Essay by:   Sean Singer

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).

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.