors where vocabulary patterns and musical sentences are used, even at the most basic levels of spontaneous composition: "After you initiate the solo, one phrase determines what the next is going to be. From the first note that you hear, you are responding to what you've just played: you just said this on your instrument, and now that's a constant. What follows from that? And then the next phrase is a constant. What follows from that? And so on and so forth. And finally, let's wrap it up so that everybody understands that that's what you're doing. It's like language: you're talking, you're speaking, you're responding to yourself. When I play, it's like having a conversation with myself" (Roach, as cited in Berliner, 192). The conversation can sometimes be bewildering to even members of the inside listener. Once, during a performance by Ahmad Jamal, where he had his piano facing the wall so that his back was to the rhythm section, he would finish his highly percussive, rhythmic solo and then extend his arm back and point toward the bassist, or the guitarist to physically signal them to start their solo. Even though the other musicians could hear this cue, Jamal also used a kinetic cue. This is unusual. Generally speaking, jazz pieces are structured so that they include a recognizable melody at the beginning, then each musician takes a solo,

then they all come back around at the end and play the melody a second time. The recognizable melody is called the "head." In some performers, the leader will wait for the last soloist to finish and then he will physically either point to his head or tap his finger on his head to physically signal everyone on the stage that it is time to play the head again. The performance is like poetry, which involves a constant and a variant. The constant, perhaps the pattern of head-solos-head is organizes a pragmatic, interactional approach. The variant, is the improvisation, which creates what Sawyer calls "a balanced cocreative performance style" (Sawyer, 292). Jazz performance is not identical to verbal communication, but the basic interactional mechanisms are similar. Sawyer offers a view of interaction in music which focusses on indexicality as the primary mechanism of collective improvisation: "Each performer is constrained by the emergent, the set of indexical presuppositions, including the key of the piece, the song's harmonic structure, and the indexical entailments projected by the other performers. In the presence of these constraints, jazz requires each performer to offer something new at each point, ideally something which is suggestive to the other performers" (292). Jazz performance in this view would limit an understanding of significance to those listeners with the highest skills of discourse; someone who uses historical or sonic references as a means of indexing (such as someone who would recognize that Coltrane's composition "Fifth House" is based on Parker's "Hot House," which is based on the standard "What Is This Thing Called Love?"). In most cases, indexical features of jazz performance are not surface level; in a sense they "generally lie beyond conscious 'limits of awareness'" (Michael Silverstein, as cited in Briggs, 103). The contextualization of jazz performance, though is clear to listeners who have studied even the most superficial aspects of it. Again, the parallels between music and spoken language, and the patterns they share, are consistently noted by the musicians themselves, and are most prone to signification. Jazz Pleasure Jazz is primarily a dazzling, spellbinding, introspective beauty. The musician and the listener find they can derive meaning from the music. The music exists first, and its meaning is defined later. When a jazz musician is improvising, he is spontaneously composing, and at that moment his music is completely subjective. He must imagine the future in his music. He cannot transcend the subjectivity of the improvisation because it is created while it is being played. Jazz is the future of itself. What that means is that within each improvisation there the entire body of black music --- ancient to the present --- is at work. Jazz exists only in the present, because it is like Heraclitus' river --- it can never be played exactly the same way twice. If jazz has any purpose, it is a way to discover, to create, and to define a missing part within human beings of what it means to be human. In this sense, jazz could be called an existential art. Jazz musicians create their essence by playing jazz, as Eric Dolphy claimed: "I'll never leave jazz. I've put too much of myself into jazz already, and I'm still trying to dig in deeper. Besides, in what other field could I get so complete a scope to selfexpression? To me, jazz is like part of living, like walking down the street and reacting to

what you see and hear. And whatever I do react to, I can say immediately in my music. The other thing that keeps me in jazz is that jazz continues to move on. There are so many possibilities for growth inside jazz because it changes as you change" (Dolphy, liner notes, Far Cry, December 21, 1960). The subjective quality to jazz is explored most successfully in Jean-Paul Sartre's Nausea. Sartre describes how Roquentin first feels when he hears the old Pathé jazz record, played with a sapphire needle. He describes the notes as living as ephemerons, and then dying before the listener. It is almost sacrificial: "For the moment, the jazz is playing; there is no melody, only notes, a myriad of tiny jolts. They know no rest, an inflexible order gives birth to them and destroys them without even giving them time to recuperate and exist for themselves. They race, they press forward, they strike me a sharp blow in passing and are obliterated. I would like to hold them between my fingers only as a raffish languishing sound. I must accept their death; I must even will it. I know few impressions stronger or more harsh" (Sartre, 21). After Roquentin heard the jazz record, there is silence and he realizes in the existential event which has just taken place that the Nausea has disappeared. He says: "When the voice would heard in the silence, I felt my body harden and the Nausea vanish" (22). What he feels at that moment is the connection between his own humanity and the music on the jazz record. When she sings, he understands all at once, in what Charlie Parker called an "epiphany," that existence and the ability to make choices is very brief, and then dies. The second time he hears the record, he only hears it for a moment, and the feeling returns: "Now there is this song on the saxophone. And I am ashamed. A glorious little suffering has just been born, an exemplary suffering. Four notes on the saxophone. They come and go, they seem to say: You must be like us, suffer in rhythm. All right! Naturally I'd like to suffer that way, in rhythm, without complacence, without self-pity, with an arid purity" (174). The suffering Sartre describes is eliminated by the jazz, the act of listening to the jazz on the old record. Roquentin only learns that he is human, and his primary duty is to feel, when he listens to the Pathé jazz record. Roquentin does not just enjoy the music, he feels redeemed by the music. The ability of the music to preserve life for him is the existential quality of jazz music. Endlessly, jazz notes end their brief period of improvisation. The only thing that retains their life is the recording. Jazz only truly exists while it is being played, and any recording of it is a kind of representation of that. The performance of jazz, like the record, can have the same effects on a person. James Baldwin, in his short story "Sonny's Blues," tells the story of a jazz drummer named Sonny who is in conflict with his "square" brother, who is the narrator of the story and a math teacher at a New York City high school. He does not understand Sonny, who has recently been arrested for selling and using heroin. Sonny's brother knows next to nothing about jazz, who Charlie Parker was, or what kind of music it is. He is the outside audience, with no competence whatsoever. At the end of the story, he accompanies Sonny to a club where

Sonny will be playing with a band. Another musician, named Creole, begins the set. Sonny's brother experience Sartre's "suffering in rhythm," and realizes at that specific moment, the way Sonny is creating his essence by playing jazz: "He hit something in all of them, he hit something in me, myself, and the music tightened and deepened, apprehension began to beat the air. Creole began to tell us what the blues were all about. They were not about anything new. He and his boys up there were keeping it new, at the risk of ruin, destruction, madness, and death, in order to find new ways to make us listen. For, while the tale of how we suffer, and how we are delighted, and how we may triumph is never new, it always must be heard. There isn't any other tale to tell, it's the only light we've got in all this darkness" (Baldwin, 50). The narrator is suddenly touched by the same force of jazz that touched Roquentin. The beauty in some was redeems the suffering and lament the narrator (who has no name) and all black people have been experiencing. Another element to the narrator's experience that is closely linked to the Sartrean sense of the meaning of the jazz record is freedom: "I seemed to hear with what burning he had made it his, with what burning we had yet to make it ours, how we could cease lamenting. Freedom lurked around us and I understood, at last, that he could help us to be free if we would listen, that he would never be free until we did" (51). Sonny speaks through jazz and his brother derives meaning from it. In these two examples the semiotic qualities of jazz are not only theoretical, they have visible effects on human lives. Conclusion In this essay I have tried to demonstrate the connections between semiotics and jazz. Jazz manifests itself in semiotics terms because it requires competence to function as fully as possible for improvisers and for listeners. Jazz performance is communicative process; it is contextual and indexical. Audiences who are part of jazz derive meaning from varying degrees of competence, whether and to what degree they recognize the contextual and indexical qualities of the music --- its history and ideas --- determine what kind of feeling; blue, cool, calm, joyful, etc. that they walk away with. From seemingly random events, random signifiers pouring from saxophones, trumpets, basses, pianos, and drums, lines of figures, colors, light, and shadow slowly appear. As far as semiotics is concerned, I am certain a sign would rather be Miles Davis' solo on "So What" than a joyless metaphor on a silent page. About Sean Singer Sean is a senior majoring in English at Indiana University, Bloomington. His principal research interests are jazz, Contemporary American poetry, and abstract painting.

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