I was delighted to read Becker’s (this issue) insightful and broad-ranging comments, especially since they touch on parallels that I’ve been exploring in my own work—between jazz, improvisational theater, and everyday social life. Becker identifies several fruitful areas for future research, and my comments will focus on these areas and how they connect with my own recent research. I focus on two key themes of Becker’s article. First, Becker’s title tells us that his focus will be on “etiquette.” Etiquette is collective social knowledge—“no one taught us these rules”—the rules are learned through long years of socialization. The etiquette of jazz is “aggressively egalitarian,” and Becker connects this egalitarian ethic to the processes of musical interaction during a collaborative jazz performance. Jazz is fundamentally an ensemble art form, and everyone involved in the improvisation is constantly offering new ideas—“tentative moves, slight variations”—and each musician is listening closely to the others. The performance that results is truly a group creation, a collective social process that I call collaborative emergence(Sawyer, 1999). Second, Becker emphasizes the preexisting structures that guide an improvisational performance. It’s a common misconception about improvisation that performers simply play whatever pops into their heads, that “anything goes.” Improvisation, although it involves spontaneity and extemporizing, doesn’t mean that there is a total lack of structure. In fact, all genres of musical performance include some structures that guide the performance (Sawyer, 1996). Likewise, in jazz, musicians follow shared structures—typically by agreeing on a song and then improvising together within the harmonic structure of that song (although the melody and rhythm may be completely improvised). Becker notes that the use of these shared structures reflects an etiquette vis-a-vis the audience; because a knowledgeable audience is also familiar with these structures, they will better be able to understand the performance and to appreciate how it is different from similar improvisations (cf. the conventions of Becker, 1982). Almost all jazz musicians also rely on licks—a less-pejorative term for what Becker calls cliches—short melodic lines that can be used at many different points during a solo and that are worked out and refined in the privacy of rehearsal. Only the dedicated fan will recognize these licks; most audiences will not be able to tell which portions of a solo are completely new and which are licks that have been used many times before. Jazz musicians know that they need these licks to perform effectively, but they have mixed feelings about relying on them too much; they
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