2003
SAMLA
Improvisation
in Jazz Writing
Scott DeShong
Quinebaug Valley Community College
Do not cite without permission of author.
The
Jazz of American Identity: Improvisation in Black and White
By "the
jazz of American identity," I mean the improvisation of identity
in the sociocultural context of the United States. I focus particularly
on identity that's acknowledged as racial, specifically on the matter
of blackness and whiteness in the U. S. In connecting jazz with racial
identity, I follow a tradition of writing about jazz, particularly as
emphasized by authors in the Black Arts movement. The key connection is
that the improvising voice (or voicing) in jazz can disrupt musical normality
in the same way that racialized identity can thwart naturalizations that
have produced (and which are circularly based on) the identity.
Addressing identity means addressing context. Certainly all identities
(human or otherwise) belong to multiple contexts, and within context they
shift--human social or cultural identities aren't "singular or internally
consistent," in Judith Roof's words (2)--yet an identity can't change
itself, but only change in terms of configuration within context. To the
extent that a particular identity can be understood as performative, it
must be understood as working upon the context in which the identification
takes place. Identity, while fully dependent on context, may be found
engaging context such that context shifts or changes--for example, insofar
as a context loses naturalization. When American racial and ethnic identity
are seen as improvised, sociocultural contexts are recognized as not natural,
but rather as constructed and both fissile and unstable.
In jazz improvisation and in the context of identity, naturalizing frameworks
are put into play when otherness intervenes--when what's outside the frame
alters the structure and semantics of the framework. When voice or race
works improvisationally upon context by engaging what's outside any purported
totalization of context, the respective context becomes denatured. Frames
of reference give way to decentered ensembles of relations in which neither
voices nor identities have full presence but emerge as traced by, while
always referring beyond, the playing amid relationships.
Craig Hansen Werner explains that jazz performance addresses binaries
that mark the inside and outside of rhythmic and tonal forms, although
demarcations aren't entirely destroyed or replaced during improvisation.
The framing contexts of inside and outside are played upon, as the player
works, for example, to be both inside and outside at once while sounding
wholly outside the key or the bar (another permutation might be sounding
inside while not being so). A doubled (or multiple) being or doubled consciousness
is experienced in the playing, and in the listening, or conceivably between
the two. Of course this isn't simply entertainment: there's pain and struggle
in the art of jazz, as Werner notes in tying improvisation to what Ralph
Ellison calls the "blues impulse" (Ellison 28), an "ancient"
source entirely anterior to the musical context. (Werner xxi) Such doubled
consciousness and the concomitant irruption of temporality put the formal
aspects of the music under critique, or under erasure, as the temporal
and physical presence of the performance context become denatured by the
intervention of the non-present (but not simply absent); improvisation
(as its etymology emphasizes) engages the dimension of the unforeseen.
That is, improvisation (of voice or identity) performs a critique of metaphysics,
of presence and totality. Jazz performance is paradigmatic of a deconstructive
moment of identification, where what's outside the contextual framework
is revealed as intervening on the frame.
Certainly the denaturing, surprising aspect of improvised performance
occurs in all music, and moreover all art. This definitional moment of
art is consistent with claims by artists and aestheticians concerning
what's critical in art--claims that art denatures, disrupts frameworks,
always engages what in jazz language is commonly termed "outside."
Seen thus, all art troubles assumptions about being--is always deconstructive--and
thus metaphysical in the sense of engaging in a metaphysics of the unassimilated,
in the sense of engaging otherness, radicality, indeed radical otherness.
Writing about jazz has tended to emphasize this aspect of art particularly
well, emphasizing the issue of being alive to alterity lying in unforeseen
time.
Thinking of race in terms of improvisation requires an understanding of
race as constructed reality. Charles W. Mills discusses race as ontological
without being physical or essential (xiv): race is real, but real in an
"intersubjective" way, by virtue of having been naturalized
in culture and language (48). W. E. B. DuBois, famously, discusses how
for African Americans, an awareness of racial marking usually entails
an indelible sense of socially mediated identity. According to DuBois,
the African-American subject can grasp the paradox of "double consciousness,"
by which inclusion in and exclusion from naturalized (read Enlightenment)
human being coincide (DuBois's "color line" being a function
of naturalized sociocultural context) (45). DuBois locates in subjective
human blackness a critical awareness of simultaneous belonging and not
belonging, a sense that one should belong, yet doesn't, to citizenship
and full humanity. Sandra Adell sees this double consciousness as exemplary
of Hegelian unhappy consciousness, in which the subject hasn't achieved
the full light of Reason (which of course even for Hegel remains a mythic
achievement). Adell's observation yields an understanding of blackness
as poignantly typical of modern human experience--typical of consciousness
that's aware of its contextual contradictions, unable to avoid or mask
them with a naturalizing myth of transcendental subjectivity.
Of course DuBois doesn't say blackness is typical of everyone in the U.
S., yet the formulation of double consciousness opens up general subjectivity
(and avoids racial essentialism): what's most significant is his opposition
of doubled subjectivity to the transcendental and deracinated subjectivity
that has become widely associated with "whiteness." Doubleness
emerges as what Trinh Minh-ha embraces as "hyphenated" existence,
entailing interrogation of any claim regarding what's naturally human.
Adam Lively writes that such interrogation via blackness breaks up the
illusion of unmediated human being, as the resultant denaturing overcomes
classical subjectivity. As is commonly expressed in the field of whiteness
studies, the naturalizing force of whiteness begins to look strange once
we gain a critical awareness of the complexity of what have been termed
non-white subjectivities.
Stuart Hall notes that blackness is "always positional": "Blackness
as a political identity in the light of the understanding of any identity
is always complexly composed, always historically constructed. It is never
in the same place" (152). Hall further describes blackness (again
like all identity) as being continually developed, always in process,
involving ambivalence and entailing a splitting of the human subject and
a lack of completion. That is, blackness per se always already exceeds
what it's identified to be. Considering the category of human blackness
as an object of knowledge, we find the object incomplete, or incompletely
known (albeit without being able to tell the difference). "Blackness"
becomes a term for experience by which expressions of human difference
are seen to fail and thus lead to différance (to apply Jacques
Derrida's terminology to Laclau and Mouffe's thinking; Laclau 125, plus
see Rapaport 1-2). Blackness becomes a notion of incompleting--a movement
of deferral and deflection of knowing about humanity.
There have been various approaches to such a notion of blackness that,
rather than reifying African or African-American experience, expresses
under the signifier "black" a humanity that plays against what's
thereby framed as mythic whiteness. Amiri Baraka, Nathaniel Mackey, and
others have referred to the thematics of jazz in discussing such self-
and social improvisation by black subjects. Even in revolutionary and
separatist Black Arts rhetoric, the term "black" is used almost
always in a knowingly metaphorical way. Although of course the word had
and continues to have material referentiality (with skin tone as the purported
referent), even in Black Arts use it's metaphoric to the extent that it
may be read as suggesting an exemplary notion of always incompletely accomplished
human identity.
For the Black Arts movement, the object "blackness" emphasizes
black culture, what Stephen Henderson calls the "commodity"
of blackness (4). In articulating this object, the most recognized voices
of the movement (such as Baraka, Larry Neal, and Addison Gayle) draw upon
folk traditions, developments in jazz, and other perceived (and somewhat
selective) features of practices inherited from African peoples, thus
developing a pan-Africanism that--in its imaginative depth and breadth--emphasizes
the excessive feature of blackness: an emphatic proliferation, always
incomplete. Kimberly W. Benston suggests this amorphous blackness is no
less effective or less real for its being legible as a synthetic "necessary
fiction" (4). He emphasizes that the Black Arts movement's attempts
to construct a "primordial blackness" have led to a broad "(re)discovery
of the subversive ambiguity of any expressive act," so that these
attempts have led to a performative and thus counter-essential notion
of blackness (10). As Black Arts rhetoric yields black culture as a radical
object that functions politically as a discourse, black culture emerges
as doubly metaphoric and self-undermining: lacking and opposing totality,
it does transformative work on itself and its broader contexts.
Mackey devotes an essay to the aesthetic transgression of "othering"
performed by African-American musicians ("Other"). He discusses
how black Americans can take the experience of having been cast as others
while being incorporated within American life--that is, their having been
palpably "othered"--and can convert that experience into an
othering of the art forms they receive within the American context, typically
European forms. Baraka discusses an example of such othering when he writes
of John Coltrane's performances of received popular songs. Baraka notes
that Coltrane alters or destroys the songs' formal aspects so severely
that he "murders" the songs and the forms (Black Music 174),
the result being the reincorporation of the musical materials in what
must be understood as an entirely different American musical context.
Baraka and Mackey locate the development and dynamics of jazz improvisation
in the historical struggle for African American liberty and power--in
the history of opposition to categorical and othering whiteness. Black
American experience, in this history, appears as the experience of being
or feeling marked or impacted by an ancestral connection to slave subordination,
within a culture that's marked and impacted by slavery. In The Location
of Culture, Homi Bhabha emphasizes the post-coloniality of African-American
experience as indispensable for any attempt to locate or identify black
culture. According to Bhabha, signifying black experience divides signification
itself. Signifying blackness--trying to make it present--splits the present,
as the past intervenes: black experience per se is an intervention of
the slave past on the present. Bhabha discusses how the splitting of metaphysical
time by history emerges in Frantz Fanon's view of the "belatedness
of the black man," who must live the trauma of having come after
the arrival of (white, Enlightenment) "Man" (Bhabha 236-37).
Bhabha cites Toni Morrison's notion of a "not-there" that he
refers to as a "'black' space that [Morrison] distinguishes from
the Western sense of synchronous tradition--which then turns into the
'first stroke' of slave rememory [sic]" (198-99, 251). This signifying
space or "void," Morrison writes, "may be empty but it
is not a vacuum" ("Unspeakable" 11). Such a "dis/location"
of black culture--perhaps better put as a dis/location of blackness in
American culture (that is, discernible at least potentially by any American)--intervenes
on systematic thought that would privilege synchronic time, time that
would organize and naturalize human relations. The intervention of history
on the present thereby overcomes what Bhabha calls the "collusive
sense of cultural contemporaneity"--that is, overcoming a metaphysics
of totalizing culture, which would claim to incorporate blackness within
the putative pluralism of a transcendentally organized culture (4). Morrison's
re-memory as a "stroke"--the intervening post-colonial moment--recalls
Ellison's depiction of the "blues impulse" (78); also, this
stroke is expressed as the outrage in the Black Arts practitioners' work
to construct cultural blackness. Seen thus, blackness bears collective
scars of American history. As Morrison develops throughout Playing in
the Dark, black life in the United States is where the history of American
cultural violence can be witnessed.
Ellison makes the point (which is implicit in DuBois) that blackness is
endemic to Americanness. Conceived as improvised identity, Americanness-as-blackness
would exceed any naturalization of the transcendental citizen subject.
Broadly disseminated, such blackness could alter radically what Mills
refers to as the intersubjective ontology of race. The politics of improvisational
thinking would emphasize non-exclusivity, rather than the liberal ideal
of inclusiveness, as the emergence of otherness reconfigures the field
in which it emerges. This is to begin by recognizing the discontinuity
of humanity, recognizing that while commonality might be negotiated, it
should never be assumed.
Two examples show how specific aspects of U. S. culture have been affected
by a logic of improvisation with the outside, in each case reconfiguring
the particular field through a logic of non-exclusion as opposed to one
of totalizing inclusiveness. Both occurred during the 1960s and '70s,
when African-American struggle helped effect major changes in thinking
about what's naturally human. In The Death of White Sociology in 1973,
Joyce Ladner reflects an aspect of a change in process. Ladner explains
that once black experience was seriously taken as valid and valued human
experience, fundamental change occurred in the social sciences. She writes
that African Americans were no longer seen as outside normalized American
life, yet also not newly included in a naturalized group of Americans.
Rather, the study of black experience per se broke open the prior naturalization:
the addition, the unforeseen voicing, reconfigured the entire field. Houston
Baker describes a similar change in the arts, drawing an analogy to Thomas
Kuhn's concept of "paradigm shift" in the sciences (Baker 74-77).
For Baker, the Black Arts movement's development and valuation of black
culture helped create a change in the "artworld" (Arthur Danto's
term), a phenomenological shift in which objects, perception, and production
all were altered.
Such contextual shifts involve a dominant mythology's giving way to a
critical consciousness of its own mythmaking. As articulated in terms
of improvised identity, subjective blackness is always other to the mythology
of full human presence. As Alton Pollard points out, DuBois didn't want
double consciousness resolved into assimilation: African-American life
for DuBois contains a revolutionary aspect that would oppose all tendencies
toward regimentation in American society and culture (Pollard 50). Yet
once expressed, double consciousness becomes a model for the way all subjectivity
is contingent, as every person is other to the transcendental subjectivity
of what Derrida calls white mythology. Clearly, all humanity isn't black
in what remains a significant referential sense. Yet all humanity resists
white mythology as black humanity does.
I reiterate that I use "blackness" in this paper as opposition
to the very category of the naturally human, working with a theory of
non-exclusion rather than one that articulates inclusiveness; this avoids
expressing blackness as human nature and thus maintains the deconstruction
of any notion of natural human subjectivity. Developing the conditions
of double consciousness as proper to human life posits a ubiquitous sociocultural
play in which the subject improvises his or her position. These are conditions
under which the violence of Baraka's or Coltrane's approach to improvisation
as revolution won't seem bizarre, or contrary to what humans do, susceptible
to being judged as unnatural or inhuman. Arguably, DuBois's exposition
of double consciousness in 1903 expresses a desire for a fully free and
inclusive, civilized subjectivity, amenable to an imagined plurality that's
perhaps conceivable in terms very much like the naturalized, universalizing
category of whiteness. So toward valuing the doubleness of improvised
life, it remains important for us to emphasize a movement always toward
the trace of something outside any possible naturalization, as played
in an ensemble of relations where the time of voices leads beyond any
possible totalization of context.
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