Music in American Life

New York City's Unseen Scene

Thomas H. Greenland

• Publisher: University of Illinois Press
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9780252098314
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Music

How do we speak about jazz? In this provocative study based on the author's deep immersion in the New York City jazz scene, Tom Greenland turns from the usual emphasis on artists and their music to focus on non-performing participants, describing them as active performers in their own right who witness and thus collaborate in a happening made one-of-a-kind by improvisation, mood, and moment. Jazzing shines a spotlight on the constituency of proprietors, booking agents, photographers, critics, publicists, painters, amateur musicians, fans, friends, and tourists that makes up New York City's contemporary jazz scene. Drawn from deep ethnographic research, interviews, and long term participant observation, Jazzing charts the ways New York's distinctive physical and social-cultural environment affects and is affected by jazz. Throughout, Greenland offers a passionate argument in favor of a radically inclusive conception of music-making, one in which individuals collectively improvise across social contexts to co-create community and musical meaning. An odyssey through the clubs and other performance spaces on and off the beaten track, Jazzing is an insider's view of a vibrant urban art world.

Chapter 1

LISTENINSG TO JAZZ

What someone hears is in large part determined by how one hears. To the extent that a listener is actively engaged in the perception of music and in the construction of musical meanings, he or she is an actor, a performer, of music. Even in the privacy of one’s home or headphones, a listener performs by exacting order and symbolic value from auditory vibrations and by self-identifying with these sounds. In a second, more obvious, sense the act of listening becomes a performance when it is presented in the public domain, as when jazz fans gather at concerts—a subject to be further explored in the following chapter. This chapter highlights some of the ways in which individual listeners interface with, understand, and thereby appreciate improvised performances.

HEARING THE “FACTS”

The subject of musical perception and, more specifically, the role of listener agency in the act of musical perception, is complex. Some theories maintain there are objective musical “facts” to be heard and recognized,1 others suggest that musical understanding is situated and subjective, while others argue that meanings are co-constructed by both communicators and interpreters. In some sense, all of these explanations are relevant to how jazz is heard and construed.

Most people can agree on certain characteristics or properties of a given performance, such as the name of a song, the literal meaning of its lyrics (if any), the rhythmic grouping of its beats (though a listener may impose alternate groupings),2 the pitch sequence of a melody, the harmonic progression of a composition (though here again we’re on shaky ground),3 or other specifiable musical features. Because jazz musicians usually improvise together, making split-second choices in response to each other’s playing, they must attune to any operative parameters such as key area, harmonic progression, and rhythmic structure. Audience members, especially those with musical training, may listen for and be aware of these features, while others will not—not that they necessarily need to. Many listeners can identify a tune like “Over the Rainbow,” even when its melody and/or harmony have been radically reinterpreted, if they are provided with sufficient “clues.” On the other hand, there is always some leeway for individuals to derive different interpretations of the same event. If someone is daydreaming or under the influence of drugs during a concert, for example, his or her perception of it may be significantly preempted or altered by internal psychological processes.

Even when we concede the existence of certain basic musical facts, matters soon become more complicated when the facts themselves are fuzzy. Most jazz performance is purely instrumental, so the music doesn’t directly refer to anything, and therefore meanings must derive from the association of musical sounds with other objects and concepts, a highly individual and unpredictable process.4 How does G

minor sound: happy, sad, both, or neither? How would you characterize a chord combining a “dark” minor third with a “bright” major sixth or seventh scale degree? How much dissonance is pleasurable, tolerable, or intolerable? The crux of the issue lies in the difficulty/impossibility of translating musical sound into words.5 Using speech to describe music implies that musical meanings are, at best, imprecisely and incompletely conveyed through language and, furthermore, that there are fundamental semiotic and philosophical biases inherent in the very use of language, but it does not therefore invalidate a listener’s perceptions and interpretations.

Some theorists would argue that looking for meaning in jazz is like shopping for apples in the orange bin. At one extreme, music philosopher Peter Kivy maintains that meaning can be expressed only through language,6 which effectively removes most jazz, a mostly instrumental music, from the equation. Many contend that music derives its meanings from its associations with other objects and events.7 Ethnomusicologist Thomas Turino suggests that listeners not only connect music to particular people, places, and experiences in their lives but often perceive music as a product of these factors, as when a screeching high note during a saxophone solo is assumed to embody the peaking emotions of the improvising musician.8 The protean and relational qualities afforded to musical sounds through these various associations accounts for the many distinct, even incongruent, ways that individuals engage with and derive meanings from jazz. To be sure, experienced listeners invariably develop subtle and complex understandings of the music, even if, paradoxically, they are unable to articulate these awarenesses. To appreciate their insights, one must listen “between the lines” for meanings indirectly stated, perhaps unconsciously understood.9

Musical elements that resist analysis and classification include timbre (the “color” of sound), nonstandard pitches or tunings, and rhythmic flexibility. While the pitch of a “blue note”10 or the placement of “swung” eighth-notes11 can be objectively measured,12 timbre is much more difficult to quantify; it is usually described in metaphorical terms that are, by definition, imprecise and highly subjective. Furthermore, these elements are always situated in a specific musical environment. Hence a musician can only “rush” or “drag” (i.e., play ahead of or behind the beat, respectively) in relation to a commonly established pulse. Avant-jazz generally avoids or eliminates the harmonic and rhythmic cycles prevalent in mainstream jazz; melodic continuity may be deliberately obtuse, and emergent structures are likely to depend on group interaction, cues, and/or timbral manipulation. Indeed, the aesthetic impact of avant-jazz is partly predicated upon its ability to resist “parsing” via the grammar and syntax of conventional musical analysis. A few analysts have used computer-generated diagrams to map and analyze changes in sound density and complexity during musical performances,13 but these and other valuations add little to our intuitive understandings of and emotional responses to the musical phenomena in question. Despite the difficulty of describing these attributes, however, experienced listeners can often agree that a particular performance was “soulful” or “swinging,” suggesting that these qualities are, if not measurable, at least observable and, to some extent, commonly understood within certain communities.

In order to respond swiftly and appropriately to emergent developments in a group improvisation, jazz musicians must cultivate their aural skills—they need to know what they’re hearing—along with “ear-to-hand” coordination (i.e., the ability to instantly reproduce any overheard sounds on their instrument).14 If a pianist plays some unusual chords behind a solo, for example, the soloist may want to alter his or her improvised melody line to fit the new harmonies. Advanced musicians can often pick out quite sophisticated elements of music, particularly if they’ve “woodshedded” (practiced) these same ideas on their instruments. The acquisition of these requisite skills may predispose them to listen analytically, even when they are “off duty” (not performing), just as people respond reflexively to the sound of their own name.15 A harmony instructor at Berklee College of Music once joked that his wife won’t go to movies with him anymore because he invariably gets distracted by the sound track. Listening competency doesn’t depend on formal musical training, however, as many experienced nonmusicians develop considerable aural acumen and fluency without necessarily being able to label, analyze, or discuss what they “know.”

As jazz artists develop new forms and approaches, listeners must find ways to track these changes. Those who try to follow a song’s form by counting beats, feeling metrical subdivisions internally, or silently singing the melody might be baffled by the latest innovations. For example, musicians associated with the M-Base collective16 often use through-composed rhythmic clavés (or “drum chants”)17 to structure their compositions and improvisations, and though it may be possible for a listener to hear these chants as symmetric cycles of evenly spaced pulses, such perceptions are not necessarily in sync with how M-Base musicians conceive of and generate their music. Traditional listening techniques may not “work” for jazz’s more radical developments, which require new modes of attention and perception.

CREATING CONTEXTS

The saying “I don’t know anything about art, but I know what I like” implies that even casual or indifferent listeners do understand something of what they hear, even if they have difficulty articulating what that is. To complicate matters, people’s ways of comprehending jazz vary considerably. In addition to the musical content (or “facts”), their perceptions are informed by the various contexts of listening. This ability to connect music to past and present experiences enables listeners to create individualized meanings for improvised jazz.

While some forms of communication are one-sided, as when someone reads a book, music performances are often mutually influential exchanges between actors and “actees.” Musical perception is not a hard-wired mechanism of the human nervous system because it varies with focus of attention, historical context, situated social conduct, and other factors. Consider Rubin’s Goblet: with effort a viewer can consciously switch between two mutually incompatible images (either a goblet, or two faces in profile), a condition Gestalt psychologists designate as multistability. If perception is active, then listening to and participating in music is an act, a practice, a performance. This isn’t meant to imply that each listener reinvents reality but emphasizes the situated nature of his or her musical experiences.

Because they occur within a broader social arena, where collective and historical forces are at play, individual acts of perception may have important ramifications. Although large-scale social structures and politico-economic forces may appear hegemonic, local activities can and do influence these formations. Individual actions, though heavily informed by and mediated through the past and present dimensions of society, may effect both deliberate and inadvertent changes in present and future societies.18 The plurality of perception insures that musical traditions in general and musical performances in particular are always the collective production of individual participants—the musicians who play and the audience members who listen. How then do jazz listeners exercise their individuality of perception? And by extension, how are perceptual acts made manifest, or performed, in broader social contexts? Finally, to what extent do shared understandings in jazz communities mediate the ways individual participants hear and interpret the music?

To better understand and appreciate jazz, listeners develop unique aesthetic criteria, self-taught vernaculars based on their perceptual “toolkit” and past experiences. Fans learn about jazz by attending concerts and through other, less immediate sources such as recordings, YouTube videos, podcasts, radio and television programs, album liner notes, fan and trade magazines, internet blogs and interest sites, and conversations with fellow fans. Utilizing these resources, listeners acquire knowledge of artists, recordings, and repertoire; increase their sensitivity to the emotional, psychological, and metacommunicative aspects of jazz performances; and enhance their ability to detect other context-dependent cues.

Knowledge of repertoire—whether that refers to the canon of frequently played standards or to original compositions associated with particular artists—gives listeners an important frame of reference for understanding performances. Much of traditional, mainstream, bebop, and many contemporary jazz styles is built on the rhythmic, melodic, and harmonic structure of specific songs, most featuring a recognizable melody and a regularly cycling harmonic progression (the “changes”) that accompanies it and serves as a model for improvised solos.19 Familiarity with previous performances or recordings of a particular song lets listeners compare and assess live performances of it: How radical or conservative is the interpretation? How do the performers express uniqueness, creativity, and immediacy in their rendition of the song? Furthermore, knowing the tune allows listeners to track improvisations by humming the melody or singing the words in their heads, repeating this theme for each complete harmonic cycle (or “chorus”).20 On commonly used chord progressions like George Gershwin’s “I Got Rhythm,” listeners can superimpose either the original song or a new one written to the same harmonies (e.g., “The Flintstones Theme”). Lujira Cooper (see Figure 17) uses standard melodies to map her listening experiences: “Some musicians like to get off on these long solos [and] you forget what the melody is, or they play songs you’ve never heard, and it sounds like noise. Some guys’ll do a solo, and it’s long, and it’s involved, but they’ll give you a hint of the melody.” On several occasions I have overheard audience members humming snatches of a tune during a solo, demonstrating not only that they can correctly imagine the melody in relation to the harmonic accompaniment, but also that they can accurately monitor the song form during an improvisation.21 Standard songs thus provide an anchor of familiarity: a point of departure for the musicians and a point of reference for listeners.

One of the most basic ways listeners contextualize a jazz performance is by following its progress through the arrangement (or “roadmap”). A typical template might look like this: 1) intro section; 2) statement of the theme (or “head”); 3) sequence of solos, each a chorus or more in length; 4) “trading fours” (four-bar solos alternating between the drummer and other musicians); 5) reprise of the theme; and 6) outro section, often a vamp or a triple repeat (or “tag”) based on the tune’s terminal harmonies.22 Despite many variations on this prototype, its general form is consistent enough to provide listeners with the musical equivalent of a narrative arc.

Listeners may also recognize the stylistic precursors of and influences on an artist’s style. For example, two of the most copied tenor saxophonists of their time were Coleman Hawkins and Lester Young. Experienced fans can usually hear the differences between their styles and may also recognize the influence of Hawkins in Sonny Rollins’s playing or the influence of Young in Stan Getz’s, though both of these younger tenor players eventually developed distinctive styles of their own.23 Some listeners can identify artists on an unknown recording purely by their “sound” (a combination of their musical style and instrumental timbre). DownBeat magazine’s long-running “Blindfold Test” challenges musicians—presumably the experts—to do just tha...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Prologue
• Introduction: The Unseen Scene
• 1 Listening to Jazz
• 2 Developing “Big Ears”: Jazz Fans
• 3 Making the Scene: Fan Communities
• 4 Providing a Place and Time: Jazz Presenters
• 5 Jazz Jobbing: Music Professionals
• 6 Hear and Now: Collective Improvisation and Spiritual Synergy
• Epilogue: Making the Changes
• Appendix: Interviews
• Notes
• References
• Discography
• Index