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Improvisation remains a fascinating factor in jazz music. Yet the value of jazz cannot be reduced to improvisation. All the more so as its musicians are often at pains to blur the boundaries between the fixed and the unfixed. It seems that 21st-century jazz players have taken this ambiguity to task, playing with listeners' perceptions. A brief review.
...before the 21st century?
Fixed (rather than "written"), unfixed (rather than "improvised").
Since the very beginnings of jazz history, this relationship to music has never ceased to preoccupy listeners, musicians and jazz analysts. There are countless books on improvisation. However, there is a long-standing tradition of the prepared solo, a piece of music fixed in the mind of the musician to which he or she gives life less as an interpreter (an interpreter often acts as an intermediary between a composer and the listener) than as a creator.
One of the solos that changed the course of jazz history is of this nature: the "West End Blues" that Louis Armstrong recorded with his Hot Five in 1928. Years later, with the exception of a few musicians and after some research, it became clear that this was a moment set before the performance, or at least refined performance after performance, and set in stone on that June 27.
Similarly, it was only with the release of the alternate takes of "Night in Tunisia" recorded by Charlie Parker on March 28, 1946, that it was discovered that his famous solo opening break was far from improvised in the moment. The same was true, but on a different level, of John Coltrane's famous May 5, 1959 version of "Giant Steps", whose publication in 1995 of the unretained takes revealed what Philippe Michel, after a detailed study of the eleven solos performed by the saxophonist, including the master take, sums up as follows: "Giant Steps" represents] a project that encompasses both a relatively fixed pre-text (the theme of "Giant Steps") and a network of pre-texts feeding into the improvisation phase. The soloist's freedom is acquired here not through the adaptation of a pre-existing form vocabulary to the harmonic framework, but through the coincidence of thought that generates both the framework and the form vocabulary intended to exploit that framework within the solo [2] [...]."
From the 1960s onwards, and even in the case of some musicians from the previous two decades, many from the field of jazz continued to blur the boundaries between fixed and non-fixed. Open works, aleatorics, graphic scores, electronic programs and many other strategies and methods were developed, with jazz musicians not hesitating to follow in the footsteps of so-called "contemporary" composers. On the face of it, the movements ofAnthony Braxton, George Lewis, Jean-Louis Chautemps and Michael Mantler seemed to be opposed to those of Karlheinz Stockhausen, Krzysztof Penderecki and John Cage: while the composers were attempting, via the written word, a return to gesture[3], the jazzmen seemed to start from the written word to motivate their improvisation. In reality, the magnetic field between the two worlds shifted so much that they often became magnetized[4].
...in the 21st century?
The paths opened up by the protagonists of the jazz field over the last sixty years continue to nourish the practices of our contemporaries. They have, however, modified, refined, developed and enhanced them, focusing even more on their perceptive aspect. Since the advent of the Internet and its corollary proliferation, the totality of which it seems impossible to grasp, it's very difficult to draw up a complete map of the trends, possible schools and various groupings at work in today's jazz field (all the more so in the restricted framework of such a piece of writing). So, in order to give some idea of the thousand and one ways in which the relationship between fixed and unfixed is considered today, let's take a look at how Stéphane Payen, John Zorn and Matt Mitchell play with the listener's perception, three representative examples of the contemporary kaleidoscope.
a) Stéphane Payen[5] and oscillation
In 2020, saxophonists Ingrid Laubrock and Stéphane Payen released All Set[6], a quartet album whose music was conceived from Milton Babbitt's eponymous serial composition for piano and small jazz ensemble, premiered in 1957 by Bill Evans on piano. The two main protagonists each set themselves the task of composing four pieces based on the four twelve-tone series of the American composer's piece. In conceiving his music, Payen explains: " I chose to create almost no form for the improvisation; I wanted something very free. I wanted to manipulate the colors of the series, including during the improvisation. So my written parts were conceived as bridges to the improvisation. "
Those of "Harmonization" are extremely structured: the series is accompanied by notes whose intervals increase in size, as do the rhythms (5 sixteenth notes, then 5+1, then 5+2, etc.), and the harmonies are conceived by alternating the order of the constituent notes of three-tone chords. "Harmonization" comprises four parts (the order of which can be changed each evening) for as many variations composed from one of Babbitt's four series. Each variation is followed by an improvisation, the nature of which is difficult to determine. Neither absolutely "free", although the spirit of it is, nor really controlled or directed, it has an active agent in the person of Payen, who explains: " As a composer, I position myself as a parameter of variability, depending on what Ingrid plays, for example. Whether she stays close to the series or moves away from it, I have two choices: either I too abandon the series altogether, or on the contrary, I will stick strictly to the initial sequence of notes to maintain a link between what has previously been heard, the written part, and the improvisation, in this way laying down a covering for what my partner proposes. " Consequence: the flexible constraint seized upon by the improviser leads to an incessant to-and-fro between the fixed and the unfixed, leading the non-expert listener (i.e. the majority) not to really grasp that the music often oscillates between these two states.
b) John Zorn and the dual state
Between 2010 and 2014, John Zorn set out to conceive " music for piano trio that could be played in clubs as well as on European jazz festival stages ", as he wrote for the booklet of the album In Hall of Mirrors[7]. For this project, he conceived highly virtuosic parts totally fixed for the piano and totally improvised by double bassist Greg Cohen and drummer Tyshawn Sorey . The six pieces thus present some of the possible, ever-changing balances between fixed and unfixed. For example, "In Lovely Blueness" begins as a jazz ballad, rather open, with atonal streaks. As the music progresses, the alternation between these two dimensions intensifies, calling for great flexibility on the part of the accompanists. However, they do not discover the sound events as they arrive. Beforehand, they have had access to the score, and therefore know the framework of the piece in advance. The rhythmic tandem is therefore at the junction of two states, or rather in a double state: performer and improviser. This leads to an auditory disturbance that Zorn, quoting him again, underlines: " Sometimes it sounds as if it's actually the piano that's following them.
c) Matt Mitchell: oscillation and the dual state
The record Fiction[8] (2013), which pianist Matt Mitchell recorded as a duo with drummer Ches Smith, is a collection of studies in the comings and goings and co-presence of the fixed and the unfixed. All fifteen tracks on the album are based on the same principle: a score in which only the piano part is written. Unlike Zorn, however, the listener is not informed. On listening, however, it becomes clear that all the pieces begin with moments set in advance of the performance, not least because they are repeated in a loop for some time. The challenge, and therefore the ambiguity, lies in the pianist's ability to move away from the score more or less gradually . And there are many solutions. In the third round of "Brain Color", Mitchell keeps his left hand identical, while on the right he modifies the pitches while retaining the initial rhythmic figures; in the following round, she gradually moves away from the imposed rhythms; during the fifth round, her left hand draws new melodic lines, both retaining the homorhythm of the beginning; and so on until the fixed elements are dissolved, before returning. All this while the drummer keeps on improvising. For "Diction", Mitchell proceeds differently. The score was written for two real voices, with Smith playing the vibraphone and his right hand in the upper part. On the third reiteration, the latter improvises pitches more or less in complete homorhythm with the left hand, leaving the top voice to the vibraphone alone. For the next cycle, the vibraphone maintains the fixed part, while the piano seems to erase elements of its part, moving in and out of the score, which it more or less respects. Smith then settles in behind his drums, while the pianist draws inspiration from his score without playing it strictly. As the track progresses, the ensemble frees itself from the score, which nevertheless remains in the background of the duo's inventions. But the listener doesn 't know all this. The question of what is improvised and what is fixed is a constant one, made all the more dubious by the fact that the notated musical elements, by their difficulty and their language far removed from any reference to the accompanied melody, contribute to the creation of a sensation of ambiguity.
At the end of our brief overview, the assertion made by Denis Levaillant - author of a reference work on improvisation[9] - at the end of the 20th century still seems relevant: those who oppose the notated to the impromptu are mistaken, for " improvisation has not created a 'language'[...] this idea is misleading, as if we hadan 'improvised music' opposite 'written music' that would be a separate aesthetic category"[10]. In the 21st century, the most important thing for practitioners in the field of jazz remains less the questioning of the differences in nature between the fixed and the unfixed than the deepening and refining of possible games with the perception of sound phenomena. This is how Greg Cohen, commenting on Zorn's pieces, sees them as heralding "the future of jazz[11]". The music recorded by Stéphane Payen, John Zorn and Matt Mitchell seems to prove him right, starting a list to which should be added the names of Craig Taborn, Kris Davis, Anna Webber, Marc Ducret, Julien Pontvianne, Tyshawn Sorey, Bo van der Werf, Luiza von Wyl, Sylvaine Hélary, Tim Berne, Adrien Sanchez...(please complete the list!).
Ludovic Florin
[1] This is the case for Charlie Parker, as Thomas Owens showed in his famous thesis: Charlie Parker, technique of improvisation, University of California (Los Angeles), 1974.
[2] Philippe Michel, "Giant Steps", la liberté gagnée sur / par la contrainte", in Vincent Cotro (ed.), John Coltrane. L'œuvre et son empreinte, Paris, Éditions Outre Mesure, coll. "Contrepoints", 2011, p. 105.
[3] On this subject, refer to Vincenzo Caporaletti's theory of audiotactile music.[3
[4] On this subject, see Ludovic Florin, ""Jazz(s)" et "musique(s) contemporaine(s)": le continent négligé. Une brève histoire de relations", in Philippe Carles, Alexandre Pierrepont (dir.), Polyfree. La jazzosphère, et ailleurs (1970-2015), Paris, Éditions Outre Mesure, 2016, p. 47-58.
[5] Information on Stéphane Payen's piece comes from a personal interview with the musician on September 10, 2021.
[6] Stéphane Payen, Ingrid Laubrock, Chris Tordini, Tom Rainey, All Set, recorded May 12 and 13, 2019, Studio La Buissonne, Pernes-les-Fontaines, RogueArt, ROG-0105.
[7] John Zorn, In the Hall of Mirrors - featuring the Stephen Gasling Trio, recorded February 26, 2014 at Oktaven, Mount Vermon, Tzadik, TZ 8317.
[8] Matt Mitchell, Fiction, recorded December 17-18, 2021 at The Loove, Brooklyn, Pi Recordings, PI50.
[9] Denis Levaillant, L'improvisation musicale, Arles, Acte Sud, 1996.
[10] Denis Levaillant, "En lisant, en jouer, en écrivant", in Filigrane, n° 8, "Jazz, musiques improvisées et écritures contemporaines" (Pierre Michel, dir.), Sampzon, Éditions Delatour France, 2008, p. 23.
[11] See liner notes for John Zorn's album In the Hall of Mirrors (op. cit.).
