Capítulo 6: Estudio de potenciación del motor
6.2 Sistema de admisión
It is common (in jazz histories at least) to discuss jazz in terms of a body of works tracing an evolutionary stylistic arc from a kind of folk expression in New Orleans at the turn of the nineteenth century to the so-‐called neo-‐classicism of the 1980s and 1990s.266 The remarkable changes that jazz performance styles
have undergone over the past century attest to the mutability of the idiom. However, if jazz is defined solely in terms of its style features, it is difficult to isolate a definition that could accommodate music as diverse as Jelly Roll Morton’s ‘Black Bottom Stomp’, Charlie Parker and Dizzy Gillespie’s ‘Koko’, Charles Mingus’s ‘Epitaph’ and Miles Davis’s ‘Spanish Key’ – all performances that are included in contemporary accounts of the music.267 However, there are
processes common to all of these performances that do suggest points of unity. In its earliest incarnations, jazz was played by African American
musicians in the south of the United States and as such is generally described as African American music.268 Christopher Small suggests that African American
music (of which jazz is said to be a subset) is primarily ‘an approach to the act of music making, a way of playing and responding to music.’269 He later elaborates,
266 Mark Gridley’s college textbook is a case in point, and is titled Jazz Styles. Ted Gioia’s The History of Jazz does similar work, as does Henry Martin’s Jazz: The First 100 Years (London: Cengage Learning, 2011). In recent years a ‘standard collection’ of the masterworks of jazz has been Ken Burns: Jazz, a 5-‐CD canonical statement to accompany the PBS television series (and book).
267 A similar point is made by James Young and Carl Matheson, in ‘The Metaphysics of Jazz’, The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 58/2: Special Issue on Improvisation in the Arts (Spring, 2000), 125.
268 Alyn Shipton (in A New History of Jazz) suggests, contrary to other writers (such as Gioia, The History of Jazz) that jazz emerged more or less simultaneously in multiple sites across the United States. What writers do appear to agree upon is that African American musicians were the principle actors in the first flowering of jazz.
suggesting that music ‘is not primarily a thing or a collection of things, but an activity in which we engage. One might say that it is not properly a noun at all, but a verb.’270 This corresponds to composer and scholar Olly Wilson’s claims
about African American music, which he argues consists of:
… the common sharing of a core of conceptual approaches to the process of music making and, hence, is not basically quantitative but qualitative. The particular forms of black music which evolved in America are specific
realizations of this shared conceptual framework which reflects the peculiarities of the American black experience. As such, the essence of their Africaness is not a static body of something which can be depleted, but rather a conceptual approach, the manifestations of which are infinite. The common core of this Africaness consists of the way of doing something, not simply something that is done.271
Wilson asserts that African American music exhibits a set of conceptual approaches, which are ubiquitous but present in different forms across two distinct traditions of African American music. Wilson illustrates his claims with analysis of a performance representative of each tradition: a work song, and a late-‐1950s performance by the Miles Davis Quintet.272
Wilson describes the first of these as belonging to the ‘folk African American tradition’, claiming that such music evolved directly from African musical traditions, sharing most of the basic concepts of those traditions while ‘selectively incorporating important aspects of western musical practice.’273 This
‘folk African American tradition’ includes hollers, early spirituals, work and play songs, rural work songs, gospel music, urban blues and soul music as its
principle manifestations.
The second tradition Wilson identifies is one characterised by ‘a greater interaction and interpenetration of African and Euro-‐American elements, although the fundamental qualities which make it unique are rooted in African conceptual approaches to music making.’274 According to Wilson this tradition
270 Small, Music of the Common Tongue, 50. (Original emphasis).
271 Olly Wilson, ‘The significance of the relationship between Afro-‐American and West African
Music’, Black Music Perspective in Music 2/1 (Spring 1974), 20.
272 Wilson, ‘Black Music as an Art Form’, 3 (for list of conceptual approaches); 11-‐21 (for
analyses).
273 Ibid., 9. 274 Ibid.
involves ‘reshaping the Euro-‐American qualities of the music to African American norms. The process of cultural transformation became the salient characteristic of this tradition.’275 This process of transformation is one to which
I will return in greater detail later in this chapter, but for now the point I want to emphasise is not that these processes might be exclusively ascribed to African Americans or to African cultural retentions, but that processes themselves can reasonably be given priority in descriptions of jazz. As Wilson claims, ‘much of the entire jazz tradition [is an expression] of this second tradition.’276
In recent scholarship Ingrid Monson suggests that such primacy of process leads to evolving traditions, thus explaining both the changing styles of jazz, and the gradual evolution the processes used to generate the music have themselves experienced. Jazz is not alone in this regard; in her introduction to The African Diaspora, Monson posits that: ‘All cultural systems, even in the absence of external influences, are inevitably engaged in processes of
reproducing themselves through time that include not only duplication but also contestation and synthesis (often intergenerational).’277 What I want to point
toward here is that while Wilson seems to view the six conceptions he delineates as foundational and essential to the music, Monson suggests they may ‘change over time’ and in some cases be traded for other conceptions:278
In the late 1940s and early 1950s jazz drew upon a multiplicity of aesthetic perspectives in fashioning individual sounds, including the African-‐American vernacular aesthetics, the aesthetics of the American popular song, the
aesthetics of classical music, and also, for some artists, African diasporic sounds such as Afro-‐Cuban sacred and secular music, Nigerian talking drums, and
275 Wilson, ‘Black Music as an Art Form’, 10. 276 Ibid.
277 Ingrid Monson, ‘Introduction’, in The African Diaspora: A musical perspective, 10. (My
emphasis)
278 Ingrid Monson, Freedom Sounds: Civil Rights Call Out to Jazz and Africa (Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 2007), 27. There is scope for ambiguity in interpreting Monson’s claims in this context. While the traditions she identifies here offer conceptions of music making (i.e. certain procedures) they also consider musical materials (particular instruments, sounds, rhythms, and so forth). Aesthetic agency may therefore take the form of adoption of procedures from other traditions (for example, Lennie Tristano’s application of counterpoint [which was informed by his study of J.S. Bach] to his jazz music) or adoption of materials or instruments from other traditions (for example, Yusef Lateef’s use of Middle Eastern instruments such as the schwaam). Either way, the notion that making jazz engages exclusively African-‐American conceptual approaches is troubled by such examples.
Trinidadian calypso. Individual musicians, regardless of their ethnic home base, can and did exercise aesthetic agency by exploring musical aesthetics from both within and beyond their expected ethnic categories.279
Jazz musicians have continued to exercise aesthetic agency by
incorporating, for example, ideas from rock music in the 1960s and 1970s, and in recent years from electronic dance music, into their jazz performances.280
Monson’s remarks about the ways cultural principles (analogous to Wilson’s ‘conceptions’ of music making) evolve over time, experiencing subtle
transformation themselves as they act on (or are mixed with) new materials, can be read either in terms of particular style features or musical materials
(contrapuntal surface features in Dave Brubeck’s music, or turntable effects in Herbie Hancock’s, for example) or in terms of processes (evolving conceptions of improvisation, for example).281 What I wish to emphasise is that processes have
significantly determined the sounding objects that result from jazz
performances. Understanding these processes – which have evolved and been used to transform an increasingly diverse range of musical materials over the past century – can help us make sense of the extraordinary range of styles those sounding objects have exhibited.
The distinction between product and process – between what is done and how it is done – is to a degree at the heart of a heated debate that has exercised the jazz community for some years. The questions raised by this debate
(sometimes called ‘the jazz wars’) are contested because they are central to
279 Monson, Freedom Sounds, 27. George Lewis (‘Improvised Music After 1950: Afrological and
Eurological Perspectives’, in The Other Side of Nowhere: Jazz, improvisation, and communities in dialogue, ed. David Fischlin and Ajay Heble [Middleton, Connecticut: Wesleyan University Press, 2004, 131-‐162]) notes that such cross-‐genre borrowing has continued to the present day, although more commonly in the field of “improvised music” – music free of idiomatic constraints – rather than specifically in jazz.
280 For example, Miles Davis’s adoption of rock music instruments and procedures in the late
1960s, or Nils Petter Molvær’s appropriation of performance strategies from electronic dance music in the 1990s. There are many other examples of this kind of aesthetic agency, such as Paul Bley’s flirtation with serial music techniques (12 + 6 In A Row) or John Coltrane’s investigation of Spanish music (for example, Olé Coltrane). See Nicholson’s Is Jazz Dead?, and in particular chapters 6 (‘Altered Realities and Fresh Possibilities: Future Jazz’) and 7 (‘Out of Sight and Out of Mind: Jazz in the Global Village’).
281 An instructive example might be a comparison between the improvisational approaches
defining the aesthetics of jazz.282 Musician and scholar Jerome Harris identifies
two camps in the jazz community that dispute what constitutes valid jazz aesthetics. He describes these respective camps as adopting either a ‘canon’ or ‘process’ approach to jazz. The canon position ‘extols the art’s continuity with past historical practice’ and sees jazz as ‘a music defined by a specific African American-‐originated canon and socially constituted guild.’ Conversely, the process position tends to ‘valorize change, risk, surprise, and the development or discovery of fresh varieties of expression and beauty,’ and views jazz as ‘the results of certain African American-‐originated processes and aesthetics
manifested in music.’283
Harris points out that, ‘both sides can rightly lay claim to embodying aspects of jazz “tradition” and to promoting “innovation” within the style parameters they have chosen.’284 However, he also posits:
For musicians and audiences in non-‐American [sic] cultures, jazz must almost inevitably be considered a process – first, because members of these
communities naturally bring their own musical and cultural backgrounds to bear on the music they make, market and listen to; and, second, because their distance from the music’s home base is such that it is impractical (if not
quixotic) to build a local aesthetic on the approval of canonmakers in the United States.285
Now, if this is the case, what can we say of those who were the originators of jazz? Given they did not have an inherited tradition called ‘jazz’ to guide their music making (a tradition that might prescribe: particular forms, melodic vocabularies, standard repertoire or agreed style features), what did inform it?
Clearly, given the nature of the music that emerged – music that contains traces of blues and spirituals, ragtime and popular dance music of the day (in other words, ‘the musical and cultural backgrounds’ of the musicians making early jazz), amalgamated and transformed into something quite different – the
282 Stanley Crouch, Considering Genius (New York: Basic Books, 2006). Crouch includes a chapter
called ‘Battle Royale’ in which some of his fusillade in this dispute is documented. Nicholson’s Is Jazz Dead? presents a alternate view of some of the same issues.
283 Jerome Harris, ‘Jazz on the global stage’, in The African Diaspora: A Musical Perspective, ed.
Ingrid Monson (New York: Garland, 2000), 120-‐121. (Original emphasis)
284 Ibid., 120.
285 Ibid., 121-‐122. David Murray’s comments about playing jazz as an African-‐American in
transformations to which these musical materials were subjected was a key determinant in the final shape of the music. For Jerome Harris, these
transformations were the result of ‘certain African-‐American-‐originated processes and aesthetics’, and it is these values that he champions.286 While
Harris is careful to provide caveats that ensure he avoid charges of racial essentialism, he does nevertheless claim that, ‘The influence of a traditionally African-‐American jazz aesthetic is still strong, of course; it remains the prime determinant of how (by what processes) jazz is constructed. But the what of jazz – the set of elements utilized in this process of construction – often includes [non-‐‘jazz’] content.’287 In this Harris’s comments broadly align with the view
adopted by Ingrid Monson, Olly Wilson, Paul Gilroy, John Storm Roberts, Travis Jackson and Eileen Southern.288 My point here is that jazz is usefully understood
as a set of processes (enacted, admittedly, on a set of musical materials with which they interact): processes historically emergent from African-‐American expressive culture, as shaped by – and in response to – specifically 20th-‐century
African American experience, but available to all. I will turn now to the three processes that I believe are most helpful in offering a view of jazz that
illuminates the ongoing presence of creativity in the music’s production.
The development and expression of individual voices
Louis Armstrong, who is considered by many to be, if not the most important, then certainly the first important soloist in jazz history, is thought to be largely responsible for transforming jazz from the predominantly collective ensemble-‐ based music it had been up to that point (c. mid-‐1920s) into music oriented primarily toward individual expression in which the soloist stood out from the
286 This is also the argument made by Eileen Southern in The Music of Black Americans, and by
Olly Wilson in the essays cited earlier in this chapter. It is a central plank of Gunther Schuller’s thesis in Early Jazz, 63-‐89.
287 Harris, ‘Jazz on the global stage’, 122 (original emphasis). Harris rejects the idea that jazz is an
exclusively African American art form: he believes that ‘the notion of “cultural purity” is largely specious and that such notions generally reflect not reality but a common psychological desire for comforting social boundaries and definitions of self.’ (123)
288 Monson, ‘Introduction’ to The African Diaspora; Monson, Freedom Sounds; Wilson, ‘Black
Music as an Art Form’; Gilroy, The Black Atlantic; Roberts, Black Music of Two Worlds; Jackson, ‘Jazz Performance as Ritual’; Southern, The Music of Black Americans.
group.289 Yet even before Armstrong moved to the front of the group (and
certainly after that), jazz has almost always been characterised by the use of personalised performance techniques.
Kevin Whitehead posits that ‘playing jazz is about making a personal statement.’290 Such personal statements are intimately linked to players
possessing an individual ‘voice’ (that is, a unique, identifiable sound or approach).291 When a musician’s musical utterances are thought to possess
unique qualities, that musician is said to have ‘a sound’, an attribute that has remained a consistently prized value and is a familiar trope in discourse about jazz. Eileen Southern, for example, in her seminal work The Music of Black
Americans identifies a personal voice as the most important feature of the music. In her view, jazz – like the blues – is vocally oriented music, and performers use their instruments to reproduce their individual singing style. Traditional
melodies or common harmonic frameworks may serve as a launching point for improvisation, ‘but it is the personality of the player and the way he or she improvises that produces the music.’292
These individual voices are a fundamental characteristic of music’s function in the African American culture in which jazz emerged. Further, the kind of self-‐expression they offer is absolutely central to jazz. Ronald Radano writes:
In colonial and antebellum slavery, voice represented the most sonically conspicuous possession of a body otherwise possessed. The vocal utterance provided slaves with an expressive tool, an audible social force that served to construct group networks and structures of meaning. Within the economy of slavery, African-‐American slaves identified a way of crafting cultural
possessions within the vessel of their own possessed self – out of the possession itself – a force that challenged the control of the master-‐owner […] More than any other expressive phenomenon, the “vocal” sound of black music has represented the crucial place from which African-‐Americans have told their
289 For example, see: James Lincoln Collier, The Making of Jazz: A comprehensive history (London:
Delacorte, 1979); Mark Gridley, Jazz Styles; Ken Burns, Jazz.
290 Kevin Whitehead, Why Jazz? A concise guide (New York: Oxford University Press, 2011), 15.
Also, Nat Shapiro and Nat Hentoff, Hear Me Talkin’ To Ya: The story of jazz as told by the men who made it (New York: Dover, 1955).
291 ‘Voice’ is a ubiquitous term that has emerged from musicians’ discourse. 292 Southern, The Music of Black Americans, 366-‐367, my emphasis.
stories […] “Black voice,” then, can be understood [first] as the literal, audible utterance empowering the singing or speaking subject…293
One reading of Radano’s claims might be that it was with the singing and
speaking voice that enslaved African Americans were afforded agency, were able to declare independent identities as people. It could be said that one of the ways the first African Americans constituted themselves – claimed for themselves autonomous identities – was through vocal (and by extension, musical) expression.
For Radano, ‘the “vocal” sound of black music has represented the crucial place from which African Americans have told their stories.’294 The idea that a
performance ‘tells the musician’s story’ is a familiar trope in jazz. As Allan
Morrison said in his discussion of Lester Young, ‘In jazz more than any other way of music, a man’s music will reflect the man, his thoughts, his emotions.’295
Saxophonist J.R. Monterose writes: ‘Why not play your own music if you’re a jazz player? Jazz is supposed to be self-‐expression. You’ve got to have a need to say something on your instrument – to get it out. If I can’t be myself, there’s no point in being in jazz.’296 Ingrid Monson emphasises this value with the title of her
book on the ensemble in jazz, Saying Something.297
293 Ronald Radano, Lying Up A Nation: Race and Black Music (Chicago: University of Chicago
Press, 2003), 14-‐15, (my emphasis).
294 Ibid.
295 Alan Morrison, ‘You Gotta be Original, Man’, in A Lester Young Reader, ed. Lewis Porter
(Washington: Smithsonian Institution, 1991), 132.
296 J.R. Monterose (sleeve note to Straight Ahead. New York: Xanadu, 1975). David Ake, in Jazz Matters complicates this idea. Observing that musicians make musical choices based not only on their preferences (which in turn have been shaped by their cultural, historical and geographical