Negotiating
Freedom:
Values
and Practices in Contemporary Improvised Music
Black Music Research
Journal 23/1 (Fall 2004)
Free improvisation is not an action
resulting from freedom; it is an action directed towards freedom. – Davey Williams (1984, 32)
A compromise between order and
disorder, improvisation is a negotiation between codes and their pleasurable
dismantling. – John Corbett
(1995, 237)
During
the last half-century, an eclectic group of artists with diverse backgrounds in
avant-garde jazz, avant-garde classical, electronic, popular, and world music
traditions have pioneered an approach to improvisation that borrows freely from
a panoply of musical styles and traditions and at times seems unencumbered by
any overt idiomatic constraints.
While a definitive history of this often irreverent and iconoclastic
group would be impossible – or at least potentially misleading – to
compile, this article will highlight several values and practices that have
been, and continue to be, negotiated within the contemporary improvising
community.
Freedom,
in the sense of transcending previous social and structural constraints, has
been an important part of jazz music since its inception. The syncopated rhythms and exploratory
improvisations and compositions of jazz have consistently stretched the
structures and forms of American music. The music has also provided a symbol and
a culture of liberation to several generations of musicians and listeners both
at home and abroad. But when
Ornette Coleman offered the jazz community Something Else in 1958, he galvanized an
approach to freedom that had been circulating among diverse musicians and one
which has continued to inspire and inflame many in the jazz community.[1]
At
that time, Coleman and other like-minded musicians began to explore performance
practices that rely less on preconceived musical models and explicitly defined
ensemble roles. For sympathetic musicians, critics, and audiences, the
"freedom" implied by these new musical approaches allowed for
creativity unencumbered by the constricting harmonies, forms, and rigid meters
of bebop and swing styles. It
evoked a return to the collective practices and ideals evident in the earliest
forms of jazz and pointed the way towards a more inclusive musical approach
that could draw on insight and inspiration from the world over. To unsympathetic listeners,
"freedom" resulted only in musical mayhem devoid of the swing,
melody, and harmony that made traditional jazz music so vital and technically
demanding.[2]
At
approximately the same time that "freedom" was becoming a rallying
point and a musical goal for many modern jazz musicians, improvisation
resurfaced in the Euro-American "classical" tradition – after a
century-and-a-half of neglect – in the form of indeterminate, intuitive,
and graphically designed pieces.[3] Composers not only expanded the amount
of real-time creative input demanded of performers, but they took, in
substantial numbers, to exploring the potential of improvisation on their own, in
a sense conflating the act of creation and performance together by removing the
interpretive step from the accepted musical equation.[4]
Since
these pioneering early years on both continents, an approach to improvisation
drawing on these and other traditions has emerged in the contemporary music
community. A variety of names have
circulated at various times and in various locales to describe this musical
practice, each with its own group of adherents and each with its own semantic
shortcomings.[5] The preferred terms tend to highlight
the creative or progressive stance of the performers and the cutting-edge or
inclusive nature of the music itself; e.g., free or free-form, avant-garde,
outside, ecstatic, fire or energy, contemporary or new, creative, collective,
spontaneous, etc. Stylistic
references (jazz, classical, rock, world or electronic) are variously included
or excluded, as are cultural or national identity markers (Great Black Music or
British Free Improvisation).
The primary musical bond shared between these diverse performers
is a fascination with sonic possibilities and surprising musical occurrences
and a desire to improvise, to a significant degree, both the content and the
form of the
performance. In other words, free
improvisation moves beyond matters of expressive detail to matters of
collective structure; it is not formless music-making, but form-making
music. Musician Ann Farber
explains:
Our aim is to play together with the greatest possible freedom
– which, far from meaning without constraint, actually means to play
together with sufficient skill and communication to be able to select proper
constraints in the course of the piece, rather than being dependent on precisely
chosen ones. (Belgrad 1997, 2)
To
define free improvisation in strictly musical terms, however, is potentially to
miss its most remarkable characteristic – the ability to incorporate and
negotiate disparate perspectives and worldviews. Jason Stanyek (1999, 47) asserts that free improvisation is
above all "a fertile space for the enactment and articulation of the
divergent narratives of both individuals and cultures." Individual
improvisers have frequently joined together to form artist-run collectives
aimed at establishing creative and financial control over the production and
dissemination of their work and ensuring the proper respect and remuneration
for their efforts.[6] Although the lifetime of these various
collectives runs the gamut from months to decades, the impulse to pool
resources and to pursue communal approaches to creativity remains strong among
improvisers.
Improvisation
has received some scholarly attention, although its emphasis on in-performance
creativity and interaction often defies the standard musicological tools of the
trade and the accepted conservatory methods for evaluating competency and
aesthetic value.[7] Authors interested in free
improvisation vary considerably in their approaches to the subject, producing
everything from biographical and formalist work to in-depth social, cultural
and political analysis. Arguing
that the arts are predominantly autonomous or self-referential discourses, some
authors present the "freedom" in the music strictly in terms of
varying degrees of liberation from functional harmony, metered time, and
traditionally accepted performance roles and playing techniques (e.g., Jost
1994 [1975], Dean 1992, and Westendorf 1994). Other authors have interpreted free jazz and free
improvisation as a social and cultural response to the appropriation and exploitation
of African American music styles (e.g., Jones 1963, Kofsky 1970, Wilmer 1977,
and Hester 1997). They focus
considerable attention on the birth of the practice during the civil rights
movement in the United States and on the musicÕs place within the context of an
emerging post-colonial world.
Still other authors have allied themselves with Marxist or neo-Marxist
critiques of hegemonic culture and have chosen to focus on free improvisationÕs
implied critique of capitalism and its related market- and property-based
economy (e.g., PrŽvost 1995 and Attali 1985).
The
diverse and emergent strands of free improvisation have problematized, for
many, issues of identity and idiom.
Not only has dissent raged within the jazz community since the early
"assault" of Ornette Coleman and others, but the development of a
distinctly European approach to free improvisation and the extreme
hybridization of the music – incorporating avant-garde, electronic,
non-western, and popular music practices – has further strained issues of
idiomatic coherence and cultural aesthetics.[8] John Litweiler (1984, 257) states that
"the precedents of free improvisation [...] are in all kinds of music, and
no single kind."
For
some, one's approach to energy, virtuosity, and stylistic inclusion or
exclusion can define quite clearly one's idiomatic allegiances. Despite their many differences, the
first generation of African American free jazz musicians all seemed to share an
intense approach to energy, momentum, and rhythmic drive; think of Cecil
Taylor, Albert Ayler, John Coltrane, Pharoah Sanders, Henry Grimes, Archie
Shepp, Sunny Murray, and many others.
The second generation of African American pioneers along with many
European contemporaries began to explore other ways – both more and less
dense and more and less structured – of creating intensity. And for even later generation
improvisers, this extreme range of approaches to energy and aesthetics can
provide fertile creative ground, but it also present a point of considerable
contention in the community. The
spectrum of contemporary improvisation appears to be both strongly linked to
the traditions of free jazz and, at the same time, increasingly open to artists
with little-to-no jazz experience. Steve Day (1998, 4) argues that
"true, jazz always contains improvisation, but improvisation does not
always contain jazz." Nick
Couldry (1995, 7) describes free improvisation as "a hybrid of both
classical and jazz traditions."
Tom Nunn elaborates on this often-mentioned connection:
One of the common links that developed between these two traditions was instrumental virtuosity, wherein techniques expanding and extending the sonic possibilities of instruments provided the material of improvisation. The use of atonality, dense textures, asymmetrical or non-metrical rhythm, and open forms or forms derived from the music rather than imposed upon it are other examples of developments common to both jazz and the avant garde leading up to todayÕs free improvisation. (Nunn 1998, 13)
Despite any sonic similarities between the emerging avant-garde traditions, many contemporary composers have remained extremely critical of musical improvisation and reluctant to challenge the implied hierarchy of composer-performer-listener. For example, Luciano Berio (1985, 81,85) dismissed improvisation as "a haven of dilettantes" who "normally act on the level of instrumental praxis rather than musical thought [É] [B]y musical thought I mean above all the discovery of a coherent discourse that unfolds and develops simultaneously on different levels."
This
and other passages by respected twentieth-century composers frequently betray a
belief that musical notation is the only means to inventing complex musical
structures and, by extension, the only valid measure of musical creativity.[9] This tendency to view all modes of
musical expression through the formal and architectonic perspective of
resultant structure is deeply entrenched in the music academy and derives in
great part from a bias towards the study of Euro-American composed-notated
works. A story from African
American pianist Cecil
Taylor recounted by A.B. Spellman (1966, 70-71) highlights the issue:
IÕve
had musicologists ask me for a score to see the pedal point in the beginning of
that piece [ÒNonaÕs BluesÓ]. They
wanted to see it down on paper to figure out its structure, its whole, but at
that point I had stopped writing my scores out [É] and the musicologists found
that hard to believe, since on that tune one section just flows right into the
next. That gives the lie to the
only structured music that is possible is that music which is written. Which is the denial of the whole of
human expression.
A
pronounced dichotomy between notated and improvised forms of musical creativity
appears to be less apparent in the African American creative music
community. Black composers,
including Olly Wilson, T.J. Anderson, Hale Smith, William Banfield, and Alvin
Singleton, have incorporated improvisation into their work. And many African American improvisers
– particularly those with close associations to the Association for the
Advancement of Creative Musicians (AACM) – interact with and incorporate
notation in a variety of performance contexts. Trumpeter,
composer, and AACM member Wadada Leo Smith, for instance,
has devised an open-ended symbolic framework he now calls
"Ankhrasmation," the purpose of which is "to create and invent
musical ideas simultaneously utilizing the fundamental laws of improvisation
and composition" (Porter 2002, 265).
According to George Lewis (2002, 128), the definition of ÒcompositionÓ
among African American creative musicians can be a fluid one, Òappropriating
and simultaneously challenging and revising various pan-European models,
dialoguing with African, Asian, and Pacific music traditions, and employing
compositional methods that did not necessarily privilege either conventionally
notated scores, or the single, heroic creator figure so beloved by jazz
historiography.Ó
Eric
Porter's (2002) new book focuses on the frequently neglected ideas of African
American "jazz" musicians and the self-conscious aspects of black
cultural production. Through a
close reading of texts by Charles Mingus, Abbey Lincoln, Amiri Baraka, Yusef
Lateef, Marion Brown, Wadada Leo Smith, and Anthony Braxton, Porter raises many
important issues about the relationship between so-called jazz, classical, and
popular musics, the role of improvisation and composition in musical
creativity, and the political, economic, and spiritual dimensions of the new
jazz. He, along with other recent
authors including Ajay Heble (2001), Sherrie Tucker (in press), and Julie Dawn
Smith (in press), also focuses the critical lens of feminist studies on this
music, which has traditionally been viewed as a predominantly masculine pursuit. Many jazz musicians are only now
beginning to realize these embedded inequities. Anthony Braxton, for one, finds it ironic that many of the
politically and spiritually aware musicians of the 1960s could also function as
"chauvinist and oppressor" (Porter 2002, 284).
The frequently touted
"openness" or inclusive nature of free improvisation does at times
obscure the gender sensibilities and the different cultural aesthetics
represented by its practitioners.
George Lewis (1996) has made a strong case for a clear distinction
between an "Afrological" and "Eurological" approach to this
music. His terms are not
ethnically essential but instead refer to historically emergent, social and cultural
attitudes.[10] LewisÕ study focuses on the work of two
towering figures of 1950s American experimental music: Charlie Parker and John
Cage. Both artists continually
explored spontaneity and uniqueness in their work, and Lewis argues that each
musician was fully aware of the social implications of his art. The essential contrast he draws between
the two lies in how they arrived at and chose to express the notion of
freedom. Cage, informed by his
studies of Zen and the I Ching, denied the utility of protest. His notion of freedom is devoid of any kind of struggle that
might be required to achieve it.
Parker, on the other hand, was (paraphrasing Leroi Jones 1963, 188) a
nonconformist in 1950s America simply by virtue of his skin color. Lewis (1996, 94) argues that for
African American musicians, "new improvisative and compositional styles
are often identified with ideas of race advancement and, more importantly, as
resistive ripostes to perceived opposition to black social expression and
economic advancement by the dominant white American culture." An Afrological perspective implies an
emphasis on personal narrative and the harmonization of oneÕs musical
personality with social environments, both actual and possible. A Eurological perspective, on the other
hand, implies either absolute freedom from personal narrative, culture and
conventions – an autonomy of the aesthetic object – or the need for
a controlling or structuring force in the person and voice of a
"composer."
Contemporary
free improvisers often struggle with the issues implied by LewisÕ
Afrological/Eurological model.
English guitarist Derek Bailey (1992, 83) betrays a Eurological
perspective when he describes his practice of "non-idiomatic
improvisation" as a "search for a styleless uncommitted area in which
to work." Gavin Bryars, a celebrated English bass
player and early improvising partner of Bailey, chose to "abandon"
improvisation after 1966 in order to focus exclusively on the aesthetic
autonomy offered by an Eurological approach to composition. Bryars argued that, "in any
improvising position the person creating the music is identified with the music
[...] ItÕs like standing a painter next to his picture so that every time you
see the painting you see the painter as well and you canÕt see it without
him" (Bailey 1992, 115).
Not
all European improvisers, however, favor a Eurological approach to the
practice. English saxophonist Evan Parker clearly sees his approach as part
of the African American jazz tradition:
WhatÕs important to me is that my work is seen in a particular context, coming out of a particular tradition. I donÕt really care what people call it but I would want it to be clear that I was inspired to play by listening to certain people who continue to be talked about mainly in jazz contexts. People like John Coltrane, Eric Dolphy, Cecil Taylor – these were people that played music that excited me to the point where I took music seriously myself. That continues to be the case. ThatÕs where what IÕm doing has to make sense, if it makes any sense at all. (Lock 1991, 30)
Contrasting
BaileyÕs and ParkerÕs approaches, British critic Ian Carr writes:
[W]ith monastic vigilance [Bailey] tries to avoid the habitual side of playing. Compared with this religious sense of purity, this sense of keeping an untainted vision, Evan ParkerÕs approach is secular, agnostic, and robust. He is prepared to rub shoulders and get involved with all sorts and conditions of musicians, and seems able to do this without losing his essential identity. (Carr 1973, 70-71)
These
and other remarks reflect an intriguing tension within the community of free
improvisers between Afrological issues of personal and cultural identity and
Eurological conceptions of music as an autonomous art. African American drummer and composer
Max Roach stated concisely the issues and his intentions:
Two theories exist, one is that art is for the sake of art, which
is true. The other theory, which
is also true, is that the artist is like a secretary [...] He keeps a record of
his time so to speak [...] My music tries to say how I really feel, and I hope
it mirrors in some way how black people feel in the United States. (Taylor
1993, 112)
Roach's comments highlight the fact that African American jazz and
improvising musicians have frequently sought to celebrate aspects of black life
and culture and, at the same time, cast off the burden of race, especially when
that burden of "racial authenticity" infringes on the marketability
or the creativity of black musicians and their music. This dilemma has played out since the 1960s most clearly in
the tension between black nationalism and universalism evident in the
commentary of many celebrated African American improvisers. Despite the helpful and often
illuminating distinctions between Afrological and Eurological perspectives, the
continued hybridization in the community of contemporary free improvisation has
made discussions of cultural belonging a very prickly topic.[11] As multi-instrumentalist Anthony
Braxton wryly comments: "Why is it so natural for Evan Parker, say, to
have an appreciation of Coltrane, but for me to have an appreciation of
Stockhausen is somehow out of the order of natural human experience? I see it
as racist" (Day 1998, 35).
George Lewis (2002), in a more recent article, advances the notion that
experimentalism was becoming Òcreolized.Ó
Where the so-called Òthird streamÓ movement (a proposed fusion of jazz
and classical styles) had failed, Lewis argues that Òindependent black
experimentalism challenged the centrality of pan-Europeanism to the notion of
the experimental itselfÓ (126).
Several AACM members rejected early on the prescriptive tenets of
cultural nationalism and questioned the idea that black music is a hermetic
field and yet still presented their work as an example of creative black music
and as an homage to black people.
As saxophonist Marion Brown poetically states, "I'm like a man
walking into the future backwards" (Porter 2002, 247). Weaving together cultural naturalism,
pan-Africanism, and universalism offered, to many, the most effective means to
negotiate the constraints put upon their creativity by the hegemony of Western
economic, discursive, and aesthetic ideals.
How
do individuals and groups negotiate these diverse ideas of "freedom"
in musical performance? In what
ways do culture and creativity, memory and muscle factor into
improvisation? And how does
context affect the meanings and economics of performing improvised music?
Venues for this music can run the gamut from small, local
coffeehouses to well publicized and attended international festivals.[12] And the featured ensembles at these
venues cover the full spectrum from one-time meetings between improvisers (the
"all-star eventÓ) to the many longer-term associations with essentially
unchanging personnel (the "working groupÓ). The former can provide a sense
of immediacy, excitement, novelty, and risk to participants, while the latter
may offer an intimacy and depth unavailable in the earliest stages of
interaction.[13] Tom Nunn (1998, 58) believes that:
Free improvisation, by virtue of its open and incorporating
nature, invites (indeed demands) the development of personal and group
styles. As an improviser
accumulates experience, a unique style develops naturally. Likewise, as a group develops rapport
and players within a group become increasingly familiar with one anotherÕs
musical tendencies (i.e., personal style traits), a general style peculiar to
the group will usually develop.
Free
improvisers, in general, share the view that technical and improvisational
accomplishments are arrived at better through in-context development and
experience rather than through isolated training. The idea of "rehearsing" during playing sessions,
however, is less common since, as the term implies, the "re-hearing"
of musical details in order to perfect a musical gesture, formal section, or
complete performance runs counter to the aesthetics of improvisation. Bassist Reggie Workman told me in a
clinic setting that he would like to rid our vocabularies of the verb "to
try." In improvisation, you
do not try, you do![14]
This
is not to say that practice techniques are unheard of in the world of
improvisation. One common device used in both free and idiom-specific
improvisation traditions is handicapping.
Handicapping refers to a self-imposed challenge designed to limit
material or techniques available to the improviser. These may be conceptual or even physical handicaps imposed
on the performer. Conceptual handicaps could involve playing only one note or
within a specified range, or aiming for a uniform mood to an
improvisation. Bassist Bertram
Turetzky recently told me that his first instruction to classical musicians who
have no previous experience with free improvisation is to play the note Bb
continuously for several hours in as many ways as possible. Physical handicaps might include using
only a particular part of an instrument or only one hand. In a recent clinic for example, kotoist
Miya Masaoka asked a student drummer to improvise using only his elbows.
While from one perspective these devices may appear to limit
individual creativity, they can also remind each participant to focus attention
on the collective statement and the musical moment rather than to become easily
overwhelmed with the enormous scope of individual musical possibilities. Tom Nunn finds the biggest mistake made
among first-time improvisers is to focus exclusively on what they, as
individuals, are responsible for.
Or, alternately, participating in simple cat-and-mouse type does not
allow for meaningful musical relationships to emerge and be explored. He writes, "they are under the
misconception that free improvisers make the music. Therefore, they each feel personally responsible to make
something happen, yet nothing happens as a group, nothing congeals" (Nunn
1998, 70). Evan Parker comments
along these same lines:
However much you try, in a group situation what comes out is group music and some of what comes
out was not your idea, but your response to somebody elseÕs idea [...] The
mechanism of what is provocation and what is response – the music is
based on such fast interplay, such fast reactions that it is arbitrary to say,
"Did you do that because I did that? Or did I do that because you did
that?" And anyway the whole thing seems to be operating at a level that
involves [...] certainly intuition, and maybe faculties of a more paranormal
nature. (Corbett 1994, 203)
Many free improvisers discuss spiritual, ecstatic, or trance-like
performance states. Total mental
involvement is cited by some, while others describe a complete annihilation of
all critical and rational faculties.
Musicians stress performance goals ranging from complete relaxation or
catharsis to a transcendental feeling of ego-loss or collective
consciousness. The sheer energy
and density of sound at times experienced in free and collective improvisation
can potentially create a state of hyperstimulation verging on sensory overload;
Cecil Taylor, for instance, claims to enter a trance every time he plays. The idea of spirit possession also
appears in the improvising community.
Saxophonist Jameel Moondoc describes a time when "the music got so
intense that spirits came into the room, just hovering around, and in one
aspect it was incredibly scary. It
was almost like we were calling the ancestors, and they came" (Gershon
2001, 15). Others describe a
voluntary, self-induced form of trance – more akin to shamanic practices
– as they guide the listener on a spiritual journey (Borgo 1997). Despite these diverse belief systems, a
feeling of spirituality and reverence pervades many improvised
performances. David Such (1993,
131) quotes celebrated bassist William Parker:
Free music can be a musical form that is playing without
pre-worked structure, without written music or chord changes. However, for free
music to succeed, it must grow into free spiritual music, which is not [...] a
musical form; it should be based off of a life form. It is not about just picking up an instrument and playing
guided by math principles or emotion.
It is emptying oneself and being.
While the spiritual concerns of improvisers can be diverse and
often difficult to analyze, the economics of performing contemporary improvised
music has been a topic of some concern for both performers and scholars of this
music. The previously mentioned
tendency to form improvising collectives was and is, in great part, a direct
response to the often racialized notion that jazz and improvised music most
appropriately belong in the under-funded club and cabaret. In a recent article surveying the
development of the AACM and investigating the racialized notions of ÒNew
musicÓ, George Lewis (2002, 121) writes:
For the black musicians, on the other hand, the Òclub,Ó rather than the concert hall, had been heavily ideologized as the ideal, even the genetically best-suited place for their music. Early on, however, black experimentalists realized that serious engagement with theater and performance, painting, poetry, electronics, and other interdisciplinary expressions that require extensive infrastructure, would be rendered generally ineffective or even impossible by the jazz club model. In this light, the supposed obligation to perform in clubs began to appear as a kind of unwanted surveillance of the black creative body.
For a time in the 1970s, the ÒloftÓ became an ÒalternativeÓ space for performances of this increasingly multimedia expression, and creative scenes began to flourish, particularly in and around New York City. But just as the term ÒjazzÓ had been criticized for decades as a boundary-imposing and financially-limiting label, the new loft venues – perceived to require minimal infrastructural investment and therefore undeserving of extensive financial support by established arts funding agencies – quickly became another obstacle to the recognition-seeking and border-crossing strategies of creative musicians and improvisers (see Lewis, 2002, 121-123). Although the situation has arguably improved since that time, venues and funding for ÒNew musicÓ tend to still be hypersegregated according to racialized categories.[15]
How
do listeners and performers of this music engage with the sounds and practices
of "freedom"? Can
improvised performance offer a window into different conceptions of musical
structuring and complexity?
Improvisation, by virtue of its emphasis on collaboration and
in-the-moment creativity, does seems to invite different approaches to
performance, listening, and analysis – approaches that focus as much
attention on the human and cultural aspects of music making as on the formal
structure of the musical work.[16]
Since,
on hearing the initial sound in a free improvisation, neither the performers
nor the audience know what direction the music will take, open and attentive
listening is essential to creating and maintaining the flow of the music and to
extracting meaning and enjoyment from the experience. The fact that both the performer and audience perspectives
begin at the same point offers, according to Tom Nunn (1998, 93), "a level
of excitement, involvement and challenge to the audience listener that is
unique, at least in degree, to free improvisation.Ó
Free
improvisation requires that performers and audiences listen actively rather
than passively and perceive the entire acoustic soundscape as "musical."
Barry Truax (1986) has described three general modes of engaging with the
acoustic soundscape: background listening, listening-in-readiness, and
listening-in-search. For Truax,
background listening is akin to "distracted listening" while the listener
is actively engaged in another activity.
Listening-in-readiness involves focused attention, but that attention is
to familiar sounds-associations built up over time that may be readily
identified. With
listening-in-search, one scans the acoustic soundscape for particular sounds,
attempting to extract or create meaning from their production or the
environmentÕs response to the sounds produced. [17]
Mark
Bradlyn (1991) adopts visual terms to describe further this soundscape to which
listeners may attend. He states:
The first step in learning to listen is stopping still and opening
our ears, first to figure, next to ground, next to field. The field, the aggregate soundscape is
the most difficult to perceive [É] [T]here must be a constant flux, a never
fully focused shifting among figure, ground, and field [...] One performerÕs
playing may suddenly emerge as a stark figure against the ground of anotherÕs
only to just as suddenly submerge into the ground or even farther back into the
field as another voice emerges. (15)
BradlynÕs
conclusion is that collective free improvisation may falter if participants and
listeners fail "to hear the texture, the field, in pursuit of the dramatic
figure, the gesture" (18).
And he further suggests that improvisation "succeeds as music only
to the extent that listening achieves equal status with playing" (15). Even these active and inclusive
approaches to listening may not take full account of the variety of emotional,
spiritual, cultural, and even political dimensions to experiencing improvised
performance.
Stanyek
(1999, 47) finds even more at stake in the process of listening than the
"musical" success of the improvisation. He asserts that "if free improvisation has anything
emancipatory or 'anticipatory' about it, then this kind of proleptic vision is
contained within the act of listening, not in the sounds themselves." For Stanyek, "listening is the way
identities are narrated and negotiated and the way differences are
articulated." He elaborates:
Indeed, the critical nature of free improvisation, its ability to
accommodate the disjunctures which invariably arise out of any intercultural
encounter, (and perhaps the fact that free improvisation resides outside of
many of the economic and aesthetic strictures of the culture industry), all
help to provide a welcome antidote to the music-as-a-universal-language trope
which pervades many intercultural collaborations. (44)
The
"freedoms" frequently associated with contemporary improvised music
are mediated by specific personal, social, and cultural experiences. Since the 1960s, the revolutionary timbres, textures, and approaches of this
music have resonated in extremely varied ways, from Black Power or
transcendental spirituality to post-modern angst and confusion. And yet, in the moment of
performance and through the act of listening, our personal, social, and
cultural understandings – and interpersonal and intercultural
sensibilities – may be powerfully changed in the rapture and rupture of
improvisation.
Can
and should improvised music be recorded?
How do we engage with the sounds of "freedom" when they are
detached from their original context and replayed at a different time? The many issues surrounding the
recording of free improvisation have received considerable attention (see
Bailey 1992, 103-104). Tom Nunn
(1998, 154) argues that "much of the unknown-about-to-be-known is lost in
recordings. The image of the
musicians playing together, communicating, collectively creating in the moment
is impossible to capture on tape."
Cornelius Cardew (1971, xvii) believes that "documents such as tape
recordings of improvisation are essentially empty, as they preserve chiefly the
form that something took and give at best an indistinct hint as to the feeling
and cannot convey any sense of time and place [...] what you hear on tape or
disc is indeed the same playing, but divorced from its natural
context." David Roberts
(1977-1978, 39) finds that "for musics not predicated upon the
dissociation of form and performance, recording can, and often does, spell the
kiss of death." Vinko
Globokar insists that recordings of this music should be listened to once and
then discarded.
These
artists and authors seem to agree on two central points: (1) an audio recording, no matter its
fidelity, necessarily reproduces only a limited spectrum of the performance
experience, and (2) the act of listening to improvised music away from its
initial performance context and on several occasions forever alters its meaning
and impact. Their disregard for
the simple utility of recordings or of the sense of tradition that they can and
do engender also seems to betray a certain Eurological perspective; one focused
on the aesthetic autonomy of the artistic/performative experience. Martin Davidson, of Eminem records,
expresses a rather different viewpoint.
He argues that "recordings and improvisation are entirely
symbiotic, as if they were invented for each other [...] the act of improvising
is filling time (either a predetermined or an open-ended amount) with music
– something that could be called real-time composition, and something
that has more need and more right to be recorded than anything else"
(Davidson 1984, 23).
Most
free improvisers acknowledge the advantages that recordings offer in actually
establishing and disseminating a tradition. Networking is a critical means of survival and exposure in
the dispersed and marginalized free improvising community, and the exchange of
recordings is a helpful means to that end. Many improvisers also conceive of recordings as important
documents or milestones in an evolving career. Derek Bailey (1992, 104) remarks that all that is usually claimed
for a recording is "that it should provide evidence of musical identity or
of changes in identity." Many
performers also acknowledge the educational value recordings can offer through
repeated listening.
Scholars of African American and improvised music have frequently engaged – and struggled – with the issue of an oral/literate dichotomy in music performance and analysis (see Sidran 1981). The increasingly interconnected and technologically sophisticated context for modern culture challenges us to view contemporary music as a complex site wherein new oral/aural cultural forms and practices are electronically inscribed into society. Tricia Rose (1994), in her recent study of rap music, adopts (from Walter Ong) the concept of "post-literate orality" to describe hip-hop culture. She writes that "the concept of post-literate orality merges orally-influenced traditions that are created and embedded in a post-literate, technologically sophisticated context" (86). Arguing a similar position, Daniel Belgrad (1997, 193) states that African American music offers a model of "secondary orality" in a postliterate culture, "the possibility of asserting the values of an oral culture within a culture already conditioned by writing." Well before these scholars began to tackle the subject, Wadada Leo Smith addressed this same issue:
In ancient times when all people held improvisation as their art-music form, it was said then that theirs was an oral tradition [...] In our times now, an oral-electronic tradition is being born, and this signifies the age of a new improvisation-art-music-form. One only needs to think in terms of the media and its proper use to understand how any significant event, and IÕm speaking culturally now and particularly of music, can be immediately received anywhere in the world within seconds or minutes depending on the transfer in time lapse through satellite techniques: indeed an oral-electronic tradition. (Smith 1973)
Improvisers,
while often centered on collective and spontaneous contribution in performance,
are equally aware of developing an individual sound and style and defending a
career path within the music industry.
Yet their approach confounds many established legal and cultural norms
of music ownership and the standard practices of music copyrighting and royalty
compensation. For example, before
1972 it was not possible to register an improvised sound recording with the
Library of Congress. And royalties
– an important economic component of countless musicians' careers –
are still dispensed almost exclusively to composers (or to the record labels
that maintain copyright over the recorded sound) to the detriment of
improvising artists.[18] Improvisation also challenges us to
rethink ingrained notions of musical value and traditional approaches to
musical analysis and discourse.
Evaluating
Freedom
Can free improvisation be criticized? If so, then by whom?
What is implied by the word "criticism"? According to Marion Brown,
"'Criticism' is by definition a product of the gulf between musicians'
ideas and those of the audience.
Once a listener determines that his or her interpretation does not match
the performer's," Brown argues, "one becomes a critic" (Porter
2002, 251).
Even among performers, a gulf can surface between divergent
interpretations. While some
artists freely engage in conversations and critical reflection immediately
following a group improvisation, others are loathe to do so, since each
memberÕs immediate impression of the improvisation may differ considerably and
candid discussion can make subsequent improvisations by the group too
self-conscious. Listening to
recorded playing sessions at a later date, either alone or as a group, is one
common means of self-evaluation and group feedback in free improvisation.
The jazz critical establishment has historically been harshly
divided over the relative merits of freer forms of improvisation. Both journalists and musicians appeared
to take sides almost immediately after the arrival of Ornette Coleman's quartet
in New York and the subsequent debate has hardly subsided to this day. Beyond the stylistic quibbling,
however, it may be the apparent critical vacuum that has done more harm to the
reception and recognition of this music.
In 1973, Marion Brown self-published Views and Reviews meant to accompany his
collectively improvised album Afternoon of a Georgia Faun released three years
earlier. In so doing, he set forth
his personal aesthetic philosophy and positioned the artist as the ultimate
arbiter of the meaning of his or her own work. And, somewhat paradoxically, he also debated the
applicability of language to represent musical experience. Perhaps most importantly, though, he
challenged the critical status-quo of writers who betray a preference for
composed music and who, by virtue of their powerful institutional positions,
can dramatically affect the lives and livelihoods of black avant-garde
artists. Eric Porter (2002, 253),
paraphrasing Brown, writes that:
[O]ne is prone to judge a piece of music by its formal, or
compositional, elements. Because
this presents a problem when analyzing fully improvised music or compositions
that include improvisational elements, Brown proposes that a different set of
aesthetic principles must be invoked when evaluating such music. 'Balance' is achieved in improvised
music not through a compositional structure but through musicans' personal
expressions and the emotional bond they create with their audience.
George
Lewis (2002, 123-125) further highlights the issue of how, where, and by whom
this music should be criticized in his discussion of the treatment afforded
various ÒdowntownÓ musics by the Village Voice in the late 1970s. The Voice, at that time, separated
critical discussion of various musical genres under the headings ÒMusicÓ
(Òi.e., reviews of work from the high culture WestÓ) and ÒRiffsÓ (Òthe low-culture,
diminutively-imagined RestÓ).
Lewis concludes that the AACM and other creative artists with similar
ideologies were Òdestined to run roughshod over many conventional assumptions
about infrastructure, reference, and placeÓ (124).
The
practice of so-called ÒjazzÓ musicians and ÒimprovisersÓ engaging with extended
notation and graphic scores, electronics and computers, and multimedia
approaches to performance directly challenged the binary thought –
black/white, jazz/classical, high culture/low culture – that was and is
still common in critical discourse.
Lewis points out that even African American critics and activists were
not immune from attempting to regulate and restrict African American creativity. Amiri Baraka, whose important early
work (Jones 1963) strongly supported the then emerging Òavant-garde,Ó later
derided many black creative musicians for being unduly influenced by European
modernism (see Lewis 2002, 129).
Several
journals and magazines consistently publish reviews of free improvisation
recordings, performances, and festivals and provide a window into the critical
values espoused by the contemporary print media.[19] As with music criticism in more
traditional veins, comparisons to previous recordings or similar well-known
groups or players factor prominently in these writings. Malcom Barry (1985, 173) writes: "inevitably there is difficulty in
separating the form from the individuals practicing that form [...] [T]he
anti-composed music becomes identified with particular figures just as composed
music does.Ó
Free improvisation critics most often base their evaluations of
the music on the perceived level of ensemble rapport. Did the musicians and music congeal in a meaningful way? Were the ensemble or sectional
transitions effective? Did the musicians explore novel and interesting
relationships? Reviewers also frequently comment on the presence (or absence)
of references to established musical styles (jazz, rock, classical, electronic
or world) within free improvisation.
While these comments can be helpful in orienting the reader (or
prospective buyer) prior to actually hearing the music, critics variously
praise or denounce the use of these "style signs" as ingenious
layerings and postmodern juxtapositions or as unfortunate byproducts of too
heavy a reliance on established techniques and practices.
Even if most overt idiomatic qualities are consciously avoided by
the performers, free improvisers still incorporate and experiment with the
accepted tools of artistic expression: stability, interruption, repetition,
contrast, etc. Performing freely
improvised music involves a constant balancing act between complexity and
comprehensibility, control and non-control, constancy and unpredictability, a
balancing act that can invite considerable debate and disagreement. The issue of control verses non-control
brings to mind an issue touched on earlier in this essay – the idea of
virtuosity in improvisation. Do
our standard conservatory conceptions of virtuosity provide an accurate measure
of a musician's improvisational skills?
A frequently recounted story may serve to illuminate this issue. By his own account,
multi-instrumentalist Steve Beresford likes to explore the totally controlled
and the totally uncontrolled. His
expansive approach to instrumental technique, however, allegedly got him
ostracized from a 1977 Company Week (Derek BaileyÕs annual meeting of
improvisers) because his approach to his instruments was deemed
"insufficiently serious" (Lake, 1977).[20]
Nick Couldry (1995) devotes a rather extensive discussion to the
subject of virtuosity in improvised music. He highlights, in addition to conventional notions of
instrumental ability or more contemporary notions of so-called "extended
techniques," the idea of "a virtuosity in finding," or the
ability to imagine new sounds and discover an individual voice. He also finds an "intensity of
application" – in his view more virtue than virtuosity –
important to the demeanor of improvised performance.
So-called "extended techniques" – the exploration
of unconventional sounds and devices on conventional instruments – has
been, and continues to be, an important part of the vocabulary of many free
improvisers (see Borgo 2003). And
critical evaluation is often based on a perceived mastery of these difficult
techniques. For example, Tom
Johnson wrote in a 1980 Village Voice review of an Evan Parker solo performance:
"In short, this was not a hit-and-miss affair the way it is with most
woodwind players when they turn on their multiphonics. This was a musician who had transformed
these new sounds into a vocabulary that was familiar to him as major scales are
to most musicians" (Johnson 1989, 461).
"Intensity of application," however, would seem to
imply, if not conventional notions of virtuosity, at least a sense of personal
conviction and performance energy.
And this intensity can arguably be heard in the full spectrum of sounds
explored by contemporary improvisers, ranging from the incredibly dense and
loud to the almost unimaginably soft and sparse.
Perhaps what is most often missed, however, in critical discussion
of freely improvised music is its functional quality. In his Views and Reviews, Marion Brown seeks to
dismantle the Western aesthetic that elevates art as an object of beauty above
and beyond its functional purpose.
Brown argues not only that improvised music is as 'valid' as composed
music but also that, even when 'arrived at through mutual cooperation at a folk
level, [it] may be as successful as any other kind of music" (Porter 2002,
251).
This may, however, beg the question that many of the music's
detractors are quick to level at it; if this music is as social and as
liberating as many profess, then why is it not more popular? This question is by no means new.[21] Many politically and socially active
black avant-garde artists have faced this continuing question of why black
creativity is seemingly so removed from African American communities. Anthony Braxton, in his Triaxium writings, casts blame on a
general lack of recognition of artistic creativity in American society and on
the market forces that promote popular music to black audiences (Porter 2002,
283). George Lewis (2002, 129)
additionally finds that academic cultural studies has frequently downplayed or
even disparaged those indigenously black musics that are not obviously or
predominantly based in or represented as mass culture. Lewis argues that in this context, Òthe
entry into classical music by black composers becomes, rather than bourgeois
accommodation, an oppositional stanceÓ challenging Òfixed notions of high and
low, black and whiteÓ (130). He
summarizes:
Thus, in the age of globalized megamedia, to the extent that certain oppositional black musical forms have been generally ignored or dismissed by academic theorists, the idea is thereby perpetuated that black culture, as academically defined and studied, is in fact corporate-approved culture, and that there is no necessary non-commercial space for black musical production. (129-130)
Porter
(2002), however, finds historical evidence for a strong connection between
creative music making and a vision to make progressive music meaningful to a
wide spectrum of people. He
expresses that, "difficult as it was to implement effectively, [this
vision] can be understood as a reflection of the Black Arts movement in the
jazz community, where making a living went hand in hand with making music
relevant" (207).
Clearly,
the diverse personal experiences and opinions of free improvisers and the
transcultural and hybrid nature of the musical activity make generalized
discussions of critical values within the community somewhat problematic. Yet despite the frequently expressed
desire among certain free improvisers for a "styleless" or
"non-idiomatic" approach to music, more than four decades of recorded
documents and live performances attest to a growing tradition and reveal
certain shared traits to the music.
Within this dispersed and disparate community, there does appear to be
– at the very least – a shared desire to meet together, often for
the first time in performance, to negotiate understandings and embark on novel
musical and social experiences.
Free
improvisation, it appears, is best envisioned as a forum in which to explore
various cooperative and conflicting interactive strategies rather than as a
traditional "artistic form" to be passively admired and
consumed. Improvisation emphasizes
process over product creativity, an engendered sense of freedom and discovery,
the dialogical nature of real-time interaction, the sensual aspects of
performance over abstract intellectual concerns, and a participatory aesthetic
over passive reception. Its
inherent transience and expressive immediacy even challenge the dominant modes
of consumption that have arisen in modern, mass-market economies and the
sociopolitical and spiritual efficacy of art in general.
According
to George Lipsitz (1997, 178), jazz music has offered "cultural, moral,
and intellectual guidance to people all over the world." John Gennari (1991, 449) asserts that
jazz has served – and continues to serve – "as a progenitor of
new forms, an inventor of new languages, a creator of new ways to express
meaning." Ajay Heble (2000, 8)
writes that "from its very inception jazz has been about inventiveness,
about the process of change," and "that sense of change and
inventiveness is most powerfully registered in its cultural forms that accent
dissonance and contingency, in music making that explores the sonic
possibilities of traditionally outlawed models of practice." But Jerome Harris (2000, 122) reminds
us that "The movement of jazz onto the global stage is a trend that may be
judged to hold some dangers."
Among other things, he identifies "the possibility that jazz may
lose benefits that derive from cultural closeness between the makers,
mediators, and audience – among them, some easy broad consensus about its
aesthetic direction." Slyly
referencing Ornette Coleman's seminal work, Harris concludes that "The
shape of jazz to come may differ from that which has come before" (124).
The increasingly global participation in free improvisation does
seem to preclude the possibility of a "broad consensus about its aesthetic
direction." But as musical
devices and relationships are negotiated within freely improvised performances
and within the community of improvisers, musicians do offer important
rhetorical commentary on desirable social organization, the politics of
representation, the public function of art, and the possibilities for
resistance to embedded cultural and historical constructions. And by paying attention to the ways in
which artists and involved listeners define, document, perform, experience, and evaluate this music, we
may gain insight not only into the process of artistic and cultural innovation,
but also into the processes by which we engage with our
natural and social worlds. Nearly all societies and artistic communities have an
"avant-gardeÓ; a cultural site in which new ideas may be expressed and
explored. As musicians and
musical practices continue to work across and between national, cultural, and
stylistic boundaries, free improvisation may play a
special role in both generating and coping with complexity.
[1] The arrival of
Ornette ColemanÕs quartet at the Five Spot in New York City in 1959 and his
subsequent albums for Atlantic Records (The Shape of Jazz to Come and Free
Jazz) further polarized early support and
criticism for the music. See also David Ake (2002).
[2] See Tynan
(1961), Welding and Tynan (1962), and McDonough (1992) for examples of this
debate.
[3] In an unpublished talk at UCSD titled
"The Secret Love Between Interactivity and Improvisation, or Missing in
Interaction: A Prehistory of Computer Interactivity," George Lewis focused
on the ways in which terms such as "interactivity,"
"indeterminacy," "intuition," and even
"happening" or "action," have frequently been employed to
mask the importance of improvisation in the arts.
[4] Composers who
have experimented with improvisation include: Amendola, Austin, Barlow,
Barrett, Bryant, Cage, Cardew, Carlos, Clemente, Curran, Eaton, Erickson,
Evangelista, Foss, Gubaidulina, Guy, Harvey, Ives, Leandre, Levine, Mazzola,
Nono, N¿rgŠrd, Oliveros, Partch, Riley, Rush, Rzewski, Scelsi, Scodanibbio,
Sender, Stockhausen, Subotnik, Uitti, Vandor, and Young, as well as the groups
FLUXUS, Il Gruppo di Improvisazione da Nuova Consonanza (GINC), KIVA (at UC San
Diego), Musica Electronica Viva, New Music Ensemble (at UC Davis), and the
Scratch Orchestra. Pioneering work
by composers in the American Òthird streamÓ such as Gunther Schuller, George
Russell, Bob Graettinger, John Lewis, and others, could be mentioned as well.
[5] One treatment
of the problems associated with categorizing such diverse musical approaches
under a single, often misleading heading is found in Such (1993, 15-29).
[6] Important artist-run collectives in the
United States have included the Association for the Advancement of Creative
Musicians (AACM) in Chicago (which has continued to the present date), The Jazz
ComposersÕ Guild (organized by Bill Dixon shortly after his famed October
Revolution in Jazz in 1964) and Collective Black Artists (CBA) in New York
City, the Black ArtistsÕ Group (BAG) in St. Louis (the birthplace of the World
Saxophone Quartet), and the Underground MusiciansÕ Association (UGMA) in Los
Angeles (formed by Horace Tapscott).
Notable European collectives have included the Spontaneous Music
Ensemble (SME), the Music Improvisation Company (MIC), the Association of
Meta-Musicians (AMM), the London Jazz Composers Orchestra (LJCO), the South
African-influenced Brotherhood of Breath, The Jazz Center Society, The
MusicianÕs Co-operative, the MusicianÕs Action Group, and the London Musicians
Collective, all in England, as well as the Instant Composers Pool in Holland,
the Globe Unity Orchestra and the Berlin Contemporary Jazz Orchestra in
Germany, and the Instabile Orchestra in Italy.
[7] See Ferrand (1961) for
work on improvisation in the European classical tradition and Nettl (1998) for
a survey of ethnomusicological work on the subject. See also Ake (2002) for a discussion of the debate
surrounding the role of avant-garde jazz in the music conservatory.
[8] See the European Free Improvisation website-http://www.shef.ac.uk/misc/rec/ps/efi/ehome.html.
[9] See Boulez (1976, 115) for a similarly
critical stance towards improvisation.
[10] One might also investigate the emerging
Asian-American consciousness centered primarily in the San Francisco Bay Area
improvising music community. See
for example Houn (1995 and 1985-1988).
[11] See Monson (1996, 200-206) for a related
discussion of ÒcolorblindÓ interpretations of jazz. See also Harris (2000) for discussion of issues surrounding the globalization of
jazz. And Atton (1988-89) offers
the results of a survey raising important issues of national and cultural
identity in improvised music.
[12] Important festivals that feature improvisation and new music include Le Festival International de Musique Actuelle de Victoriaville in QuŽbec, The Vision Festival in New York City, The Guelph Jazz Festival near Toronto, and several in Europe including Saalfelden (Austria), Willisau (Switzerland), La Batie (Geneva, Switzerland) and Vilshofen (Germany).
[13] The annual Company Week, organized by
Derek Bailey since the 1970s, provides an excellent example of an event that
encourages first-time meetings and unusual groupings of well-known improvisers.
[14] Improvisation seminar held at the
Ò(Re)soundingsÓ festival in Atlanta, Georgia, July, 1998.
[15] Lewis (2002) highlights many additional issues regarding the various ÒdowntownÓ improvising scenes and the discriminatory arts funding policy regarding ÒNew music.Ó
[16] See Sarath (1996) and Borgo (in press and 2002).
[17] See also Barry 1977-78, Attali (1977,
136-140), and Durant (1989) for similar discussion.
[18] An ongoing legal battle over the use of
an improvised flute passage by James Newton in a Beastie Boys song has brought
additional attention to this issue.
[19] Journals and
magazines that regularly provide coverage of this music include Avant,
Bananafish, Cadence, Coda, Contact, Downbeat, Gramophone Explorations, Hurly
Burly, Improjazz, The Improvisor, Musicworks, Opprobrium, Resonance,
Rubberneck, Signal to Noise, and The
Wire.
[20] In Borgo (2002) I document a similar
disrupting experience in which the musical devices and personal dynamics that a
new member brought to the improvising group Surrealestate provoked discontent
among the existing members.
20 Porter (2002,
204-206) discusses
Archie SheppÕs 1965 Impulse release Fire Music and the saxophonistÕs desire
to create a music that could reach a larger audience without being too
"commercial.Ó On the album,
Shepp moved between political eulogy ("Malcolm, Malcolm–Semper
Malcom") and songs inspired by a children's television show
("Hambone"), to covers of Ellington ("Prelude to a Kiss")
and a recent pop hit ("The Girl From Ipanema," which had reached the
charts a year earlier in a version by Stan Getz and Astrud and Jo‹o
Gilberto). Fire Music, although containing some
inspired playing and arrangements, demonstrates that the fusion of avant-garde
aesthetic goals with a socially responsible and popular music that would be
relevant to a wide range of people was a difficult proposition. Three years after the albumÕs release,
Shepp expressed displeasure that he sold more records on college campuses than
in black communities.
Acknowledgments
Much of
this article is drawn from my unpublished Ph.D. dissertation (Borgo 1999). I would like to thank my committee
members at UCLA, Tim Rice, Robert Walser, Cheryl Keyes, Roger Savage, N.
Katherine Hayles, and Joseph DiStefano for their invaluable assistance and
David Ake and Robert Reigle for their frequent suggestions. I am also indebted to the three
anonymous readers for their insightful comments.
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David Borgo
recently joined the faculty of the University of California in San Diego as an
Assistant Professor in the Critical Studies and Experimental Practices
Program. He received a Ph.D. in
Ethnomusicology from UCLA in 1999 and previously taught at James Madison
University in Virginia. David has
been a professional saxophonist for over 15 years and is currently at work on a
book exploring the relationship between the emerging sciences of complexity and
contemporary improvised music.