Jazz Improvisation: an Expression of the Immediate

            Before taking this class on the history of jazz, I had viewed the jazz solo as an extension of the principles of the cadenza in classical European music. The cadenza is a solo designed to show off the technical and expressive capability of the musician. However, the cadenza is pre-written and does not reflect the immediacy of the performance. This class allowed me to understand improvisation in jazz not as a musical extension of the soloist but as a reflection of the present relationship between the musician and audience.

            Jazz developed without any intention of performance in the recital-hall format. It took until 1938 until jazz would premier at Carnegie Hall in a performance by bandleader Benny Goodman (Gioia 152). Jazz music instead relies on the dialogic relationship between performer and audience. In a small space like a Harlem rent party or a dance club like The Savoy, musicians constantly communicated with the audience by observing their dancing. A discussion of improvisation would be incomplete without considering this dialogism because improvisation developed as a feedback response to the audience. As an example, stride pianist James P. Johnson had a diverse repertoire including popular works as well as classical pieces. This versatility allowed him to adapt to the audience by improvising around themes which drew positive responses—whether a ragged-up Chopin Nocturne or Johnson’s “Carolina Shout” (Gioia 97).

            Improvisational expression in jazz originates in the blues of the 19^th century American South. The blues, along with the spiritual, developed as a group musical format intended for collective expression, as opposed to the lecture style recital seen in European classical styles which propagates the expression only of those on stage (lecture 1/17/2013). In his autobiography, Miles Davis wrote of how he infused his revolutionary album Kind of Blue with Arkansas blues and gospel in order to create the feeling of walking along a dark Arkansas road as a child (Davis 234). Along with its expressive roots, Jazz inherits the idea of preset chord sequences from the blues. The blues uses formats like the “12-bar blues” which systematically modulates between I, IV, and V chords (Gioia 14). This structure confines each part just enough so that multiple musicians can simultaneously improvise while retaining overall coherence. The resulting music is a direct and immediate expression of human communication itself—an element of humanity which pre-scored music cannot fully address.

            Bebop improvisation revolves around “scrambled” lines, complex runs with the functional intension of preventing imitators from appropriating the music as whites did during the swing era (lecture 2/21/2013). Because the solos cannot be imitated, each performance is spontaneous and is unique to its location and time. Bebop developed in Minton’s Playhouse, a Harlem club which Miles Davis described as a “music laboratory” (Davis 54). Since most of the patrons were musicians themselves, the performers were forced to adhere to the standards of the most informed critics—Miles recalls a patron beating up a man for playing badly (Davis 54). The combination of the small physical space of Harlem bebop bars and the involvement of the audience summons the image of a soloist playing and an audience yelling back in a constant dialogic relationship.