Projection, Call‐Response and the Improvisational Moment

Abstract

In my work on musical interaction in jazz improvisation (Michaelsen 2013 and 2019), I have grappled with the nature of the connections occurring between musicians in what Chris Stover (2017) calls the ‘improvisational moment’.1 By what process can I propose a hearing of the relationships that emerge from a moment of interaction? How can I even propose that such a moment exists in the first place? What do I mean by ‘interaction’? What is interacting and what does it mean to interact? Are the only actants in an improvisation the performing musicians or is it possible for other, potentially non-human influences to be heard and felt in the musical utterances of humans? In answering these questions, my aim is to adopt an analytical position as close to that of an improvising musician as possible. When an improviser decides what to play in a particular moment, they typically perceive what is going on around them, weigh those utterances against whatever structures their performance is based on and then interpret what each of those elements separately, as well as collectively, suggests they might perform in the next moment. From that assemblage, an improviser might perform something aiming for similarity, or they might perform something emphasising difference, but whatever they play will be heard in relation to what came before. Listeners can regard listening experiences from myriad vantage points, and I suggest that, when engaging in ‘interactional listening’, a listener's analytical processes are identical to those of the interacting performer: both separate the sounds they hear into streams having musical or relational meaning (e.g. these sounds come from this person or these sounds serve to accompany the utterances of a soloist) and then make judgements about what happened leading up to those sounds and how the latter might continue in future. The primary difference, of course, is that the performer can contribute something which might alter the course of the performance, while the listener is swept along.2 In placing my perspective as analyst alongside that of the improviser, my aim is to ground my interactionist theory in the material experience of improvisation, to create as little separation between the phenomenology of the analyst and that of the improviser. But of course, the analyst has access to the entire improvisation – when regarding a technologically mediated recording of one, at least – which the improviser only has after the improvisation is completed. As a listener, however, I find that the meaning I derive from listening to an improvisation comes from being situated in time alongside the improviser, even when hearing a recording I've heard many times before. Moments of surprise or delight emerge not because I can anticipate them, but as a result of the decisions made by musicians at a particular point in time based on the relationships which have emerged leading up to that point. Although the future can be known, the act of listening recapitulates the experience of hearing music and re-enacts its drama each time I listen.3 If listening to an improvisation puts the listener in the position of the improviser, attending to the utterances in each moment and searching for the possibilities which each points towards, then a central question will be: how are these future possibilities suggested? In contemplating the answer to this question, the processive approach of Christopher Hasty's ‘projection’ (1997 and 2020) immediately appealed to me.4 Projections are a ‘throwing forth’ (2020, p. 113), as he says, like a light shone forwards from a source which illuminates a path. At their most elemental level, they emerge from the simplest of processes: a single sound ending with the beginning of a second sound. In contrast, Leonard Meyer's (1973) notion of melodic ‘implication’ relies on perceptions of holistic gestalt patterns to imply continuation. As David Lewin's (1986) phenomenological model of musical perceptions emphasises, context is an essential factor in making determinations of what music says about its future. In addition to their many other differences – namely Hasty's focus on duration and meter and Meyer's on pitch and melody – projection and implication require different degrees of context, with Hasty intricately attending to the present moment and Meyer encompassing longer swaths of time. It strikes me that Hasty takes the moment as seriously as an improviser: he lingers on what it means for a single sound to be in the process of becoming, what happens when it gives way to a subsequent sound and what that process of ending–becoming–beginning creates. Hasty considers numerous contexts, from a single sound's becoming to the projective play of many sounds over longer time spans, but he always foregrounds the experience of those sounds at precise moments in time. In a crucial passage, Hasty draws a stark dividing line between the durational properties of sound and its other qualities: ‘From the beginning, once the timbre, pitch and volume of the sound are given, it is possible for these qualities to remain relatively fixed’ (1997, p. 124). He refers to these as ‘determinate’ properties, the qualities of a sound which might be comprehended at any point in a sound's becoming. ‘By contrast, what cannot remain fixed and what cannot be determinate while the sound is going on is its duration’ (p. 124, emphasis in original). Hasty describes this as an ‘ontological’ perspective (p. 125), an aspect of durational indeterminacy intrinsic to the ongoing sound and a fundamental difference between it and the ontology of determinate musical parameters. As I began applying the term ‘projection’ to the utterances of improvising musicians, I found myself using it to describe not only the projective potential for the duration of a present sound to be relevant to the becoming of a future sound, but for the projective potential of all other musical qualities such as timbre, pitch and volume. What does it mean to say that a determinate parameter such as pitch can be projected? As with duration, it means that future utterances might reproduce the pitch (or pitches or patterns of pitches) of previous utterances, which they might call back to those prior utterances and make them relevant to their present becoming. When comparing this category of ‘general projection’ to the ‘special projection’ of duration, the fact that determinate parameters might be perceived from a sound's beginning means that no phenomenon as strong and palpable as meter emerges from their projective interplay; it is within the ontological indeterminacy of duration that meter emerges, as Hasty emphasises. Although the indeterminacy of durational projection does not expand to qualities of sound such as timbre and pitch, the interactional experience of listening in time, of hearing the improvisational moment, is indeterminate. By characterising determinate aspects of music in terms of projection, I aim to capture the processive temporality of the improviser, to place the listener/analyst alongside the improviser in their experience of the music. In his book The Power of Black Music (1995), Samuel Floyd Jr. proposes ‘Call-Response’ as the ‘master trope’ of Black music, the primary interpretative frame for construing meaning in the music (p. 95). He casts Call-Response as the musical equivalent of Henry Louis Gates Jr.’s (1988) ‘Signifyin(g)’, which Floyd describes as ‘a way of saying one thing and meaning another; it is a reinterpretation, a metaphor for the revision of previous texts and figures; it is tropological thought, repetition with difference, the obscuring of meaning’ (1995, p. 95). Thus, Floyd writes that Call-Response ‘implies the presence within it of Signifyin(g) figures (calls) and Signifyin(g) revisions (responses, in various guises), which can be one or the other, depending on their context’ (p. 95). In stylising Call-Response as he has done, Floyd generalises it from the musical figure ‘call and response’, the series of patterned utterances which might be construed as a statement and reply. Such figures appear in the leader–follower alternations of ring shouts, the work songs of chain gangs, the instrumental replies to blues phrases and the alternations of ‘trading fours’ in jazz, among many others. Call-Response, then, is the larger trope – the ‘trope of tropes’ (p. 95) – which describes the intersubjective/intertextual/intermusical ways in which Black music signifies. I turn to Floyd's notions of Black aesthetics and interpretation at this moment to call out the important work Black scholars and musicians have done to theorise musical processes based on in-time musical creativity. Importantly, this creativity is based on relationships and interactions between people, music and ideas. George Lewis has proposed a pair of adjectives, ‘Eurological’ and ‘Afrological’, which ‘refer metaphorically to musical belief systems and behavior which […] exemplify particular kinds of musical “logic”’ (1996, p. 93). Lewis's conception of the terms ‘refers to social and cultural location and is theorized here as historically emergent rather than ethnically essential, thereby accounting for the reality of transcultural and transracial communication among improvisers’ (p. 94). Viewing musical utterances as constantly in dialogue with each other, always understood relationally, is therefore a highly Afrological practice. By juxtaposing Call-Response with projection, I emphasise a connection between these ideas: a call/first sound projects its duration/pitch/timbre into the future, which a second sound/response might take as relevant to its becoming. Call-Response and projection are both rooted in repetition, but both crucially imply difference: a responding utterance replicates some aspect of a prior utterance but changes it, adds some new meaning, just as a second sound's duration realising the projective potential of a first sound imparts it with metrical qualities such as continuation or anacrusis. In theorising duration, rhythm and metre as relational musical phenomena experienced in time, I would characterise Hasty's theory as Afrological. To bring together the ideas of projection, Call-Response and the improvisational moment in a musical example, consider what happens at precisely 3:01 in John Coltrane's ‘Blue Train’ (1958), a moment I have long found fascinating. In the three preceding minutes, Coltrane's ensemble has performed the tune's head, and he has taken the first solo. During that solo, in response to Coltrane's consistent sixteenth-note rhythms, drummer Philly Joe Jones performs in ‘double time’ alongside the saxophonist starting at 1:38, though, unusually, the pianist Kenny Drew and bassist Paul Chambers do not.5 Then, at 2:18, Jones drops back to standard time as Lee Morgan and Curtis Fuller on trumpet and trombone enter with bluesy background figures.6 These figures unfold in call-and-response format, though Coltrane – in his characteristically voluble manner – blows across both call and response. As the ensemble approaches 3:01, the end of Coltrane's seventh blues chorus, all projections point to an ending: the brass players’ backgrounds have gone on for two full choruses, and they are unlikely to continue for a third; the rhythm section's accompaniment has been constrained by the combination of these backgrounds and Coltrane's activity, giving their utterances a feeling of marking time; and Coltrane has shifted towards longer note values and blues-based utterances, hinting at a soloistic dénouement. Coltrane then encircles the E♭7 tonic chord's third degree with a chromatic enclosure,7 with G3 arriving precisely at the start of the next blues chorus. The moment feels profoundly like an ending; these utterances sound final and conclusive, not needing any further development. Despite my knowledge of what comes next, every time I hear it, I am surprised! Two pitches follow, B♭3 and E♭4, as a response completing the tonic triad begun with the G3 call. G3 forms a projection of pitch, chord and duration which B♭3–E♭4 make relevant to their becoming. For the briefest moment, my ears hear this response as they expect, as a cross-solo reply by the next soloist; surely this cannot still be Coltrane. Perhaps my ears deceive me, but these two pitches sound timbrally different, distinct from Coltrane's typical tone. But as these responses issue new calls which ask in turn for their own responses – new projections confirmed and expanded – it becomes clear that this is still Coltrane continuing his solo. He takes one more chorus and ends his solo at 3:22 with a clear-as-day ascent to B♭4 corresponding to the onset of Morgan's first solo chorus. I have always wondered why Coltrane continued after what sounded like a perfect ending. Did he continue simply because of his proclivity for constant, unending playing, which resulted in (in)famously long solo improvisations later in his career? Was there some idea, some utterance still lingering in his mind which he hadn't yet played and that he needed to get out before he finished? Or was Morgan simply not ready to step in and take the next solo, resulting in Coltrane's decision to fill in the gap? I don't have an answer here, but it is the experience of that moment and my interpretation of its complex projections which has made it stand out in my memory for years. This example resonates strongly with Hasty's theory. Although Call-Response is a trope which can be applied at every level of musical/social/cultural Signifyin(g), it is in the play of expectations in the improvisational moment that its resonances with projection become so apparent. A projection is a ‘call’, an invitation for the creation of meaning manifested by a ‘response’, a confirmation or denial of that projection's potential. Hearing in time is the focus of all improvisers, and Hasty's musical-theoretical contributions provide fertile ground for interpreting the improvisational moment in Black American musicking. Garrett Michaelsen is Assistant Professor of Musicianship and Music Theory at University of Massachusetts Lowell. His research on jazz, improvisation and music theory pedagogy appears in Music Theory Online, GAMUT, Critical Studies in Improvisation and Engaging Students.

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