Saying Something: Jazz Improvisation and Interaction (Chicago Studies in Ethnomusicology) [Paperback] Review

Ingrid Monson's volume, "Saying Something: Jazz Improvisation and Interaction" is a somewhat lesser known work following in the shadow of Paul Berliner, whom Monson pays ample tribute to. Her volume is intended to say something to all of its overlapping audiences, and it succeeds well, using interviews and close musical readings of very important pieces. There is much to say about the musical analyses, but I choose here to concentrate on the less formalistic aspects. That job will remain for another reviewer.

Monson claims that when "a musician successfully reaches a discerning audience, moves it members to applaud or shout praises, raises the energy to dramatic proportions, and leaves a sonorous memory that lingers long after, he or she has moved beyond technical experiences....and into the realm of 'saying something.'" But what does this mean? For Monson, this means to make discourse, and multivalently, to make community.

Monson moves towards thinking of music making as a community-building function, rather than communities organized by race, class, geography, or gender. In fact, those categories are attended to in terms of music, rather than the other way around. Music performance, and well as repetoire, promotion, and booking agents, create imagined communities between performers. Her approach to community-building is based in Anthony Giddens (1984) rather than Benedict Anderson (1991).

In outlining the special contributions of the rhythmic and accompaniment sections of the jazz ensemble, Monson draws special attention not only to the specifics of drum, piano, and bass, but also to the word "listening." For her, listening means "being able to respond to musical opportunities or to correct mistakes." It is an active term. Musicians must pay attention to what is going on if they "expect to say things that make sense to the other participants." Moreover, since improvisation is key to jazz performance, listening is a prerequisite for playing to the moment within a musical narrative. In the free play of conversation/improvisation, the discursive conditions may change spontaenously and unexpectedly from moment to moment, since no one person authors the narrative alone. In addition, to be told that one "doesn't listen" is a paramount challenge and insult in jazz performance. It means the performer isn't communicating with other performers, but ineptly (at best) or arrogantly (at worst) attempting to control the entire parameters of the discourse. Sociability and interaction is at the core of collective improvisation, and if it is denied, the conversation is foreclosed.

But what of the statements themselves? How do jazz phrases and sentences work in what we might call improvisation/conversation? Monson takes a page from Bakhtin (1981), discussing the notion of internal dialogism, in two aspects: 1) multiple semantic meanings that change and are changed according to the shifting demands of the relationship between the meanings and the cultural context that makes meaning sensible. 2) the "temporal context" in which things are expressed in relation to the history of other discourses.Statements are caught between two different forces of language (centripetal and centrifugal forces) Utterances are caught signifying towards the unitary center (centripetal) and away from it in their particularity (centrifugal). Thus each statement is a torn contradiction inside, and also most meaningful at the same time. A "tension-filled unity." Others have race-d and extended this concept, such as African-American poet Elizabeth Alexander, who contend for a space that moves away from bifucated division and towards an space of "myriad particulars of identity."(1992) Notice how compatible this dualistic tension formula is with W.E.B Dubois's notion of the African-American "double consciousness." These racial aspects of hegemony in both in the history of jazz reception and in the interactions of jazz musicians with others who talk about jazz and "music" are highlighted in Monson's work.

When jazz musicians talk about music departments, they recognize that the words "music department" means "Western Classical Music department." Western Classical form has been anointed at the recognized highest status, and therefore stands for (and crowding out) the space in which the term music has institutional meaning. So when jazz musicians request not to be pigeonholed by the term "jazz," we must recognize that they are speaking to the cultural politics of labeling, or naming..of telling, and of listening. Musicians recognize Foucault's truth that 'discourses construct the objects of which they speak', rather than represent them in some naive, simplistic way. At the same time, Monson is careful not to overstate the case of cultural theory in explaining or explicating the 'meaning of music.' If we leave the realm of the musician too often or too long, we are no longer listening--no longer able to respond in the free play of conversation/improvisation.

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Product Description:
This fresh look at the neglected rhythm section in jazz ensembles shows that the improvisational interplay among drums, bass, and piano is just as innovative, complex, and spontaneous as the solo. Ingrid Monson juxtaposes musicians' talk and musical examples to ask how musicians go about "saying something" through music in a way that articulates identity, politics, and race. Through interviews with Jaki Byard, Richard Davis, Sir Roland Hanna, Billy Higgins, Cecil McBee, and others, she develops a perspective on jazz improvisation that has "interactiveness" at its core, in the creation of music through improvisational interaction, in the shaping of social communities and networks through music, and in the development of cultural meanings and ideologies that inform the interpretation of jazz in twentieth-century American cultural life.

Replete with original musical transcriptions, this broad view of jazz improvisation and its emotional and cultural power will have a wide audience among jazz fans, ethnomusicologists, and anthropologists.

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