R-E-S-P-E-C-T
The primacy of a collective Community is not found solely in Davis’ quintets. Many improvising musicians believe that anything other than an egalitarian Community when creating music can be harmful. A gender-imbalanced group, for instance, offers ‘no real hope of composite transformation … or cosmic transformation.’[1] True improvisational Community cannot be defined by ideology, race or gender. The aim is ‘to be in a community in which association foes not mean conformity and in which directive, authoritarian ideologies are not the social glue’.[2] Improvised music thus eternally remains open to anyone, ‘the skill and intellect required is whatever is available’.[3] Tensions arise in the gap between total openness and indefinability – for how can a hegemonic culture of ‘logic’ categorise and define a creative, critical field whose orthodox is the acceptance of the inchoate amateur as equal to the seasoned theorist or professional?
Is it not this that Adorno had in his sights when he claimed that the products of jazz were not improvised, but carefully planned out with ‘machinelike precision’?[4] Adorno’s position has been much maligned as the peak of a negative critical moment, promoting elitism within jazz. Such a view fails to interrogate Adorno’s dialectical position of cultural production. Adorno adopted a Gramsci-esque pessimism, which suggests an inevitability of hegemonic capitalist forms to subsume and commodify external forms of expression and rebellion.[5] Often, this act of absorption takes the path of a total fetishisation: a fetishisation into commercialism.[6] Adorno’s aesthetics combines cultural products (implicating use-value, labour-value, production-value, etc.) with acts of cognition, in the Hegelian realm of social-labour and human personal and cultural development (Bildung).[7] Not only was Adorno not exclusivising jazz, he was radically opening it up as a phenomenon of social psychology. His target was a completely open improvisation, incipient, pure spontaneity, not inspired by popular songs, limited to form, or technical skill nor dehumanised by self-reflexive electronic punditry.[8]
A dismantling of hierarchies is paramount. Importantly, this includes the barriers erected between performer and audience.[9] Marion Brown advocated for a free intermingling between musicians and not musicians in the act of improvising music, as a ‘sane sociology of contemporary music’.[10] A ‘positive’ act whereby all in the Community may ‘express their emotions’.[11] Many improvisers, though, have suggested that simply by engaging in the act of listening – of critically determining that what is occurring is worth hearing and can be called ‘music’ – audiences play an active role in a ‘collective unitive experience’.[12] ‘I’m almost playing on the audience, instead of the piano. I mean, the audience is in the room and it’s vibrating’.[13]
Edward Strickland reductively calls this relationship a gesture of mutual respect, of submission.[14] Strickland compares the relationship between performer (Keith Jarrett) and audience as that between preacher and congregation. Jarrett has some higher connection to a ‘Divine Will’ that the audience will be able to momentarily glimpse through the performance.[15] But what is a preacher without a congregation? A vain solipsist cursing the world. Jarrett-as-preacher is only enabled through audience-as-congregation and, as such, the entire preacher/congregation master/slave dialectic here invalidates itself. The ‘Divine Will’ thus glimpsed in not seen through the conduit of the performer, but of all in the performance Community. That is, all Selves present and engaged in the performance – as performers, listeners, critics and so on.
Possible questions of ownership are avoided by two factors: firstly, that the improvisation could never be heard again; or, if recorded, the commodity becomes a relic of a work-event, which cannot be reduced so easily. Jarrett’s solo improvised performances are entitled simply after dates and locations: the audience cannot be removed as co-authors of the work-event.[16]
Moments of transcendental subjectivity thus occur on an egalitarian playing field, wherein singular subjectivities – creating personal divinations of the work-event simultaneously - explore each other. The only pure solo performance would be that without an audience. It is through this Community that enables a panoptic understanding of Self through others. Music’s meaning is instantaneously sutured into larger cultural relations, webs of singular historicities and discursive formulations pertaining to each Self in the Community – every audience member, every performer. Community is thus enabled: a multidimensional fluid exchange between all within that Community. Improvisation’s provisionality therein forms part of its strength, not constrained within larger, tenuous sets of ‘rules’.[17]
And, through interactions of Self, the Community is completely free of ideology or conformity.[18] An inherent solidarity nonetheless endures. Brad Mehldau:
Music is cherished in part because it supersedes the need for discourse ahead of time. The consensus that people often reach is that they can’t reach a consensus — in words at least — on what they just experienced. Our very muteness towards music, though, is often the precondition of a deep solidarity that its listeners experience amongst each other. It involves a preternatural kind of group knowledge, a resounding “I know that you know.” I don’t know what you know, but that’s not important. I’m satisfied by the mere knowledge that music pushes your buttons like it does mine. There is something in the world out there that correlates with both of us immediately, albeit in different ways[19]
Mehldau’s interpretation wholly embraces the polysemic nature of Community. ‘An “inner life” – our own or others’ – not only is formed by the “outside” but in many ways gets displayed there and continually shapes the way we understand ourselves and the world’.[20]
Concepts of Community mysticism have root in the Western ‘logical’ systems of classification, as well.[21] Music, improvised music especially, holds a means of exploring ontological structures of consciousness through emotional response based on categorisations from context-dependent situations.[22] To rephrase Mehldau, a development of Self through empathetic emotional memory – of exactly the ‘therapeutic’ kind performers filter, extract and recompose in performance.[23] So as Jarrett continues his physical ‘love affair with the piano’, he autophsyiophysically interacts with the Community of Selves present, using a ‘cenaesthetic’ corporeal semantics – making the body a mediator between physical environment and subjective experience - to further mediate subjectivity through musical and Community surroundings.[24] And, since Self relies upon one’s psycho- and geo-localities, we can call this a manipulation of corpoReality.[25] As the audience infer meaning in Jarrett’s physical gestures, which both suggest and preclude certain heuristic responses, they too unavoidably embody an understanding of it. In turn, the audience’s embodied reaction can return to the source and influence the performer. Within Communities, audience and performers are equal in the development of what one would call ‘vibe’, lacking a better term.
In front of an audience, I get more feedback and it’s easier for me to lose myself, because it’s about forgetting things and letting the subconscious take over. When I’m feeling the energy, I’m able to get into it[26]
‘The individual body becomes an element that may be placed, moved, articulated on others … This is a functional reduction of the body. But it is also an insertion of the body-segment in a whole ensemble over which it is articulated’.[27]
* *
Gesture, movement, corporeal semantics: presence. Music as a voice for the body. The audible prospects of one’s physicality provide the basis of an entire infra-semantic musical layering. Consider the body in the mastering and dismissing of technique – Peter Brötzmann, Albert Ayler, Pharoah Sanders – nontechnical technicality. Body as technique, technique as body. Body as technique as expression, expression as technique as body. I am here. The body as point of resistance to the hierarchies of melody, harmony, time. Previously repressed into a pseudo-absence, a vessel, by the score, conductor, composer as a means to an end, improvised musics liberate the body. Watch Monk dance and think of Schuller remarking that he should work on his technique.[28] Liberated, the body becomes the site of harmony, melody, time: presence: the surface of bodily culture, outside strict contexts: without depth. The body is the instrument, the instrument in the body: Q: ‘You are your instrument?’ A: ‘Yeah’.[29] Fart = fugue.[30]
Butt: do not mistake sign for signified: ‘reprehensible … deceitful’: ‘the reality of a sweating brow’ cannot be a signifier for realness in music, it is a by-product, misread by journalistic practices that imply primitive, racialized ideas of expression.[31] ‘“The reality of the sweating brow” has to do with how white writers have come to interpret whether a given black musician is accurately “doing the best” he or she can … jazz musicians are supposed to simply supposed to sweat – if they are serious’.[32] In some regard, Ake catches himself here. Could (Bill) Evans’ genuflection to the piano keys not be the cause of the supplication? There will always be more than one means of involvement. Watch Monk Dance.
* *
All experience and meaning in performance and all Community must involve the physical aspect of performance, autopoietically.[33] ‘What we call “mind” and what we call “body” are not two things, but rather aspects of one organic process, so that all our meaning … emerge from the aesthetic dimensions of embodied activity’.[34] ‘Music is mediated by our experiences of our bodies and our interactions with the rest of the material world, just as our bodily experiences are, in turn, mediated by music, language and other aspects of cultures’.[35] Take Brown’s ‘Djinji’s Corner’, an exercise in expression through ‘music, speech, song, movement’.[36] Embodiment of the music cannot be overlooked
When people hear a musical performance, they see it as an embodied activity. While they hear, they also witness: how the performers look and gesture … how they regard the audience, how other listeners heed the performers. Thus the musical event is perceived as a socialised activity[37]
What is important to realise here is that the embodiment of the performers maintains an impact on the audience, not just the means of producing the music.[38] Gestures, proxemics, and interaction all play part of Community interaction. It thus becomes possible to perform non-sonic musics and still develop Community. ‘With an enactive view of music and music cognition, however, not only is the mind embodied in a very real sense (both in performance and in listening), but the body and mind are socially and culturally mediated’.[39] Intuiting from Daoism, one could argue that such music would in fact be more expressive
‘The Great Harmonic’ refers to the sound that cannot be heard. As soon as a sound is produced, a schism is introduced; and once there is a schism, one note exists while another exists not, and one loses command of the whole. That is why when sound is produced, it is not ‘the great harmonic’[40]
Combining these various schools of thought, from Daoism, anti-Cartesian understandings of metaphorically elaborated kinaesthetic experiences, through our understandings of Self and Community we can arrive at an interesting proposition. We can see that Self in Community is not just autopoietic, but also ontopoietic. We can see that Self in improvised music is auto-ontopoietic.[41] Within Community, Self is a self-sustaining interaction of being, constantly drawing on the experiential and hermeneutic fields of Community through other auto-ontopoietic Selves. A cyclical syllogism arises:
(1) The weaving of the material world is mediated through social and cultural constructions, and is necessarily inter-actional[42]
(2) Meaning is negotiated through physical manifestations of Self[43]
(3) Manifestations of Self are mutually mediated through manifestations of other Selves (reciprocally determined)
(4) All manifestations of mutual Selves fluctuating through horizontal, experiential exchange are mediated through the inter-actional, material world
(5) The weaving of the material world is mediated through social and cultural constructions, and is necessarily inter-actional……
Not only can the natural environment carry you beyond your limitations, but the realisation of your own body as part of that environment is an even stronger dissociative factor … What we do in the actual event is important – not only what we have in mind. Often what we do is what tells us what we have in mind.[44]
Tao Yuanming knew nothing of music, but he had at home a simple, unadorned zither without any strings. Whenever he experienced, in drinking wine, a feeling of plenitude, he touched the zither in order to express the aspiration of his heart.[45]
[1] Anthony Braxton, Composition Notes C (Frog Music, 1988), 150-1. Consequently, Braxton dismisses bebop as sexist. See: Anthony Braxton, Tri-axium Writings (Synthesis Music, 1985), vol.3: 460-8.
[2] Daniel Fischlin, Ajay Heble, George Lipsitz, The Fierce Urgency of Now: Improvisation, Rights, and the Ethics of Cocreation (Durham: Duke University Press, 2013), 22-3.
[3] Derek Bailey, Improvisation (Dorchester: The Dorset Press, 1992), 83.
[4] Theodor Adorno, ‘Perennial Fashion – Jazz, in Critical Theory and Society: A Reader, edited by Stephen Bronner and Douglas Kellner (Abingdon: Taylor and Francis, 1989), 201.
[5] See: Antonio Gramsci, Selections from the Prison Notebooks of Antonio Gramsci, edited by Quentin Hoare and Geoffrey Smith London: Elecbook, 1999), 9–10.
[6] How else can it be that ‘jazz’ (in the broadest sense taken as an art-form of black origin that rails against hegemonic Western formulae) is now seen as denoting class and sophistication on television adverts? A recent Stella Artois advert, for example, combined the lamentations of a legal slave in an innocuous arrangement of Oscar Brown Jnr’s ‘Work Song’ with the – clearly – arduous task of a wealthy, white, middle aged male drinking cider. Archie Shepp, speaking in 2007, believed that jazz had become brand as much as Coca-Cola. Interview in Archie Shepp Band – The Geneva Concert, DVD, Weinerworld, 2007.
[7] Michael Thompson, ‘Th. W. Adorno Defended against His Critics, and Admirers: A Defense of the Critique of Jazz’, International Review of the Aesthetics and Sociology of Music, vol.41/1 (2010): 37-8.
[8] Ibid., chapter 15 for Adorno’s full text. Michael Thompson, ‘Th. W. Adorno Defended against His Critics, and Admirers: A Defense of the Critique of Jazz’, International Review of the Aesthetics and Sociology of Music, vol.41/1 (2010): 37-49.
[9] For clear evidence that such barriers exist and are, in fact, willingly maintained by Western classical forms see: ‘Concert Manners’, http://www.naxos.com/education/enjoy2_concertmanners.asp.
[10] Marion Brown, Notes on Afternoon of Georgia Faun: Views and Reviews (NIA Music, 1973), 6-7.
[11] Ibid.
[12] David Ake, Jazz Cultures (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002), 109.
[13] Keith Jarrett, quoted in Ben Sidran, Talking Jazz (New York: Da Capo, 1995), 286.
[14] Edward Strickland, ‘Keith Jarrett and the Abyss’, Fanfare, March/April, 1983: 92.
[15] Strickland, quoted in Ake, Cultures, 109.
[16] Anthony Braxton wanted the same for many of his records, but was constantly disrespected by those who issued the albums. See: Anthony Braxton and Graham Lock, Forces in Motion: Anthony Braxton and the Meta-reality of Creative Music (London: Quartet Books, 1988), 89.
[17] Similar to Judith Butler’s understanding of ‘excitable speech’. Butler, Excitable Speech: A Politics of the Performative (London: Routledge, 1997).
[18] Fischlin, Heble, Lipsitz, 20-5.
[19] Brad Mehldau, ‘Progression’, accessed May 3, 2016, http://www.bradmehldau.com/essay-progression.
[20] Ake, 111.
[21] Strickland calls Jarrett a ‘piano mystic’.
[22] Tuija Saresma and Henna-Riika Peltola, ‘Spatial and bodily metaphors in narrating the experience of listening to sad music’, Musicae Scientiae, vol.18/3 (2014): 292-306.
[23] Yusef Lateef, Yusef Lateef’s Method on how to Improvise Soul Music (Teaneck: Almur Music, 1970), 3-6.
[24] Jack DeJohnette, quoted in Ian Carr, Keith Jarrett: The Man and His Music (New York: Da Capo, 1992), 190; Lateef, 5-6; Marc Leman, ‘Music, Gesture, and the Formation of Embodied Meaning’, in
Musical gestures — Sound, Movement and Meaning, edited by R.I. Godøy and Marc Leman (New York:
Routledge, 2010); Leman, ‘An Embodied Approach to Music Semantics’, Musicae Scientiae, Vol.14/1 (2010): 43-67. Cenaesthetic being the general sense of one’s bodily existence.
[25] The body is vital in the unravelling of meaning, moreover. See: Paul Churchland, Plato’s Camera: How the Physical Brain Captures a Landscape of Abstract Universals (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2012).
[26] Sonny Rollins, interview by Hilton Als, April 18, 2016, accessed May 04, 2016, http://pitchfork.com/features/from-the-pitchfork-review/9865-sonny-rollins-the-saxophone-colossus/.
[27] Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish, translated by Alan Sheridan (New York: Random, 1979, 164.
[28] Cecil Taylor, quoted in A. Spellman, Four Lives in the Bebop Business (New York: Limelight, 1985), 31.
[29] Evan Parker, quoted in Bob Parker, ‘Interview with Evan Parker’, Cadence 5/4 (1979): 8-11.
[30] See: John Corbett, ‘Ephemera Underscored: Writing About Free Improvisation’, in Jazz Among the Discourses edited by Krin Gabbard (Durham: Duke University Press, 226-229, 217-241.
[31] Roland Barthes, Mythologies (St Alban’s: Paladin, 1973), 26-8; Anthony Braxton, Tri-axium Writings 3 (Synthesis Music, 1985), 235-308.
[32] Braxton, Tri-3, 297-9.
[33] See Mark Johnson’s philosophical tract The Body in Mind: The Bodily Basis of Meaning, Imagination and Reason (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987). Johnson argues that bodily functions and interactions with the material world produce ‘image schemata’ of meaning in cognitive patterns and experience of that material world. Because image schemata’ are derived physically, they are also inherently social. Autopoietically, in its simplest derivation, means self-created and sustained.
[34] Mark Johnson, The Meaning of the Body: Aesthetics of Human Understanding (London: University of Chicago Press, 2007), 1.
[35] David Borgo, Sync or Swarm: Improvising Music in a Complex Age (New York: Continuum, 2007), 47, 40-9
[36] Brown, Notes, 1.
[37] Richard Leppert, The Sight of Sound: Music, Representation and the History of the Body (California: University of California Press, 1993), xxii.
[38] Other studies have looked into embodied cognition for the performer, as a conduit of improvisation: Vijay Iyer, ‘Embodied Mind, Situated Cognition, and Expressive Microtiming in African-American Music’ Music Perception, vol.19/3 (2002): 387-414.
[39] Borgo, Sync or Swarm, 44.
[40] Wang Bi’s commentary of Laozi, ß12, in Laozi Daodejing, annotated by Wang Bi, in Zhuangzi jishi vol.3/6, 26.
[41] ‘Ontopoiesis’ was coined by phenomenologist Anna-Teresa Tymieniecka in the creation of being. It is a deliberately polyhedral term that has been applied to many fields of study. Here, I use it to indicate the origin of Self, that is, its continual change and development. See: Anna-Teresa Tymieniecka, ‘The Ontopoietic Self-Individualization of Being: In Search of the Foothold of Change, Becoming and Transformation’, Analecta Husserliana, vol.60 (1999): 3-20.
[42] See: Fernando R. Bornaetxea, ‘Intersubjectivity: From Phenomenology to Ethnomethodology’, Analecta Husserliana, vol.54 (1998): 167-177.
[43] Meaning is not solely reached this way, clearly.
[44] Cornelius Cardew, ‘Towards an Ethics of Improvisation’, in Treatise Handbook (Peters Press, 1971), xviii, xx. See: Tony Harris, The Legacy of Cornelius Cardew (London: Routledge, 2016), 143.
[45] Songshu, 93.16b; A.R.Davis, Tao Yüan-ming: His Works and Their Meaning (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1983), vol.2, 168.