In the Course of Performance: Studies in the World of Musical Improvisation (Chicago Studies in Ethnomusicology) [Paperback] Review

An excellent set of articles on improvisation, with one on the psychology of improv, and articles on Gamelan, Arabic music, jazz, Cantonese opera, Latin dance, Hindustani music, children's games.
Improvisation is not the same everywhere.And there are differences from culture to culture, and performer to performer, in just how much of a performance is improvised.These essays address these and other issues.

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In the Course of Performance is the first book in decades to illustrate and explain the practices and processes of musical improvisation. Improvisation, by its very nature, seems to resist interpretation or elucidation. This difficulty may account for the very few attempts scholars have made to provide a general guide to this elusive subject. With contributions by seventeen scholars and improvisers, In the Course of Performance offers a history of research on improvisation and an overview of the different approaches to the topic that can be used, ranging from cognitive study to detailed musical analysis. Such diverse genres as Italian lyrical singing, modal jazz, Indian classical music, Javanese gamelan, and African-American girls' singing games are examined. The most comprehensive guide to the understanding of musical improvisation available, In the Course of Performance will be indispensable to anyone attracted to this fascinating art.

Contributors are Stephen Blum, Sau Y. Chan, Jody Cormack, Valerie Woodring Goertzen, Lawrence Gushee, Eve Harwood, Tullia Magrini, Peter Manuel, Ingrid Monson, Bruno Nettl, Jeff Pressing, Ali Jihad Racy, Ronald Riddle, Stephen Slawek, Chris Smith, R. Anderson Sutton, and T. Viswanathan.

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Bebop : Third Ear - The Essential Listening Companion [Paperback] Review

This is a handy compendium of introductory overviews, musical biographies, and rated record recommendations for all of Bebop's main and minor players, but unfortunately it doesn't stop there. Dozens of entries for musicians whom you'd never think to connect with Bebop (Lew Tabackin? Marian McPartland?) merely serve to unnecessarily complicate the issues and probably confuse newcomers. That said, Scott Yanow is a knowledgeable reviewer and writer, and this guide will be a useful starting point for jazz fans who want to explore more deeply the musical essence of modern jazz.

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On the heels of swing, bebop lifted jazz from the dance floor into an art form powered by virtuoso players. This engaging collection of essays, biographies and reviews by veteran jazz journalist Scott Yanow probes the lives and revolutionary works of more than 500 great beboppers, including the giants: Charlie Parker, Dizzie Gillespie, Bud Powell, Max Roach and Thelonious Monk. The guide also explores key artists such as Sarah Vaughan, Charlie Christian and the young Miles Davis, plus such later figures as Joe Pass and Barry Harris.

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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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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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Sassy: The Life Of Sarah Vaughan [Paperback] Review

While Gourse's biography of the Divine One traverses Vaughan's life decade by decade, it does so in a very cursory way, so if you know anything at all of Vaughan's life, you've probably already been exposed to most of the contents of this biography.While this book is decent in its cursory examination of Vaughan's life and her wonderful contributions to American and world music, one doesn't go away from this book feeling he or she has encountered Vaughan on an intimate level...the Devil's in the details, but it seems as though many of the details that would have allowed for an ampler and fuller study of Vaughan on a quotidian level were not provided.There are some interesting photographs of Vaughan, her family, her friends, her coterie of fans and colleagues, included in this biography, but those pictures should have been in bold, beautiful color, full pages, allowing the reader to see the vagaries of Vaughan in all her glamour, sophistication, and wit.One will learn more from listening to Vaughan's vast recording history.Still, this book will be of interest to Sass's devoted fans.

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Free Jazz (The Roots of Jazz) [Paperback] Review

This is a great book, but, thankfully, it differs from other books on the same topic.This is a fairly in-depth analysis of the musicians' MUSIC.Don't expect long anecdotes about Cecil Taylor's life or John Coltrane's spirituality or about revolutionary politics or whatever.Jost feels that this stuff is abundant in others' books and accounts of the "free" movement, and that it has distracted us from the music itself.That's what I love about this book; the author isn't afraid to dig deep into the music.Also, most of his recorded examples are easy to find (or at least available somewhere).There isn't any of that "one time in 61' I saw Ornette play the harmonica in this pub in sweden and....".This book makes this seemingly difficult music more accessible...check it out.

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When originally published in 1974, Ekkehard Jost's Free Jazz was the first examination of the new music of such innovators as Sun Ra, Ornette Coleman, and the Art Ensemble of Chicago. Jost studied the music (not the lives) of a selection of musicians-black jazz artists who pioneered a new form of African American music-to arrive at the most in-depth look so far at the phenomenon of free jazz. Free jazz is not absolutely free, as Jost is at pains to point out. As each convention of the old music was abrogated, new conventions arose, whether they were rhythmic, melodic, tonal, or compositional, Coltrane's move into modal music was governed by different principles than Coleman's melodic excursions; Sun Ra's attention to texture and rhythm created an entirely different big bang sound then had Mingus's attention to form.In Free Jazz, Jost paints a group of ten "style portraits"-musical images of the styles and techniques of John Coltrane, Charles Mingus, Ornette Coleman, Cecil Taylor, Archie Shepp, Albert Ayler, Don Cherry, the Chicago-based AACM (which included Richard Abrams, Joseph Jarman, Roscoe Mitchell, Lester Bowie, Anthony Braxton, and the Art Ensemble of Chicago), and Sun Ra and his Arkestra. As a composite picture of some of the most compelling music of the 1960s and '70s, Free Jazz is unequalled for the depth and clarity of its analysis and its even handed approach.

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