INTRODUCTION: BLUE NOTES TOWARD a NEW JAZZ DISCOURSE I. Authority and Authenticity in Jazz Historiography Most Books and Article

Home , Almost (Sweet Music), Bebop, Buddy Bolden, Charles Gayle, Gene Lees, Hard bop

INTRODUCTION: BLUE NOTES TOWARD A NEW JAZZ DISCOURSE

MARK OSTEEN, LOYOLA COLLEGE

I. Authority and Authenticity in Jazz Historiography Most books and articles with "jazz" in the title are not simply about music. Instead, their authors generally use jazz music to investigate or promulgate ideas about politics or race (e.g., that jazz exemplifies democratic or American values,* or that jazz epitomizes the history of twentieth-century African Americans); to illustrate a philosophy of art (either a Modernist one or a Romantic one); or to celebrate the music as an expression of broader human traits such as conversation, flexibility, and hybridity (here "improvisation" is generally the touchstone). These explorations of the broader cultural meanings of jazz constitute what is being touted as the New Jazz Studies. This proliferation of the meanings of "jazz" is not a bad thing, and in any case it is probably inevitable, for jazz has been employed as an emblem of everything but mere music almost since its inception. As Lawrence Levine demonstrates, in its formative years jazz—with its vitality, its sexual charge, its use of new technologies of reproduction, its sheer noisiness—was for many Americans a symbol of modernity itself (433). It was scandalous, lowdown, classless, obscene, but it was also joyous, irrepressible, and unpretentious. The music was a battlefield on which the forces seeking to preserve European high culture met the upstarts of popular culture who celebrated innovation, speed, and novelty. It

'Crouch writes: "the demands on and respect for the individual in the jazz band put democracy into aesthetic action" (161). How this interaction is more "democratic" than the interaction in, say, a rock group or string quartet is not explained. See also Belgrad 2.

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was a confrontation between the old and the new, between traditionalists and iconoclasts. Indeed, writes Kathy Ogren, "to argue about jazz was to argue about the nature of change itself' (7). And so it is today, when jazz, now dubbed "America's classical music," has again become the site of a culture war, one that eerily recalls many earlier ones in its history. On one side are those determined to preserve and protect the music and celebrate its foremost practitioners of the past. This camp is engaged in canon-building, using a Great Masters approach that, as Krin Gabbard notes, is based "on paradigms that have been radically questioned in other disciplines" ("Introduction" 12), where canons are now viewed as exercises in hegemonic power consolidation. This camp wants to make jazz more fully bourgeois. On the other side is a motley aggregate of musicians and musicologists, historians, and literary and cultural critics who see flexibility and innovation as the essence of jazz. This group accuses the traditionalists of a multitude of sins—turning the music into a set of museum pieces, smothering it in high seriousness, barring the doors of innovation by restricting who may enter the house—all of which are killing jazz. Yet it was always thus, as John McCombe's essay in this issue suggests: jazz history is a chronicle of a hundred years of such controversies. This newest furor first bloomed in the 1980s, when trumpeter Wynton Marsalis was hailed in mass-market publications such as Time as a messiah who would resurrect a moribund art form. It grew hotter in the early 1990s, after Marsalis was appointed Artistic Director of the prestigious Jazz at Lincoln Center program. Since then he has actively and, in many ways, admirably used his position to educate the public about jazz history, hold workshops, visit schools and colleges, showcase young musicians, and revive earlier forms of jazz. Unfortu- nately, he has also used it to utter inflammatory and ill-informed pronouncements about jazz past and present. When Marsalis was featured prominently in Ken Burns's mammoth PBS miniseries Jazz in early 2001, the battle was re- engaged. For Burns's sometimes stirring, sometimes boring seminar on jazz history adhered closely to what Scott DeVeaux calls the "neoclassicist" (486) party line, as propagated by Marsalis and his mentors, journalist Stanley Crouch and novelist/critic Albert Murray. After it aired, Jazz was widely criticized for dissem- inating a narrow and tendentious version of the music in which at least four questionable premises were presented as facts: 1) that jazz is a form of the blues; 2) that jazz has been and should be an African-American music; 3) that virtually all music created after about 1965 is not really jazz and can therefore be dis-

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missed; 4) that the Marsalis-led neobop revival of the '80s and '90s saved jazz from the barbarisms of (brrr!) Free, the stultifications of (snore) Third Stream and the corruptions of (shudder!) Fusion. These principles, particularly the first two, derive in part from Albert Mur- ray's 1976 book Stomping the Blues, a colorful if somewhat cranky history of what he calls "blues-idiom" music. For Murray, jazz is really a branch on the blues tree, and hence acts as a "counterstatement" to an oppressive, racist political system and an expression of "affirmation . . . and continuity in the face of adversity" (68, 6). Yet he does not really argue the premise that jazz is blues in Stomping the Blues; rather, he simply asserts it repeatedly (often in photo cap- tions) by referring to "the blues musician (also known as the jazz musician)," by commenting on "jazz which is to say blues music," and by describing Duke Ellington as a "blues musician" (17; 182; 214).2 Few serious scholars doubt that jazz arose partly from the blues. However, Murray's label would radically narrow the range of the music by eliminating, for example, a good deal of swing and the cool school and all of Latin jazz, and also fails to account for many contemporary styles (which, of course, is precisely the point, since they aren't "really" jazz).3 Hence, when Marsalis declares that "what makes fusion not jazz is that certain key elements of jazz are not addressed. First and foremost the blues. If you aren't addressing the blues you can't be playing jazz," he is reading out of Murray's fake book (qtd in Thomas 295). More disturbing to some are the apparent racial implications of Murray's premises: that white musicians cannot authentically play blues or jazz. Of course,

2This description seems to violate Ellington's much-noted disavowal of labels and "categories of any kind" (Ellington 452). Although Murray attempts to distinguish between "folk blues" and "fine art" blues, this distinction seems mostly to be a tortured attempt to avoid using the term "jazz." 3The inadequacy of Murray's description is exposed when he mentions the "endless list of out- standing blues-idiom compositions derived from the songs of Jerome Kern, Irving Berlin, George Gershwin" and other Tin Pan Alley composers (205). He is referring to so-called "contrafacts" (Park- er 169): bebop tunes that set different melodies to standard chord progressions, such as Charlie Park- er s > "Ornithology" (based on the changes of "How High the Moon") or "Ko Ko" (based on "Chero- kee") and the endless variations of "I Got Rhythm" changes. But what places these tunes in the "blues idiom?" If it is the harmonies, then wouldn't that make Berlin, Gershwin, et al, "blues" composers as well? Is it the act of improvisation? Then were baroque and early classical performers who improvised also playing the blues? Is it the fact that the "blues-idiom" composers and performers were primarily African Americans? Wouldn't that mean, then, that any music performed by black people is blues? News to Kathleen Battle, I'm sure. Is it the use of the blues scale? Actually, bop and post-bop jazz use a myriad of different scalar forms, some blues-based, some not. When examined closely, in short, this assertion falls apart.

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neither Murray nor Marsalis states such views outright and if asked would no doubt deny them.4 Nonetheless, the essentialism implicit in the notion that jazz is blues, and the way that jazz history was presented in Burns's series, imply this position. Of course, strict adherence to such ideas would yield absurdities such as that only the Irish can really play Irish ballads, or only Poles can play polkas. Not surprisingly, these views, as stated by Marsalis in particular, have drawn fire from many quarters. One of the harshest responses issued from Gene Lees, who in the final chapter of Cats of Any Color lambastes Marsalis and others for their racialist pronouncements, particularly the claim that whites have appropriated jazz from African Americans.5 While there is scarcely space here for a thorough analysis of the music's racial politics, it is safe to say that race remains the elephant in the kitchen of jazz discourse. The righteous desire not to minimize the history of racism and the necessity to acknowledge that most of the greatest innovators in jazz have been African American, coupled with the need to respect the contributions of white musicians, promoters, critics and audiences, has handicapped jazz historiography by engendering often pugnaciously polarized statements (see Gabbard, "Introduction" 17). Many jazz historians in fact agree that jazz devel- oped out of fluid interactions among European, African, African-American, Caribbean, South American and Euro-American cultures and musics. In this vein, Nicholas Evans concludes that the best approach is to recognize "jazz's racial/cultural indeterminacy" (291). He may even be right that the music is, like the narrator of James Weldon Johnson's novel, "ex-colored" (292). But to transcend more fully both the tired essentialisms of the warring parties and the trite platitudes of the peacemakers, we need more scholarly work on jazz history that

4Murray's other writings outline a more inclusive view of American identity and a disdain for racism, as Roberta Maguire suggests in her essay in the second of these special issues. Yet in Stomping the Blues his racial views approach incoherence. For example, he writes that the "blues idiom" is "native to the United States. It is a synthesis of African and European elements, the product of an Afro-American sensibility in an American mainland situation" (63). This description wants it both ways: jazz is both African-American and hybrid. For a good discussion of Murray's views, see Evans 7-10. 5See Lees 187-243. But while Lees rightly demolishes some of Marsalis's and Crouch's more ignorant statements, his wounded tone and indiscriminate lumping together of writers with very different positions diminish the value of his critique. Moreover, Lees's charges of racial bias in the Lin- coln Center Jazz Orchestra do not ring true—at least not today. For example, during a recent performance by the LCJO in Baltimore, I counted five white musicians out of fourteen players. It should be noted, however, that though Marsalis has toned down his act in recent years, he does not seem to have changed his views about jazz history.

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engages the complex details of its interracial and intercultural exchanges without turning them into the handmaidens of ideology.6 In any case, these polarized attitudes about race and the music's origins show how, in seeking to elevate and dignify jazz history, traditionalists have instead tended to cage it in reductive categories. Rather than acting like archivists, they have often behaved like security guards. Indeed, what has most irritated the critics of Marsalis and Company is not so much their views themselves as the dogmatism with which they have voiced them. And although the neoclassicists say they are merely responding to those who, in Gregory Thomas's words, "have either used the music for their own political or ideological ends or had . .. misrepresented some aspect... of the music" (305), it is all too obvious the neoclassicists are themselves using the music to further a conservative ideology. As DeVeaux suggests, the "neoclassicist stance is . . . potentially harmful to the growth of jazz because it makes a fetish of the past, failing to recognize that the essence of jazz is the process of change itself' ("Constructing" 486). The more things change.... Underwriting what Timothy Murphy dubs (in this issue) this "curatorial" approach to jazz are ideological assumptions about authenticity and authority: that only certain kinds of people can play jazz authentically; that there is a single, identifiable vein of real jazz that must fight off corruption by other kinds of music; and that only certain people (whose identity varies, according to the writer) are qualified to write about jazz. In short, as Thomas (a defender of Marsalis) puts it, the controversy over Jazz at Lincoln Center is really about "who has the authority to define what jazz means" (289). Similar questions of authenticity and authority have lurked behind most of the controversies in jazz history. As Michael Jarrett observes, "Instead of considering that authenticity might be a question of politics—an effect of hegemony—jazz discourse has con- cerned itself with . . . erecting and policing real/fake distinctions" (346). Com- peting claims to authenticity and authority have vied for sovereignty in jazz dis-

6Evans posits "indeterminacy" as an improvement over the view (propounded by Lees and Richard Sudhalter, among others) that jazz is "multicultural and multiracial"(289), because the latter formula retains the black-white binary. It's not clear to me that his term gets us much further. More helpfully, Charles Hartman suggests that charges of white appropriation ignore the pervasiveness and power of African-American culture in shaping American subjectivity in general, which he interprets as deeply dialogical. Those who play and love the music don't just "possess" it, Hartman writes; it also "possesses" us (148-9).

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course, each one pushing itself forward by denouncing the others. Jarrett cites three: those from musicians ("I know because I blow"), from African Americans ("I know because I'm black"), and from hipsters ("I know because I'm hip": 347). Mix in the claims from scholars and historians ("I know because I read jazz") and those from wives, lovers, and family members of musicians ("I know because I bleed jazz"), and you have a hot but not very savory gumbo. The dominant neoclassicist aesthetic of preservation has also been accompanied by a hagiographical treatment to the music's founders and leading lights. Nor have the anti-traditionalists, many of whom work within shifting, collectivist frameworks, managed to crawl out from under jazz's strongly individualist mentality. Thus, the paradoxical result of the battle between traditionalists and iconoclasts is that, until very recently, jazz writing (from both sides of the cultural divide) has been unable to move beyond an ossified set of Romantic tropes and tales. Jazz history has provided fertile soil for the cultivation of narrative forms that have fallen into disfavor in other cultural circles. Foremost among them is the Tragedy of the Misunderstood Genius, in which an artist (usually but not always black) is driven to early death or exile by self-destructive habits and an uncomprehending, even actively hostile philistine society (see DeVeaux, "Constructing" 489). This pattern, which Vance Bourjaily dubs "The Story" (44), is a version of the age-old sacrificial myth in which a genius's struggles are consumed by what Ralph Ellison terms a "ravenous, sensation-starved, culturally disoriented public" (Shadow 227; other musical genres, particularly rock 'n' roll, have their own versions of The Story). A related narrative is that of the Romance of Style: an avant-garde (bop) or vernacular (early "hot" jazz) art form is vilified, but because it is truly innovative, ends up either ousting or being crushed by a popular, diluted form such as swing or Whitemanesque "orchestral" music (see also DeVeaux, "Constructing" 498; as we'll see later, versions of these narratives also dominate jazz-oriented fiction). As Frederick Garber notes, such narratives lend themselves to a cult-like adula- tion that both ensures their endurance (81) and traps musicians, critics and audiences within constraining discursive and performative paradigms. Jazz his- tories have largely accepted a Romantic and progressivist notion that there exists some essence called "jazz" that has endured through the musical metamorphoses that transformed ragtime and blues into "hot" music, and then brought swing, bop, cool, hard bop, free and so forth (DeVeaux, "Constructing" 498). But this story—more characteristic of the nineteenth century than of the twenty-first—

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falters badly when it comes to the present, as was obvious in Burns's Jazz which, attempting to cram the last forty years of jazz history into a single final episode, devolved into a bewildering mishmash of styles and figures. In the ground-breaking essay that I've been quoting, DeVeaux calls for approaches to jazz history "less invested" in these Romantic ideologies and more attuned to "issues of historical particularity" ("Constructing" 505). Recent scholarship on jazz history and discourse, including the three historical essays that begin this issue, has responded to this call in diverse ways. In our opening essay, for example, Douglas Field delves into the oft-noted but rarely investigated parallels between jazz and Pentecostal religion to reveal their shared emotional, spiritual and practical elements. This essay sheds new light on the origins of both practices and furnishes another reason why jazz greats have inspired quasi-religious devotion. The bebop period has long been one of the most mist-enshrouded periods in jazz history, in part because its gallery of major figures includes several artists, such as Bud Powell and Charlie Parker, whose lives epitomize the tragic and romantic mythologies described above. Recent scholarship on the bop era has begun to clear away some of this mist. Bernard Gendron has investigated the culture war surrounding bebop, when these "modernists" were pitted (mostly, it must be said, by critics) against the so-called "moldy figs" (i.e., adherents of New Orleans-style jazz). Gendron shows how this battle centered around a series of binaries—"art-commerce, authenticity-artificiality . .. modern-traditional, black- white"—that both recall earlier jazz wars and presage those of the present day (50). Eric Lott's valuable essay on bebop's "politics of style" places the boppers within the social currents of their time, particularly the aftermath of WWII in African-American communities where bebop "attempted to resolve at the level of style what the militancy fought out in the streets" (459): that is, it aimed to affirm a proud African-American consciousness and style that would resist white appropriation (see also Ellison, Shadow 212; Panish 12). DeVeaux's excellent The Birth of Bebop further shows that the young black musicians who created bop were responding not only to aesthetic demands, but also to commercial, political and racial ones: they were artists and professionals (Birth 28). These works all suggest how the boppers established authority and authenticity by rejecting outdated performance styles and forging new harmonic and melodic paths. One question that has not been satisfactorily addressed in these admirable studies, however, is the relationship between jazz and modernism. Most critics simply assert that bop, in contrast to previous styles, is "modernist," without

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defining what that modernism means. But others suggest that all jazz is modernist. For example, in ]azz Modernism Alfred Appel, Jr., discovers parallels between earlier jazz artists such as Louis Armstrong and modernist visual artists and writers such as Matisse, Mondrian and Joyce (see my review in this issue). Frederick Garber contrasts jazz, which he reads as a modernist form, with rock, which he describes as postmodernist (78). These contradictory descriptions demonstrate how difficult it is to apply such terms to different art forms. If such terms are to retain any explanatory value, we must try to discern parallel practices and principles in diverse cultural arenas. Thus Lott explains that bop was modernist because, in appropriating pop tunes and rewriting their melodies, the boppers demonstrated that, like Joyce, their "relationship to earlier styles was one of calculated hostility" (462). But this formulation ignores both the fondness for popular culture apparent in writers like Joyce, and the fact that efforts at canon-formation were as typical of modernism as were revolutionary manifestoes (viz: T. S. Eliot). That is, many modernists really aimed to elevate a new set of historical works over the ones that had been traditionally valued. The same is true of bop, which maintained a highly ambivalent relationship with earlier music. Like Anglo-European modernism, it used tradition as a trellis upon which to plant exotic new flowers. Thus, for example, Lorenzo Thomas notes how bop musicians extended the high-cultural aspirations of Harlem Renaissance intellectuals, remarking that they "pushed jazz further toward the 'serious music'" that earlier writers such as Alain Locke had envisioned (117). That is, they thought of themselves as part of a tradition. And despite their professed disdain for "moldy figs," the boppers kept certain moldy tunes on life support through pastiche and revision. Bop needed earlier jazz and pop as much as Joyce needed Homer. For example, as Douglass Parker shows in his witty essay on "Donna Lee," that notoriously tricky tune thrusts us forward (very rapidly!) only by sailing us back home-—not only to James Hanley's 1917 pop tune "Indiana," but even farther back, by quoting the melody of the song on which "Indiana" is based, Paul Dresser's 1899 "On the Banks of the Wabash" (Parker 169-80). Thus, writes Park- er, this swift and jagged "Classick Bebop Melody has, at its heart, something like mush, a tripled quotation . . . from Ye Olde Tyme Classick Nostalgic Ballad" (180). Like the literary modernists, jazz modernists reformed the canon through a deconstruction that was also a celebration. The boppers married a near-Byronic glorification of the individual performer to a sophisticated, even scholarly, neo- classicism worthy of Alexander Pope. The bop attitude to the canon was not

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merely hostile, then; rather, it harnessed hostility to homage, and in so doing further helped extend the jazz tradition. However, as Michael Coyle explains in his essay in this issue, they weren't the only jazz modernists who tried to construct canons. Performers could not make history by themselves; like their cohorts in literature, they needed non- artists such as producers and agents to help them. In this light, Coyle examines the work of record producer and label owner Norman Granz, whose "songbook" recordings with Ella Fitzgerald helped to solidify and memorialize the canon of compositions that other jazz performers had already informally created. Coyle argues that Granz was engaged in a modernist enterprise that was, like others of its ilk, Janus-faced, gazing both forward to new syntheses of different styles and backward through a selective reading of its own history. Implicitly, then, Granz's work set the stage for the institutionalization that people like Wynton Marsalis have furthered, whereby jazz throws off the rags of the revolutionaries for the pressed suits of the bourgeoisie. Nevertheless, to maintain the usefulness of such periodizations—or perhaps to jettison them in favor of new terms—we need more scholarship that examines specific eras and figures in terms of both particular social and cultural cir- cumstances and broader economic and musical currents. One period in jazz history that has begun to attract such scholarship is the 1960s, when hard bop was squeezed by the birth of free jazz, stretched into soul jazz and then shouted down by fusion. Some of this scholarship detects in the avant-garde styles that emerged in the aftermath of the Black Arts Movement a set of potent political and cultural forms and practices. Ajay Heble, for example, argues that the practice of "landing on the wrong note" identified with groups such as the AACM can "be a politically and culturally salient act for oppressed groups seeking alternative models of knowledge production and identity formation" (20). Such collectives, Heble claims, exemplify "communal interaction, responsibility, and forms of mutual tolerance" in which "dissonance" amounts to a "strategic intervention into dominant social relations" (76). As in Murray's reading of the blues, here avant-garde jazz is said to offer a counterstatement to hegemonic institutions by embodying a communal authenticity that contests established authority.7

7Heble probably exaggerates the cultural significance of these avant-garde artists, because the very practices that make them distinct also limit their influence. Heble also assumes too easily (like many other recent writers on jazz) a parallel between musical and political innovation, which is why he ties himself in knots trying to deal with the homophobic assertions of Charles Gayle.

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Scott Saul's Freedom Is, Freedom Ain't mounts a somewhat similar but more historically precise argument. Bringing together such disparate phenomena as the Newport Jazz Festival riot, the rise and fall of the hipster figure, and the work of writers and musicians such as Norman Mailer, Langston Hughes, James Bald- win, Charles Mingus, Cannonball Adderley and John Coltrane, Saul compellingly demonstrates how hard bop "was part of a budding critique of postwar Ameri- can culture, one that elevated the values of collaborative freedom and creative spontaneity over the values of rational administration and collective security" (6). Though Saul may overstate the "revolutionary" effect of these sometimes marginal cultural phenomena, his book represents the kind of historically alert and musically conversant scholarship that heralds a truly new jazz discourse. But Saul is hardly alone in his fascination with John Coltrane (as we'll see below, the Coltrane poem is a mini-genre unto itself). Of course, Trane was without doubt one of the most important innovators in jazz history, but the reasons for his enduring appeal transcend his musical prowess. For one thing, Coltrane's life and early death almost perfectly exemplify the Romantic and religious tropes that have characterized jazz discourse. After purging himself of his drug and alcohol habits and undergoing a spiritual reawakening in 1957, Coltrane was able to combine the roles of dedicated artist, committed professional, humble religious devotee, and race hero. He was thus fully vested with both the musical authority and personal authenticity that jazz lovers have vener- ated. Indeed, for many African-American writers, Coltrane came to stand for black music itself, which in turn represented what Kimberly Benston calls the "ordeal of authority and meaning at the heart of modern black performance" (117; emphasis his). Further, as John McCombe suggests in his essay in this issue, Coltrane embodies a pattern of death and rebirth that has been recycled obsessively in jazz writing. He has become less a musician than a page on which various authorities can inscribe their own versions of jazz history. While the lamentations (or celebrations) of jazz's death that McCombe chronicles epitomize the tragic and Romantic myths I have been discussing, each of these announcements also involves a claim to authority: to say that jazz is dead presumes that one knows what is jazz "really" is. Competing claims to authority, as we have seen, have always characterized jazz discourse. Today, many of those calling for a new jazz discourse suggest that we abandon the musicological scholarship of the past in favor of approaches informed by cultural studies. But musicological and sociological studies should be able to sit alongside

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autobiography and memoir, literary scholarship, poems, plays and fiction. Such coexistence will, however, require that musicians, musicologists and literary/cultural scholars acknowledge the limitations and strengths of their own perspectives; they must recognize that jazz is rich enough to admit many different kinds of authority. These recognitions may, in turn, challenge poets, fiction writers and literary scholars to educate themselves more fully about the music, and may inspire musicians to explore the ways that their art responds to and shapes the broader cultural currents that impinge upon it. If these cross-fertilizations take place, we may at last discard the myths and ideological constraints that have hampered jazz scholarship and threatened to turn it into a cacophony of discordant voices.

II. Interpreting Improvisation In turning their attention to jazz, literary scholars are illuminating the music through techniques and paradigms drawn from cultural studies and poststruc- turalist theory. One of the major topics for this arena of the New Jazz Studies has been improvisation—appropriately, since critics and musicians from all parts of the spectrum describe improvisation as one of the music's defining characteris- tics. Yet this term has also been subject to ideologically-fraught competing defi- nitions. On the one hand, as Michael Titlestad notes, both "literary representations and theoretical and musicological accounts of jazz regularly reiterate Romantic and primitivist myths about improvisation" that parallel those in jazz history (25. I'll address literary representations a little later.)8 One such myth that we can readily dispel is the notion that improvisations emerge without thought from the hands or mouths of musicians—that improvisers "just blow." Most jazz aficionados surely know that successful improvisation requires years of training and discipline, as well as a constant and evolving awareness of the contributions of others, past and present.9 As Garber comments, "there is no 'inno- cent' solo that springs only from its moment, no absolute autonomy within the moment of the solo's making" (72). Yet Henry Louis Gates surely goes too far in

8Heble outlines two other views: 1) that improvisation is an expression of unblocked natural identity; or 2) it is a process-oriented enterprise that unsettles conventional notions of identity (96). Both of these models are, however, far removed from the ways that most jazz musicians think of improvisation. 'Paul Berliner estimates that it takes seven to ten years to acquire basic competency in jazz improvisation (494). This figure, of course, will vary according to the talent and commitment of the musician, but as a general estimate it sounds plausible.

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the other direction when he states that "improvisation ... is 'nothing more' than repetition and revision" of established formulae (63-4).10 Is improvisation an unending quest for novelty? An exercise in emulation and preservation? Some- thing in between? Two important recent musicological studies have thoroughly examined the nature and forms of jazz improvisation. Paul Berliner's magisterial volume, Thinking in Jazz, investigates in overwhelming detail the preparation, aesthetic principles and communal values involved in improvisation. In describing the "intellectual rigor" (177) required, Berliner acknowledges how improvisation engages "multiple levels of cognition" (400) and demands the juggling of "multiple tasks simultaneously" (497). Comparing such training to learning a second language (184), he notes now frequently improvisers use linguistic metaphors to discuss their art (492). Two of the most enduring tropes are those of storytelling and conversation (see 192, 201, 357-8; on the latter, see also Monson 84). Berlin- er suggests that musicians often judge solos by narratological criteria: the range of materials employed, consistency and logic, fluidity, pacing, texture, and so on (201-10). Telling a decent story, of course, first of all means that the performer has mastered the tools—his or her instrument, the musical vocabulary, an awareness of audience, the history of the form, a rapport with fellow artists— required for the job. If the trope of storytelling celebrates the individual artist, that of conversation seems to accent the communal and communicative aspects of jazz performance. The two tropes may thus exemplify a tension between two aspects of jazz performance—individual virtuosity and group cohesion. Yet while the trope of conversation certainly includes the oft-voiced idea that playing jazz necessitates give-and-take among musicians, it also encompasses other forms of dialogue.11 For example, Berliner cites drummer Max Roach's assertion that improvisation is like "having a conversation with myself' (192): the musician hears what he or she is playing and responds to it while continuing to play. A musician also

'"Murray also emphasizes the formulaic and traditional aspects of improvisation (Stomping 252). "Even this aspect of the trope is more complex than it may seem. For example, the nonverbal conversations occurring among musicians who have played together for a long time are probably more fluid than those among strangers, since in the former case each musician is drawing from a range of shared experience, just as a group of old friends talking is probably going to revert to the same ideas and experiences. Conversely, the injection of new personalities may enliven the conversation by giving the speakers new material or stifle it by removing the common ground or injecting an incompatible set of idioms.

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engages in a dialogue with previous improvisations—including her own—on the same material, so any that improvisation may constitute a record of what Heble calls "the subject in process" (95). Further, musicians engage in a dialogue with the text (if there is one), embellishing, interpreting and altering the melodies and harmonies as they pass (see Belgrad 10). And of course, there is also (one hopes) an ongoing dialogue with the audience, whose members can inspire or inhibit performers by reacting to the narrative devices and conversational gambits that the players offer (Berliner 470-73; Hartman 73). These criteria are not merely descriptions; they are also yardsticks by which musicians and audiences gauge the success of a performance. A bad improvisation, for example, may fail to engage with the other musicians, or may simply rehash cliches in a way that implies a lack of originality; or it may (by going on too long, for example) display disdain for the audience (see Berliner 403-8). In Saying Something, Ingrid Monson's fine study of jazz improvisation, she further develops the trope of dialogue, asserting that "saying something" involves "interaction at several analytical levels," including the interaction of sounds, the "interactive shaping of social networks and communities," and "the development of culturally variable meanings and ideologies that inform the interpretation of jazz in American society" (2). "Conversation," that is, does not preclude competition and conflict. Citing Mikhail Bakhtin's influential concepts of literary dialogism and heteroglossia, Monson notes that jazz improvisation incorporates both "centripetal and centrifugal forces."12 If so, Monson suggests, jazz music-making is just as "contradiction-ridden [and] tension-filled" as nov- elistic language (99; cf Bakhtin 263, 272, and Hartman 72). Although she does not say as much, those "variable meanings and ideologies" also include the claim that jazz improvisation and interplay function as a "model of democratic action" (Belgrad 2). Indeed, if one draws out the ramifications of these ideas, one could assert that jazz improvisation always opposes what Bakhtin calls "authoritative discourse"—a language that refuses to engage in fluid play with its borders and that promotes "no gradual and flexible transitions, no spontaneously creative stylizing variants." Such discourse is "indissolubly fused with authority" (Bakhtin 343). Authoritative discourse sounds disturbingly close to the conserv-

12Heteroglossia refers to the propensity for language (particularly in novels) to incorporate multiple contexts, voices and competing forces. Dialogism describes the social effect of heteroglossia, in which "everything means, is understood, as part of a greater whole—there is a constant interaction between meanings" (Bakhtin 426)

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ative positions in the many jazz wars; however, as Bakhtin defines it, such discourse is anti-jazz. Musical conversations, Monson suggests, begin even before the musicians warm up and continue after the players walk off the bandstand. Before the gig, that is, the musicians have already implicated themselves in a network of shifting relationships: commercial and professional ones, such as financial arrangements with producers, promoters and club owners; personal ones, such as friendships with other musicians and gigging "debts" (Rhonda called me to sub for her on this gig, so I'll call her the next time I need a sub); and those with musicians who have preceded them. In all respects, improvisation involves a conversation with history: the history of those who have previously played a given instrument, piece or style; a history of the many times one has played the same tune, and so on (see Berliner 369). To put it in literary terms, jazz "owns a richly textured intertextual life" (Garber 92).13 This condition, which Monson dubs "intermusicality" (97), assumes a variety of forms, ranging from certain players' penchant for quoting standards, classical melodies or previous solos during improvisations,14 to the broader parodic impulse behind jazz itself.15 The result is a dynamic tension between working within a tradition or idiom and creating something singular in the moment in order to produce something that expands the idiom while also honoring it. In other words, improvisation melds Romantic individualism with a neoclassical awareness of the value of history and form. As Monson summarizes, "the shape of a musical performance is the product of human beings interacting through music both in time and over time" (129). As

13See also Dyer who, in the afterword to his But Beautiful, writes that each solo is a "syllabus of enacted criticism" of previous solos (186). 14Berliner cites Arthur Rhames, who maintains that "being able to quote from songs and solos is always part of a mature artist because he's aware of the contributions of others and its [sic] impact, how valid it is" (104). Of course, such quotations gain their full impact only if the other musicians and the audience recognize them. 15This propensity is in line with Gates's concept of "Signifyin(g)," which is exemplified by Jelly Roll Morton's embellishments on a Scott Joplin rag. But claiming that improvisation is Signifyin(g) is not identical to claiming, with Amiri Baraka, that in playing a piece like "Nature Boy" John Coltrane "takes a weak Western form, the popular song, and murders it. . . mutilates and disembowels [it] by using discordant and aggressive sounds to attack and destroy the melody line" (qtd. in Harris 14). This notion begs all sorts of questions. For example, as Gerald Early asks, why bother to destroy a "weak" form (381)? In any case, this "weak" form has provided rich material for jazz musicians for over eighty years now. Moreover, as Gates argues, Morton's improvisations do not destroy Joplin's work, but complexly extend it (63). Likewise, though Coltrane takes liberties with the song, his aims are certainly more creative than destructive. For a further discussion of pastiche and irony in jazz, see Monson 102- 106; for a critique of Signifyin(g) as it applies to jazz writing, see Munton 248-50.

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one plays jazz, one is not playing for or by oneself; one is expressing the rich nexus of human interconnections that have helped to produce the player and the music she plays. Another set of complex problems in improvisation resides in the relationship between musical preparation and execution. For one thing, preparation does not always yield successful results. As Berliner observes, there is an "unpre- dictable relationship between the musical materials . . . mastered . . . and the actual ideas that occur [to musicians] during solos" (205). Moreover, not all "improvisations" are improvised. Some players prefer to map out part or all of a solo in advance ("precomposing"), while others try to play something different each time.16 Most improvisers (both traditional and free) probably fall somewhere in between: thus, according to Berliner, there exists a "perpetual cycle between improvised and precomposed components of the artist's knowledge as it pertains to the entire body of construction materials" (222). But how does this cycle keep moving? To what degree do improvisers think about their playing as they are doing it? Certainly much of the time an improviser thinks ahead, using techniques and skills honed over the years—scales and arpeggios, memorized tunes and solos, melodic training, instinctive aural responses—to sculpt out a satisfactory performance. But not always. One great mystery and delight to me (here I speak as a jazz musician) has always been the occasional ability to surprise myself when I play. During such non-cerebral moments one's fingers seem to act on their own, riding the train without stopping at the brain's cognitive sta- tions. At such times one seems to stand outside of the music, which simply takes you along with it (see Berliner 190). Improvisation, then, sometimes means letting go, relinquishing control and authority, giving in to the voices and forces that you have imbibed and allowing them to speak. Such occasions relieve us of the illusion that making music is a one-directional, calculated process; sometimes the music plays you. I would thus concur with Berliner that improvisation is a tight-rope act in which one creates "art on the edge of uncertainty and surprise" (220).

16AS Berliner writes, some musicians "view improvisation as a process with the goal of creating an original but relatively fixed solo particular to the piece that has served as its vehicle, and they deliberately consolidate their most successful patterns from previous performances into a fully arranged model" (240-1). Others intentionally limit the use of set patterns, or pose challenges to themselves ("I'm not going to use that riff or phrase this time") in order to maximize difficulties and generate new possibilities (see Berliner 268).

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If my analysis seems to apply best to "traditional" jazz performance, two essays in this issue expand the discussion by attending to more experimental artists. Tamas Dobozy's essay returns us to the music of John Coltrane who, in his late, "free" period, practiced a mode of "proliferation" that, according to Dobozy, sought "an ultimate representation, which can never be arrived at, [and which] results in a continual proliferation of musical moments." Employing concepts taken from the work of Jesuit philosopher Michel de Certeau, Dobozy argues that Coltrane's quest for a mystical unity enables his music to move between insideness and outsideness, eventually rendering such categories inade- quate. Dobozy suggests that Coltrane's music thereby generates a disseminated authority that inspires us to emulate his own humility. In a similar vein, Timo- thy Murphy adduces three figures from jazz's avant-garde—Derek Bailey, Cor- nelius Cardew and Ornette Coleman—who have promoted innovative improvisational practices and paradigms. By advocating "non-idiomatic" improvisation, anti-hierarchical organization and novel harmonic concepts, Murphy argues, these musicians not only offer more inclusive approaches to the music and its history; they also expand musical ideas into political and ethical principles. Both of these essays, indeed, imply that improvisation is not just a way of playing; it's also a way of being. To conclude this section, I offer some notes—blue notes, to be sure— toward a definition of improvisation. I call them "notes" in order to avoid pro- pounding an "authoritative" discourse of my own that would seek to prohibit exceptions and variations. And yet it seems to me essential to offer a fairly rigor- ous definition in order to lay the groundwork for the ensuing discussion of jazz literature.

1. Temporality a. Spontaneity: A given improvisation takes place in "real time," at a moment's notice, ad libitum (after, paradoxically, many hours of carefully disciplined preparation); it does not recapitulate in full any previous improvisation, nor is it reiterated verbatim in any succeeding improvisation. b. Historicity: While an improvisation may question, "signify" upon, or undermine tradition, it also remains aware of its inextricable location within various traditions ("intermusicality"). As John Corbett argues, to improvise is therefore to "make history" (234).

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These two principles are often in tension with each other; but at best that tension produces the music's electrical charge.

2. Elasticity Improvisation may exist within a harmonic or melodic frame or idiom, but also stretches frames. An improvisation that does not stretch the frame, that is merely conventional, then, would not satisfy this criterion. In this regard, Dick Hebdige uses Alan Watts's essay "Beat Zen, Square Zen and Zen" to suggest a set of practices and ideas revolving around the notion of frame. What defines the artwork, for Watts, is the frame: whatever is framed becomes a work, insofar as it distinguishes the artwork from the business of everyday life (Hebdige 338-9). To the degree to which improvisation cannot be framed, then, it seems incompatible with the concept of a finished artwork. Nonetheless, improvisation can itself become the frame within which the music operates. In an important sense, improvisation is never finished; it neither begins nor ends on the bandstand.

3. Sociability Improvisation occurs within a myriad of shifting social relationships, at once responding to and inviting interaction among musicians (past and present) and between musicians and audiences. To improvise is to converse with one's own developing and fluctuating identity, with other musicians (both those present and those who have played before), with those in attendance, and with those who have supported the creation of the music. Improvisation thus invites sociable— whether congenial or competitive—responses from others. It asks those who receive it to give something in return. In that sense, then, improvisation functions like a gift: it is partly earned, but not entirely; it occurs within a social circuit; and it lies partly within and partly outside of the marketplace. To put it another way, we might say that improvisation participates in an erotic economy.17

17This term is from Lewis Hyde (22, 163), who argues that all art lies primarily within a gift, rather than a mercantile economy. Though Hyde downplays the labor involved in art and sentimen- talizes gift exchanges, his terms seem to fit improvisation as I am describing it here. I am indeed struck by the close similarities between these principles of improvisation and the principles of gift exchange that I outlined in a previous scholarly project (see Osteen 26). Perhaps these merely attest to my own propensity to repeat myself, but I prefer to believe instead that they show that improvisation and gift exchange offer compatible modes of apprehending and enriching social life.

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4. Expressivity a. Technique. Expressiveness depends to some degree on technical facility, for one cannot say something unless one has mastered the vocabulary and tools of expression. But improvisation is not just grandstanding or noodling; it must "say something"—express a musician's and/or an ensemble's evolving emotional, spiritual and intellectual being(s), in relation with those of others. Technique is merely a vehicle for expression, not an end in itself. b. Identity. That "something" is only partially musical, however, because it emerges from the musician's (or musicians') totality of life experiences. Further, improvisation does not simply issue from a fully-formed self; it also reshapes that self by opening it to the flow of ideas and sounds coming from other selves. As Ralph Ellison eloquently writes, "each solo flight, or improvisation, represents (like the successive canvases of a painter) a definition of his identity: as individual, as member of the collectivity and as a link the chain of tradition. Thus . . . the jazzman must lose his identity even as he finds it" (Shadow 234).

5. Risk Because it takes place in time and involves the temporary loss of self, improvisation incurs risk. John Corbett (222) remarks that improvisation both raises and renders irrelevant the question of risk because: a) it is always subject to the risk of failure—both minimal (i.e., "clams" or wrong notes; inexpressive or banal playing) and maximal (the "trainwreck" or discord): that is, improvisation involves risk because one does not know in advance what to play; b) on the other hand, he suggests, because there is no written score, improvisation eliminates risk because there can be no error.18 Hence, Corbett writes, "improvisation involves the permanent play of threshold and transgression" as the improviser "develop[s] and employ[s] a repertoire of possibilities in order to risk the unknown" (224, 225).

6. Contingency Improvisation resides in the shifting space between planning and acting beyond one's knowing. Guitarist Joe Beck has recently written that "the essence of playing any instrument [is] not being surprised by what you play. It should be

18Corbett quotes free jazz saxophonist Evan Parker about other risks (223): the Risk of Stagna- tion; the Risk of Insanity (losing one's way); the Risk of Completion (a work becomes too finished, static). These are, of course, only some of the potential errors.

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no more surprising than something you would sing" (64). Obviously he is right in one sense: you must gain an intimate knowledge of your instrument so that you can execute what you hear or conceive. But improvisation must also carry the potential for surprise. It must be a constant dialogue between the planned and the aleatory, between expectation and surprise, control and its loss. In other words, an improviser must be free not to think—and in fact should resist thinking too much or planning too carefully. As Hebdige observes, a "master wrestles with contingency neither by submitting nor resisting but by playing (with and into) it, producing in the process... what Alan Watts referred to as Zen's art of 'controlled accidents'" (342). In short, one gains mastery of materials "through the paradoxical act... of letting go" (Hebdige 340).19 These principles should remind us that improvisation is, above all, play. In that regard, jazz has much in common with games such as basketball where, although set plays exist, success depends upon disciplined instinct. In keeping with the spirit of play, we should not think of these principles as prescriptions, nor try to freeze improvisation into a set of rules.20 Let us also refrain from magnifying any or all of these principles into some transcendental trope or controlling definition, for in any given improvisation some of the principles may be eclipsed and certain ones (say, temporality) may conflict with others (e.g., risk). I offer them rather as a kind of lead sheet on which others may improvise their own melodies. I would emphasize, finally, that improvisation is not a thing but a process, not a noun but a verb. Nor is it merely a musical practice. Indeed, cultural theo- rist Pierre Bourdieu has argued that social life itself comprises a web of "regulat- ed improvisations" that are "collectively orchestrated" without a conductor (qtd. in Monson 214). Improvisation is not only an "apt metaphor for a more flexible social thinking" (Monson 214); it is also, as Albert Murray declares, a mode of being that "conditions people to cope with disjuncture and change" and that provides a survival technique suitable to "the rootlessness and discontinuity" of contemporary existence ("Improvisation" 113).

19Hebdige continues, "to think that not to think ahead might operate in practice as a virtue flies directly in the face of most of the theoretical proscriptions currently in place in arts-related discourse" (351). It's worth noting in this regard that, as Jarrett points out, improvisations cannot be copyrighted and are therefore in legal terms composerless (340). Economically, then, improvisation lies at least partly outside of the system of property. 20Some may wonder why I do not list "novelty" as one of my principles, since, by definition, no two improvisations are alike. But novelty seems to me an effect of the shifting dialectical relationships among temporality, elasticity, sociability, expressivity, risk, and contingency. In any case, my discussion implies that novelty is far from an absolute criterion.

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III. Writing Music We have seen how musicians and critics use linguistic metaphors to describe jazz improvisation. But are music and language truly homologous? What do the two forms really share? The question is far too large to exhaust here. I will instead focus briefly on two smaller sets of questions. First, in "saying something" do musicians say something specific? That is, does music directly refer to anything outside of itself? Can one assign a specific meaning to a melody, cadence, rhythm, composition or collection? The second questions concern the other side of the equation: how does one capture linguistically the evanescent experience of performing or listening to music? This problem, which Monson (borrowing from Charles Seeger) calls the "linguocentric predicament" (74), occupies in some way all of the remaining essays in these issues. For in jazz literature, Leland Chambers points out, the music is generally used to "support nonmusical ideas or experiences. This is one effect of applying the referential aspects of language to the nonreferential sounds of music" (58). But is it truly nonreferential? Bridging the essays on music and those on literature in these issues, Philippe Carrard takes up the question of referentiality in his essay. First providing a taxonomy of the titles of Blue Note records (primarily from the hard bop period), Carrard then discusses how these titles—some evoking a particular mood or political movement, others doing little beyond naming the artist—display conflicting stances toward referentiality. Carrard is cautious about championing either side of the question. Others who have confronted the linguocentric predicament have been less circumspect. Indeed, many poems, fictional works and critical studies that pur- port to be about jazz are not really about music either; unfortunately, however, the writers think they are. That is, much jazz writing—fictional, poetic and critical—is marred by a careless or ill-informed use of musical terms and tropes that assumes the very transposability it attempts to demonstrate. Steven Scher's "Lit- erature and Music," though it was written twenty years ago and has not a word to say about jazz, remains valuable for its salutary warning about this penchant for finding "apparent correlations that ultimately prove to be illusory or at best metaphorical" (225) and for its charge that "too many potentially promising interart comparisons by literary scholars ... have been severely flawed by a lack of sophistication in musical matters" (241). Scher isolates three types of music-literature relations (226; see also the chart on 237):

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1. Music and literature. This type designates music with words attached; criticism of such works thus deals with interpretations of lyrics and so forth. 2. Literature in music. This refers to "program music," or "instrumental music inspired by or based on a nonmusical idea" (228). Most jazz does not fall into this category, but works such as Mingus's The Black Saint and the Sinner Lady (originally designed as dance pieces) and Wynton Marsalis's Blood on the Fields, as well as some of Duke Ellington's longer compositions, certainly qualify. 3. Music in literature. This category covers the bulk of jazz literature and criticism. Scher divides it into three subcategories. a. "word music": a practice that "aims primarily at imitation in words of the acoustic quality of music" (229). Much jazz poetry and some jazz-oriented fiction attempt to do this through onomatopoeia, metrics, etc. (as do texts such as the "Sirens" episode of James Joyce's Ulysses). These representations, however, rely upon the reader's knowledge of the instruments or compositions being imi- tated in order to fully achieve their effects. b. musical structures and techniques in literary works. Criticism that describes recurring verbal patterns as "leitmotivs," for example, fall under this classification. Such criticism, Scher argues, often produces "horrendous misin- terpretations" deriving from the use of musical terms to designate compositional or structural patterns that could easily be called something else (233). Unless there is a compelling reason to choose musical terminology, such investigations will appear contrived. Nevertheless, he suggests, such terms are among the only true parallels between the two art forms. c. "verbal music": "any literary presentation... of existing or fictitious musical compositions; any poetic text [or, I would add, fictional one] which has a piece of music as its 'theme'" (234). This also characterizes much jazz fiction and poetry. Scher calls on scholars to "evolve a set of clearly defined critical terms" that will put an end to the "loose metaphorical use of technical terms" (242). One doubts whether the last three will serve this purpose, since Scher's "verbal music" and "word music" not only sound much alike but also blur together conceptual- ly: is there always a clear distinction between "presentation" of music and "imitation" of it?21

21This confusion is not dispelled by Scher's example of "verbal music," a passage from Thomas Mann's Doktor Faustus that actually seems to exemplify "word music"—i.e., imitation—better than it does "verbal music"—that is, representation (see Scher 235-6).

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Putting this problem aside for now, it is obvious that behind his call lies yet another question of authority: "should we insist on thorough academic training and equal competence in both arts?... Is there a definable minimum of musical knowledge necessary for fruitful musico-literary study?" (240-1). Scher does not ask the corollary questions: is academic musical training really helpful for approaching jazz literature? And who is qualified to determine how much knowledge is enough, and what kind of knowledge one should have? Is this merely another of those "real/fake" distinctions that, Jarrett charges, conceals an attempt to police the discipline? Jarrett's own "Four Choruses on the Tropes of Jazz Writing," one of the sharpest metacritical interventions into jazz discourse, constitutes another* attempt to establish such critical terms. Here, too, however, we encounter some overlap of definition. One of his tropes, satura, refers to the parodic or satiric impulse in jazz; as such, it may be another name for Signifyin(g), which, as Gates defines it, "always entails formal revision and an intertextual relation" (51). Satura also refers to the way that jazz represents a confluence of styles; it is often employed in jazz texts that use collage or montage (e.g., Michael Ondaatje's Coming Through Slaughter [his example: 343-45] or Andre Hodeir's The Worlds of Jazz [my example]). A second trope, rapsody (which at first resembles satura quite closely), refers to the performative process that helps to create satura—that is, the music's emotional intensity; this quality, in turn, encourages critics to generate the various claims to authenticity that I have been discussing. Rapsody is indeed the very quality in jazz that resists definitive claims to authenticity. A third trope, charivari, points to the way that jazz has been frequently associated with interruptions in meaning—with noise (348-51). This trope partly accounts for the horrified responses to jazz that have accompanied the music since its beginnings, as well for as its embrace by marginalized groups (345-48). But Jar- rett's tropes risk becoming so all-encompassing as to be nebulous and are better approached as starting points than as definitive classifications.22 The first "trope" that Jarrett isolates, however, is the most important: improvisation. As he observes, most jazz writing "aspires to the condition of improvisation" (338). And it is true that many jazz writers—critics, novelists and poets alike—describe their work with this word. Novelist John A. Williams, for example, states that in his work he tries to "deal in forms that are not standard,

22See Evans 100 for a clarification of Jarrett's terras.

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to improvise as jazz musicians do" (qtd. in Panish 127). Toni Morrison has also said that writing her novel Jazz forced her to improvise like a jazz musician (qtd. in Munton 242; Morrison's work has been a focal point for controversies about the transposability of music into prose, as I'll suggest further below). Likewise, critic Julian Cowley finds parallels between musical improvisation and the practices of such postmodernists as Raymond Sukenick, Gilbert Sorrentino and Don- ald Barthelme, inasmuch as their work is "predicated upon acceptance of contingency and uncertainty" (196). The most famous example of a writer attempting to emulate jazz improvisation is Jack Kerouac, whose "Essentials of Spontaneous Prose" offers guidelines for a jazz-like artistic practice that endorses the "undis- turbed flow from the mind of personal secret idea-words, blowing (as per jazz musician)," and exalts "Not 'selectivity' of expression but following free devia- tion (association) of mind into limitless blow-on-subject seas of thought, swim- ming in sea of English with no discipline other than rhythms of rhetorical exha- lation and expostulated statement" (65-6). The problem with this formulation will by now be obvious: it lies in the notion of "no discipline." As a true Roman- tic, Kerouac celebrates authenticity but makes no mention of craft or study (see Panish 110). In short, he does not understand jazz improvisation. Nor does his own late prose give compelling evidence of the usefulness of his method: in works like The Subterraneans, writer and readers seem more likely to drown than to swim in his seas of prose. Indeed, "improvisation" would appear to be a perfect instance of those "loose metaphorical" parallels that Scher abhors. Writing and improvisation seem, at first blush, incompatible; a cursory consideration may induce us to agree with Alan Munton, who declares that the relationship between improvisation and writing "can never be closer than analogy" (242). Thus, for example, writers can minimize risk and contingency by outlining and planning in great detail in advance. Writers do not receive the immediate audience response that improvising musicians do, and therefore cannot be as immediately affected by it. Yet, as most writers will testify, writing does sometimes occur in a zone beyond calculation, and one must be willing to take chances and follow impulses in order for the writing to live. And just as musical composition begins with improvisation, so a willingness to depart from the plan, to take risks, must figure into any good writer's tactics. Jarrett sums up the question well when he concludes that "improvisation" is really "the emblem of a problem, an enigma useful for

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writing, not the emblem of a solution, the name of a method used in writing" (341).23 Involved here are more problems of authority and authenticity. Many writers who say they improvise seem to be hoping to borrow authenticity from jazz musicians and thereby at once to consolidate their authority as writers and abdicate it by suggesting that their inspiration comes from somewhere else. But what hap- pens when jazz musicians themselves write? Do their improvisational musical strategies carry over onto the page? Certainly they have no need to borrow an aura of authenticity, since they already play jazz. And their approach to the written word may display a jazz-like impatience with convention. In this vein, Brent Edwards has compared Louis Armstrong's scat singing to his singular writing practices (the use of multiple underscores, unusual punctuation, eccentric spelling, and so on) to argue that scat singing, far from a sign of inarticulateness, actually connotes an excess of signification, an "augmentation of expressive potential" ("Scat" 649). Thus, for Edwards, though scat does not necessarily signify anything in particular, it nonetheless condenses a myriad of meanings into syllables whose indeterminacy parallels the indeterminacy of Armstrong's own writing.24 If he's correct, then perhaps some musical practices can be transposed—at least by musicians—into textual practices. In his essay in the second of these issues, Daniel Stein further addresses this aspect of improvisation in jazz musicians' autobiographies. He demonstrates how Ellington, Mingus, Billie Holiday and Mezz Mezzrow, as well as Armstrong, employ shifting personas in their writings that adumbrate an improvisational method similar to that used in playing or singing jazz. In telling their stories, these musicians perform, trying on various masks that allow them simultaneously to disclose and to escape disclosing their shifting identities. These autobiographies, Stein suggests, embody an improvised authority fully in the spirit of jazz. Stein thus suggests that, at least when discussing musicians' own written words, we should not dismiss the possibility that writers improvise.

23The problem, for Jarrett, derives from the "classical" (or what I would call "neoclassical") paradigm that opposes improvisation and composition and that therefore obscures the features that the two share. 24Edwards may overemphasize the "indeterminacy" of Armstrong's quirky orthographic habits when he claims that we have "no means to decipher the shifting levels of those effects through interpretation" (641). Of course, that assertion, itself an interpretation, assumes that each of these habits requires interpretation.

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IV. Chasing the Trane of Jazz Poetics Jazz-oriented literary criticism has frequently used terms such as "jazz aesthetic" (Harris) or "jazz impulse" (Werner) to describe works either about or influenced by the music. The "jazz" in these formulations, however, may seem far removed from most people's experience of the music. According to William Harris, for example, Amiri Baraka's poetry and drama employ a "jazz aesthetic" that transforms "white poetic and social ideas into black ones" (13). But Harris admits that Baraka's "jazz" impulse consists mostly of destructive tactics—inversions, aggressive Signifyin(g), mutilations—that can be summarized by this phrase: "kiss my unruly black ass" (qtd. in Harris 14). No doubt there is something titillating about such a phrase, but it scarcely represents the complexity of jazz. Where is the delight, beauty, tranquillity or even sadness? Such manifestoes merely erect yet another rigid binary. As I suggested earlier in regard to boppers, jazz musicians' revisions or inversions of earlier forms are not merely destructive; they also celebrate, extend and comment on the efforts of previous performers. So while Baraka deserves praise for vehemently protesting the bourgeoisifi- cation of jazz and for drawing attention to its African-American roots and its history as protest music, statements such as the above are regressive. Baraka's jazz poetry, though it too indulges in propagandizing, reveals a deep love for and understanding of the music and an acute comprehension of its social role. His poem "AM/TRAK," for example, provides a capsule biography of John Coltrane that conveys Coltrane's influence on his audience and represents his music through agile, infectious rhythmic cadences. More generally, however, jazz poetry has exemplified all of the potential dangers in putting music into words. There is altogether too much lame onomatopoeia, self-indulgence, stereotyping and name-dropping in jazz poetry, which often seems so insecure about its own medium that it feels the need to steal from the glamor of jazz to shore up lazy or banal writing. And many jazz poems, though lively and provocative when read or recited, lie dead on the page. Part of the problem may be that much jazz poetry follows the following aesthetic formula, as delineated by Hartman:

improvisation ->• spontaneity -• genuineness -*• authenticity -*• authority. (4)

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In other words, jazz poetry has endorsed a Romantic aesthetic of authenticity derived from the popular understanding of jazz as "the land of heart's desire" (Hartman 4). In striving for an immediacy of voice, this poetry has underplayed and misapprehended its condition as printed artifact. Criticism of jazz poetry is also subject to the hazards—particularly the careless use of analogy—that Scher identifies. When, for example, critic Mary Ellison writes that poet and jazz pianist Roy Fisher is influenced by jazz forms and structures, one nods in assent. But when she then declares that his poems use "visual imagery in the way a musician evokes memories with sounds" (132), she is merely offering a vague analogy. Or when she writes that Fisher's "The Dirty Dozen" (which repeats "Dirty" in each line and then follows each repetition with a different noun) plays with "repetition in a pianistic way" (126), one strains in vain to hear something percussive or pianistic, or indeed anything specific (for example, an allusion to the Count Basie tune of the same name) that makes the poem sound more like a piano than the countless other poems that employ anaphora. In her wide-ranging and generally illuminating essay on jazz prosody, Meta DuEwa Jones highlights (and inadvertently promulgates) a prime example of one major problem in jazz poetics. She quotes a portion of "AM/TRAK" where Baraka reproduces (using both "word music"—i.e., imitation—and "verbal music" or representation) a tune by Thelonious Monk: "duh duh-duh duh-duh duh / duh duh / duh duh-duh duh-duh duh / duh duh / duh duh-duh duh-duh duh / duh duh / duh Duuuuuuuuuhhhhhh" (74; for the full text of the poem see Feinstein & Komunyakaa 2-7). Take a minute and hum it to yourself. I mean you. Does the name of the tune reveal itself? Well, you needn't continue, I'll reveal the title Jones offers: "Criss Cross." She says that she readily hears Monk's melody in her "mental ear" (75). Perhaps my mental ear is tin, but I do not hear "Criss Cross" in these syllables. If the lines read something like "Duddly doo / duddly doo-Dah / duddly doo dah / duddly doo doo-doo Dah," and so on, then I might recognize it. In fact, I strongly doubt whether "Criss Cross" is the composition being represented here. In fact, if you go back to Baraka's syllables and think of "Well, You Needn't," you will hear it instead of "Criss Cross." Either Baraka intends the ambiguity or his transcription—of whichever tune—is imprecise. So does the error lie in Jones's interpretation or in Baraka's poetics? Such passages again raise Scher's question: how much musical knowledge is sufficient for a jazz poet or critic? Should one be able to distinguish between eighth notes and the sixteenth-note triplets that Monk uses in "Criss Cross?"

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Should one insist on a transcription of Monk's articulations more meticulous than Baraka's generic pseudo-scat syllables? Or should one rather respect the need for ambiguity? Hartman observes that "voice, in poems, has to be con- structed or reconstructed by the reader's imagination" from the "mute, unifying facade of print" (132). But it certainly helps the reader's imagination if the blue- print for reconstruction is musically precise. Jones admits that such effects "assume a readership that is familiar enough with these particular jazz performances so that the effectiveness of their orthographic techniques can be fully realized" (76)—but, I would add, not too familiar, or the limitations of the techniques become obvious. Without insisting on some specific way of apprehending jazz poetry, shouldn't we nevertheless demand that jazz literature and criticism maintain rigor in rendering music and its terminology? Despite such pitfalls, there exists a good-sized body of strong jazz-inspired poetry.25 The pre-eminent figure in this canon is Langston Hughes, whose work from The Weary Blues through Ask Your Mama provides a poetic history of jazz from the 1920s through the early 1960s. Evans suggests that Hughes's entire oeu- vre dramatizes a "wandering aesthetic," whereby his voice undergoes "constant movement within a wide array of racial, sexual, gendered, and national discourses and subject positions" (204). His jazz poems have displayed this restlessness: after his early variations on the twelve-bar blues form, he shifts, in 1951's Montage of a Dream Deferred, to seeking to capture the "conflicting changes, sudden nuances, sharp and impudent interjections, broken rhythms" of bebop (Hughes 387). As its title implies, Montage pieces together short poems and fragments linked via repeated phrases and motifs, primarily that of the deferred dream of African- American equality; the result is a brilliant marriage of two modernisms that portrays bebop as an expression of the cultures of Harlem and African America (see Hokanson 63). This work succeeds because Hughes dramatizes both bop's cultural and its musical meanings. For example, as Robert Hokanson notes, the poems are "often in dialogue" with each other, as if the different voices are trading fours (70). Hence, the work's fragmentary quality reflects bebop's characteristic tension and discontinuity (see Lowney 371). By eschewing monological discourse in favor of a range of voices (from various social classes and places of origin), Hughes not only conveys the elasticity, sociability and expressivity of jazz improvisation, but also hints at its role in African-American history.

25See Feinstein for a helpful survey of jazz poetry through the early nineties. Feinstein's Biblio- graphic Guide is also an indispensable resource.

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Hughes's poems continued to wander. His late long poem, Ask Your Mama, written in the aftermath of the Newport Jazz Festival riot of 1961 (Saul 130-31), is based on the Dozens, the African-American practice of ritualized insult. Fus- ing music and poetry even more closely than does Montage, it uses the traditional "Hesitation Blues" as a "leitmotif' (Hughes 475), and even provides musical directions—ranging from blues and flute calls to "The Battle Hymn of the Republic"and frantic bop—in the margins of the pages. Here again, repeated phrases, such as "IN THE QUARTER OF THE NEGROES" (the entire text is printed in capital letters: 489), along with a dominant anapestic and paeonic meter, unify the disparate elements of the text. As Larry Scanlon summarizes, "music offered Hughes a model for imagining the relation between his poetry and his community" (48). Jazz was the ring in that wedding. Few others have been as successful in marrying them. Nor have many poets done justice to the joy in jazz. In fact, as Sascha Feinstein points out, jazz poetry (especially since the 1970s) has been dominated by elegies, which tend to highlight precisely those tragic and Romantic myths that I've already discussed (Feinstein 146). Five figures—Bessie Smith, Billie Holiday, Monk, Bird, and Coltrane, each of whom epitomizes either the Tragedy of the Misunderstood Genius or the Romance of Style (or both)—have inspired the most poems (Feinstein 144). In addition to giving poets larger-than-life subjects, these icons have also allowed politically-oriented poets to vituperate about racism and commercialism. Nobody, however, has attracted more poems, good and bad, than John Coltrane (Feinstein 136). Indeed, notes Kimberly Benston, the Coltrane poem has become "an unmis- takable genre of contemporary black poetry" (120). As I noted earlier, because Coltrane embodied musical and cultural authenticity and authority, in the 1960s he came to symbolize black artists' drive for recognition and respect (even though he usually steered clear of overt political statements). Gerald Early provides other, less noble reasons for Coltrane's enormous cultural capital. One reason he cites is that jazz is a "highly technical virtuosic art" (and Coltrane perhaps its greatest postbop virtuoso), and so his work could be "romanticized and intellectualized without having to know anything at all about what it was technically" (380). It is thus no accident that most of this poetry concentrates on Coltrane's death or on his late music, when he had eschewed the "sheets of sound" style of the late 1950s for untrammeled interstellar regions to which he was sometimes impelled by shrieks, squeals and mantra-like repetitions. In trying capture this difficult music, however, many Coltrane poems end up illustrating jazz poetry's

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flaws: sentimentality, a mannered use of orthographical gimmicks, a lack of rigor in representing music, and a tendency to enlist him as mouthpiece for the author's political views.26 Instances of these traits can be found, for example, in Sonia Sanchez's much-anthologized "a / coltrane / poem," where revolutionary slogans and "word music" imitating Coltrane's saxophone playing run in full caps across the page (see Feinstein & Komunyakaa 183-86). Obviously, Sanchez is attempting to honor and emulate Coltrane by disrupting poetic conventions as his late music disrupted jazz conventions, and the poem successfully displays the sense of outrage and grief that many felt after Coltrane's early death. But how is one to read lines such as these:

screeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeCHHHHHHHHHHH SCREEEEEEEEEEEEEECHHHHHHHHHH screeEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEE (185)?

Are we supposed to scream differently in each line? Are we supposed to sound like a saxophone? And do these lines really make us hear the music of Coltrane, the man who gave us "Naima," "Psalm," "After the Rain" and "Welcome?" Or do they just draw attention to themselves? In contrast, poems such as Michael Harper's "Dear John, Dear Coltrane," and Elizabeth Alexander's "John Col" avoid ostentatious lamentation and onomatopoetic imitation in favor of strategies such as theme and variation (Alexander) and call-and-response (Harper), strategies that represent Coltrane's music but that also show a respect for and confidence in their own medium. These works disclose the manifest power in a jazz poetry that creates authority through a firm understanding of both music and language—their strengths as well as their limitations.27 All of the poets I have named write in English. But they are scarcely the only writers to have been inspired by jazz. In fact, as Gregory Stallings demonstrates in his essay in the second of these issues, Spanish poets from the 1920s through the present have found in jazz both emotionally resonant material and aesthetic models. The three poets about whom Stallings writes all associate jazz with ecsta- tic experiences in which personal identity dissolves. Emerging from this form- lessness, however, they discover a vision of a Utopian community of hybrid sub-

26For more extended treatments of the Coltrane poem, see Feinstein 115-42, Benston 145-86, Early 379-85, and M. Jones 79-87. 27Harper's poem is reproduced in Feinstein & Komunyakaa (77-78). As Feinstein argues, Harp- er's poem, which repeats the chant from the opening movement of Coltrane's A Love Supreme, itself consists of four movements that mirror the four movements of that much-lauded suite: see Feinstein, Jazz Poetry 131.

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jects. Stallings's essay points to the work that remains to be done on the relationships between jazz and modernist movements such as Surrealism, and suggests that there remains more to say about how jazz permeated twentieth-century art beyond North America. As my brief and very selective survey suggests, we need both more jazz poetry that avoids the excesses I have described and more musically sophisticated scholarship on this work that will generate an authority that does not depend on name-dropping or hagiography but is instead born out of a productive inter- course between musical and verbal languages.

V. Fictions of Jazz The body of jazz-inspired fictional works is almost as large as that of jazz poetry, and spans the almost one hundred years since James Weldon Johnson's Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man appeared in 1912.28 Many of these works display the same Romantic myths and mystifications that I've spotlighted in jazz poetry and historiography. Indeed, as far back as 1958, Hugh Smith remarked on its "consistently romantic treatment of jazz subject matter," and described it as "a Transcendental brand which concerns celebration of self, expansiveness, high idealism, belief in art, anti-materialism, non-conformity" (467-8). As we have seen, this brand has not been updated much. Though many of the novels Smith cites— Piano in the Band (1940) and Dupree Blues (1948) by Dale Curran, Music Out of Dixie (1952) by Harold Sinclair—have long since fallen into obscurity, his por- trayal of jazz fiction as enthusiastic, anti-authoritarian, and individualistic still describes the tenor of fictional and ostensibly non-fictional jazz writing today.29 What qualifies a novel or story to be called "jazz fiction"? In her study of voice in African-American fiction, Gayl Jones delineates several possibilities: 1) the music may affect the subject matter (as in novels or stories about jazz musicians); 2) it may involve the conceptual/symbolic functions of the text (here jazz functions primarily as a metaphor or analogy); or 3) it may have predominantly stylistic implications. (Of course, some jazz fictions combine the three.) In the last case, "the writer's attempt to imply or reproduce musical rhythms can take the form of jazz-like flexibility and fluidity in prose rhythms . . . such as nonchrono-

28Albert's Annotated Bibliography usefully lists almost all of the jazz fiction and much of the jazz literary criticism published through the early 1990s. 29Smith mentions only two novels by African American writers, which is partly a function of the times and partly a consequence of the fact that few African Americans had written jazz novels before 1958. More recent criticism of jazz fiction rightly places African American authors in the foreground.

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logical syncopated order, pacing, or tempo. A sense of jazz—the jam session—can also emerge from an interplay of voices improvising on the basic themes or motifs of the text" (200: these correspond mostly to the last two of Scher's "music in literature" categories—motivic structures and imitation or "word music"). Most criticism of jazz fiction has focused largely on those "conceptual/symbolic" functions of the music, aiming more to elucidate the "spirit" or "impulse" of jazz than to treat fictional portrayals of musicians. In his influential study of African-American modernism, for instance, Craig Hansen Werner draws from the work of Ellison, Murray and Houston A. Baker to investigate how the blues impulse (involving a progression from brutal experience to lyrical expression to affirmation) and the gospel impulse (revealing the burden of suffering, bearing witness, leading to a vision of salvation) give way to the "jazz impulse," which means "realizing the possibilities of the self, of expanding consciousness through continual improvisation" (253, 219). For him, the two central functions of the jazz impulse are "clarifying (blues) realities and envisioning (gospel) possibilities" (269; italics his). Thus the jazz impulse combines realism and idealism, at once showing problems and posing solutions. Using similar categories, A. Yemisi Jimoh contrasts jazz, blues and gospel characters and philosophies. According to Jimoh, "Jazz philosophy" "posits an awareness of the instability of categories" and emphasizes "multiple approaches to a single idea" (28). Unlike blues characters, jazz characters "move at will among the discourses from which they are fragmented" (102). For both critics, then, jazz represents flexibility, intensity, heteroglossia, and liberation—or, in Jarrett's terms, rapsody and satura. For them, jazz fictions embody and endorse improvisation as a way of being. Gayl Jones offers a similar description of the "jazz modality" as an expression of freedom and pluralism, observing that African-American writers continue to "look to the musician as the artistic vanguard and range finder" (92).30 Whereas Werner and Jimoh do not discuss fiction treating jazz musicians, aside from James Baldwin's "Sonny's Blues," Jones devotes a chapter each to Ann Petry's story "Solo on the Drums" and to Baraka's "The Screamers." But studies of fiction about jazz musicians remain rare. In fact, the only book-length study

30Jones, however, has an unfortunate tendency to treat white writers as one-dimensional foils for black ones. For example, she asserts that "the European (and European American) writer is open to only one level of possibility" (92). Even if there were such a thing as "the" European-American writer or "the" African-American writer, European novels such as Don Quixote, Tristram Shandy, Notes from Underground, and countless modernist and postmodernist fictions stand as strong coun- terexamples to her reductive declaration.

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of fiction about jazz musicians is Jon Panish's The Color of Jazz, which concentrates on the racial differences in such texts. Panish proposes that white texts tend to romanticize the jazz musician's experience, stereotype jazz heroes, dehistoricize and decontextualize the development of the music, and emphasize competitive individualism over any sense of community. Black texts, on the other hand, tend to present the jazz musician as an admirable but com- plicated figure; set the development of the music in a clear tradition that is con- tinually repeated and revised; make connections between the music, the musician, and social experience; and inextricably link the accomplishments of the individual with the success of the community, (xix)

As this excerpt indicates, Panish is prone to programmatic argumentation. Nev- ertheless, his book is valuable for its astute dissection of the racial (and musical) stereotyping that hamstrings jazz-influenced novels such as Dorothy Baker's Young Man With a Horn (1938), Kerouac's On the Road (1957), John Clellon Holmes's The Horn (1958), and Ross Russell's The Sound (1961).31 Panish has begun the important work of recalling our attention to the substantial number of neglected texts about jazz musicians. But we are still awaiting a comprehensive critical work that will establish paradigms beyond race for the range of jazz fictions and that will explore their narrative styles in greater detail. Writing such a work will, of course, require coming to terms with the history of jazz fiction as a secret sharer of jazz history. Such a work should also challenge the fictions of jazz historiography and poetics and in so doing provide literary critics, historians, and musicologists with new material to enrich jazz discourse. As a prolegomena to such a work, I offer the following historical sketch. The first true "jazz" novel, Johnson's Autobiography of an Ex-colored Man, is a Bildungsroman depicting the narrator's early piano training, his embrace of ragtime, his aborted attempt to combine European and African-American musical forms, and his ultimate decision to hide his mixed-race condition and pass as white. Johnson, of course, was a songwriter and musician before he wrote his novel, and was thus "instrumental in the establishment of jazz as a crucial aspect of American culture" (Henson 32). A number of recent critical articles have explored Johnson's complex treatment of African-American music as a sign of

3IIn contrast, Kristin Henson's recent study of the "symbolic role of jazz" in twentieth-century fiction concentrates not on racial divisions in the literature, but rather on the constant association in these texts between jazz and racial " 'mixing' and the negotiation of boundaries" of all kinds (4).

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black flexibility and American hybridity (Washington), as a metaphor for the mediation between oral and written language (Edwards, "Seemingly" 588), as an emblem of Johnson's attitudes about folk and fine art (Evans 74), or as a trope for a "fusion of coherence that allows contradictions to exist" (Henson 12). All agree, however, that music is deeply implicated in the ex-colored man's racial uncertainty: it is, one might suggest, both a sign of a new black identity and a means of "passing." In his contribution to the second of these special issues, A. T. Spaulding further examines the narrator's struggle to create an identity through the "cultural matrix"—that is, the professional as well as the musical elements—of ragtime. Comparing the narrator's decisions to those of real-life counterparts W. C. Handy and Scott Joplin, Spaulding argues that the contradictions of ragtime both reveal and conceal Johnson's own conflicted attitudes about race and culture. Later jazz fiction is jammed with characters modeled on tragic and Roman- tic figures such as Bix Beiderbecke and Charlie Parker, whose musical skills seem less important for novelists than their self-destructive habits and love lives. Loosely based on Beiderbecke's life and career, Young Man with a Horn established a formula followed by many later jazz novels. Its influence derived less from its clumsy style, blithe racial stereotyping, and character "development" (protagonist Rick Martin remains inarticulate and opaque throughout) than from its retelling of the dramatic story of Bix's difficult life and early death. Other novels, including Russell's The Sound, John A. Williams's Night Song (1961), and even The Horn, whose protagonist, Edgar Pool, is partly modeled on Lester Young, borrow liberally from Bird's life, and in so doing depict jazz musicians as irremediably misunderstood and self-tormented. More broadly, Johnson's and Baker's novels stand as the prototypes for one of the two main subtypes of jazz fiction, the Bildungsroman. Emerging early in the flowering of European Romanticism, the Bildungsroman (and its subspecies, the Kunstlerroman or artist-novel) brought with it Romantic notions of identity and self-formation that play into jazz history's informing myths. Indeed, jazz novels by both white (e.g., Evan Hunter's Streets of Gold [1974]) and African- American authors (e.g., Herbert Simmons's Man Walking on Eggshells [1962], William Melvin Kelley's A Drop of Patience [1965] and Murray's Scooter trilogy) closely follow nineteenth-century Bildungsroman conventions: a country boy develops his talent, is recognized for it and travels to the city, where he becomes involved in love affairs that test his dedication, and where he is exploited by vari-

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ous authority figures and eventually discovers his true vocation.32 Their prose also often resembles that of nineteenth-century realism; few make any attempt to imitate jazz stylistically, and some barely even try to represent the music.33 Some writers associated with the Harlem Renaissance frequently referred to jazz. For example, Hughes included three stories about musicians in his collection Ways of White Folks (see Henson 69-86), and Claude McKay's Banjo uses the title instrument as a symbol that bridges the novel's (now familiar) dichotomies between the modern and the traditional, white and black, low-class and high-class culture (Lutz 54). However, virtually all jazz novels of the 1940s and '50s were written by white authors, and almost none of them mobilize modernist techniques. Nor is there much mention of bebop, even though bop had emerged by the late forties as a dominant strain in the music. For example, the music in Curran's and Sinclair's novels is New Orleans-style jazz;34 George Willis, author of the Three Musicians trilogy of the 1940s, proposes a merger with modernist "classical" music as jazz's only hope (see Tangleweed 166-7). Even as late as 1957, when Harold Flender published his novel Paris Blues, bop appears only as a threatening but eventually dismissed "new thing," and protagonist Eddie Cook's repertoire is dominated by swing-era standards.35 These novels (and others that followed them) almost invariably depict the jazz musician as an idiot savant, freak, sacrificial victim or, at best, an outsider doomed to remain that way because he (they are all male) cannot adapt to the

32My description of these conventions comes from Buckley 17. See also Hirsch 296-300. 33Simmons does employ several "experimental" elements—inserted song lyrics, headlines, and a generally impressionistic narrative surface—that depart from nineteenth-century conventions. In such moments the novel blends a cinematic style of storytelling with an improvisational aesthetic that befits the jazz-oriented content. His protagonist, trumpeter Raymond Douglas, also maintains an ambivalent relationship with his community that resembles other, modernist Bildungsroman protagonists. 34Curran's Piano in the Band may be more successfully approached as a 1930s labor novel than as a book about music. During a flashback, for example, we witness the desperate, piano-playing protagonist George Baker get trapped into a steady gig playing for gangsters. He doesn't get paid, but because the gangsters keep the instruments locked up overnight, the musicians can't get free. George tries to organize them, but each is worried only about his own job. The novel later depicts an interracial jam session held in the Communist Party hall, and in general indicates that jazz epitomizes the collectivist ideal of a interracial group with no leader. 35AS Krin Gabbard shows in his comprehensive study of jazz in film, the movie version of Paris Blues even implies that jazz "cannot be an art form even if it has been written [as the score of the film is] by Duke Ellington and Billy Strayhorn" (200).

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straight world.36 They also emphasize their characters' love lives rather than their musical lives, and habitually accent the competitive aspects of jazz (cutting contests and the like) over the camaraderie and communication among musicians that scholars like Monson and Berliner emphasize. Certainly love, sex and com- bat are more inherently dramatic than cooperation or passionate professional- ism; nonetheless, a closer attention to the details of the music and its history would have improved many of these novels, as would an acknowledgment of the ways that jazz musicians may successfully negotiate among the various commercial, pharmaceutical, erotic, and aesthetic demands they face.37 A recent example of a fictional musician coping successfully with adversity is found in Albert Murray's novel Seven League Boots. The third installment in Murray's lyrical Scooter trilogy, the narrative follows the protagonist introduced in Train Whistle Guitar as he becomes the substitute bass player in a swing band. However, as Roberta Maguire notes in her contribution to this issue, Murray's storytelling skill doesn't quite equal his stylistic panache; hence, the novel lacks tension. But she finds an aesthetic source for Murray's narrative smoothness in the swing music of the 1930s and '40s—the music that Scooter's band plays. Offering analogies between Murray's style and organizational strategies and the Kansas City swing of Count Basie, Maguire demonstrates how the novel synthe- sizes subject matter (Scooter's travels with a swing band) and form through verbal riffs and rhythmic cadences that convey the musicality of Scooter's world. However, Maguire continues, those musical models may also limit the novel's capacity to deal with conflict. Though writing in the 1990s, then, Murray can elude the tragic and Romantic conventions of jazz fiction only by evoking a sen-

36Panish is probably right that African-American authored jazz novels tend to make their musicians less grotesquely dysfunctional than white-authored ones. However, even characters such as Williams's altoist Richie "Eagle" Stokes and Kelley's blind horn player Ludlow Washington find it nearly impossible to manage their musical or emotional lives successfully. According to another character in Night Song, Stokes "symbolizes the rebel in us" (126): that is, "Eagle" is more of a symbol than a character, and thus must die at the end to serve his proper symbolic function. Washington, too, eventually abandons jazz to abide in a small-town gospel community. 37A couple of notable exceptions to this pattern are two short stories from the early 1940s, Eudora Welty's "Powerhouse" and J. F. Powers's "He Don't Plant Cotton." Powers's story depicts a group of African-American jazz musicians who refuse to "Tom" to an audience of drunken whites, and walk off the bandstand rather than re-enact the history of African-American subjection to white whims. In Welty's story, as Chambers shows, the title musician (based on Fats Waller) uses improvisational tactics such as theme and variation to tell stories about the death of his wife and thereby transform loss into laughter. By employing call-and-response in the dialogues between Powerhouse and his friends, Welty ingeniously incorporates jazz styles into the fabric of her narrative (55; see also Appel 111-12).

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sibility that predates bebop and its confrontational spirit and thereby sacrificing much narrative power. The Beat writers of the 1950s, in contrast, worshiped bop. For example, jazz (mostly but not all bop) plays a significant role in Kerouac's On the Road, both as the inspiration for Dean Moriarty's "madness" (see 128, 197-8) and as a kind of engine for the characters' headlong, improvised lifestyle. However, Kerouac fails to articulate a bop aesthetic beyond alluding to some vague "IT" that the music and musicians possess (see On the Road 127, 206). The result, as Panish observes, is to make a "fetish out of jazz" (113) in scenes that portray musicians (both black and white) as priests passively blessing the wild sprees of Sal Paradise and his gang. Another product of the Beat sensibility, Holmes's The Horn, is somewhat more successful at transposing music into words. This novel both adopts jazz structures of "chorus" and "riff' into its organization and places musicians firmly in the foreground as it recounts the final hours of saxophonist Edgar Pool through a round-robin set of chapters that reveal his influence on a circle of other musicians, many of them based on real performers such as Dizzy Gillespie, Billie Holiday, and Wardell Gray. In flashbacks, Holmes also recounts the experiences that have shaped Pool, thereby fashioning what Gregory Stephenson dubs a "Bildunsgroman in reverse" (95). The novel floridly (particularly in Holmes's efforts to describe jazz improvisation) but vividly portrays the connections and competition among musicians, while also elevating the status of jazz musicians through parallels to canonical American writers, including Poe, Melville, Dickinson, and Hawthorne. Jazz is for Holmes a "celebration of . . . American reality," an embodiment of the promise of liberation and individuality within the collective (241). Two of the authors treated in these issues also allude to bebop, albeit in quite different ways. Michael Borshuk's essay reads Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man as a product of the "bop aesthetic." At first this claim may seem incompatible with Elli- son's own tastes, for his essays on music reveal a deep ambivalence about modern jazz. For example, in "The Golden Age, Time Past," an essay on the birth of bebop at Minton's Playhouse, Ellison points out the artificiality of the boppers' studied coolness and rudeness (Shadow 211). And in his essay on Charlie Parker, he comments sharply on the way that Bird seemed to encourage his own transformation into a sacrificial victim. Moreover, the music in Invisible Man—Louis Armstrong's "What Did I Do to Be So Black and Blue?," numerous old folk and blues songs— seems far removed from bebop. Hence, many critics have argued that it owes more

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to blues than to jazz.38 But Borshuk compellingly demonstrates how the novel incorporates bop in numerous indirect ways, and argues that the narrator's gradual discovery of his own voice mirrors the musical discoveries of contemporary bop musicians. The novel's panoply of expressive styles, he continues, further parallels the disjunctions of bebop. Like bop, then, the novel simultaneously pays trib- ute to the African-American cultural legacy and transforms it. Through his use of a complex musical and literary intertextuality, Borshuk concludes, the Invisible Man embodies Ellison's understanding of the modes through which bebop musicians defined themselves not only as individuals but also as "members of a collectivity and as a link in the chain of tradition" (Ellison, Shadow 234). James Baldwin's famous story "Sonny's Blues"—perhaps the most-discussed fiction about a jazz musician—portrays a bop pianist. The struggles between Sonny and his older brother also illustrate a broader generational shift in African-American music and culture: while the narrator adopts a middle-class lifestyle and disdains modern jazz, Sonny yearns to emulate Charlie Parker. Most critics agree that the story emphasizes the value of listening. Thus, numerous critics have argued, when the narrator finally hears Sonny play, he at last learns to appreciate how jazz can forge connections between individual suffering and collective trauma and, moreover, how it transmutes those traumas into a collective triumph.39 Susanna Lee's essay in the second of these issues alertly attends to the story's use of sounds to demonstrate the characters' oscillation between con- nection and disconnection, or individuality and community. Lee insists in her provocative and wide-ranging piece that even at the end, when Baldwin's grace- ful biblical cadences suggest empowerment and transcendence, the story does not entirely resolve its themes of disconnection and individual pain. "Sonny's Blues" dramatizes conflicts that were very much alive when it was published; likewise, until the 1970s, most jazz-influenced fiction reflected the music of its day. More recent jazz fiction has, however, tended to gaze backward. Novels such as Coming Through Slaughter, Patrick Catling's Jazz Jazz Jazz (1981),

38Among those discussing Invisible Man in terms of a "blues aesthetic" are Lhamon (49-50), Murray (Omni-Americans 167), and Jimoh (137, 146). In contrast, Berndt Ostendorf reads the narrator's developing improvisational abilities and capacity to draw from diverse traditions while also "making it new" as evidence of Ellison's adherence to a jazz aesthetic (110-15). All of these interpretations are indebted to Houston Baker's Blues, Ideology, and Afro-American Literature. 39Jimoh suggests that the narrator is a "Blues character" who learns that he needs Sonny's jazz to thrive (207). Panish observes how Baldwin moves at the end from "I" to "we" and "us," thereby connecting the family's suffering to a broader history of racial violence (82).

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Samuel Charters's Jelly Roll Morton's Last Night at the Jungle Inn (1984), Xam Carder's Be-bop Re-bop (1987) and Muse-Echo Blues (1991), Murray's trilogy, Harper Barnes's Blue Monday (1991), Toni Morrison's Jazz (1992), Geoff Dyer's But Beautiful (1996), and, recently, Frederick Turner's novel about Bix Beider- becke, 1929 (2003), all deal with figures and periods in jazz's distant past. Even novels that treat contemporary life often contain episodes set in earlier periods or depict aging musicians whose major contributions were years ago (as in Jack Fuller's The Best of Jackson Payne). Along with the Bildungsroman, then, the second major subtype in jazz fiction is the historical novel. Several reasons for this pattern come to mind. One is the decline in jazz's cultural currency: since the glamor days of the music lie in times past, authors sensibly set their novels in these livelier eras. Another reason is that historical novels lend themselves readily to the Tragedy of the Misunderstood Genius and the Romance of Style. Like the Bildungsroman, that is, the historical novel is a nineteenth-century form that emerged from and still often propagates Romantic and progressivist ideals. For example, Dyer's beautifully written biographical/fictional sketches blissfully wal- low in the Misunderstood Genius mire. Even Michael Ondaatje, who deploys a variety of modernist and postmodernist tactics in his novels, nonetheless seems to subscribe to most of the legends about Buddy Bolden in his much-praised Coming Through Slaughter.40 While these authors demonstrate that improvised music remains a vital source of inspiration for writers, their decisions to remain within the confines of genres such as the historical novel or the Bildungsroman seem to have rendered them content to replay the timeworn tropes and tales that have turned so much jazz writing into myth-mongering or hagiography.

But all of this begs an important question: do any of these texts really "write jazz?" Is such a thing even possible? Who has the authority to write it and the authority to say who can write it? Toni Morrison's fiction has offered a test case for these questions, for a number of critics have detected jazz structures and styles in her prose: some, for example, claim that Morrison uses improvisational strategies (a claim that, as we have seen, is difficult to substantiate), while others point to her rhythmic prose, her tendency to Signify upon traditions, and her use of "riffs" and call-and-response patterns, as evidence of a jazz aesthetic.41 Morri-

40For a general treatment of Ondaatje's use of jazz in his fiction, see Malcolm. 41See for example Boutry, Rice, and Randle. Henson offers a crisp summary of critical positions on Morrison's "jazz" aesthetic (142 n30), and also indicates five ways that Morrison's Jazz explores the music (89).

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son's prose, these critics hold, does not so much represent music as embody it. In a caustic rebuttal, Alan Munton takes these critics to task for their alleged ignorance and misuse of musical terms such as riff (239), antiphony (242), and improvisation (246). He also charges that they promulgate an "Africanist agen- da" that inaccurately portrays the hybrid harmonic and cultural origins of jazz, and that they repeat an egregious error in "thinking of jazz as a language similar in kind to spoken human language" (250). In other words, Munton questions these critics' musical and historical (and hence, literary) authority. While Munton's attack rightly targets some of these critics' assumptions, some of the exaggerations are more his own than those of his critics. Fritz Gysin diagnoses the malady more broadly and more neutrally, suggesting that in searching for equivalents, critics often employ terminology so vague that "almost anything under the sun can be characterized as a solo, an arrange- ment, an improvisation." His remedy is to apply such equivalents only to "texts which thematize the music in some way" (275). While I would echo his call for more rigor in using musical terms, I'm not so sure that we can or should limit their use so narrowly. How much license should we permit? And what other ways of writing jazz can we imagine? Gysin adduces three writers—Leon Forrest, John Edgar Wideman, and Nathaniel Mackey—who have devised alternate modes of writing jazz, but still concludes that their postmodernist tactics "cast doubt on the communicability of the music to an audience that lacks musical sensibility" (285). Once again we seem to be left with a problem rather than a solution. Gysin's essay does, however, reveal that not all contemporary jazz-inspired fiction gazes nostalgically at the past. Thus, for example, Rafi Zabor's amusing and musically literate fable The Bear Comes Home (1998) is set in the present day. Nathaniel Mackey continues his fascinating (though at times recondite and pretentious) explorations of postmodern improvised music in the series of epis- tolary-essays-cum-novels that began with Bedouin Hornbook. In these books, Mackey doesn't even try to imitate the music of his Mystic Horn Society; rather, he ingeniously literalizes the tropes of conversation and storytelling by representing their musical exchanges as a series of disquisitions (see, for example, Bedouin Hornbook 54-59). While one may doubt that Mackey's texts accurately depict how most musicians really think or work, those reservations are probably less significant than Mackey's uncompromising refusal to recycle jazz fiction's worn- out tropes and styles. Both Zabor's and Mackey's work indeed suggest that writ-

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ers willing to cross disciplinary and generic boundaries, eschew established modes, and go beyond literalist or "realist" forms of imitation and representation, can introduce new ways of writing jazz. Another author who sought to break down generic boundaries and write jazz from the inside was Andre Hodeir. As a musician, jazz critic and fiction writer, Hodeir brought a polymathic authority to texts such as The Worlds of Jazz, the opening chapter of which is the subject of the final essay in this double issue, written by Ken Husbands. The introduction to Hodeir's book, "For Tun- ing the Instrument," comprises six different narratives from six different perspectives. Shifting from one mode to another in high modernist fashion, Hodeir also asks readers to shift gears, to respond as flexibly as a jazz musician reading a new chart or an audience hearing a novel, experimental piece. Husbands argues that this text, which investigates the presentness of jazz composition and performance, raises a series of provocative questions important for all of jazz discourse: what is the relationship between jazz performance and composition? Is it possible to possess a piece of music? Are the diverse forms of creativity involved in making jazz all related? If so, how? Hodeir's suggestion may be that jazz works to break down walls: it defies our attempts to build inflexible categories and under- takes an unending process of revising its own traditions. Thus it requires that those engaged with the music constantly retune our instruments as well. In a multitude of ways, in fact, jazz asks those who write about it to think musically: to remain attentive to nuances and constant changes; to respect and sound out the many different currents that have flowed into its stream; to build authority (and perhaps authenticity), in a paradoxical fashion, by resisting doc- trinaire claims to authority. A new jazz studies worthy of the name must therefore affirm the necessity of musical literacy and rigor while also recognizing the value of insights and methods derived from literary and cultural studies; but it must do so without turning any one of these methods into a critical key signa- ture. A truly new jazz discourse will require that, like good improvisers, we take risks, remain willing to step outside of our safe disciplinary boxes, and work to keep our paradigms as elastic as the music itself. Those who employ that discourse will be conscious of our own temporality, of the cultural contexts and determinants of our assumptions and methods, while being comprehensively educated in the music and its history. The authority of such a discourse will be collectively generated, impermanent, alive: it will be in the spirit of jazz. This does not mean that we should simply discard traditional approaches to jazz writ-

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ing, such as musicology. Rather it means that we should encourage writing and performance—scholarly, musical, creative—that reflects minds both open and voracious. Only then will we answer Ingrid Monson's call "for a more cultural music theory and a more musical cultural theory" (3). Indeed, this enterprise will not only encourage better jazz writing—writing animated and authorized by the many valid jazz aesthetics; it will also inspire musicians to speak more fluent- ly through their instruments and through their words by reassuring them that somebody out there is really listening.

* x- * This double issue is the second harvest of a collaboration between Genre and the Society for Critical Exchange. The SCE is a consortium of literary and cultural scholars that has, over the past twenty years, promoted in panels, conferences and publications precisely the kind of fruitful cross-disciplinary projects that this issue exemplifies. The essays here by John McCombe, Timothy Murphy, Philippe Carrard, Daniel Stein and Roberta Maguire were originally delivered as talks in three different conference panels sponsored by the SCE. Given the SCE's charge, it is only fitting that we conclude this issue with a living example of the interplay between jazz and literary theory: a dialogue between Jacques Derrida and Ornette Coleman called "The Other's Language," and an improvised talk by Derrida, inspired by Coleman, entitled "Play—First Name." In "The Other's Language," Coleman and Derrida conduct an interview that both discusses and embodies the dynamic of repetition and freedom that I've described as a major feature of jazz improvisation. Incidentally, in discussing his childhood, Coleman recalls performing in a "sanctified" church, thus fur- nishing further evidence of the affiliation traced in Douglas Field's opening essay. Finally, in his verbal "improvisation" with Coleman, Derrida utters a phrase that succinctly sums up the essence of thinking in jazz: it is "expected without expecting."

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