Voice and Movement in Keith Jarrett’s Pianism

8/20/2019 Voice and Movement in Keith Jarrett’s Pianism

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Body'n'Soul?: Voice and Movement in Keith Jarrett's PianismAuthor(s): Jairo MorenoSource: The Musical Quarterly, Vol. 83, No. 1 (Spring, 1999), pp. 75-92Published by: Oxford University PressStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/742261

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The Twentieth Century

B o d y n S o u l ? Vo i c e n d ovement

n K e i t h J a r r e t t s P i a n i s m

Jairo Moreno

Not long ago, in the midst of a jazz-quartet ession in which I was partic-ipating, the recording engineer complained about what he called the"radiator oise" the pianist made while playing, a hisslike sound thatclosely followed the pitches of his improvisation. After the engineerasked him to try to keep "it" down, his performance became considerablystifled; eventually this supposedly harmless and even sensible suggestionby the engineer appeared o paralyze he creativity of an otherwise ratherimaginative improviser. As a sideman playing the bass, the "noise" of the

pianist did not bother me, since I was in some way, I guess, filtering itout and concentrating on his choice of notes. From the control roomthe engineer, I thought at the time, had the necessary distance to makethe right call. But hearing the musical results made me reevaluate thesituation, particularly ince I, too, as a listener, had sometimes wonderedabout the "noise" hat one of my favorite pianists, Keith Jarrett, made. Iremembered everal reviews where critics attacked Jarrett or what theyidentified as an arrogant mposition of mannerisms on the listener, man-nerisms that

gotin

the way of the "music."Reviewing the first volume of what would become a popular series,titled Standards, y Jarrett's rio, Owen Cordle of Down Beat states in1984, "[T]he only detraction from a perfect record s Jarrett's moaningand singing over his piano lines. Embarrassing tuff, but filter it out anddig the music, which is tough and strong."' (Down Beat, it is worthpointing out, is the most widely read jazz publication in the UnitedStates.) Seven years ater, John Ephland, also in Down Beat, writes,"Jarrett's ush chromaticism and gritty swing make the ballads slow-dance delights ... (with Jerry Lewis's mpersonations hankfully under-recorded)."2

But it is not only Jarrett's oice that critics object to. It is, in fact,the movement of his body during ive performances hat elicits the mostsarcastic responses.3 n the book The Great Jazz Pianists Speaking f TheirLives and Music, by Len Lyons, one reads, "[I]n pecially rhapsodic pas-sages ... [Jarrett's] enuflecting and gyrating n front of the keyboard

75


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76 The Musical Quarterly

make Elvislook

likea mannequin."4 The author John Litweil adopts amore provocative tone, referring to Jarrett's "autoerotic groans, sighs,

grunts, and moans, as he leaps from his chair to thrust his pelvis at thekeyboard while he plays."5 By 1994 John Andrews of Down Beat summa-rizes the jazz establishment's attitude: "bashing Keith Jarrett enjoys criti-cal cachet right now."6

It is noteworthy, however, that critics such as Andrews, Cordle,and Ephland, among others, also praise the artistry of Jarrett's improvi-sations and his virtuoso pianism.7 Positive evaluations of his playinghardly drown out the criticism. Despite these concessions, Jarrett's criticsfocus for the most part on a decidedly negative aspect of his playing: Jar-rett's voice and body movement are sonorous and visual hindrancesinterfering with the beautiful music he produces.

The present essay addresses the assumptions these critiques arebased on, assumptions that, however concealed, I believe fuel the criti-cal reception of musical performance as aesthetic experience, the cre-ative processes of jazz improvisation, and, most fundamentally, the rela-

tionship between performer and listener.8 My approach is pluralistic,seeking to address these questions from a variety of perspectives. In thefirst section I focus on Jarrett's voice, elaborating on the distinctionoften made between interiority and exteriority, and so frame the critics'reaction within a critical model based on the concept of logocentrism.Using this concept I consider the notion of performance authenticity,the ontotheological connotations within the very idea of authenticity,and the stability of meaning that authenticists desire in musical sound. I

also consider the artificial separation between meaning and the material-ity of the voice as a pertinent way to address the critics' misunderstand-

ing of cognitive processes in jazz improvisation and their claims abouttimbral purity. Lastly, I discuss the extent to which conventions of per-formance practice discourage instrumentalists to vocalize. A second sec-tion concentrates on the etiquette of the body, sketching a general his-

tory of its reception from Aquinas and Descartes to the romantics andtranscendentalists, and to the rise of the aesthetic as a category duringthe late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. I conclude by dis-

cussing Jarrett's body as a contested site of expression and the constitu-tion of the self, on the one hand, and discipline, on the other. The crit-ics' discourse, I will show, is firmly located within outmoded aestheticboundaries imposed in the nineteenth century. My critique of Jarrett'sreception by the journalistic establishment calls into question the valuesof such an outdated aesthetic and the usefulness of applying such an "artmusic" aesthetic to modem jazz. Critiques of modem jazz-at once a

popular and an elitist musical expression-urgently necessitate a recon-

sideration of the aesthetic experience.


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Voice and Movement n Jarrett's ianism 77

1Critical accounts of Jarrett's pianism set up a hierarchical oppositionbetween a pure acoustic signal from the piano and the adulterated sound

resulting once the human voice is superimposed. An intruder, the voiceis perceived as a separate layer, or, as the critic Owen Cordle puts it, "a

singing over."9 (I will discuss the appropriateness of the expression"singing" later.) Here the preposition "over"-with its attendant spatialconnotations-constitutes no empty journalistic jargon. Rather, it sug-gests the existence of an ideal space, the sound of the piano, that can

and, in the critics' opinion, should be contemplated without interfer-ence. Their position is predicated on the concept that improvisationalcreation is an internal process of which the piano constitutes its mostintimate (i.e., authentic) expression. We may call this internal processcognitive or imaginative, for at the moment I make no distinction.What is clear is that there exists a well-marked conceptual distance sep-arating inner process and outward expression, and that this duality

establishes a definite hierarchical ordering and, furthermore, is an ideo-logical imposition that has its roots in logocentrism, a most pervasivetrope in Western epistemology.

Logocentrism, to review, establishes an order of meaning conceivedas foundation (that is, thought, truth, reason, logic, the word, or logos), afoundation that is considered to be prior to and independent of the signsor acts in which they are expressed or made physically manifest.10 It sees

language as a mediating system through which thought is realized. In

this view spoken or, worse yet, written words are physical signifiersstanding for spiritual, transcendental signifieds. There exists in logocen-trism a strong desire for the unmediated, which constitutes a perhapsinsatiable need for self-sufficiency showing itself in attitudes toward

meaning (e.g., the belief that the signified has logical precedence overthe signifier, a logical precedence that is underwritten by a point of pres-ence or fixed origin)."I But in logocentric ideology, a similar attitude

shapes the very idea of the subject's position before the world. That isto say, there must be a validating presence or center that supports theexistence of subjects. According to this, the subject designates an invari-able metaphysical presence, be it essence, existence, God, substance, or

transcendentality, which it realizes and which in this process becomesinternal to it (I will refer to this presence as "inside"). The goal of thehuman subject, under these terms, is to be present to itself, presenceconstituting the nuclear matrix of logocentrism. In fact, the unshakablebelief in the discontinuity between immaterial and material gives"inside" a seeming epistemological stability. This stability, however,

exacts a high cost for those elements that are determined to create any


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kind of distance between a metaphysical presence and those domains ofhuman activity that it seeks to ground. As a system, logocentrismattempts to delimit potential meanings and indeterminacies hat wouldinvalidate presence as a guarantee of signification and ultimately ofbeing. Accordingly, a number of hierarchically organized oppositions canbe grafted onto the conceptual scheme of logocentrism: or example,reality and appearance, meaning and form, essence and accident, imma-terial and material, and the central metaphor of inside and outside.

By way of example we may note the overtones of logocentricismaudible in contemporary debates in art-music quarters about the rela-tionship between musical creation and its reproduction, particularly smanifested n the so-called authentic performance movement. The veryidea of authenticity evinces an obsession with origin, interpretive clo-sure, and the illusion of self-presence: he ontological stability of themusical text afforded by the primacy given to poiesis entails the repres-sion of absence (the performer spires o become, in some sense, the

composer)and of difference

(thereis

onlyone

possible,valid

expression-not an interpretation-of a work). By this account, the nonauthenticresults rom the expulsion of thought from a state of grace out into theexteriority of representation.12 uriously enough, while the motto oflogocentrism s contemptus mundi, authenticists, as Richard Taruskin hasnoted, are willing to give music a rather narrow definition: the timbralqualities that original instruments produce.

The biblical connotations in the expression "expulsion of thoughtfrom a state of grace out into the exteriority of representation" bove areparticularly imely considering that compositional or improvisationalinspiration s still for many based upon a metaphysical or even religiousform of communication. For many of Jarrett's ritics too, I suspect,improvisation constitutes an internal process observing "a mysticalreliance on illusory nonknowledge," o use Taruskin's words.13 mprovi-sation, in their minds, is not conscious; in fact, a "natural" mproviser sone who appears o suddenly abandon all accumulated knowledge in therapture of creation.14 Accordingly, mprovisation s described as an

attribute of the soul, a private, interior process. On the other hand, theartful, which is to say the human, is exiled in the exteriority of the body,which brings the interior process to the outside, or realizes t. As a result,conscious thought would be seen as a layer that is separated rom thesoul, the purity of which it contaminates. The concepts of unconscious-ness (i.e., naturalness) and the soul in improvisation parallel the inner,spiritual, and self-sufficient nucleus reified by logocentrism. Jarrett, how-ever, would have none of it, since, according to him, "one of the bad

rapsthat

improvisations

always goingto have is that it is an off-the-


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top-of your-head, pattern-related, non-intellectual thing. Whereas n real-ity, with consciousness, mprovisation s a much deeper apping f somethingthan any other process."15

What are we then to make of Jarrett's "singing" musical lines simul-

taneously with the piano? I believe that by this procedure he reveals the

presence of a conscious thought process. He makes explicit the fact that

imagining sound and structuring it around the chord progressions andmelodies of the songs he improvises on entails embodying it in mind,

soul, and body (here, body signifies the voice). The sound of his voiceunleashes what in the critics' minds should be a metaphysical presence,which is to say, an invisible or repressed Other. To let this Other becomeaudible is to make a public admission of the presence and power of con-sciousness in improvisation. Once audible, this presence becomes anOther that, in fact, helps divide Jarrett's self into a pianist and a grunter,or so the critics argue. This Other, the grunter, the voice, competes forour attention in performance and occupies space reserved exclusively forthe musical imagination-in the critics' account of improvisation, thatis. It is as if they do not want to witness the embodiment of the musi-cian's soul, which encompasses the totality of his playing, or, put another

way, to admit that the doings of the soul in improvisation are as muchmental and physical as they are spiritual. Jarrett, the critics may think,should leave the singing to his practice studio. What they fail to realize,however, is that Jarrett's vocalization constitutes an ontological facet ofmusical creation. That is to say, the sound will not come into beingunless it is imagined. There is a cognitive factor at work in the real-time

process of improvising that melds together thought, sentiment, fingeraction, and vocal articulation. Thought and musical realization happenat once; there is neither temporal deferral nor spatial distance separatingthe two.16 Just as the essence of language resides not in the distancebetween thought and speech but in the material continuity evidentwhen we, for example, hear ourselves speak, Jarrett's voice establishes asimilar immediacy between his body (i.e., vocal chords) and the musicalsounds the listeners perceive.17 This is not, however, the kind of un-

mediation that logocentrism aspires to; in the present case the voiceprojects onto the outside something that critics suggest is valid only asinteriority. To continue the language analogy, in Jarrett's pianism signi-fier and signified are bound in a sign, where expression is inevitablyjoined both to the emotional and cognitive meaning it ex-presses.18If we consider his voice as gesture-in opposition, that is, to the soundof the piano-we may invoke the logocentric association betweensound and idea as the signifying aspect of musical communication. Inthe critics' account, on the other hand, voice qua gesture is excluded


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from signifying unctions, becoming a redundant, accessorial representa-tion, one that assumes a disruptive role in the unwritten conventions ofperformance-practice tiquette. Defying these conventions, Jarrett'svocal pianism constitutes a site where music, as a metaphysical entity,becomes physical, human, sensuous.

The objection to Jarrett's ocal intrusions stems from their unique-ness as a simultaneously material/immaterial, song"/thought ntity, andfrom the ways in which the natural dialectic it creates with the piano

creates obstacles in grasping he unity of expression and meaning. Thisis what Kaja Silverman expresses when she notes that "the voice is thesite of perhaps he most radical of all subjective divisions-the divisionbetween meaning and materiality."19 ut once it is understood positivelyas the site where meaning and materiality converge rather than divide-a union that makes possible meaningful communication-the voiceceases to be seen as hindrance and is regarded nstead as a manifestationof the way in which disembodied and embodied expression define oneanother (being mindful, of course that disembodied expression s noexpression at all). The materiality of meaning as sound is a presencealways-already-there, locus of the embodied condition of our being inthe world. To acknowledge his is to accept that the vocal, gesturalexpression of music is in no way less significant a part of the whole thanits "pure" ound is. Thus the voice cannot only be a layering over, asimultaneous commentary on the piano line, or even the embodimentof an otherwise pure sound image. The jazz mproviser pitomizes theidea of the moment: piano and voice are united in time, and, in addi-

tion, their sum is inseparable rom the consciousness hat originatesthem both.

What Jarrett's ocal chords produce is symbolic material nsofar asit resembles a common signifier, namely singing. But simply to interprethis vocal utterances as fulfilling the musical function of singing would beinadequate because it would be judging his vocalizations mproperly san object, rather than as a process. Considering Jarrett's music as anobject allows critics to reify a given improvisation as a finished work and

thus to impose ontological categories usually applied to art-music scoresin which many, but not all, parameters are carefully pecified andnotated. The information contained in a score becomes a neat spatialrepresentation of the composers' attempt to limit potential variants inthe reproduction of a finished work. But I have already ketched how forthe jazz mproviser reation is a process, a dynamic, temporal activity,one to which a fixed spatial conceptualization of the work does notapply. Thus, Jarrett's tterances are significant n that they allegoricallypoint to another domain. By this I mean that the voice represents an


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unseen cognitive reality apprehended by the consciousness and thusbecomes a manifestation of an existing but usually repressed voice. Theconditions supporting his repression demand further discussion.

It is curious how instrumentalists are encouraged o sing throughtheir instruments, yet performance practice conventions have set strictlimits to the notion. The same discipline system that prohibits addingoctave doublings to a passage n a written score by Chopin, for example(which amounts to controlling the performer's musical utterance under

the auspices of respect for the composer's ntention), seeks also to con-trol movement and gesture. These elements are controlled because thereis in place a conventional belief in the role of the performer; hus thearticulations and gesticulations of the body are part of the mechanicsof reproduction, but not, perversely enough, of the articulation of mean-ing.20 Control is applied to the signifying elements of the language of thebody in order to obtain homogeneity in the sociomusical order known asperformance-practice tiquette. The control these conventions haveover the signs of the body, assume, I think mistakenly, he separabilityof the signified from the signifier, he voice from the performer's xpres-sivity.

To illustrate his separation, consider how instrumental tudioteachers encourage students to internalize heir singing, because duringperformance, according to our conventions, they have to choose oneform of expression: nstrument or voice, but never both. By conventionthe instrumentalist s asked to have a hold on her voice, becoming aconduit for the composer's ntentions. But this passivity s no more than

a simulacrum of a socially imposed correct meaning of music and perfor-mance. The voice, in this case, acquires a strictly extramusical tatus, somuch so that "singing" urns out to be little more than an immaterialsound. A musician's nstrument becomes both her voice and her mes-sage, as the internalized inging voice is muted.21 Sadly, we become"ventriloquists" f our own soul.22 Consequently, n a jazz pianist's case,conventions of improvisation are restricted only to a kind of digitalexpression, fingertips pressing on keys. There is no allowance for vocal-izations of

any kind, for such expressions ie beyond the boundaries ofaccepted performance practice. Jarrett s, after all, not a singer; we pur-chase his recordings expecting to hear an improviser's oice throughthe piano, not the pianist's voice. The conductor Hermann Scherchenhas stated that orchestral players may have impressive control on theirinstruments, but often, he comments, "we miss one thing: the soul of themusic, the song that gives inward ife to musical sounds. To sing is thelife-function of music. Where there is no singing, the forms of musicbecome distorted and they move in a senseless time-order mposed from


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without."23 would put it bluntly: here are two kinds of music, "music"and "music hat sings." arrett s expressing he latter; but he makesmusic hat sings explicitly, gainst stablished onventions. My argu-ment, then, is that the expectation f the performer's cquiescence osilence during performance riginates n a seldom-questioned iscipli-nary convention, one that bears no substantive onnection with musicin the wonderful ense that Scherchen rticulates. arrett's oice exposesthe subjectivity f performance ractice nd dissolves he implicit on-

tractual bligations hese conventions ave created with the listener.Another challenge o conventional erformance ractice n Jar-rett's ase s the critics' oncern with timbral urity. Whereas thermusical ultures egard uzzing ounds, or nstance, as being musicallyacceptable, ven desirable, he Western radition f art music reats uchphenomena s imperfections, hat is, as non-musical ccurences. hisparticular onvention tems rom he nineteenth-century otion of thework oncept Werktreue), concept hat not only includes performancepractices ut, more mportantly, mplicitly egislates separationbetween performer nd composer.24 udging rom he critics' biting com-ments on Jarrett, t appears s if they embrace his philosophy whole-heartedly. o be sure, ome nstrumentalists n the jazz radition avesuccessfully ncorporated he voice as part of their signature ound-towit, the bass great "Slam" tewart nd the jazzand pop guitarist GeorgeBenson. However, hese musicians' seof the voice is critically, nd thussocially, ccepted because f the precision i.e., purity) with which theirsinging matches he pitch of their nstruments. he voice is in this case

a layering ver, o use Cordle's xpression, r a kind of orchestral evice.There are also those whose "dirty" ound s valued, uch as Miles Davis.In this case, however, qualifier lways ppears isguised s a compli-ment; namely, ow he manages o successfully xploit imited nstru-mental echnique o fit his artistic ision and expression. ut thosewhose voiceovers roduce o-called noise, and I would nclude n thisgroup, long with Jarrett, ablo Casals, Glenn Gould, and ArturoToscanini, re summarily hastised. Their voice is considered n annoy-

ance. (An interesting xception o this might be the piano virtuosoErroll Garner, whose grunting as been deemed acceptable ecause tdoes not in any sense compete or the aural pace of the music, .e., it isso soft as to be barely udible). These days his attitude oward xtrane-ous "noise" as a dangerous xtrapolation: ith the rise of digital rans-mission f sound, cratches n our vinyl records ould potentially is-qualify hose performances rom being music. There seems o be a movetowards n essentialization f timbre. Advances n electronic eproduc-tion of sound no doubt encourage his limited aesthetic, one that seeks


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not only to define noise, but to separate t from music and music making.Without digressing nto a distinction hat could well occupy us for quitesome time-the distinction between noise and music-it is worthobserving, onetheless, hat the idea that one can or should be able tofilter out the noise from he music once again llustrates he superiorityof the work concept n our current erformance ractices. Noise is sepa-rate rom music because he performer s considered o be separate romthe composer nd the composition.25

2

If in the critics' minds vocalizations epresent corruption f musicalexpression, hen physical r bodily gestures are even worse. Whencritics compare arrett o those icons of American popular ulture, ElvisPresley nd Jerry Lewis, heir ntention s not to elevate Jarrett o their

status; ather, heyare

claiminghat his

bodymovement

during erfor-mance s nothing more han superficial how-business osturing, nempty, f at times entertaining, acade. The body s clearly een as thelocus of ultimate xteriority nd as a threat or contemplation f apurely musical esthetic-jazz has, after all, become part and parcel ofthe concert hall, the sacred place of art-music xperience. Like heintrusion f the voice, the intrusion f the body nto the aesthetic xpe-rience has a long and varied history. To my mind, he somatic ngage-ment of Jarrett's erformance tyle makes elevant an otherwise isparatecollection of writers who have greatly nfluenced ur understanding ngeneral. am thinking of Aquinas's medieval heological iews; healienation f the body rom he mind ostered y Descartes's pistemol-ogy; and nineteenth-century otions of musical ranscendentalism, ar-ticularly he absence of the body rom he romantic xperience f theaesthetic.

Long before Descartes evalued he body n favor of the mind andthe soul in his effort o demonstrate he immanence f the latter, Christ-

ian theologians uring he Middle Ages took more nterest n the body,an outlook characterized y,among other hings, ssuesof liminality,heightened one could even say sensual) manner f communication, ndthe transcendence f the physical n the earthly domain.26 orAquinas,for instance, he body carried he imprint f the self's dentity, he soultaking over this function only in the absence of the body, hat is, upondying. "Me" s expressed n my body, or, as Aquinas puts t, "when hingsare as they should be," hat is, here on earth.27 nowing, eeling, and

experiencingre ocated n the

body,which n the late Middle

Agesalso


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furnishes an instrument of redemption.28 rom the musical aestheticpoint of view, it should also be noted that after Boethius the humanvoice was believed to be the only pure musical instrument, much to thedetriment of instrumental music. In a general sense, then, the body wasa central site for experiencing as well as producing music, and, inAquinas's epistemology, he locus of knowledge and feeling.

Descartes, on the other hand, set about the project of distancingknowledge from the sensuous; "leading he way away from the senses . ..

toward a clear and distinct vision," the mind could enter the first stage ofknowledge.29 During the quest for epistemological certainty, he body, asthe matrix of the senses, is discarded n a moment of radical doubt. Buteven when accepting the existence of the body, Descartes asserts hathuman action, "the power of self-motion," as well as sensing and think-ing are not dependent on the body in the sense that they have a physicallocation in the body.30 Of particular ignificance to my main argument sthat even those matters most likely to be bound with the body, such asextension, shape, and movement, fall now under the exclusive jurisdic-tion of the mind. The turn toward he inside and the construction of awall separating mind and soul, on the one hand, and body, on the other,is here definitive; Descartes simultaneously places the subject in the fore-ground, while distancing the "thinking self" from all else, including,most famously, he embodied self. This shift in the conceptualization ofthe body introduces the notion of objectivity and so bears direct influ-ence in conceptions of the body in music. Thus, in his Compendiummusicae 1650), Descartes classified he effect of music on the subject as

an irrational element, one incapable of being measured and belonging toaesthetics and metaphysics.31

When Baumgarten Meditationes hilosophicae, 735) articulates heprinciples of aesthetics in terms of the mental states a perceiver experi-ences, he reclaims the sensuous as a form of cognition, the one epistemo-logical avenue so conveniently blocked by rationalists ike Descartes.But while this conclusion paves the way for the autonomization of thesensuous rom the intelligible and the recognition of the sensuous as a

form of knowledge, sensations are themselves characterized y an irre-versible turn inward. Baumgarten, with his romantic subjectification ofaesthetic experience, stands in stark contrast to his successor Kant, whoin his critique of the aesthetic judgement attributed such notions as "dis-interested attention" and "purposiveness without a purpose" o the art-work. Once placed within the frame of transcendentalism, however, bywhich tenets music is said to surpass he worldly and the particular on-tingencies and transitoriness f mortals, Kant's notions of the aestheticjudgement appear sensible, logical even.


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The romantic or transcendentalist position, curiously, opens thegates of self-expression, yet strives for the universal. In particular, musicappears as a phenomenal manifestation of things eternal. "Music bringsbefore us in rhythm and harmony the form of motion of physical bod-ies," states Friedrich von Schelling in what could well be a manifestoof the bodily condition of the musical experience. Yet he immediatelycounteracts such impulses by adding, "[I]t [music] s... pure form, liber-ated from any object or matter. To this extent, music is the art that is

least limited by physical considerations n that it represents pure motionas such, abstracted rom any object and borne on invisible, almost spiri-tual wings."32 The duality of this account of musical experience, bywhich the human and the exalted coalesce, depends upon "a certainkind of illusion, the ability to see and hear in a physical object or perfor-mance, less the concrete and the physical, than the transcendent," sLydia Goehr puts it.33 Continuing with the metaphor of illusion, it is ashort step to asking the performer o give him- or herself to the creativegenius, as E. T. A. Hoffmann

famouslydoes in 1813: "The true artist

lives only in the work that he has understood as the composer meant itand that he then performs. He is above putting his own personality or-ward in any way, and all his endeavors are directed toward a single end-that all the wonderful enchanting pictures and apparitions hat thecomposer has sealed into his work with magic power may be called intoactive life, shining in a thousand colors, and that they may surroundmankind in luminous sparkling circles and, enkindling its imagination,its innermost soul, may bear it in rapid light into the faraway piritrealm of sound."34 f so much is asked of the performer, what then couldbe demanded of the listener? Far more, I would suspect.

So what of the body? What begins during the post-Enlightenmentera as an auspicious move away from reason's exclusive domination ofknowledge and experience quickly becomes a turn away from the body.Only by fleeing the body and occupying someone else's space by meansof contemplation is it possible to attain the highest degrees of the aes-thetic experience, as Hoffmann describes t. The transfiguration f the

self into an other is considered an act of redemption, a justifiable nter-pretation given the closeness between religion and romantic aesthetics.Or, as Schilling puts it, "[I]t s music that elevates man to the infinite, toGod himself."35 n turn, by considering redemption as a flight into another for eternity, we may compare t with ecstasy, a category of experi-ence closely associated with musical performance hroughout variouscultures. Ecstasy means "to put out of place," a condition that wouldseem to have much in common with music's so-called ability to trans-port the listener. But instead of

fleeingthe

presentmoment into

pastor


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future, ecstasy is just the opposite. It is an unconditional identificationwith the present and a total suppression of past and future.36 More

importantly, in contrast to redemption, which again entails a kind of sur-

render, ecstasy entails an absolute oneness of the self. Two factors arise,one temporal and the other ontological, a conclusion that I believe,returning to my example, has an interesting bearing on Jarrett's perfor-mative style.

Keith Jarrett is acutely aware that improvising constitutes a unique,unrepeatable experience of time in which there is no room for deferral.37He has stated that "when you are an improviser, a true improviser, youhave to be familiar with ecstasy, otherwise you can't connect with music... when you are an improviser, at eight o'clock tonight, for example,you have to be so familiar with that state that you can almost bring iton."38 The "state," as he calls ecstasy, demands one to focus conscious-ness on the musical moment, a condition that inherently denies the

phenomenological separation of sound and gesture, of music and me-

dium. The musician (and by this I mean the body and soul of the per-former) is united with the instrument in the creative moment. The body,like the voice, assumes an ever increasing role in communicating to theaudience the power of the moment. However, in the case of Jarrett'sbody movement, we must ask whether his behavior is governed by prac-tical or symbolic considerations, or perhaps even by both. Are his gyra-tions and genuflections expressions of emotional states that cannot becommunicated any other way, or are his gestures symbolic but unessen-tial

expressions?Maurice Merleau-Ponty offers an answer: "movement

must somehow cease to be a way of designating things or thoughts, andbecome the presence of that thought in the phenomenal world, and,moreover, not its clothing but its token or its body."39 By this account

perception (esthesis) and production (poiesis) are unified, situated, and

embodied, rejecting the split of mind and body and refusing to considerthe body as mechanical object. Vocalizations and gestures are not justsupplements of pure signifiers (such as music) whose signification is inde-

pendent of the acts through which they are made manifest: Jarrett's body

movement and gesturing are, so to speak, significations of the flesh. Froman aesthetic point of view, it should be noted that this position wouldconsider sound and motion to be phenomenologically separable. Weknow that they are not; deferral may operate in the relation between

thought and the world, but not in thought in relation to the spoken orwritten word, and definitely not in the relation between thought andmusical expression. Jazz improvisation has a unique way of defying tem-

poral deferral. It is ecstatic; it belongs in the immediacy of the moment.


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Where hought ends and movement begins becomes mpossible oseparate; estures may be, after all, forms f knowledge, ssential parts nthe production f sound. Musicians ave long noted this relationship,pointing oward kind of kinetic musical pistemology. travinsky ncereferred o his fingers shis "inspirers," nd though an avowed ormalist,he also stated hat "the sight of the gestures nd movements f the vari-ous parts producing he music s fundamentally ecessary f it is to begrasped n all its fullness."40 t is indeed one of Jarrett's tylistic rade-

marks o produce ncredibly ong musical hrases, hrases hat, inciden-tally, a single breath ould not sustain. t is no "theatrical" oincidencethat during hese ong phrases e is usually ff the piano bench. Thisshould come as no surprise, ince thinking n sound s a transactionin which sense becomes motion and motion, ense. One wonders f,were Jarrett o sit, his fantastically ong musical hraseswould come tocadences more requently. ny communicating ignificance arrett'smovement may have could be equally onsidered ractical nd produc-tive when viewed rom he

perspectivef kinetic

knowledge;t becomes

part of the poietic process, dynamic uccession hat follows ts ownlogic and creates a bodily ogos.41

In the case of Jarrett, ne final observation hould be brought obear n the discussion: he relationship f the performer o the instru-ment tself. Jack DeJohnette, he drummer ith Jarrett's rio anda musical ssociate f his since the 1960s,has said, "Keith eallyhas alove affair with the piano, t is a relationship ith that instrument."42One is reminded f a famous azzanecdote about John Coltrane, which,whether apocryphal r not, goes to the heart of the matter. After Col-trane had played nnumerable horuses n a solo, Miles Davis reportedlyasked him, "Hey ohn, why didn't you stop?" oltrane eplied, "I didn'tknow how." Davis hen suggested, just ake the horn out of yourmouth[ ]." asier aid han done. Coltrane's oint, as I see it, is that theinstrument s not simply vehicle to express ourself ut becomes partof the musician's elf, an extension of the subject, not an object. Thepiano presents nique hallenges n this regard. t is an intensely physi-cal instrument, et in hardly ny other nstrument s the human bodymore removed. At best, besides he fingertips, he soles of our shoes willmake actual contact. There s some perversity n this, and also in thefact that while it offers he entire spectrum f acoustical requencies, tdoes not offer ts voice. Put another way, he grain of the piano's oice,its particular imbral ualities, annot be shaped by finger ction. Apianist's ingers nd arms annot affect he sound of a piano beyondattack and dynamics; nce produced, ts sound imply dies away, without


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there being much a pianist can do. It comes as no surprise hat often,though not exclusively, it is pianists and mallet instrument players whotend to give their instruments a voice, literally, and thus attempt to closethat unbridgeable ap between subject and object. Jarrett's nique musi-cal voice forms part of a reciprocally nhancing fusion between thepiano sound and his vocalizations, resulting n a mutual envelopment,as it were. But also, Jarrett's odily gestures become part of a profoundlyphysical interplay with the piano, whose inanimate body they seem to

bring to life.Part of the listener's confusion and resistance that Jarrett's move-ment generates resides in the fact that these movements resemble otheraspects of emotional expression in our lives (i.e., dancing or lovemak-ing). But such similarities between his voice and true singing are aresemblance or even an unfortunate coincidence. It is thus importantnot to consider body movement as encoding a kind of visual semantics,which would be saying that the body "means" hrough movement whatthe music might be trying to express n sound.43 From the epistemologi-cal standpoint that I am trying to describe, he aural presence of themusic establishes a relation to the body, and, reciprocally, he visualpresence of the body constitutes a representation of the fundamentalmateriality of music, its acoustical presence. Certainly, there is a kind ofsemiotic contradiction here, one that Richard Leppert characterizes s"the slippage between the physical activity that produces musical soundand the abstract nature of what it produces."44 erformance may be ges-tural or theatrical, but whatever the case, from the listener's perspectiveit is always at the distance of the gaze, which may, at times, objectify.Sound, by contrast, draws he subject in, surrounding er-in fact, mak-ing everyone it reaches sensual. Enticing as it no doubt is, this divisiongives sound ontological exclusivity in the aesthetic experience of music;by this account, music is sound, and only sound is music. I disagree. Pre-cisely because performance s a socially constructed phenomenon, itbecomes urgent to resist such a division, particularly ecause it polarizesproduction and reception. The aesthetic I have in mind is shaped by

both. Keith Jarrett's ianism illustrates a late-twentieth-century aes-thetic, one in which the distinction between sound and music has col-lapsed. His sounds and gestures are unquestionably part of the music,so much so that one could describe these sounds and gestures not as atranslation or mechanisms n service of music, or an addition to themusic, but the music itself.

Seeing Jarrett mprovise reminds me of how much of music's powerresides not just in the notes or in the spaces between them, but also inthe fully embodied movement that invites me, as a listener, to partici-


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pate in the moment. A critique of Jarrett's oice and movement as anobstacle to the music denies the possibility of unifying the mental, thespiritual, he embodied, and the unrepeatable of in-the-moment cre-ation. If Aquinas was right and the self is inscribed n our body and soul-and I wholly agree with him-then how can anyone deny Jarrett'sright to a form of expression that is of a piece through time and space, aself that is not subject to parsing according to a most pervasive, yet usu-ally unexamined inheritance of our intellectual tradition? When Jarrett's

body appears o take flight and his voice seems to sing, it is because hebelieves in the priority of the improviser as a person whose imaginationrolls and tumbles from vocal chords as well as fingers, whose body is notonly instrument, expression, and locus of self, but self itself. In Jarrett'spianism, communication is aural, oral, visual, and kinetic; it encom-passes poiesis and esthesis, logos and pathos. To center music's communi-cation in sound alone is to dehumanize t. So as long as we permit thecritical establishment to stomp around with their late-romantic deas ofthe aesthetic

experienceand their

logocentristicnotions of music, all

those acts that make a performance a performance will be regarded s asurplus of humanness. This is something that we simply cannot allow tobe, no matter how heightened the promises of transcendentalism maybe. It is not Jarrett's estures and moans that are out of place, "layeredover," t is the aesthetic by which we measure hem. For Jarrett hemusic is voice, body, and soul.

NotesAn earlier version of this article was presented at the 1996 meeting of the AmericanMusicological Society in Baltimore. The author is grateful o Julia Hubbert or her com-ments on a previous draft of this article.

1. Owen Cordle, review of Standards, Vol. 1, The Keith Jarrett Trio, ECM Records,1983, Down Beat (Jan. 1984): 32.

2. John Ephland, review of Tribute, The Keith Jarrett Trio, ECM Records, 1990, DownBeat (May 1991): 30.

3. In a personal communication, the pianist Michael Cain, who attended a recordingsession by Jarrett's rio, told me that Jarrett engages his body regardless f whether he isplaying before an audience or not. We shall return to this point.

4. Len Lyons, The Great Jazz Pianists Speaking f Their Lives and Music (New York: DaCapo Press, 1989), 295. The interested reader may observe Jarrett n several commer-cially available videos; I recommend Keith arrett, Solo Tribute, RCA Victor 09026-68201-3.

5. John Litweiler, The Freedom rinciple: azz After 1958 (New York: W. Morrow, 1984),233-35.


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6. John Andrews, "Catching Up with Keith," Down Beat (Oct. 1994): 55. Andrews'spronouncement seems prophetic; n a recent article-critique itled "Who's Overrated?Who's Underrated?" arrett arned three entries, the highest number, n the "overrated"category. To witness, Bill Milkowski, "And don't get me started about his horriblemewling"; and Tom Terrell, "[H]e has become a petulant, arrogant, gomaniacal, elf-proclaimed artiste' who dabbles wanly in classical shallows, can't swing, grunts/contortsgrotesquely." azzTimes 7 (Sept. 1997): 31, 39.

7. Most critics, it should be noted, are enthusiastic about Jarrett's ontribution to jazzpiano. Some exceptions, such as the critic Gary Giddins, do exist. Giddins, for instance,objects to Jarrett's lleged excessive lyricism and romanticism.

8. I do not, in this essay, attempt to place criticism of Jarrett n the context of the ani-mosity that has accompanied the jazz establishment's eaction to his work outside jazz,namely the distrust with which jazz critics view Jarrett's mmensely popular recordings ofsolo piano concerts.

9. Keith Shadwick writes of Jarrett's Bye Bye Blackbird a 1993 album dedicated to thememory of Miles Davis), "A very worthy tribute indeed, although his [Jarrett's] ocalintrusions are, as usual, a drag." Keith Shadwick, review of Bye Bye Blackbird, he KeithJarrett Trio, ECM Records, 1993, in Gramophone June 1993): 118-19, 119.

10. The classic exposition of the tenets of logocentrism appears n Jacques Derrida, OfGrammatology, rans. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UniversityPress, 1976).

11. See Jacques Derrida, Writing nd Difference, rans. Alan Bass (London: Routledge,1978), 278.

12. This is a point that critics of the "authentic performance" movement have notmade. Much critical discussion, such as that by Richard Taruskin, enters around tsnineteenth century philosophical roots (transcendentalism, absolutism, ormalism, ultof the genius, and so on) and its modernist manifestation (e.g., the dehumanization of

art expression). See Richard Taruskin, Text and Act: Essays on Music and Performance(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995).

13. Taruskin, Text and Act, 100-101 passim.

14. Paul Berliner thoroughly describes he complex learning processes undertaken byimprovising musicians; ee his Thinking n Jazz: The Infinite Art of Improvisation Chicago:University of Chicago Press, 1994). In section 2 of this essay I will discuss the role oftranscendentalism and the aesthetic in molding conceptions of musical creation as nat-ural and of its performance as disembodied.

15. lan Carr, Keith arrett: The Man and His Music (New York: Da Capo Press, 1991),66. Italics in original.

16. For a discussion of issues of temporality n jazz mprovisation, ee Ed Sarath, "ANew Look at Improvisation," ournal f Music Theory 40 (1996): 1-38.

17. Jonathan Dunsby addresses he acoustic differences n the ways instrumentalistsand singers hear themselves during performance n Performing Music: Shared Concerns(Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1995), 60-61.

18. Julia Kristeva writes of a kind of primordial emiotic of gesture, suggesting a kind ofkinetic communication in which no distinction is made between signified and signifier.

This position fits well the perspective of the improviser or whom the doings of the body


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set forth relations without pointing to specific objects within these relations. See Julia

Kristeva, "Le geste, pratique ou communication?" n Semeiotike: Recherches our une Sem-analyse Paris: Editions du Seil, 1969), 93 passim.

19. Kaja Silverman, The Acoustic Mirror: The Female Voice n Psychoanalysis nd Cinema

(Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1988), 44. Silverman's nsightful aphorismappears n the context of a broad synthesis of French psychoanalytic heory about thevoice and sound; there she deals in particular with issues of gendering and subjectivityin classic cinema.

20. See Michel Foucault, Discipline nd Punish, rans. Alan Sheridan (New York: Vin-

tage Books, 1977), 136-37.

21. I do not intend with this characterization o indict those musicians who do notvocalize as being nonexpressive or necessarily repressed.

22. Carolyn Abbate, from whom I borrow he expression, uses the notion of ventrilo-

quism differently. She calls ventriloquism he tendency to consider music to be unable to

speak for itself. My sense is that "disciplined" nterpreters, ike the magician with a

painted doll on the lap, undertake o speak for music without letting others see the phys-ical mechanism by which sound is produced. See Carolyn Abbate, Unsung Voices: Operaand Musical Narrative n the Nineteenth Century Princeton: Princeton University Press,1991), 16-18 passim.

23. Handbook f Conducting, rans. M. D. Calvocoressi (London: Oxford UniversityPress, 1993), 29.

24. For incisive and comprehensive treatments of this subject see Taruskin, Text andAct, and Lydia Goehr, The Imaginary Museum of Musical Works: An Essay on the Philoso-phy of Music (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1992).

25. Simon Frith has argued hat listeners of popular music feel that they "own" t: "itis not just the record that people think they own: we feel that we also possess the songitself, the particular performance, and its performer." n "Towards n Aesthetic of Popu-lar Music," n Music and Society: The Politics f Composition, Performance, nd Reception,ed. Richard Leppert and Susan McClary (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,1987), 143. A distinction must be made, however, between two forms of possession:that of an ephemeral performance i.e., the concert), and that which can be repeated adinfinitum (i.e., the recording). The disembodied experience of recorded performancesaccentuates the sense of ownership and control that a listener might exert on music. Fur-thermore, t is there that musical performance, ollowing the purchase of a recording, smost objectified.

26. For an excellent introduction to medieval conceptions of the body, see Caroline

Bynum, "WhyAll the Fuzz About the

Body:A Medievalist's

Perspective,"Critical

nquiry22 (1995): 1-33. My account of Aquina's views is indebted to hers.

27. Bynum, "Why All the Fuzz About the Body," 22.

28. A central tenet of udeo-Christian doctrine is that by becoming flesh God grants usredemption rom our sins. The role of redemption n Judeo-Christian heology undergoesan interesting transformation n romantic accounts of the aesthetic experience, a subjectthat I discuss below.

29. Rene Descartes, Meditations n First Philosophy, rans. Donald A. Cress (Indianapo-lis: Hackett Publishing Company), 8.


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30. Here we mustkeep

in mind that Descartes s as interested n"perspective"

s he isin establishing "location." n addition, he somewhat extends medieval unified theoriesby locating the soul within a specific place, the pineal gland. Thanks to Julia Hubbert forbringing these points to my attention.

31. Descartes's writings on music, including the Compendium 1619), view the subjectfrom either a scientific perspective (i.e., the physicoacoustic aspect of sound) or a "com-

positional" angle (i.e., the practical aspect afforded by the rules of counterpoint).

32. From Philosophie er Kunst 1802-3), cited in Music and Aesthetics n the Eighteenthand Nineteenth Centuries, d. Peter le Huray and James Day (Cambridge: Cambridge Uni-

versity Press, 1981), 280. Italics in original.33. Goehr, The Imaginary Museum, 167. Naturally, his is not to say that transcenden-talism in music is responsible or post-Cartesian views of the body. Rather, music tran-scendentalism makes manifest some tenets of the Enlightenment project.

34. E. T. A. Hoffmann, "Beethoven's nstrumental Music," n Source Readings n MusicHistory, ed. Oliver Strunk (New York: Norton, 1950), 780-81.

35. Gustave Schilling, Encyclopddie er gesammten musikalischen Wissenschaften, derUniversal Lexikon er Tonkunst Stuttgart 1834-38), s.v. "Romantik und Romantisch,"cited in le Huray and Day, Music and Aesthetics, 470.

36. I borrow his interpretation rom the novelist Milan Kundera. See TestamentsBetrayed: An Essay n Nine Parts, trans. Linda Asher (New York: HarperCollins, 1995),84-87.

37. The notion of deferral s important to Derrida's ritique of self-presence as anuclear element of logocentrism. An important distinction from this in my discussion sthat I consider improvisation as act, not as a process divisible into thought and act.

38. Art Lange, "The Keith Jarrett nterview," Down Beat (June 1984): 16-19, 63.

39. Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology f Perception, rans. Colin Smith (London:Routledge, 1962), 182.

40. Igor Stravinsky, Chronicle f My Life (London: Victor Gollancz Ltd., 1936), 122.

41. This reading applies Kristeva's ategories n "Le Geste, Pratique ou Communica-tion?"

42. Carr, Keith arrett, 7-48.

43. There have been attempts to work out theories of motion in music by associatingmusical gestures with bodily movement symptomatic of human emotions, moods, and

feelings. While in principle such work seeks to reclaim the human body for music, these

theories quickly dissolve into a series of repertoire moves of associated meaning. For asympathetic summary f this work see Patrick Shove and Bruno H. Repp, "MusicalMotion and Performance: Theoretical and Empirical Perspectives," n The Practice fPerformance: tudies n Musical nterpretation, d. John Rink (Cambridge and New York:

Cambridge University Press, 1995), 55-83.

44. Richard Leppert, The Sight of Sound: Music, Representation, nd the History of the

Body (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993), xxi.

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Voice and Movement in Keith Jarrett’s Pianism

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