Reading Comprehension

A persistent misconception treats improvisation in jazz as the opposite of composition — the spontaneous filling of empty time with whatever the player happens to feel, set against the careful labour of the writer with a manuscript page. The misconception flatters both kinds of work in different directions and gives an accurate picture of neither. The improviser is doing many things at once, most of them prepared, and the writer is making decisions at speeds that surprise anyone who has watched the work being done; the two activities differ less in their proportion of labour to spontaneity than the common picture suggests.

To hear a strong improviser in performance is, in part, to hear a vast vocabulary deployed in real time: scale patterns, characteristic rhythmic figures, harmonic substitutions developed over years of practice, fragments of melodies the player half-remembers and quotes. The choices in the moment are choices among materials whose form was decided in advance; what is freshly composed is the sequence and the inflection, not the basic units. A pianist whose stride at twenty was indistinguishable from his teacher's becomes, by forty, a stride pianist whose voice can be recognised in eight bars, and the difference is not the absence of training but its absorption.

This is why the older argument over whether jazz solos can be transcribed and studied as compositions is more interesting than it first sounds. Transcription would not be possible if the solo were merely an emanation of the moment, because there would be nothing in the solo with the persistence to be set down; transcription is possible because the solo has the structure of composition, however quickly assembled. To deny this is to romanticise the form, attributing to it a purity from craft that its practitioners would, in any account they themselves give of their work, repudiate.

None of this reduces improvisation to composition with the labour merely accelerated. The compression of time matters. To make a decision among twenty harmonic options inside the duration of a chord change is to make a different kind of decision from making the same choice with a week to consider it, and the practitioners themselves are clear that the difference is felt as such. The right way to describe the matter is that improvisation and composition share more apparatus than the common picture allows, and that what divides them is best understood not as a contrast between thought and feeling but as a difference in tempo and a difference in the kind of attention the work calls for.