Essay by:   Sean Singer

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.