Thresholds: Jazz, Improvisation, Heterogeneity, and Politics in Postmodernity

Abstract

In this essay, I explore the possibilities of improvisation—or what might better be called “improvisationality”—as something of an aesthetic model and, possibly, an ethical practice, beyond the confines of genre. Paradoxically, the focal point for my discussion is the genre of “free improvisation,” or “free jazz,” but my interest here emphasizes more the musical practices (broadly construed) that these formative examples of improvisation engender. Echoing what Jacques Attali, in his Noise: The Political Economy of Music, called “composition,” a look into improvisationality concurrently entails a pragmatics of the critical and theoretical discursive possibilities suggested by improvisational music toward the reconfiguration of our musical experience as both musician‐composers and listeners. Here, the deconstructing impetus of postmodern critique meets the utopian skepticism of critical theory, and postmodern musical heterogeneity attains its immanent force more through an erotics of sound and affect than through genre‐focused pastiche. Improvisation and composition collide, and the fruits of supposedly distinct “idiomatic” and “non‐idiomatic” musics become blurred and intertwined, as one chases the other's tail. Freedom might paradoxically reach its possibility precisely through the work of the “impossible,” as suggested in Derrida's work, and “passability,” a term Lyotard employs in his discussions of aesthetic experience and reception in order to blur the hard distinction between “active” and “passive” modes of aesthetic engagement. Such concepts allow for an apprehension of music that would not be given by some magical, dialectical twist of fate, but precisely by the playing out of musical rereadings and recombinations themselves, be they technological or other. Here, we not only discover better uses of music, but we discover them on our own terms. We improvise.