The jazz storyteller
Improvisers’ perspectives on music and narrative
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.1558/jazz.v9i1.21502Keywords:
storytelling, jazz improvisation, narrativization, intermedial metaphorAbstract
The term 'storytelling' has a long history of prominence in descriptive and prescriptive talk about jazz improvisation. The main aim of this article is to point out that the ways in which jazz musicians themselves employ the 'storytelling' metaphor with reference to jazz improvisation display several important perspectives on perennial and fundamental problems in the field of musical narrativity and offer very efficient ways of dealing with these issues. The empirical interview study summarized in this article constitutes an attempt to decipher the full potential of this intermedial conceptual loan, jazz improvisation as storytelling, based on how it is used by a number of highly accomplished Swedish jazz musicians. From a theoretical point of view, there are severe difficulties involved in viewing any music as narrative. The aim of the empirical study is to provide means for understanding jazz musicians' conceptualizations of their art form; to investigate how they deal with such difficulties. The interviewees favour a metaphorical rather than literal interpretion of the concept of storytelling: for instance, as communication, expression, mission, or vision. Their understanding of storytelling tends to focus on the how – rather than the what – of narrative. In their view, the narrative potential of jazz is connected in significant ways to the music's ontological status as situated activity, including perspectives that concern the construction of musical meaning through narrativization of intra-musical patterns, as well as the significance of cultural competence. In sum, jazz practitioners' understanding of jazz 'storytelling' emerges as an important way of dealing with issues of meaning in music.
References
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——(2005) ‘Music and Narrative’. In Routledge Encyclopedia of Narrative Theory, ed. David Herman, Manfred Jahn and Marie-Laure Ryan, 324–29. London: Routledge.
Almén, B. (2008) A Theory of Musical Narrative. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press.
Attali, J. (1985) Noise: The Political Economy of Music. Manchester: Manchester University Press.
Bakhtin, M. M. (1981) The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays, trans. C. Emerson and M. Holquist, ed. M. Holquist. Austin, TX: University of Texas Press.
Berliner, P. F. (1994) Thinking in Jazz: The Infinite Art of Improvisation. Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press. http://dx.doi.org/10.7208/chicago/9780226044521.001.0001
Bjerstedt, S. (2014) ‘Storytelling in Jazz Improvisation: Implications of a Rich Intermedial Metaphor’. Dissertation, Malmö: Lund University, Malmö Academy of Music.
Brown, C. S. (1987) [1948] Music and Literature: A Comparison of the Arts. Hanover and London: University Press of New England.
Bruner, J. (2004) ‘Life as Narrative’. Social Research 71/3: 691–710.
Butler, J. (2004) Undoing Gender. New York: Routledge.
Chatman, S. (1978) Story and Discourse: Narrative Structure in Fiction and Film. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press.
Cropley, A. (2006) ‘In Praise of Convergent Thinking’. Creativity Research Journal 18/3: 391–404. http://dx.doi.org/10.1207/s15326934crj1803_13
Daniels, D. H. (1985) ‘Lester Young: Master of Jive’. American Music 3/3: 313–28. http://dx.doi.org/10.2307/3051473
DeVeaux, S. (2000) [1997] The Birth of Bebop: A Social and Musical History. London: Picador.
Finkelstein, S. (1988) [1948] Jazz: A People’s Music. New York: International Publishers.
Floyd, S. A., Jr. (1991) ‘Ring Shout! Literary Studies, Historical Studies, and Black Music Inquiry’. Black Music Research Journal 11/2 (Fall): 265–87. http://dx.doi.org/10.2307/779269
——(1995) The Power of Black Music: Interpreting in History from Africa to the United States. New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Folkestad, G. (1996) ‘Computer Based Creative Music Making: Young People’s Music in the Digital Age’. Dissertation, Göteborg: Acta Universitatis Gothoburgensis.
Foucault, M. (1972) The Archaeology of Knowledge. London: Routledge.
Gushee, L. (1991) ‘Lester Young’s “Shoe Shine Boy”’. In A Lester Young Reader, ed. L. Porter, 224–54. Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution Press.
Gustavsen, T. (1998) Improvisationens dialektiske utfordringer (The Dialectical Challenges of Improvisation). Hovedoppgave in musicology. Oslo: Universitetet.
——(1999) The Dialectical Eroticism of Improvisation. http://www.tordg.no/dialectics_of_improvisation.pdf (accessed 10 January 2010).
Hanslick, E. (1986) [1854] On the Musically Beautiful: A Contribution towards the Revision of the Aesthetics of Music, trans. G. Payzant. Indianapolis: Hackett.
Harker, B. (1997) ‘“Telling a Story”. Louis Armstrong and Coherence in Early Jazz’. Current Musicology 63: 46–84.
——(2011) Louis Armstrong’s Hot Five and Hot Seven Recordings. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Hermerén, G. (1986) ‘Musik som språk’. (Music as Language). Svensk tidskrift för musikforskning: 7–16.
Iyer, V. (2004) ‘Exploding the Narrative in Jazz Improvisation’. In Uptown Conversation: The New Jazz Studies, ed. R. G. O’Meally, B. H. Edwards and F. J. Griffin, 393–403. New York: Columbia University Press.
Johannisson, K. (2001) Nostalgia. Stockholm: Bonnier Essä.
Johansson, K. (2008) ‘Organ Improvisation—Activity, Action and Rhetorical Practice’. Dissertation, Malmö: Lund University, Malmö Academy of Music.
Kernfeld, B. (1995) What to Listen for in Jazz. New Haven: Yale University Press.
Kivy, P. (2002) Introduction to a Philosophy of Music. Oxford: Clarendon Press.
——(2009) Antithetical Arts: On the Ancient Quarrel between Literature and Music. Oxford: Clarendon Press. http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199562800.001.0001
Knauer, W. (1990) Zwischen Bebop und Free Jazz: Komposition und Improvisation des Modern Jazz Quartet. Band I: Text. Mainz: Schott.
Kramer, J. D. (1988) The Time of Music: New Meanings, New Temporalities, New Listening Strategies. New York: Schirmer.
Kramer, L. (1991) ‘Musical Narratology: A Theoretical Outline’. Indiana Theory Review 12: 141–62.
Kvale, S., and S. Brinkmann (2009) InterViews: Learning the Craft of Qualitative Research Interviewing. Los Angeles: Sage.
Liebman, D. (1996) Self-portrait of a Jazz Artist: Musical Thoughts and Realities. 2nd ed. Rottenburg: Advance Music.
Mackey, N. (1998) ‘Other: From Noun to Verb’. In The Jazz Cadence of American Culture, ed. R. G. O’Meally, 513–32. New York: Columbia University Press.
Maus, F. E. (2005) ‘Classical Instrumental Music and Narrative’. In A Companion to Narrative Theory, ed. J. Phelan and P. J. Rabinowitzpp, 466–83. Oxford: Blackwell. http://dx.doi.org/10.1002/9780470996935.ch32
McClary, S. (1991) Feminine Endings. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
——(1997) ‘The Impromptu that Trod on a Loaf: or How Music Tells Stories’. Narrative 5/1: 20–35.
Meelberg, V. (2006) New Sounds, New Stories: Narrativity in Contemporary Music. Leiden: Leiden University Press. http://dx.doi.org/10.5117/9789087280024
——(2009) ‘Sounds like a Story: Narrative Travelling from Literature to Music and Beyond’. In Narratology in the Age of Cross-disciplinary Narrative Research, ed. S. Heinen and R. Sommer, 244–60. Berlin and New York: W. de Gruyter.
Mendelssohn-Bartholdy, F. (1878) Briefe aus den Jahren 1830 bis 1847. Leipzig: Hermann Mendelssohn.
Monson, I. (1996) Saying Something: Jazz Improvisation and Interaction. Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press.
Nachmanovitch, S. (1990) Free Play: Improvisation in Life and Art. New York: Tarcher/Penguin.
Nattiez, J.-J. (1990) ‘Can One Speak of Narrativity in Music?’ Trans. K. Ellis. Journal of the Royal Music Association 115/2: 240–57. http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/jrma/115.2.240
Neubauer, J. (1997) ‘Tales of Hoffmann and Others: On Narrativizations of Instrumental Music’. In Interart Poetics: Essays on the Interrelations of the Arts and Media, ed. U.-L. Lagerroth, H. Lund and E. Hedling, 117–36. Amsterdam and Atlanta, GA: Rodopi.
Newcomb, A. (1987) ‘Schumann and Late Eighteenth-century Narrative Strategies’. 19th-century Music 11/2 (Fall): 164–74. http://dx.doi.org/10.2307/746729
Nicholson, S. (2005) Is Jazz Dead? (Or Has it Moved to Another Address). New York: Routledge.
Radano, R. (2003) Lying up a Nation: Race and Black Music. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Ricoeur, P. (1983–85/1984–88) Time and Narrative. 3 vols., trans. K. McLaughlin and D. Pellauer. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Robinson, J., ed. (1997) Music and Meaning. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press.
Schippers, H. (2006) ‘“As if a little bird is sitting on your finger…”: Metaphor as a Key Instrument in Training Professional Musicians’. International Journal of Music Education 24/3: 209–217. http://dx.doi.org/10.1177/0255761406069640
Schwartz, J. L. (1996) Bebop and Deconstruction: The Philosophy of the Harmonic Limit (Paper presented at the Society for the Study of Narrative annual conference, Columbus, OH, 25–28 April, 1996). http://www.reocities.com/jeff_l_schwartz/bebop.html (accessed 10 January 2010).
Small, C. (1998) Musicking: The Meaning of Performing and Listening. Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press.
Stern, D. N. (2010) Forms of Vitality: Exploring Dynamic Experience in Psychology, the Arts, Psychotherapy, and Development. Oxford: Oxford University Press. http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/med:psych/9780199586066.001.0001
Tirro, F. (1979) Jazz: A History. London: Dent.
Weston, R., and W. Jenkins (2010) African Rhythms: The Autobiography of Randy Weston. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. http://dx.doi.org/10.1215/9780822393108
Wittgenstein, L. (1967) Zettel. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press.
Wolf, W. (2002) ‘Das Problem der Narrativität in Literatur, bildender Kunst und Musik: Ein Beitrag zu einer intermedialen Erzähltheorie’. In Erzähltheorie transgenerisch, intermedial, interdisziplinär, ed. A. Nünning and V. Nünning, 23-104. Trier: VWT.
——(2005) ‘Music and Narrative’. In Routledge Encyclopedia of Narrative Theory, ed. David Herman, Manfred Jahn and Marie-Laure Ryan, 324–29. London: Routledge.
Published
2015-10-21
Issue
Section
Articles
How to Cite
Bjerstedt, S. (2015). The jazz storyteller: Improvisers’ perspectives on music and narrative. Jazz Research Journal, 9(1), 37-61. https://doi.org/10.1558/jazz.v9i1.21502
