The power of improvisation. The temporal logic of improvisation
Daniel Martin Feige
State Academy of Fine Arts Stuttgart
Miles Davis is reputed to have said the following: "Do not fear mistakes - there are none." This statement is astonishing: anyone who has ever picked up an instrument will know only too well that there is a lot you can do wrong. And the jazz listeners among you, should you also have experience in playing this music, will also know that improvisation is not something you can do just like that: Even talented musicians have to practise hard to develop their talent. Nevertheless, this sentence attributed to Miles Davis can be explained in such a way that it contains an important insight. It should not be understood to mean that everything is equally good in the course of jazz improvisation (which would hardly fit in with Miles Davis' traditional and sometimes highly judgemental remarks about other musicians and their playing style). Rather, it is to be understood that the category of 'error' in jazz is problematic, precisely because or when this music is understood as essentially improvised music. This can be explained as follows: the particular temporality of jazz is one that does not recognise any predetermined rules of success. A jazz improvisation does not just have to ignite from the moment (it can also be formulaic, rote, boring or lacking in other respects). Rather, it must be understood in such a way that it produces the criteria of what it means to be successful in and through the performance.
My aim in the following is to develop this bold idea a few steps further and to ask how improvisation in jazz differs in this respect from interpretation in the tradition of European art music (often abbreviated to 'classical music').
"Do not fear mistakes - there are none": Why can this sentence not be understood to mean that everything you do in an improvisation is equally good? For the following reason: Improvisations in jazz can succeed or fail, they can be aesthetically sparkling or less so, which even applies to the improvisations of free jazz, which may seem chaotic to untrained listeners. However, unlike in classical music, the fact that they succeed or fail, ignite or fail to ignite, cannot be explained in jazz by referring to the musical works on which the improvisation is based.
So that readers who are also well acquainted with the classical music tradition are not surprised by this characterisation, a few remarks on the role of the musical work in this tradition. The term "work" can be used in at least two ways. On the one hand, it can refer unspecifically to the product of aesthetic labour. If 'work' is understood in this way, both compositions and their interpretations, both improvisations and recordings are 'works'. On the other hand, the term 'musical work' can also mean the product of the composer (or several people who have written it) - a product that exists in such a way that it is made to speak in and through musical interpretations that can be more or less in keeping with the spirit of the work. It is the second concept of the work that I have in mind at this point. This concept of the work is a relatively recent invention.
It has only existed as an independent mode of existence for music since around the time of Beethoven. The tradition before Beethoven was not yet able to understand the activity of composing in such a way that it produced musical works in today's sense. Baroque composers did not necessarily see it as an encroachment on their artistic authority when third parties rewrote their musical text and continued to work on it. When we praise the power of Bach's or Handel's musical works today, we are looking at them from the perspective of a musical practice that certainly represents a major departure from its time. The musical work is the product of the activity of composers, is recorded in a score and is made to speak in and through musical interpretations (simply: the playing of this score).
How does jazz relate to the work? Of course, there are analogues to musical works in some musical practices of jazz. This applies not only to the musicians of the third stream, which means crossing the border between jazz and new music (Anthony Braxton is particularly relevant here), but also to past and more recent big band compositions (I am thinking here of the compositions of Maria Schneider or Bob Mintzer, for example). It should be noted that in many cases of classical big band music (and here I am thinking primarily of Duke Ellington) the idea of faithfulness to the original was not particularly relevant; as the American music philosopher Andrew Kania has shown, Ellington understood the notation primarily as a practical aid and often wrote passages of the scores to suit his current band members. It should also be noted that elements and aspects of improvisation can be found in the vast majority of jazz scores.
However, I would like to emphasise that, unlike in the classical music tradition, works are not paradigmatic for jazz. This can be shown by a paradigmatic practice of jazz itself, the so-called playing of standards (the movable canon of jazz; on the wonderful CD 'The Good View' by Peter Weiss, Skylark, for example, belongs to this canon, as do several other pieces). Standards only appear to be 'works'. Some Anglo-American music philosophers (such as Stephen Davies) have argued that standards are 'thin' works. This seems to be supported by the fact that different jazz musicians can play one and the same standard; Autumn Leaves is played by both Chick Corea and Jacky Terrason. Talking about jazz standards as 'thin' works interprets this fact in such a way that there is a common basis on which both musicians orientate themselves and which makes their musical performances those of the corresponding standard. It is obvious to understand the musical text, the so-called lead sheet, which can be found in real books (compendia of jazz standards) as the basis. To take this analogy with the work further: just as speed and phrasing cannot be specified precisely in conventional scores in classical music (they are approximate indications that are concretised through practice), the more precise voicings in jazz, i.e. which notes of the corresponding scale I use in the specified chord, are also not clearly defined.
The fact that jazz works with 'thin' works would then mean the following: If most scores in classical music define many characteristics of a work (and violating these definitions means no longer playing the work itself or at least making a mistake), 'scores' in jazz only define a few characteristics of the corresponding work. To visualise this: The former would be something like fully developed drawings, the latter sketches limited to the bare minimum.
The problem with the thesis that standards are 'thin' works that go hand in hand with correspondingly 'thin' scores is, in my opinion, that it is not very plausible. Unlike when playing a score, when playing a jazz standard you have not already made a mistake or stopped playing this standard if you play something other than what is notated. It is therefore not the case that improvisation on a jazz standard only concerns aspects that are not clearly notated (such as the question of whether to add a ninth or an undecimal to a minor chord). It is common, for example, to replace the dominant in a conventional II-V-I connection, such as Cm7, F7, Bbmaj7, with a functionally harmonically equivalent chord in the form of a tritone substitution (i.e. Cm7, B7, Bbmaj7) - or to make other, sometimes more extensive reharmonisations. Anyone who starts to do this with a Beethoven piano sonata, on the other hand, is no longer playing the corresponding piano sonata - he or she is improvising on it. In jazz, this goes even further: even the functional harmonic relationships are often completely redefined when advanced musicians play together and often even abandoned (as in modal playing), as long as the form of the standard somehow remains in play (e.g. you arrive at the tonic after the joint musical movement).
If you play Autumn Leaves in a key other than G minor, in a tempo other than 'medium', if you base it on a bossa nova rhythm instead of a swing feel and if you reharmonise its harmonic structure in favour of certain progressions or even colour tones in individual harmonies and also play the melody in a completely different phrasing, with additions, omissions, in a completely different rhythm etc., you have not already stopped playing the corresponding standard because of this. And the fact that this is not sacrilege in jazz is because no works are played when playing standards as the paradigmatic type of jazz music.
To 'do justice' to a standard must then mean something quite different from doing justice to a work in an interpretation. To play a standard appropriately means, against the background of a tradition of playing this standard, to do something unique and at the same time aesthetically powerful with it. This also has to do with the fact that lead sheets are usually not notations by the composers of the standards, but rather transcriptions of historically influential recordings of the standard, reduced to a few details. In a way, they are snapshots of something that is actually in flux. It is no wonder that advanced jazz musicians generally dispense with notation altogether and can rely primarily on their ear and habitualisation when improvising - and if I am right, this is not simply because they have memorised 'thin' scores of 'thin' works, but because they are involved in a musical practice of a completely different kind than a practice related to the interpretation of works.
These remarks, which apply to the rejection that jazz standards are works as the paradigmatic practice of jazz, bring me to the following central question: If it is the case that improvisation cannot simply be based on a musical text - how is the distinction between success and failure ensured or made comprehensible? Here I come back to the quote from Miles Davis: If something is already clear before the musical interpretation of a musical work, for example what would be a wrong note at a certain point, it is not so simple in jazz. What is a 'wrong' move in improvisation and what is an aesthetically appropriate and relevant move in playing is only determined in and by the improvisation itself.
Miles Davis' sentence can be paraphrased to say that what is and what is not a mistake is not determined before the improvisation, even before its conclusion. Whether something is a mistake in the sense of an unproductive or boring improvisation move, for example, or even in the sense of a merely wrong chord, is only determined by the performance of the improvisation itself.
It is in this spirit that Herbie Hancock tells the following anecdote in his autobiography Possibilitites:
"Miles starts playing, building up to his solo, and just as he's about to really let loose, he takes breath. And right then I play a chord that is just so wrong. I don't even know where it came from - it's the wrong chord, in the wrong place, and now it's hanging out there like a piece of rotten fruit. I think, Oh, shit. It's as if we've all been building this gorgeous house of sound, and I just accidentally put a match to it. Miles pauses for a fraction of a second, and then he plays some notes that somehow, miraculously, make my chord sound right. In that moment I believe my mouth actually fell open. What kind of alchemy was this? And then Miles just took off from there, unleashing a solo that took the song in a new direction. The crowd went absolutely crazy. [...] It took me years to fully understand what happened in that moment onstage. As soon as I played that chord I judged it. In my mind it was the 'wrong' chord. But Miles never judged it - he just heard it as a sound that had happened, and he instantly took it on as a challenge, a question of How can I integrate that chord into everything else we're doing? And because he didn't judge it, he was able to run with it, to turn it into something amazing."
what he himself played after Hancock's supposed mistake. From this, a decisive insight can be gained regarding the tense of jazz - and also an insight regarding the question of the error in jazz. It is this: later actions within the framework of an improvisation change the meaning of earlier actions. Whether I repeat a certain melodic phrase, move it to a different key, modify its rhythm or develop it afterwards as a spelling out of the colours of the underlying harmony makes all the difference. Bill Evans got it right: Jazz is not a prospective art that uses a blueprint to structure the musical event in advance, but a retrospective art.
Even if fragments of something played earlier appear in improvisation, and even if an improvisation is composed solely of fragments that can all be found in the improviser's earlier playing (licks, etc.), it is not the case that its aesthetic meaning and thus its aesthetic unity (however fragmented and thwarted) is already determined before it is performed
Already determined before its realisation. Improvisation does not mean assembling something from a given vocabulary. Improvisation is not a composition of previously available material - i.e. a mere recombination or addition - any more than it is the rattling off of a previously determined path.
Without wishing to level out the difference between improvisation and interpretation, I would like to point out that a certain moment of improvisation can also illuminate an important dimension of interpretation. My basic idea here is this: Just as the elements of improvisation determine each other in a retrospective relationship (the later in each case further determines the earlier in its meaning), so do different musical interpretations of a work relate to each other. With the completion of the musical text, not everything is said in a conventional composition - the work must be made to speak through the interpretation. And interpretations do not only refer to the musical text, but also have a relationship of succession; the history of interpretation is not irrelevant to the works. Interpretations allow the work to be heard in a new and different way. What it means to do aesthetic justice to the work is not already clear before the interpretation. The history of interpretations of a work would be quite meaningless if one did not assume that there is some kind of development here that is of aesthetic relevance.
Music is an art form that, in paradigmatic cases, realises its own stubborn success in such a way that it has to ignite in the moment and from the moment. In jazz, this happens to a certain extent without a net or double bottom, because there is no score to point to (which is not a value judgement with regard to classical music).
Jazz lives in and from its vital live improvisation. These are dependent on places where they can take place. The Jazz-Schmiede in Düsseldorf is one of these special places.
Professor Dr Daniel Martin Feige teaches at the 'Staatliche Akademie der Bildenden Künste' Stuttgart as Professor of Philosophy and Aesthetics. With his 'Philosophy of Jazz' (Berlin 2014), Daniel M. Feige has - according to one review - finally provided "jazz in Germany with an intellectual forum". The article on 'The power of interpretation. The temporal logic of interpretation' was written in its present form especially for this Jazz-Schmiede commemorative publication. Ten years ago, Daniel Martin Feige contributed an essay entitled 'Jazz as living music' to the former commemorative publication. We would like to take this opportunity to express our sincere thanks for the author's repeated, friendly and generous co-operation!
