Representations of Jazz Music and Jazz Performance Occasions in Selected Jazz Uterature

REPRESENTATIONS OF JAZZ MUSIC AND JAZZ PERFORMANCE OCCASIONS IN SELECTED JAZZ UTERATURE by MICHAEL FRANK TITLESTAD submitted in fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of MASTER OF ARTS in the subject ENGLISH at the UNIVERSITY OF SOUTH AFRICA SUPERVISOR: PROF IA RABINOWITZ APRIL 1999 Student number: 640-979-2 Statement by candidate I declare that Representations ofJazz Music and Jazz Performance Occasions in Selected Jazz Literature is my own work and that all the sources that I have used or quoted have been indicated and acknowledged by means of complete references. ~/-t 3o ,4p,,/ /??'? ·--~~~.................. ·················/.··········· SIGNATURE DATE (MR MF TITLESTAD) Department of English University of South Africa Acknowledgements I would like to thank Professor Ivan Rabinowitz for his graceful interventions and guidance in the course of this project. In addition I owe a debt of gratitude to Professor Susan Spearey for her encouragement and comments, particularly concerning the broader implications of improvisation. Further, I am obliged to those colleagues, particularly Mitzi Andersen, Gwen Kane and David Levey, who assisted with proof-reading and were enthusiastic and supportive. Finally, this dissertation is a tribute to all the jazz musicians and writers who have contributed to the 'one continuing song'. Summary The founding hypothesis of the study is that creative writers translate jazz music and performance into discourse by recourse to a number of figurative domains. These translations map existential, anthropological and political spaces and situate jazz within these. The first chapter concerns the representation of jazz in the construction of alterity, focussing on the evocation of the Dionysian spirit of jazz, the parallels between jazz and Bahktin's carnival and the strategic deployment of 'blackness' in configurations. The second chapter applies the notion of 'existential integration' in tracing some of the fluid boundaries between the music, the body of the instrument and the body of the performer in representations. The final chapter looks at the contrary tendency: the representation of mystical transcendence in the course of listening to or performing jazz. Underlying each of the three chapters is a concern with the emergence and propagation of oppositional identities in jazz writing. 810.90357 TITL UN !SA BIBLIOTEEI( I LIBRARY r(las .. 810.9357 TITL Ace es Aanwi ~I~ l~l~l l/11~Ill/II~11/~mlil~ 0001740965 Contents Introduction 1-Vll Chapter 1: Civilization's Noise: Jazz, Dionysus and the Carnival 1-49 Chapter 2: Jazz Bodies: Somatic, Instrumental and in Process 50-98 Chapter 3: Mystical Jazz,: Romantics, Shamans and Preachers 99-155 Conclusion 156-162 Bibliography 163-174 Introduction N., the correspondent in the epistulatory work, The Bedouin Hornbook (1986) by Nathaniel Mackey, is invited to speak at a symposium entitled 'Locus and Locomotivity in Postcontemporary Music'. He chooses to offer a meditation on a piece of music performed at harvest time by the Toupouri of the Fianga region in Chad. The piece is 'played by a wind orchestra comprised of ten men, nine of whom form a counterclockwise-moving circle, at the centre of which the tenth player stands' (1986:112). Two sections of N.'s ruminations on the implications of the piece, both intricately analogical, announce the theoretical problematic of speaking or writing about music. My impression is that the lead horn is played by the man who stands at the centre of the revolving circle. A commitment to pulling free of ceremonial stasis is there to be heard in the ostensibly centered yet in reality ripped, eccentric voice bled by the orbiting chorus of horns' centrifugal flutter. A would-be hub overcome by wobble one might call it. What gets me is the way this loss of alignment throws and then retrieves the voice, as though it installed or instituted a rift only in order to erase it. (1986:114) The susceptibility of the Toupouri piece to any number of allegorizations (symbolic sociality, symbolic circumlocution, symbolic hollowness-musically-sculptured-by breath and so forth) leaves me dangling as to which thread to pursue. I'm thinking of calling my talk "The Creaking of the Word," which is the name the Dogon give to their weaving block. The sense I get from this is that a) we can't but help be involved in fabrication, b) a case can be made for leaving loose ends loose, and c) we find ourselves caught in a rickety confession no matter what. (1986:115-6) The voice of the Toupouri lead horn is endlessly decentred, persistently overcome by the momentum of collaborative effort to which it speaks. In its temporary assertion of dominance it pretends a capacity to anchor, but is repeatedly reduced to eccentricity. When the lead horn is eccentric, when it is out of 'alignment' with the group, it announces a rift by speaking for 1 the group from which it has become distinct. It can be considered, at these moments, to be metonymic. According to Bhabha, metonymy, 'a figure of contiguity that substitutes a part for a whole [. .. ] must not be read as a form of simple substitution or equivalence [but as a] circulation of part and whole, identity and difference ... ' (1994:54). In its flights of difference, the singular voice of the dominant horn announces its lack, its dislocation from the whole for which it comes to stand. In doing so, however, it simultaneously becomes a departure point for a new identity of the assembly. Borrowing from Bhabha's formulation, the lead horn heralds both the 'thrill' and the 'threat' (1994:55) of the metonymic relationship. The 'threat' is persistent eccentricity, being endlessly at odds with the whole. The 'thrill' is the advent of the new, the possibility that the singled out can be reciprocated in a movement which affirms the integrity of the whole. By analogy, any allegorization of a musical work is metonymic. An allegory, while masquerading as a 'would-be hub' of the work's meaning, is endlessly 'overcome by wobble'. Stated simply, a musical work is always in excess of any discursive translation because of the 'centrifugal flutter' of possible readings and meanings which surround it. The speaking subject who translates music into discourse inevitably introduces a rift between a singular reading and potentialities which surround the musical work. The process of representation is unstable in that its inevitable singularity suggests lack: representation announces its own difference from its object and, in doing so, the words 'creak' under the strain of their function. This dissertation is about the 'creaking of the word' under the weight . of representational responsibility. My hypothesis is that music is not simply unspeakable as is regularly held (Barzun 1996:193-202). To return to the figure of the Toupouri horn player: there is an economy of exchange between singularity and wholeness in representational practice. Attempts to translate music into discourse, while they separate themselves from their object, are also contiguous with that object. Music is not independent of attempts to represent it in discourse. This is not to make a sweeping claim about musical meaning; rather it is to suggest that the rhetoric of representation exists in a circular relation to musical composition, performance and reception. Whether, for example, on the level of subcultural argot or the interdependence 11 of conceptualization and composition, music and the language in which it is represented cannot be held to be distinct. What will emerge in the course of this dissertation is that representations of jazz music and performance contribute to the fabric of the music itself. Representational and musical practices are coextensive in many pertinent ways. Whatever rift is instituted in the act of speaking for and about music, the characterizing voice offers itself up to the productive possibilities of incorporation, contradiction or development. It also, in its difference (from other voices, from its object, and from itself), sounds spaces in ways which elucidate and create, even while seeming inadequate to the music itself. This dissertation, then, concerns the discursive work of representing jazz rather than forms of resignation to the impossibility of encapsulating it in words. The problem raised by Mackey as to 'which thread to pursue' haunts the present study. Any contemplation of representational practices finds itself 'involved in fabrication' in both senses implied by Mackey. Firstly, the selection of a particular thread in analysis determines a course through a rich rhetorical fabric. In this dissertation a limited number of threads has been chosen and, while I resist statements disguised as definite conclusions, this selection risks the accusation of a prior scheme of expectations. All I can hope is that the singularities of the tropes and allegories I examine are at least productive. The second sense of fabrication is more difficult to sweep under a rhetorical carpet. To re-present representational practices is to be complicit in the tropes which they comprise. At times, I am aware, my analyses are embedded in the discursive configurations which are supposedly the object of their commentary. While I have attempted to avoid a blurring of the tropes under analysis and the analytical discourse in which they are explicated, this occurs repeatedly. These introductory comments themselves stage this problematic. For much of the remainder of this dissertation, as here, the analyses are spoken in an implicated voice; they are rhetorical performances which repeat, with difference, the rhetoric of the literary texts being considered. To use a jazz analogy, the dissertation plays around a series of tropic standards used in representing the music and its performance. The exact point at which it is possible to extricate this performance from the performances of others is difficult to discern. Accepting that jazz can be model for theoretical discourse, this study shamelessly substitutes jazz standards for the conventional standards of analytical discourse.

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