Jeff Schwartz
April 1996

1. Is jazz structured like a language?

It is widely believed by performers and scholars that jazz is like a language, as exemplified by the
famous quotation attributed to Lester Young: "A solo should tell a story." Paul Berliner's recent
study of how jazz musicians learn their art, Thinking in Jazz, relies on language acquisition
models, and constantly refers to improvisational skills as "vocabulary." Thomas Owens's book
Bebop also is informed by a linguistic model. Owens catalogs motifs from Charlie Parker's
playing (30-40) and shows how they formed a common vocabulary which defined bebop for
other players: Sonny Stitt (47) and Cannonball Adderley (55-56) in particular.

Owens's earlier dissertation on Parker is certainly the most impressive work of jazz scholarship
to date. He has transcribed every note Parker ever recorded and developed a generative grammar
of Parker's improvising: what Parker's improvisational vocabulary was, and what syntactical
rules applied to its use. Owens's work here anticipates that of David Cope, who has developed
similar grammars for various composers and converted them to computer programs, so that
Cope's computer can produce endless fake Joplin rags and Mozart piano sonatas.

Obviously, this is important work, but in the case of jazz improvisation, it is not enough. The
language metaphor has not been sufficiently examined. Owens doesn't theorize his method at all,
and Berliner only cites Alfred Lord's The Singer of Tales. In the musicological tradition, this is
not unusual, but it is not acceptable in a cultural studies context.

The best attempt to define the relation of jazz studies and linguistics is Perlman and Greenblatt's
essay "Miles Davis Meets Noam Chomsky." Like Owens, they identify motifs and discuss how
songs' harmonic form and players' personal taste govern their combination. Also like Owens,
their work is clearly defined by Chomsky's concept of generative grammar: that it is possible to
develop a complete, logical explanatory system.

However, they do finally, acknowledge that jazz cannot be fully grammatically mapped
(181-182), as does Berliner (205, 249), though in neither text do the authors see this as requiring
them to rethink their relation to the linguistic model.

It is telling that, while Miles Davis appears in the title of Perlman and Greenblatt's article, his
playing is not analyzed, because Davis was not a formulaic player. The dominance of the
Chomskian linguistic model in jazz studies promotes the study of players whose work fits well
with the model, and encourages student musicians to develop in similar ways, both of which fit
well with the thriving neo-conservative movement in jazz.

In the remainder of this essay, I attempt to trouble this model by establishing a relation between
bebop performance practices and Derridian deconstruction, particular as reformulated by Gayatri
Spivak and Drucilla Cornell. Much of this work has already been carried out in articles by Ingrid
Monson, Gary Tomlinson, and Rob Walser, all of which significantly center on the music of
Miles Davis. However, their work relies primarily on Henry Louis Gates's concept of
signifyin(g). While this is a crucial concept, particularly for the study of African-American music
and I will return to it, I will deal primarily with deconstruction, in order to concentrate on formal
characteristics of musical texts and to insist on the continuing importance of deconstruction in
cultural studies.

While the Chomskian approach to jazz study has created an environment for neo-conservative
players, my sympathies are with the avant-garde. If jazz is structured like a language, it is not
one governed by prescriptive or generative rules, but one resembling an experimental poetics,
which values the invention of new words, new structures, and forms of reflexivity and
auto-critique.

This is why Cornell's renaming of deconstruction as "the philosophy of the limit" is significant.
There is a widespread misperception that deconstruction is a negative procedure, an
un-construction or destruction. I frequently hear colleagues speak of deconstructing power,
racism, sexism, homophobia, etc., as if that meant that those things would then be gone. This is
clearly a misunderstanding, but a pervasive one. Spivak repeatedly insists in an interview on the
problem of essentialism in feminist theory that deconstructive critique does not dismantle its
object, but rather recognizes its "unavoidable usefulness" and its "danger" (129, also 134).
Deconstruction is about the necessity and impossibility of metadiscursive concepts such as
ontology and essentialism. The understanding of harmony in bebop and post-bop improvisation
must work along these same lines. I will demonstrate this in two ways: first, by arguing that
bebop increased the complexity of jazz harmony to the point that it could no longer serve a
prescriptive function, defining certain "right" and "wrong" notes, and second, by examining how
three alto saxophonists apply this freedom while remaining within song form and the tradition of
jazz. In bebop, the logic of harmony is carried to a limit where it can no longer dictate what is
played, but harmony is not abandoned. Indeed, it is more important than ever.

2. Chords and Scales.

To begin, a favorite phrase of Thelonious Monk's, usually used for introductions and endings:

This figure is easily described using the standard framework of chord-scale relationships: it's a
whole tone scale played over a dominant seventh chord, but this description says little about why
this riff sounds interesting.

The right hand line can be considered in two ways, horizontally and vertically. Horizontally, the
relationship of the melody notes to the underlying harmony is: 9, 3, b5, #5, 7, 1, repeating in
higher octaves. This line navigates a limit of the chord, cycling from notes which clearly belong
to the material expected to be played (1, 3, 7, 9) and those more dissonant (the altered fifths).
Since the whole tone scale is symmetrical, it frustrates cadential expectations. This pattern repeats
the same ambiguous movement throughout.

More interesting is the vertical character of the line, it can be read as arpeggiating a Faug9#11
chord. This exotic extension of the marked F7 is an example of the variety of chord extensions
and substitutions which bebop brought to jazz. Bebop pianists began adding upper intervals to
chords, and often chromatically altering them for coloristic or melodic purposes. Playing a chord
exactly as written would strike a bebop pianist as hopelessly corny. The more bizarre the
substitutions and extensions employed, the hipper the player is.

Here is a C7 chord, and two ways of interpreting it.

Neither of these voicings include the natural eleventh. When it is used, the major third is usually
omitted, and chords are usually voiced mostly in fourths. Here are some typical guitar chords
with elevenths.

Looking at these last two examples, it becomes clear that jazz theory can give no authoritative
answer as to what notes one can and cannot play over a given chord. While prescriptive
chord/scale relationships are a useful tool for teaching beginners, bebop performance practice
deconstructs them. While the C mixolydian scale is recommended for use over the C7 chord,
these extensions and alterations make it possible for improvisers to justify any combination of
notes. For example, the top three notes of the C7b9#11 chord, plus the E which is the third of
the C triad, spell a Gb7, and other combinations of notes from this chord imply other tonalities: E
diminished, C augmented, etc. Each of these can be used as a substitution by the soloist and
accompanists. Combining the notes of the scales usually used over the Gb7 and C7 chords yields
the entire chromatic scale. Without delving too deeply into bebop harmony, the system has
already deconstructed itself. It has already provided a way to explain the use of any note over any
chord by a soloist and the use of any combination of notes to express any chord by an
accompanist.

If this is true, then what prevents a player from performing at random? Without a prescriptive
system, how is chaos avoided? What defines a song if the form of the song does not dictate its
performance?

3. Three Alto Saxophonists

To begin to show how signification at the limit of harmony differs from chaos, I have chosen
examples from improvised solos by three alto saxophonists: Charlie Parker, Eric Dolphy, and
Anthony Braxton. Each of these players navigates the boundary between inside and outside,
between what the laws of Western harmony and the traditions of African-American music allow
and something other.

My first example comes from Charlie Parker's recording of "Billie's Bounce" from his first
recording session under his own name, in 1945. As previously mentioned, Parker was the
leading figure in defining the bebop style. This figure is one which reoccurs frequently in his
playing as a way of navigating the ubiquitous ii-V-I progression.

While contemporary improvisation primers recommend the G Dorian and C Mixolydian scales
(the same notes: C D E F G A Bb, but starting on G for the G Dorian scale) over a ii-V-I
progression in F, Parker uses nearly all the notes of the chromatic scale in this phrase. However,
he keeps very close to the basic chord changes throughout. Each bar can be seen as an
ornamented arpeggio of the basic chord. In the first measure, the chromatic notes clearly function
to lead up to very consonant, "inside," notes. The F# is an ornament to the G Bb D F arpeggio,
which explicitly spells the basic Gm7 chord, and then Bird descends from the F through E and
D, each of which is led into chromatically from a whole step below. In bar two, all the notes
except the Db are from the C Mixolydian, and the Db is the flat ninth, a common extension which
immediately settles down to the tonic C.

While Parker's rhythmic phrasing is very creative and his technical proficiency unprecedented,
his harmonic practice in this particular example is not much more complex than that of, say,
Coleman Hawkins. Parker uses extended harmonies here only to ornament lines which stay
clearly within conventional scale to chord relationships.

In the late 1950s, after Parker's innovations had become formulae, players such as Sonny
Rollins, John Coltrane, Booker Little, Freddie Hubbard, and others began further explorations.
Parker and his followers had moved the limit of harmonic sense, had shifted the ground, so that
the next generation of players could take the harmonic deconstructions of Parker et al. as the
objects of their new critiques. Rather than playing off of the song, they could play off the
expectations listeners accustomed to Parker-style jazz brought to a performance.

For example, the Eric Dolphy phrase below (recorded in 1960) clearly follows a Parker-like
rhythm for the first three bars, with a fundamentally different harmonic strategy.

In bar 2, Dolphy superimposes a C minor seventh arpeggio over the written B7. This partially
functions as a substitution for the B7, since the notes of the C minor triad: C, Eb, G, are the flat
ninth, third, and augmented fifth of the B7, all acceptable extensions. Dolphy is working in an
alternate space from the rest of the band here, developing a tangent from the original piece by
taking a fairly distant relation of the written harmony as his center. This move becomes
questionable when he adds the Bb, the seventh of the C minor seventh, at the end of bar two and
the start of bar three. Playing the Bb (or A#), the major seventh in the key of B against the B7
chord, which functionally must contain the dominant seventh A, is not acceptable, so Dolphy
concludes bar three with a Parker-like phrase that clearly relates to the B7 tonality. He resolves
his earlier use of the augmented fifth G by bringing it up through more consonant intervals: the
sixth, G#, and the seventh, A, then using the fifth and sixth to begin the long glissando of bars
four and five, a figure whose function is more gestural and timbral than harmonic.

In this brief excerpt, Dolphy asks a question about harmony, "Can I play a Cm7 over a B7?" and
answers it, "Yes, but only in certain ways." This is clearly a form of limit-work. Rather than
obeying a harmonic system, Dolphy is testing the boundaries of that system. The pleasure of his
playing here comes from its pushing against the boundary of harmonic sense.

Anthony Braxton represents a still later generation of improvisers, one influenced by Parker and
Dolphy. My final excerpt is from his solo on a performance of the standard "(There is) No
Greater Love" with the avant-garde collective Circle in 1972. While his rhythms are somewhat
Parker-like and his use of wide intervals reminiscent of Dolphy, his harmonic thinking follows a
different path.

It is difficult to find any logic to Braxton's note choices from a scalar or chordal viewpoint. For
each note that relates to the underlying harmony in a conventional way there are several that have
no business being there at all.

There are two complimentary ways to explain what Braxton is doing in this passage. First, he
may be selecting notes from a coloristic viewpoint, experimenting with the sound of different
flavors of "wrong" notes, or he may be thinking in terms of the intervallic relations within his
improvised line and not of the supporting harmony at all. Second, and more significantly given
the thesis of this paper, Circle's performance of "(There is) No Greater Love" is an extension of
the "silent theme" tradition in jazz.

In the "silent theme" tradition, musicians improvise on the harmonic structure of a song whose
melody is never played (often to avoid paying royalties to the original composer). What Circle
does to "No Greater Love" is an extension of this technique resulting from the deconstruction of
harmony begun by bebop (and most clearly defined by the Miles Davis Quintet of the mid to late
1960s), what might be called the "silent form" technique.

In Circle's performance, none of the players may be directly expressing the written form of the
tune, instead playing altered and substitute chords and rhythmic figures which contradict the 4/4
tempo and thirty-two bar structure. However, the band is still thinking of "No Greater Love" and
shaping their performance in response to it. Their performance is a critical reading of the text
which pushes the boundaries of the text which functions as the absent center. This clearly evokes
the practices of deconstructive criticism.

4. Text and Tradition

However, as I stated in my introduction, it is Henry Louis Gates's post-structuralist
interpretation of the African-American rhetorical practice of signifyin(g), and not deconstruction
per se which has gained favor with jazz critics. While deconstruction is somewhat open to
charges of ignoring context and history (a debate I will not engage here), signifyin(g) is directly
tied to those things. My readings of musical excerpts above have concentrated on how jazz
soloing, at its best, is a form of deconstructive analysis of harmony, while jazz criticism centered
around the idea of signifyin(g), particularly that of Walser and Monson, has put as much
emphasis on jazz soloists' critiques of lyrics and earlier performances. If one plays "My Funny
Valentine," that performance will likely have a relation to Miles Davis's classic recordings of the
song, to the lyrics (even if they are not sung), and to the structure of the piece.

What distinguishes signifyin(g) from the purely formal way I have been using deconstruction is
the centrality of community. For a soloist to signify in Gates's sense requires an engagement
with codes with which the audience is familiar. Even in an avant-garde performance such as that
of Circle, there is a commitment to a tradition of jazz and to the group as a community. It is this
commitment alone which keeps their performance of "No Greater Love" from devolving into
chaos.

In conclusion, it is this potential of jazz to signify, to perform deconstructive critique, which is
missing from much contemporary jazz pedagogy. Improvisation becomes a merely formal
exercise is it is conceived as happening within borders instead of on them.

Works Cited

Abersold, Jamey. The Charlie Parker Omnibook. New York: Atlantic Music Corp., 1978.

Bergson, Katherine and Philip V. Bohlman, eds. Disciplining Music: Musicology and its
Canons. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1992.

Berliner, Paul F.. Thinking in Jazz: The Infinite Art of Improvisation. Chicago: U of Chicago P,
1994.

Circle. "(There is) No Greater Love." The Paris Concert. Oslo: ECM Records, 1972.

Cope. David. Computers and Musical Style. Madison, WS: A-R Editions, 1991.

Cornell, Drucilla. The Philosophy of the Limit. New York: Routledge, 1992.

Gabbard, Krin, ed. Jazz Among the Discourses. Durham, NC: Duke UP, 1995.

Gates, Henry Louis. The Signifying Monkey: A Theory of African-American Literary Criticism.
New York: Oxford UP, 1988.

Isacoff, Stuart. Thelonious Monk. New York: Amsco Pub., 1988.

Midema, Harry. Alto Sax: A History of the Jazz Alto Saxophone via Recorded Solos. Chicago:
Maher Pub., 1974.

Monson, Ingrid. "Doubleness and Jazz Improvisation: Irony, Parody, and Ethnomusicology."
Critical Inquiry 20 (Winter 1994): 283-313.

Nelson, Oliver. "Alto-itis." Screamin' the Blues. New York: Prestige Records, 1960.

Owens, Thomas. Charlie Parker: Techniques of Improvisation. Ph.D. dissertation, UCLA. 2
vols. 1974.

---. Bebop: The Music and its Players. New York: Oxford UP, 1995.

Parker, Charlie. "Billie's Bounce." Bird: The Savoy Original Master Takes. New York: Savoy
Jazz, 1988.

Perlman, Alan M. and Daniel Greenblatt. "Miles Davis Meets Noam Chomsky: Some
Observations on Jazz Improvisation and Language Structure." in Steiner. 167-183.

Spivak, Gayatri. "In a Word. Interview." with Ellen Rooney. differences 1:2 (Spring 1988):
124-156.

Steiner, Wendy, ed. The Sign in Music and Literature. Austin: U of TX P, 1981.

Tomlinson, Gary. "Cultural Dialogics and Jazz: A White Historian Signifies." in Bergson and
Bohlman. 64-94.

Walser, Robert. "`Out of Notes:' Signification, Interpretation, and the Problem of Miles Davis."
in Gabbard. 165-188.

Référence: http://www.gslis.utexas.edu/~jeffs/bebop.html