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Jazz Improvisation : A Mimetic Art? Author(s): Garry Hagberg Source: Revue Internationale de Philosophie, Vol. 60, No. 238 (4), Philosophie de la musique/

Philosophy of music (dcembre 2006), pp. 469-485Published by: Revue Internationale de PhilosophieStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/23955748Accessed: 09-05-2015 23:35 UTC

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Jazz Improvisation : A Mimetic Art ?

Garry Hagberg

There are numerous art forms in which the representational content of the works

in question is readily apparent. The art of jazz improvisation is not among them.

But the fact that such representational content is not immediately apparent, is

not as it were on the surface of the work, should not blind us to the deeper fact

that this distinctive form of art is, in the senses that Plato and Aristotle use the

word, mimetic. And the fact that this mimetic aspect is not readily evident is

one part of what makes jazz improvisation an art possessing a subtlety and

layered complexity that is not always appreciated. But to begin to articulate

these layers, we must first ask what is meant by representational content, by mimesis.

In Plato's Republic1 we encounter this concept as early as Book III, in which

he describes the danger presented by the work of those poets who depict the gods in an unflattering light (and thus establish models for bad behavior) and who

describe the afterlife as a dank underworld in which souls shriek like bats

hanging in a darkened cave (and thus inculcate cowardice rather than an after

life-embracing courage in our soldiers). Plato's infamous answer to the threat

posed by such morally corrosive images is an unrelenting censorship, allowing into the Republic only those few poetic images that are, in his narrowly defined

terms, character-building. For our purposes, the conceptual linkages are fairly clear: the representational or mimetic content is given by the poet's description of what we might call a way of being, and that depicted way of being, regarded as a moral influence, is subject to evaluation vis--vis our social interests. It is

not long after this discussion that Plato turns to music in particular, where he

expresses his particular fear of this art form for its ability to bypass the inter

mediary of language and make its mark directly upon the soul.2 But it is what

1. Plato, Republic, trans. Sterling and Scott (New York: Norton, 1985). 2. Republic, pp. 95-100.


470 Garry Hagberg

is presumed about music, prior to the expression of this fear, that is perhaps of

special interest for us.

If the soul is imprinted directly by music, i.e. without the mediation of language, then it, as a kind of inner tabula rasa (to borrow a term from Locke's much later

philosophy3) has linguistically-unmediated content inscribed upon it. That

content, if Plato's expressed fear is coherent at all, must then be construed as

pre-verbal content that is nevertheless of a kind that can be inscribed. This

makes music, for Plato, a kind of language, broadly speaking, and if it is a kind

of language - a musical language - then it too must be able, in a manner analo

gous to the instruments of the poets, to describe a state of affairs, or, again, a

way of being. And with these conceptual underpinnings in place, in a sense beneath or behind Plato's discussion, it is thus no surprise that Plato turns to

his examination of the musical modes and their intrinsic correspondences to moral

states of being. But before proceeding to that, we need to sort out what may

initially appear a water-muddying conflation.

The poets are, in Plato's mind, guilty of an artistic crime of description, while the musicians, it might be argued, not only are not, but could not be, guilty of the same. Indeed, by Plato's own account we see that they bypass what he thinks

of as the intermediary of language, so how could description of any kind be in

play? Technically, perhaps, it isn't, or it is so only metaphorically. But its close

relative, depiction, is : the music as played makes a sonic image of a determi

nate way or state of being, and thus sonic depiction plays the part (in the account

of representational content we are pursuing) played by description in the work of the poets. That these are very close relatives is further evidenced by our quite naturally speaking of a painter producing a work that perfectly describes (as well as depicts) a scene, or, more importantly, a person's attitude or mood. In short, the representational content of a poem is given in a description (that, if suffi

ciently evocative in terms of its imagery, we will also call a depiction); in a

painting, that content is given by depiction (which, in some cases, we also call

description); in music - and here we take a step forward - that content is given by a sonic image that we may call variously a depiction of a state of affairs

(think of Ellington, and Marsalis after him, depicting the sound of a train's

locomotion) or a description of a state of mind (think of Miles Davis' descrip tion of a state of human fragility with muted upward wide-interval skips with

imprecise and broken attacks). We might say that the representational content

3. John Locke, Essay Concerning Human Understanding, ed. P. H. Nidditch (Oxford : Oxford

University Press, 1975). .


Jazz Improvisation : A Mimetic Art ? 471

of music, a further or more exacting comprehension of which we are pursuing,

partakes of description and depiction in its evocative power, but - as music

bypasses language and is not a visual art - reduces to neither.

Plato's discussion of the musical modes, then, fits more closely with his

discussion of poetry than one might initially think. And the representational content that brings them together Plato, again, fears as a moral force that may, under the strict control of censorship, work for good, but far more likely, for ill.

The modes Plato describes here, by virtue of their intervallic structures, are

sonic analogues of moral characters, and they thus constitute moral (or immoral)

models that inculcate behavior just as did the poems. Plato identifies a few that

have strong, confident, forthright characters (probably our Ionian, and perhaps

Lydian, although the relation between his modal nomenclature and ours is

unclear), and some that exemplify lassitude, indulgence, weakness, and so forth

(perhaps our Phrygian or - as an image of extreme decadence or unsettledness

the Locrian).

On the surface of Plato's text he is, then, discussing all of the foregoing in rela

tion to his argument for the need for censorship in his Republic and the moral

force of the arts. However, beneath that text, as we have begun to see, lies a concep tion of the representational content of art, and particularly of music, that provides the basis for understanding and articulating the ways in which jazz is a repre sentational art. And much later in Plato's book we find - although Plato himself

of course did not see it - a set of categories that presciently constitute what we

might call the first layer of the mimetic content of improvised jazz.

In his typology of governmental structures, Plato identifies the five major

categories : timocracy, oligarchy, democracy, tyranny, and aristocracy. It is often

said - and perhaps is now said with increasing frequency - that jazz improvi

sation is the art of democracy, indeed a musical celebration of American demo

cratic principles. What is striking, once one surveys the Platonic origins of our

thinking about representational content in the arts, and then his own survey of

governmental types, is that all of these types are, with a rather chiseled preci

sion, represented in jazz. In short, it is true that jazz represents democracy, but

this is only a partial truth that can, here again, blind us to a more interesting and

nuanced set of mimetic options. Timocracy, Plato indicated, is a structure within

which the love of honor is central; honor is the criterion by which we therein

judge worthiness, and the pursuit of honor is the motivational force behind poli ticians and others. A generation ago jazz saw the Modern Jazz Quartet bringing tuxedoed presentational polish, along with a far more important improvisa tional elegance of a structured, compositional style, to the classical concert


472 Garry Hagberg

stage. More recently, Anthony Braxton has presented his work as a manifesta

tion of formal designs often more in the idiom of contemporary classical music

than in the jazz tradition. (The often-heard phrase "America's classical music"

is, I would argue, itself a study in timocratic phraseology.) Oligarchy, the rule

by those who are advantageously positioned by ownership, is also reflected in

jazz's mirror : the repeated (and dubious) claims of Jelly Roll Morton to have "invented" jazz are not disinterested claims made in pursuit of historical accu

racy - or certainly not only that. Similarly, the frequently unpleasant conflict

originating in the 1980s between "uptown" and "downtown" directions of jazz performance were at bottom debates concerning the rightful "owners" of the tradition of jazz, where the issue, once settled, would provide the rightful owners with a proprietary claim to this art form's legacy and thus a correlated conferral of status - an imprimatur of historical evolution - on its owners.

Democracy, Plato said, is the rule by each member as that member enters into the collective (and is thus, incidentally, distinct from anarchy). There is a gentle irony in the fact that the celebration of jazz as representative of American demo

cracy is very often made in reference to some of the least democratic styles of the art form. Persons making such celebratory remarks are often referring to

comparatively regimented big-band music between and through the World Wars

(and not to the revolutionary bebop that was emerging in late night reaction to that regimentation and its harmonic constraints) or, more recently, to the preser vationist impulses manifest in the sound-museum of Lincoln Center curators

(rather than to the ongoing melting-pot innovations of the contemporary impro visational scene). But one can see a reflection, in tellingly distinct ways, of what Plato had in mind under this distinctively American heading, in the break

through recordings of Cecil Taylor, in those of the late Coltrane Quartet, and more recently, those of Evan Parker (to name just a few). Individuals, in Plato's

classification, fall on a continuum from the more to the less democratic, and so do these players, compared both player to player and - more interestingly, really - phase to phase or recording to recording of a single player or - more interes

ting still - one solo to the next, or one part of one solo to the next part of that same solo.

Tyranny is a regime in which one answers to the whims of a tyrant, with an

abrogation of autonomous rights as one of the givens of life's social order. It would be going too far to say that jazz's improvisation itself exemplifies this

type - that would degrade the seriousness of the political by too blithely aesthe

ticizing it. But this is not to say there are not analogies, and one does hear of some well-known ensembles where the players are - or can be - called upon



to answer, under uncomfortable if not inquisitorial circumstances, for every

single note played. Aristocracy was, for Plato, rule by the best. But this defini

tion instantly calls for an answer to the question "Best for whom ?" or "Best

by which criteria ?" Plato, of course, develops his famous answer in terms of

Philosopher-Kings. Rule by the best is meritocratic, but it was precisely when

jazz emerged as an art form independent of its more humble origins in enter

tainment that the criteria for meritocratic evaluations were clarified. The "cutting sessions" of the pre-and early-bebop era4 functioned as a kind of final exami

nation in the jazz analogue to Plato's Academy (indeed, an academy of the

street - first in Harlem on 132nd Street, and later at Minton's)5; the criteria

included an ability to play every tempo with ease from ballads to extremely rapid

bebop; to improvise coherent melodic lines, unbroken by sudden changes in the

underlying harmonic terrain, that themselves carried rich harmonic significance

beyond that straight or "inside" underlying harmony; the mastery of standard

(and growingly esoteric) repertoire; rhythmic precision, "

swing", and the ability to move ahead of or behind the beat at will, as called for by the phrase; the

ability to effortlessly employ the device of quotation (itself a measure of scho

larly depth in the music); and lastly and most importantly, the finding of an

individual "voice", a sound. These criteria do not, of course, constitute an

exhaustive list. But they are, with variations and emendations, still with us to

the present day, and they serve to reflect the meritocratic ideals of what Plato

thought of as an entirely respectable aristocracy. Our own democratic sensibi

lities may yield a knee-jerk reaction to the very idea of aristocracy, but it is

significant that we preserve so clear a reflection of one within the very art form

that is allegedly the most democratic. But again, the word is "allegedly," or

perhaps the phrase "by popular consensus" would do : the reality is that all of

the categories of Plato's typology are carried as representational content within

the art form very much in the manner that Plato first conceived mimesis.

Putting the matter this way, however, makes the art of jazz sound less complex, less subtle and nuanced, than it is. I have suggested that the claim that jazz

4. For an extraordinarily detailed and masterful account of the emergence of the be-bop style, see

Scott Deveaux, The Birth of Bebop : A Social and Musical History (Berkeley : University of

California Press, 1997). See especially, in the present connection, "College of Music : Coleman

Hawkins and the Swing Era", pp. 34-164, and Chapter 5, "The Jazzman's True Academy",

pp. 202-235. See also Rex Stuart, "The Cutting Sessions", in Reading Jazz : A Gathering of

Autobiography, Reportage, and Criticism from 1919 to Now, ed. Robert Gottlieb (New York :

Pantheon, 1996), pp. 387-392.

5. See Ralph Ellison, "Minton's", in Reading Jazz, pp. 545-554, and Dizzy Gillespie, "Minton's

Playhouse", in Reading Jazz, pp. 555-572.


474 Garry Hagberg

improvisation is democracy in music is too simple, and blinds us to the varia

tions in mimetic content (at this first level) that we have now considered. But

we cannot leave Plato until we see that this five-category typology can blind us

in much the same way, if within a more differentiated matrix of mimetic content.

The first point to make here is that these ensemble-organizational categories seem

clear from a certain distance, but with increasing magnification the lines often

become rather blurred. There are ensembles that place an aristocratic element

into any of the other types, as when Coleman Hawkins played his famous idiom

stretching solo on "Body and Soul" against a more rule-following accompa niment. A "summit" session - in which two or three of the leading or best-known

players of an instrument appear together - can constitute a battle of the oligarchs, but one raged against a background of timocratic, honor-seeking accompanists. Free improvisation can deliberately free itself from the grip not only of harmonic

and melodic constraints, but also of the demand for coherence within a demo

cracy (whereupon democracy devolves into anarchy). And so forth.

The second point to make emerges when we recall that Plato's contribution to political typology concerned not only the categories, but - perhaps more

importantly - the intrinsic dynamism, and the inherent instability, of each poli tical type (outside of his ultimately static Republic). Plato's dialogue describes the quite precise ways in which one type degenerates or loses its cohesion, thus

evolving into its successor-type. (Tyranny results, he claims, from the erosion of social cohesion - hence the increasingly urgent need for imposed order - of an ever-more-individually-based democracy.) It is one aspect of the multi faceted achievement of jazz as an art that it possesses not only the capacity to reflect - or indeed exemplify - each type (or combinations of and layerings of

types at a higher level of magnification), but also the dynamic processes of

change, of evolution or devolution, from one type to another. Here again, whole albums (e.g. Coltrane's Ascension) can be seen in these terms, as can the progres sion or journey undertaken within a single improvised solo. This music, rightly understood, is not at all simple, and neither is its mimetic content. It is an art form particularly suited to the depiction of movement, particularly suited to

depict, not fixity, but rather change and dynamism of precisely the kind Plato articulated.

The third and final complicating point under this heading is that mimetic content in these various categories is not necessarily located within the action of the performer. What I mean is this : Duke Ellington, conducting his band from the piano, is, if not a tyrant, then a kind of enlightened despot. Thelonius Monk, in refusing to write out his charts, instead teaching his tunes to his band by ear,



is a kind of sound-over-sight aristocrat. But in other cases, the politically mimetic agency is effectively external to the musician. In the sad and instruc

tive late phase of Miles Davis' career, in which we find him stating that his

ambition is to be as well known as a rock star as he was as a jazz master, playing covers of melodically trite and harmonically thin Cindy Lauper tunes and soloing with barely-engaged passivity, we see in a mimetic tableau not Davis' action

as such but rather the imposed tyranny of the entertainment industry, the imposed

timocracy of the rock-star phenomenon, the imposed oligarchy of the criterion

of commercial as opposed to artistic success. But then, within this, we can

descry an act of Davis' after all, the realization of one of Plato's worst fears: an

artist of great distinction lowering himself by chasing the false idol of demo

cratic taste.

The mimetic content of jazz is complicated in each of the foregoing ways, and

it is one of the high achievements of the art form that the content of its mimesis

is as intricate as the reality it depicts.

It was Plato's greatest student who very considerably advanced our unders

tanding of mimesis. In the Poetics6 of Aristotle we see a far more nuanced

analysis of artistic representation, where the concept is extended from that of

a mere reduplication of the static appearance of the world, to that of a depic tion of an action in time or an unfolding process. Of course, Plato had impli

citly gestured in this direction with his focus on the politically dynamic, but it

was left to Aristotle to articulate the matter explicitly, in detail, and in a manner

that allows us now to discern a second level of jazz's mimetic content.

Early in the Poetics Aristotle writes that "mimetic artists portray people in

action."7 A bit later, he observes our "natural propensity" to "engage in mimetic

activity",8 noting that there is an intrinsic pleasure we all take in mimesis, rooted

in our recognition of the object thereof. Now, if music is imitative of character

in the way Plato suggested, and if jazz, by extension, is mimetic in the way

suggested above, then we have in Aristotle at least the beginnings of an account

of the pleasure we take in this art form. Moreover, if this art form is, as I have

6. Aristotle, Poetics, trans, and commentary Stephen Halliwell (London: Duckworth, 1987). I offer

a discussion of Aristotle's expansion of the concept of mimesis in "Aristotle's Mimesis and

Abstract Art", Philosophy 59:229 (July 1984): 365-371; reprinted in Theories of Art and

Beauty, ed. R. Wilkerson (Milton Keynes : Open University Press), pp. 484-492.

7. Aristotle, Poetics, p. 32.



476 Garry Hagberg

suggested, particularly suited to the depiction or representation of movement, then our pleasure in seeing this music well played just is a special instance of

the pleasure we all naturally take in mimetic objects. This is true because, to

make sense of the actions of persons, we must see those actions within a context, that is, woven into the places where those actions have meaning. If we see an

action represented within what we might call the "freeze frame" of a sculpture, we understand the sculpted action only to the extent that we are able to imagine that frozen moment within a larger frame of reference, within the context of a

larger narrative - a point central to Lessing's discussion of the Laocoon sculp ture in his famous treatise of that name. This is of particular importance to our

understanding of jazz improvisation for at least two reasons. First, and more

simply, the special suitedness of jazz as an art form to depict movement makes it an art form that - unlike sculpture, painting, photography or other static visual arts - carries its own larger context internally, and is in this respect akin to film. In other words, the depicted movement within jazz improvisation makes sense within its own unfolding musical narrative; what happens, what musically unfolds, does so against, and in internal relation to, what has preceded it within the piece. Similarly, a gesture made by a character in a film makes sense against the contextual backdrop of that character's internal development, and it makes sense as one gesture or action within the larger unfolding narrative structure of the film. Musical gestures, improvisational actions, exhibit just the same context

dependence, and without that backdrop such gestures would be as incoherent, as ambiguous, ultimately as meaningless as a single action utterly out of context,

say, one inserted as unrelated footage in the middle of a film as the result of an

editing error. The mimesis of which Aristotle writes, the mimesis of action, is

dynamic, and it requires that we see it within its narrative, within its developing internal "logic", in order to see it for what it is. Without this, we could take no

pleasure in mimetic recognition of the kind Aristotle describes. The unders

tanding, the following, of an improvised solo fits this perfectly : without hearing the specific musical gesture in a context, we do not genuinely hear the musical

gesture at all. And while all music carries its own internal context as the back

drop or context within which its thematic material is rendered coherent and made intelligible, the art of jazz improvisation presents its own internal context for the relational comprehension of its thematic material, its narrative content,

precisely as it develops. This fact, once focused on, reveals a fundamental aspect of what is special artistically about jazz improvisation. Aristotle writes, to further explain the pleasure we take in mimetic objects, that we "enjoy looking at images, because what happens is that, as [we] contemplate them, [we] apply



[our] understanding and reasoning to each element."9 Precisely this happens in

the understanding of a jazz improvisation, and the intellectual pleasure of an

Aristotelian kind is all the greater because the understanding and reasoning,

applied to each element, track that element - the improvised gesture, the thematic

statement - as it unfolds according to the evolving logic of the ensemble, in the

moment of its creation, as it relates to the shifting accompanimental terrain

beneath it. And it is not surprising that we are able to place players along a

continuum ranging from the most logically exacting or classicist in mode

(e.g. John Lewis playing with the MJQ or Bill Evans playing a Rodgers and Hart

tune, among countless others), to the most unrestrained and romanticist in mode,

those most concerned to turn on a dime and to seize the moment (Lester Bowie

playing with the Art Ensemble of Chicago, perhaps.) Of course, both sides, the

classicists and the romanticists, along with everyone in between, make musical

sense within context. But they do so in the former case (the classicists) in a way that frequently looks back to what thematically came before and to what those

musical antecedents logically entail; in the latter case (the romanticists), in a

way that frequently looks ahead, to the directions, lines, trajectories, or textures

that might spontaneously open up before them as they move forward. Aristot

le's model explains, at least in part, both. So much, then, for the first, simpler

point concerning what Aristotle's remarks suggest about jazz's representational content.

The second, somewhat more complex, point concerns the very nature of the

mimetic image that jazz presents. We have seen that the comprehension of

improvisational sense, of thematic logic, is contextual, and much like the unders

tanding of a gesture in a film or a remark embedded within a conversation. But

now, thanks to Aristotle's having taken the concept of mimesis beyond where

Plato left it, not only can we see the musical phrase in terms of the representa tion of character and political type, but we can in addition see how the very musical

event of an improvisational performance represents, or puts on the stage a

mimetic depiction of, the entire process of making sense musically. That is

another level of mimetic content, and it is a spectacle in which, for the reasons

Aristotle articulated, involving the employment of the reason and understan

ding, we can indeed take a good deal of pleasure. Jazz improvisation presents an image, or delivers within its sonic microcosm, a representation of the human

interaction, the contextualized, ever-expanding linguistic, gestural, and expres sive engagements that collectively negotiate and ultimately constitute the world



478 Garry Hagberg

with which we interact. Admittedly, that may sound a rather grand pronounce ment, but then would we not need an explanation (of the kind Aristotle's remarks

have stimulated) on a rather grand scale to account for the profound value

perceived in jazz improvisation around the world ? Beyond the first level of

mimetic content discussed in connection with Plato, jazz does not only - as do

all of the arts - depend on that fundamentally human sense-making capacity; more profoundly, it also puts on stage the dynamic experiencing of that sense

making capacity as it unfolds in the heat of the moment. (One might indeed say that what is distinctive of this art form, and what is profoundly important to our

understanding of its aesthetic power, is that jazz presents, rather than only repre sents, this capacity.) Aristotle, we have seen, said that the mimetic artist "portrays

people in action." If I am right that jazz, in one of its central aspects, is a mimetic

art, it turns out, millennia later, that his remarks hold deep significance for our

appreciation of this art form that is surprisingly not so radically unlike the arts

of his time.

But if much, if not all, of the sense we make of the world is internally contex

tualized, and narrative in nature, what more can we say of the various narratives

presented by jazz improvisers ? One of Aristotle's most fundamental distinc

tions between types of narratives in his analysis of plot-development - and jazz

improvisations indeed display their own kind of plot structure - is the distinc

tion between the episodic and the inexorable. He shows that, with the far weaker

episodic type, we simply witness one event after another, where - however

momentarily entertaining any one episode may be - there is no deeper or under

lying sense of necessity driving the sequence of events. Any link in the episodic chain might be linked to any other, and the cumulative result is, as he convin

cingly describes it, however diverting, ultimately unsatisfying. By contrast, driven, and hence inexorable, plot development makes each successive event not a mere contingency, but a necessity, and the end result, Aristotle shows, is the cathartic gratification that comes from having witnessed, not a mere arbi

trary sequence of spectacles, but a progression leading toward a culmination, where the gathering force of the underlying "logic" of the plot is felt by the viewer, who experiences a growing anticipation of events as interconnections between events are made increasingly evident. For Aristotle, the power of inexorable form is itself, along with the more plainly evident representational content of the

drama, put on stage or exhibited. And all of this describes perfectly the second, more complex layer of the mimetic content of jazz improvisation.

Every teacher of jazz performance knows how challenging it can be to incul cate a sense of the long form, a sense of longer-term musical structure that, as



some players put it (Pat Metheny, among many others, has called attention to

this), "tells a story", or displays coherence going beyond the mere playing of a

riff over a given chord change. And every accomplished player can recall the

struggle of moving beyond the episodic - the matching of scales to chords and

the running of them through the changes, to higher-level musical concerns of

thematic coherence and long-term thematic development or, indeed, plot. Many

composers have spoken of the need to develop an ability to discern within a

musical idea, a thematic germ, its inherent logical developmental possibilities.

Any composer who has written variations on a theme has displayed, in varying

idiosyncratic ways, precisely this kind of discernment. Consummate improvi sers show just this logico-thematic perspicacity, but here again they do so within

the real-time flux of organically-evolving musical development. Aristotle's

exemplar is Sophocles' Oedipus Rex, in which the mounting necessity of each

subsequent action is clear; Sophocles makes the attentive viewer feel the "logic" of each incremental step toward Oedipus' moment of self-knowledge. Exem

plars of the highest levels of parallel thematic integration as a function of such

discernment in classical composition might be Bach's Art of the Fugue or, in a

different way, the late quartets and sonatas of Beethoven. It is telling that -

while each listener may have his or her favorites on this particular score - it is

not an easy matter to pick out the towering achievements of this kind in jazz

improvisation. This is not because achievements on this score are so rare, but

rather precisely because within this extraordinarily demanding art form, they are - among the masters of the idiom - so common. Sidney Bechet showed it

in one way; Louis Armstrong - a kind of savant in the not just rapid, but almost

instantaneous, discernment of thematic entailment - in another; Duke Ellington, as pianist, in still another. Charles Mingus was notoriously intolerant of a certain

kind of playing, and if one studies what he liked and disliked one sees the

contrast between the episodic and the inexorable. Paul Desmond had a witty, effervescent version of thematic integration, while Art Blakey presided - using a fast-moving rhythmic logic - over a fiercer, more aggressive kind. Billie

Holiday worked out, in phrasing, the necessary implications of preceding anti

cipations and postponements of note-deliveries, while Coltrane moved the level

of logic from thematic, single-line melodic entailment to variations and plot evolutions of ensemble texture. Ella Fitzgerald performed the rapid-fire conse

quences of her prior thematic actions in a manner reminiscent of Charlie Parker's

bursts of harmonically-enriched lines following fleetly upon each other. Aris

totle described something of profound significance about the deeper sense we

make of the events of the world, and jazz players represent or present this in


480 Garry Hagberg

myriad, individualized ways, through all of the stylistic directions of this many faceted music.

Aristotle, further pursuing his expanded concept of mimesis, wrote that the successful plot is "a representation of an action which is serious, complete, and of a certain magnitude."10 Proceeding in reverse order, his last criterion, "of a

certain magnitude", just is the larger-scale formal control we have been discus

sing. His second criterion, "complete", however, calls for further elaboration. Aristotle famously invoked the need in drama to have a beginning, a middle, and an end, and this, as all close readers of the Poetics know, is not as simple, and is far more interesting, than it initially sounds. A beginning is a circums

tance, or condition, pregnant with developmental possibilities. A middle (like the development section of the classical symphony) is a sequence of events that make these possibilities, or one subset of them, manifest in the internally-inter twined manner just described. And the end is the weaving together of those

strands, leaving none dangling. It is of great interest for the study of jazz impro visation that an increasing number of full-session recordings of classic sessions have become available: one can now hear various ensembles of Armstrong, Parker, Davis, Ellington, and many others work through false starts and out-takes in order to arrive at the originally-released version. The results are fascinating: we hear, in Aristotle's sense, different beginnings, and thus the middles, before

they are stopped, proceed in ways distinctive of, and uniquely fitting to, the

inaugural gestures of each take. With respect to middles, incidentally, Aristotle writes of the plot-anchoring device of what he calls recognition, where the arrival of a character we believe to be unknown to us is in truth, we suddenly recognize, someone we do know (often in disguise); a recognition may also occur where the deeper significance of an earlier event now suddenly dawns on us. The parallel to the device of re-harmonization, where we suddenly see a theme in a new light, now exhibiting newly-revealed harmonic significance that went

unperceived on first harmonization, is exact. And by his first criterion, "serious", Aristotle means that the most gripping, most powerful, dramatic plots will be those with weighty ethical themes - contrast Oedipus Rex with Aristophanes' Clouds to get the idea. There seems to me no question that we make a very similar distinction in jazz, when we are mindful of the weightiness, or depth versus

superficiality, of the fundamental thematic gestures involved - compare hard

bop to the largely diatonic, often stepwise melodic statements of smooth jazz to get the idea. If we need further specification concerning the musical analogue




to the ethical weight or gravity of thematic material, we need only turn back to

Plato on the moral content of the melodic modes.

The parallels continue, and each one strengthens the relation between the

seemingly disparate matters of plot structure and coherence in improvised music. Of the experience of recognition within a plot, Aristotle cites as a prime

example the washing scene in the Odyssey, with its recognition, by the now

old woman, of Odysseus's scar, where this recognition lends weight to the

narrative. The realization, on repeated hearings of the Coltrane Quartet recor

dings with McCoy Tyner, that we are hearing, in the flux, thematic material

that has been treated with the devices of twelve-tone serial composition, i.e. retro

grade and inverted iterations of the motif, is not so different in its plot-unifying

power. And, as with the classical epic, such a recognition locates the listener

along the narrative's way, within what could otherwise prove to be a disorien

ting cascade of notes. Aristotle also observes that "a plot structure does not

possess unity by centering on an individual."11 Nor does a solo possess unity by virtue of its having emanated from one player. And Aristotle identifies scale as

an important element: the size or duration of the drama must not exceed the grasp of a fully-attentive, experienced listener. A parallel consideration arises in

soloing. Aristotle claims that a work should not be so small as to be instanta

neous, nor so large as to be beyond "contemplation of it in a single experience", so that "it is not possible to derive a sense of unity and wholeness from our

perception of it."12 Almost as if referring to the now much-criticized, super

elongated improvised solos of the late 1960s and 1970s, the scale of a work of

art "must be one which allows it to be perceived altogether." (We can never, given the limits of human sensibility, be in a position to perceive the beauty or the formal

integrity of an animal one thousand miles long, to use his striking example.) And

of such formal integrity, he remarks that the events of a narrative "should be so

constructed that the displacement or removal of any one of them will disturb

and disjoint the work's wholeness."13

These are precisely the aesthetic forces, and the elements of our human capa cities for sense-making, that are put on stage by jazz. They are set before us, at

an aesthetic distance, so that we can recognize and contemplate our own mental

world-organizing processes as they appear in the mirror that improvisation holds up to our mental reality. The use of metaphor, as Aristotle analyzes it, is

one particular mental world-organizing device that allows us to carry connota

11. Aristotle, Poetics, p. 40. 12. Aristotle, Poetics, p. 39 13. Aristotle, Poetics, p. 40.


482 Garry Hagberg

tions from one place to another (the Greek "metapherein" literally means to carry across or over), so that we can speak not just of the sunset of the day or the old

age of life, but - carrying over connotations by exchanging terms - the sunset

of life or the old age of the day. Quoting in improvisation can be a fleeting

homage to a master, as in the frequent quotations of Charlie Parker's melodic

lines. But musical quotations can also do more : they can, within the internal melodic story of an improviser's progress, carry over connotations and impart resonances from other musical contexts. Aristotle wrote, in expanding the

concept of mimesis, that the successful drama is "a representation not of people as such but of actions and life."14 Actions are revelations of character, and they make sense, they show their meaning, within - and only within - a context. And our life is a mental process of making a structural, coherent, powerful, and

complete narrative sense of those actions. That is what jazz improvisation, in its moment and in its way, exemplifies above all.

m.

It is not only the writings of the ancients that shed light on the mimetic content of improvisation. It was Nietzsche who wrote, in his late little book subtitled "How to Philosophize with a Hammer," the memorable and surely correct asser

tion, "Without music life would be a mistake."15 But it is his remarks in Twilight of the Idols that are not expressly on music that shed the most light on this third and last level of mimetic content.

Nietzsche observed, early in the book, "that the value of life cannot be esti

mated,"16 and he supports this claim with both an argument and a dark witticism. He adds that such judgment could be given "Not by a living man, because he is party to the dispute, indeed, its object, and not the judge of it"; he then adds the humorously chilling observation, "not by a dead one, for another reason." It is the argument that is significant for us. Living persons are not, and will never be, in a position to judge the value of life, precisely because they are not

only party to, but the object of, the dispute. The vision we derive from this is one of persons inextricably interwoven into the fabric of life - what Wittgen stein called the "stream of life." Real persons, Nietzsche insists, are so thoroughly

14. Aristotle, Poetics, p. 37. 15. Nietzsche, Twilight of the Idols, p. 26. I offer a discussion of the significance of this text for

music in "Apollo's Revenge : Music and Nietzsche's Twilight of the Idols", Historical

Reflections/Reflexions Historiques, Special Issue on Nietzsche, ed. J. Gilmour, 21:3 (Fall 1995) : 437-449.

13. Nietzsche, Twilight of the Idols, p. 30 (and following quotations).



enmeshed, so buffeted about by ever-shifting seas of change, that any perspec tival "perch" of independent stability must of necessity be merely illusory. And

it would only be through such a disinterested and disengaged position that we

could judge the value of the incessant flux, what William James called the "bloo

ming, buzzing, confusion," of the world's sensory experience.

Given this vision, it comes as little surprise that Nietzsche sets "apart with high reverence the name of Heraclitus."17 Of that lone-wolf, pre-Socratic defender

of ceaseless flux, Nietzsche wrote, "When the rest of the philosopher crowd

rejected the evidence of the senses because these showed plurality and change, he rejected their evidence because they showed things as if they possessed dura

tion and unity." (By "duration", he means here not just temporal extension - jazz

certainly has that - but rather stable ontological fixity over time - which jazz,

importantly, as we shall see, does not.) "In so far", Nietzsche says, "as the

senses show becoming, passing away, change, they do not lie." Plato, of course, in addition to writing the foundational work on mimesis, was to go on to argue for a transcendent world, one that is eternal, immutable, and unchanging, and

available to the higher intellect but not the lowly senses. Nietzsche's neo

Heraclitan vision instead resolutely embraced, and did not attempt to transcend, the flux of experience, and he said, with the word "being" standing for every

thing a static ontology implies, "Heraclitus will always be right in this, that

being is an empty fiction."

It would be possible to chart the historical trajectory of jazz from the early

styles of St. Louis and Kansas City to Dixieland to Swing to Bebop to Hard Bop to Cool to Free as a unitary, linear evolution, moving ever forward toward the

most extreme celebration of flux in post-Ornette Coleman free jazz chamber

music. It would be possible, but wrong - that narrative would leave out far too

many individual voices that do not conform to this evolutionary story. And my claim is not a politically motivated, but an aesthetically motivated, claim : the

nature of the music itself, in its radical and artistically deep acceptance of - or

even insistence upon - the variability of individuals and the circumstantial

unpredictability of the unending stream of sessions and performances that make

up this art form, is incompatible with a single-line teleology. Jazz improvisa tion itself repudiates such simplifying historicism. Rather, we encounter in the

history of jazz, up to the present, a dizzying array of autonomous gestures made

within the chorus, the tune, the set, the night, the session, the phase of career.

It is true that stylistic movements have come and gone, and what was musica



484 Garry Hagberg

nova in one period became musica antiqua in another. Bebop did emerge18 out

of the late-night sessions played after, and around, big-band swing.19 And musical

"languages," if you will,20 did stabilize within these periods. But it is, I believe, a profoundly important fact about the art form that if one "spoke" any of these

languages in an imitative voice, or as a kind of musical mannerism, that itself

was cause for suspicion, and never congratulation. The art form is mimetic, but

it does not - when one moves to the highest levels of the art - allow an internal

mimesis, an imitation of an established voice. Some phenomenally gifted

players, such as Sonny Stitt, were, however stunningly accomplished, regarded as speaking in a voice too close to that being imitated, and thus relegated to a

second tier. The world, reflecting this brute fact, remembers Parker, but only fitfully Stitt. The mimetic content then, in this third way or level, is precisely the content

of Heraclitian flux. But, before closing, there is one more thing to be said about

what jazz improvisation does by making these extraordinary demands of origi

nality.

Nietzsche also aims his philosophical hammer at what he calls "the distinc

tion between deed and doer",21 and he goes on to describe what he calls the

"antecedentia of action." By this he means the false phantoms of inner protracted deliberation that we impute to those who take action in any arena. Nietzsche here sees a falsified moral psychology, one in which we believe ourselves to be

able to discover the causal chain of motives, of what he derisively calls "inner

facts", that would ultimately explain our action. But for him, a true picture of

human action is far more immediate, far more instantaneous, far more in the

moment, rather than prior to it. The "phantoms and false lights"22 are self-delu

sional inner images that need removal, if we are to see the flux for what it is.

Art, for Nietzsche as for a number of his late-nineteenth-century Romantic

compatriots, is a form of escape from illusion, a way out of the prison-house

18. For a helpful brief account of this emergence, see Scott De Veaux, "The Advent of Bebop", in The Oxford Companion to Jazz, ed. Bill Kirchner (New York: Oxford University Press, 2000) pp. 292-304.

19. For helpful brief accounts of these big-band crucibles, see James T. Mahar and Jeffrey Sultonof,

"Pre-Swing Era Big Bands and Jazz Composing and Arranging", in The Oxford Companion to

Jazz, pp. 264-276, and Max Harrison, "Swing Era Big Bands and Jazz Composing and

Arranging", The Oxford Companion to Jazz, pp. 277-291. 20. The analogy between music, or the arts more generally, and language is hardly a simple - or

invariably philosophically innocent - matter. I discuss a number of ways of spelling out the ana

logy, and a number of conceptual etiologies that generate instructive misconceptions of artistic

meaning, in Art as Language : Wittgenstein, Meaning, and Aesthetic Theory (Ithaca : Cornell

University Press, 1995). 21. Nietzsche, Twilight of the Idols, p. 38 22. Nietzsche, Twilight of the Idols, p. 49.



of bogus moral psychology. Jazz improvisation just is an art form that repre sents, at its deepest mimetic level, this immediacy and spontaneity of the flux

of life, stranger to all factitious causal determination. That flux is represented both in the stream of harmonic-rhythmic undulations that the soloist must - by virtue of being in that world and not above it - negotiate, and in the instanta

neous choices made in the process of playing through, indeed, those "changes."

Hammering now with relentless fury, Nietzsche calls the return to the illusions

of stasis only "the idiosyncrasy of the degenerate".23 Nietzsche urges not what

he calls the life-denying rejection of this brute truth of the autonomy of choice, a rejection of the individualized spontaneous freedom that jazz not only preserves but in fact demands. He calls instead for its whole-hearted life-affirming accep tance.

We have seen how jazz functions as a mimetic art in the manner articulated

by Plato in terms of political and characterological typology. And we have seen

a second layer of mimetic content thanks to Aristotle, who advances a more

dynamic conception of mimetic content and foregrounds the pleasure we take

both in the mental process of making sense and in seeing that process depicted. But finally now, with Nietzsche as our guide, we glimpse the third, highest level

of mimetic content that this great art form displays. Jazz shows us how free we

really are.

University of East Anglia



Article Contentsp. [469]p. 470p. 471p. 472p. 473p. 474p. 475p. 476p. 477p. 478p. 479p. 480p. 481p. 482p. 483p. 484p. 485

Issue Table of ContentsRevue Internationale de Philosophie, Vol. 60, No. 238 (4) (dcembre 2006) pp. 397-525Front MatterIntroduction [pp. 397-400]Platonism in Music : a Kind of Refutation [pp. 401-414]Imagination, music, and the emotions [pp. 415-435]Toward a Broad Understanding of Musical Interpretation [pp. 437-452]The Fundamental Heteronomy of Jazz Improvisation [pp. 453-467]Jazz Improvisation : A Mimetic Art? [pp. 469-485]The Cognitive and Appreciative Import of Musical Universals [pp. 487-503]Concatenationism, Architectonicism, and the Appreciation of Music [pp. 505-514]Music Through a Narrow Aperture : a Qualified Defense of Concatenationism [pp. 515-522]Compte-RenduReview: untitled [pp. 523-525]

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