Velocity of Celebration: Jazz and Semiotics
February 1997
By Sean Singer
Introduction
Jazz is a semiotic event. Ornette Coleman was talking to a group of elementary school children at Margaret Mead's school and he asked them: "Who would like to play music and have fun?" All the children raised their hands. He then asked them how do you do that? One little girl raised her hand and said: "You apply your feelings to sound." That was exactly it. When a jazz musician applies his feeling to sound he is forming, from given material new information which improves upon that original concept and creates for the artist and the listener new meaning and beauty.
Terence Hawkes describes the process of jazz improvisation in the same terms Roland Barthes assigns a cultural life in modern Japan where signifiers have a higher role than signifieds:
"The role Barthes gives the critic could also be said to rank him with the jazz musician, as an artist whose art derives from 'given' material, 'given' signifiers (a text, a chord-sequence) but which creates, from these, new signifieds, a new reality which is not given, and which surpasses the original in invention and beauty. This art --- an art of signifiers, not signifieds, can be said to be truly modern, whether its modernity manifests itself in jouissance or jazz" (Hawkes, 121).
The jazz musician is intimately involved in the life of signs. There is never a wrong note in jazz, the photographer Roy DeCarava said, because each note can be redeemed by the next note. The connection between jazz and semiotics, simplified, is this: the meaning and feeling behind each note, each chord, each chorus, and each improvisation, are not given. They, like the signifier and the signified, are arbitrarily formed. They arrive at their meaning within the context of the notes which surround it. My purpose in this essay is to identify the connections between jazz and signification. I am interested in the way improvisation works to manipulate signifiers to create art. In this essay I want to explore in detail the connections between signification and jazz, which unfold in these: ways: 1) there is a system of unstated, predetermined rules a jazz musician must comprehend and utilize to be a successful improviser, this system of use or competence is parallel to the system of internal coherence in
speaking, 2) jazz performance involves an intimate relationship between artist and audience. Like speaking, there are verbal and visual clues the soloist gives the other musicians and which all the musicians give the listener, and 3) in jazz, the musician and the listener interpret their feelings from the music. These feelings are created as ad-hoc responses to an environment of jazz. There is a link between pleasure to a creative effort. Barthes describes this phenomenon as jouissance. The feelings are spontaneous and the listener accepts them automatically and instinctively, and occur from within the connections of signifieds.
On to Part 2 of Jazz and Semiotics
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