Taking It to the Bridge: Music as Performance

Jazz Improvisation as a Social Arrangement

52 Philip Auslander Jazz Improvisation as a Social Arrangement My starting point is an essay by the philosopher Lee B. Brown entitled “Phonography, Repetition and Spontaneity” in which he argues that the repetition of musical performances made possible by recording is “the enemy of improvised music,” for which jazz is his point of reference.1 He argues (as others also have) that recording turns improvised jazz performances into fixed compositions by “transform[ing] an improvisatory process into a depersonalized, structured musical tissue.”2 He further claims that those who listen seriously to jazz are interested not only in the music’s sound and structure but also in “a performer’s on-the-spot decisions and actions that generate the sonic trail. . . . But this interest is at odds with one of phonography’s chief ‘virtues,’ namely its capacity for repetition.”3 Subjected to repeated listening, recordings of jazz improvisation become wholly predictable, rather than spontaneous, and, ultimately, boring. Although I sympathize with Brown’s desire to assert and preserve jazz improvisation’s identity as performance rather than composition, I do not agree with his argument that one can experience jazz as improvisational performance exclusively in live settings because recordings reify improvisation in a way that eventually robs it of interest. Brown’s general arguments are vulnerable on several grounds. For one thing, they take for granted a clear distinction between improvisation, on the one hand, and composition and playing from score, on the other, a distinction that is in fact highly problematic. Carol S. Gould and Kenneth Keaton argue, for example, that inasmuch as even the performers of scored music have to make choices not specified by the score, all performed music is improvised to some extent, and, therefore, “jazz and classical performances differ more in degree than in kind.”4 Whereas Philip Alperson argues, like Brown, that improvisation Jazz Improvisation as a Social Arrangement • 53 is different from scored playing because it draws our aesthetic attention primarily to actions rather than works, other writers (e.g., Ed Sarath) agree with Brown for different reasons, seeing improvisation and composition as two distinct, perhaps even opposed practices.5 Still others, by contrast, see jazz improvisations as appropriate subjects of formal analysis and, therefore, as comparable to compositions (e.g., Frank Tirro, Lewis Porter ).6 One can only agree with the ethnomusicologist Bruno Nettl when he writes,“Obviously the relationship of improvisation to composition and notation is a complex one, on which there is no general agreement.”7 Another difficulty with Brown’s argument is that the kind of listening he attributes to consumers of recorded music bears a strong resemblance to “structural listening,” a concept derived from the work of Theodor Adorno and Arnold Schoenberg “intended to describe a process wherein the listener follows and comprehends the unfolding realization, with all of its detailed inner relationships, of a generating musical conception.”8 The idea that structural listening is the ideal mode of listening has been roundly criticized within musicology, particularly by Rose Subotnik, and seems out of touch with a world in which “ubiquitous listening,” a mode of listening that “blends into the environment, taking place without calling conscious attention to itself as an activity in itself,” seems closer to the norm.9 Yet another problem with Brown’s account of the baleful effects of phonography is his assumption that the listener experiences the same recording so many times, and remembers it so well, that at some point it becomes predictable and dull. While this may be true in principle, Jacques Attali notes that the stockpiling of potential musical experiences made possible by recording means that most listeners own far more recordings than they have time to listen to, let alone grow overly familiar with!10 For the sake of argument, however, I will accept Brown’s premises—including the clear distinction between improvised and non-improvised music, and the implicit characterization of the analytical listener who has the time and strength of memory to listen to the same recording until it becomes overly familiar—and offer a counter-argument that addresses a differently problematic dimension of Brown’s position. In another essay, Brown describes the jazz musician’s activity and the listener’s experience in the following terms. In typical jazz improvisations, players can be heard probing and testing possibilities latent in the music they are making. . . . Correlatively , we take a special kind of interest in this activity—in how a performer is faring, so to say. If things are going...