‘Minor language, minor practices’
(Talk given at the 2021 Australasian Jazz and Improvisation Research Network conference)
In 2002, David Ake published an essay that shrewdly and strategically situates Ornette Coleman’s mode of social performativity, his musical genealogy, and indeed the very sounds he made with his saxophone (and later with trumpet and violin) as deliberately outside the majoritarian masculinist framework that defined the jazz practices of the time. Ake’s characterization can be summarized by about seven ways in which Coleman breaks with jazz’s mainstream.
1) In a framework where performative modes of masculine assertiveness were valued, Coleman was deliberately ‘uncool’ in terms of his manner of dress, his toy plastic saxophone, his ‘nerdy’ way of speaking.
2) Deliberately placing himself outside the insider ‘boy’s club’ of jazz by growing his hair long, opening questioning his own sexuality, and eating vegetarian.
3) Eschewing jazz’s ‘dues-paying’ trope in which one needs to master specific repertoires and modes of engaging them; instead coming from a background of blues and R&B and spending little time on canonical ‘jam session’ tunes and post-bebop syntaxes.
4) Resisting what Ake calls a ‘competition-based jazz aesthetic’ exemplified by the ‘cutting contest’, in favor of a communal musical approach resistant to such a competition-drive.
5) Eschewing jazz’s premium on instrumental virtuosity (and its association with ‘manliness’); in favor of an approach that was deliberately anti-virtuosic, at least in a conventional sense.
6) Projecting earnestness and eagerness rather than the ‘implacable demeanor’ of coolness and aloofness practiced by mainstream jazz musicians.
7) And stepping deliberately outside jazz’s ‘master-disciple’ lineage; here Ake cites Amiri Baraka, who suggested at the time that Coleman ‘uses [Charlie] Parker only as a hypothesis; his … conclusions are quite separate and unique’.
One of the remarkable things about Ake’s essay is how he brings social and what we might call ‘within-the-music’ issues and ideas into close dialogue. It’s not just about the sounds Coleman made, nor the social spheres he occupied and contributed to constituting: rather, we start to see that these are irreducible in a very important way. There’s already the seed of an immanent critique here, which we ought not ignore in the ongoing wake of #MeToo and Black Lives Matter, which is that our postmodern dismissals of author agency might actually be highly problematic, that it’s not quite right to ‘engage the idea, not the person’, that the material, relational, and historically contingent aspects of the lives of the artists we study have might have real consequences in terms of what their artistic practices mean.
(This, many of you know, is what has been animating the controversy around music theorist Heinrich Schenker in the United States in recent months.)
I’m not here today to talk about about cancelling this or that artist, however: quite the opposite. I’m calling today to redouble our efforts to root around in the margins of mainstream discourses, historiographies, what I’m going to call ‘theoriographies’, and pedagogical practices in jazz, working to reclaim the subaltern or undercommons or nomadic voices and practices that have been silenced by what Jacques Rancière would call jazz’s police logic. Specifically, it is a call to foreground what I’ll call the ‘why’ question. Why did this particular musician develop their improvisational ‘language’ in the particular way they did, with what material consequences, in what kind of an even potentially fraught relationship with the contexts they were living and working in?
As a performer and listener, I’m particularly drawn to two kinds of such individualizing developments. On one hand, those that enact sometimes extreme torsions of mainstream syntaxes—for example Eric Dolphy’s fantastical distentions of bebop’s gestural language, which Fred Moten poetically describes as ‘an extemporaneous reformation of rules’, a ‘resignification or redeployment’, and most productively, a ‘cut interpellation’—what Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari characterize as ‘that which a minority constructs within a majority language’.
On the other hand, I’m drawn to what I’ve described elsewhere as the kinds of musical utterances that move expression outside the Aristotelian logic of sensible speech versus noise, where the latter is that which is not recognized by an interlocutor as an intelligible utterance, and therefore its utterer is not recognized as human. To move outside this logic, I argue, is not to insist that what is thought of as noise—phonē—is indeed a logos that we merely need to accept as such but that noise is in itself a highly politically and aesthetically valent form of expression that needs to be taken on its own terms rather than made to function under a particular kind of syntactic regime. I’m thinking in this case of the Pharoah Sanders of Coltrane’s late ensembles, or the Gato Barbieri of Carla Bley’s early work.
These kinds of improvisational expressons resist theorization and pedagogical framing. As Derek Bailey wrote back in the early 90s, ‘taking the music made by, say, Jack Teagarden or by Albert Ayler and extracting from it a ‘method’ is difficult to imagine’. It’s crucial that Bailey’s point is not just about so-called avant-garde utterances, although Teagarden was his own sort of iconclast. It’s not just the ‘weird’ that gets written out of our theories and methods, however. It’s the way those theories and methods get constructed through processes of abstraction away from the living reality of the musicians whose voices they purport to represent, and how the idea of what jazz’s language ‘is’ gets reified through that very process of abstraction.
For just one example, a version of Charlie Parker’s improvisational language has served as the ground for a number of theories of bebop improvisation, all of which in varying ways fix bebop as ‘a’ language, for example Dan Haerle’s The Jazz Language or Mark Levine’s The Jazz Theory Book. These theories focus on notes: scales or chordscales, melody-harmony relations, characteristic gestures or ‘licks’, and to a lesser extent rhythm. But of course these are only a few aspects of what Parker was doing and why his music matters, and we should insist that gesture, timbre, groove, microtiming, pitch elasticity, and even ephemeral ideas like energy and intensity are not accidental qualities but are foundational to understanding jazz’s syntaxes. Likewise, to return to Derek Bailey, ‘the restlessness, the adventurousness, the thirst for change which was a central characteristic of the jazz of that period’. The point ought not be to mine jazz’s recorded history in order to find common threads that hold it all together, as a recent big data project has attempted to do, but to search for what is idiosyncratic, personal, ‘weird’ in every player’s sound, timefeel, and melodic repertoire, and to be asking the ‘why’ question: why those sounds, why that feel, why those gestures?
The ‘weird’, then, is everywhere. Difference is everywhere; all there is is difference, as Gilles Deleuze insists. To re-ask the question: How do we re-theorize jazz—how do we begin to construct an alternative theoriography—that begins with difference, that begins with individuating utterances and the ways they fold back to construct subjectivities and contexts, that resists the reification-drive that slices and dices history by looking for sameness and dismissing difference as merely the noise that must be cleaned up in any good data-analysis project?
In order to think a little more concretely about these ideas, I’d like to turn to Sun Ra for the remainder of this presentation. I’ve been working recently on the ways Sun Ra and Cecil Taylor have engaged standard jazz repertoires, which among many other things, I suggest, involves specific details of their lives, locations, engagements with histories and futures, theoretical orientations, statuses as queer bodies in a radically heteronormative milieu, and much more. How can these strata play into a music-analytic understanding of their improvisational utterances? How can they point the way toward new practices and pedagogies?
Let’s listen to the beginning of a 1976 performance of ‘Take the A Train’, from the Montreux Jazz Festival. I’m going to play a fairly substantial excerpt, just over three chorus.
There’s obviously a lot here—where to begin, in my last three or four minutes today? In no particular order, there’s the rhapsodic way in which Sun Ra repeats and variously contorts the signature eighth-note flourish that concludes each of the song’s A-sections: moving it around in registers, changing details of its intervallic content, repeating it as a kind of record-skip motif. There’s the temporal elasticity Sun Ra enacts by speeding up and slowing down the pulse, by adding measures, by staging dramatic caesuras. There’s the big moment where the A Train achieves a sort of mimetic sonic lift-off, as the express train to Harlem enacts a dimensional redeployment, blasting off into outer space, with all the tumultuous, violently destructive force required to escape the earth’s gravitational pull. Pitch turns into noise in this moment, logos gives way to phone in the enactment of a new discursive anti-logic.
But the big, obvious aspects of Sun Ra’s improvisation aside, I am equally interested in what Ian Biddle would call the ‘tiny seductions’ we can hear, see and feel in this excerpt. For example, what Tim Stüttgen calls Sun Ra’s ‘alien drag’ presentation is important for understanding his historiography and how both his understanding of and fabulatory, fabulous retelling of histories—and futures—affect the particular directions his musical explorations take. But what of the little glimmer in his eye and the barely-suppressed grin as he announces the song? I see this look constantly in his interviews, and quite often on stage: the little peek into a mischievous honesty that has us constantly guessing whether Sun Ra is serious or having a go at us. Thelonious Monk had a better poker face: we rarely if ever see the impishness peek through the mask. Duke Ellington didn’t even try: his wry irony is omnipresent. Charlie Parker’s too.
That mischievousness is crucial for Sun Ra, because it is the inverse double of the face that expresses the devasting seriousness of his critical utopian project. Every trickster, from Elegua to Anansi to Rabbit to Coyote, shares this double visage. Fred Ho suggests that Sun Ra’s utopian politics might be a little too abstract and future-oriented, too removed from the here-and-now of transformative activism. I disagree: Sun Ra’s Afro-pasts and and Afro-futures are built into the very material constitutions of his improvisational language, precisely because of the way his gestures reclaim and rework pasts and open onto new possibilities. Here’s where I want to repeat my suggestion about the relationship between the ‘personal is political’ material-historical contexts within which musical utterances are constituted, and the very specific shapes those utterances take: their pitch and timing content, their gestural impetus, the ways they incorporate and express their musical genealogies. For example, right at the beginning of Sun Ra’s solo, just as his brief introduction is starting to coalesce into the first statement of the ‘A Train’ theme, his left hand begins something very much like a walking bass line, which never quite fully takes shape before self-transforming into more of a free melodic counterpoint to the right-hand melody. Three times in the first twelve seconds, a little dissonant eruption—a product of two or three low-register melodic pitches blurred into one through Sun Ra’s use of sustain pedal—impinges on the left-hand countermelody, threatening to transform it into something else—we don’t know what, but new potentialities are in a process of being activated. A fourth eruption starts to realize this new affective potential, as Sun Ra plays a more overt low-register cluster as part of the melodic unfolding of the tune. A relationship between two, or maybe three, different kinds of syntaxes unfolds from here: the melodic-harmonic language of Duke Ellington and Billy Strayhorn’s 1940s jazz, deterritorialized as an idiosyncratic post-bop expression, and the increasing impingement of noise as an altogether different sort of expression. Like Sun Ra’s persona itself, it’s all at once playful and kind of hilarious, and deeply, intensely serious.
And so on—all this leads to my main point, which I’ll frame as a question before signing off: how can these little moments, and countless others like them, in virtually every improvised performance that has ever transpired, frame a new way of thinking about jazz theory, analysis and pedagogy? How can we reorient our theories and analytic projects to focus on difference first and foremost, rather than striving to find sameness where we can in order to construct taxonomies and define common practices? Among many other productive implications of such a turn is a radical eschewal of jazz’s still-pervasive ‘Great Man’ narratives (always men, of course), ‘dues-paying’ tropes, stylistic demarcations, geographic chauvinisms and much more.