Abstract
Most analytical literature on jazz still places a premium on structural unity. Early writers, such as Andre Hodeir (1956) and Gunther Schuller (1958), sought to legitimize the music in the eyes of the musicological community by demonstrating its accessibility to traditional formalist interpretation. This methodological orientation persists in much current jazz analysis (e.g., Block 1990; Martin 1996; Larson 1998; Harker 1999). In recent years, however, the formalist view of jazz improvisations as autonomous artifacts, whose aesthetic value stems from their internal coherence, has been challenged on the grounds that it remains as inseparably tied to an inapposite, European ideological heritage as the conservatism it opposes. Ethnomusicologists and “new” musicologists have instead preferred to divert their attention toward jazz’s immediate social context-primarily the vernacular culture of black America-and its historic roots in sub-Saharan Africa (Tomlinson 1992; Walser 1995; Floyd 1995). This more humanistic perspective has served to dispel formalism’s claims to objectivity. A compromise can be found between these opposing standpoints by regarding musical structure and social context as inextricably interdependent (Monson 1996:186, 190). But a further possibility that has yet to be considered seriously is that jazz might be subjected to close analysis without necessarily invoking the organicist corollary that the music itself ought, at some level, to exhibit a unified structure. Indeed, as this paper will show, an examination of manifestations of discontinuity, rather than of unity, may offer insight into the creative processes underlying improvised performance.