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 self-
regulating (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 self-
creating, 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 African-
American 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 post-
structuralist 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 European-
American 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 self-
expression? 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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