The Improvisation Studies Reader

Spontaneous Acts

Ajay Heble, Rebecca Caines, Ajay Heble, Rebecca Caines

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781136187131
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Jazz Music

Improvisation is a performance practice that animates and activates diverse energies of inspiration, critique, and invention. In recent years it has coalesced into an exciting and innovative new field of interdisciplinary scholarly inquiry, becoming a cornerstone of both practical and theoretical approaches to performance.

The Improvisation Studies Reader draws together the works of key artists and thinkers from a range of disciplines, including theatre, music, literature, film, and dance. Divided by keywords into eight sections, this book bridges the gaps between these fields. The book includes case studies, exercises, graphic scores and poems in order to produce a teaching and research resource that identifies central themes in improvisation studies. The sections include:

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• Listening

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• Trust/Risk

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• Flow

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• Dissonance

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• Responsibility

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• Liveness

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• Surprise

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• Hope

Each section of the Reader is introduced by a newly commissioned think piece by a key figure in the field, which opens up research questions reflecting on the keyword in question.

By placing key theoretical and classic texts in conversation with cutting-edge research and artists' statements, this book answers the urgent questions facing improvising artists and theorists in the mediatized Twenty-First Century.

Part 1

Listening

1 Improvised Listening: Opening Statements

Listening to the Lambs

George Lipsitz

George Lipsitz’s writings on an enormous range of subjects are informed by his overriding concern with social justice and his fascination with the politics of culture. An American Studies scholar and a professor in the Department of Black Studies at the University of California, Santa Barbara, his research interests span social movements, urban culture, inequality, the politics of popular culture, and Whiteness Studies. A special interest in music has led him to collaborations on the autobiographies of Johnny Otis and Preston Love, and studies of the St Louis-based Black Artists Group and Ken Burns’ Jazz. His recent books include The Fierce Urgency of Now: Improvisation, Rights, and the Ethics of Cocreation, co-authored with Daniel Fischlin and Ajay Heble (2013), How Racism Takes Place (2011), Midnight at the Barrelhouse: the Johnny Otis Story (2010), Footsteps in the Dark: the Hidden Histories of Popular Music (2007), and Time Passages: Collective Memory and American Popular Culture (2001). Countless scholars have been influenced by Dr Lipsitz’s views of popular culture as a repository of history and as a historical force in itself. In “Listening to the Lambs,” he evokes the legendary musician Johnny Otis’ reactions to the 1965 Watts rebellion, and in doing so frames improvisation as “an alternative academy crucial to preparing ourselves for … the struggle to keep sorrow from degenerating into despair.”

Key words: Black Studies; jazz; USA

When the Watts rebellion broke out in Los Angeles during the summer of 1965, politicians, the press, and much of the public expressed surprise at the sudden eruption of rage and fury. But rhythm and blues musician Johnny Otis was not surprised. He knew that Black people in Los Angeles had been crying out for justice for years, but their cries had not been heard. As Otis witnessed the destruction of the community that he loved, he thought of the gospel song “Listen to the Lambs.” In the song the lambs are crying for the Lord to come by. Looking at the destruction all around him in Watts, Otis (2009, p.5) thought to himself, “They wouldn’t listen to the lambs … The lambs cried, and finally one day the lambs turned into lions.”

Johnny Otis had learned how to listen to the lambs from his experiences as a working musician. Afro-diasporic cultural production teaches its practitioners to engage in improvisation in order to discern the hidden possibilities disguised in proximate appearances. A jazz musician has to listen carefully, to recognise not only what the music being played is, but also what it could be, to listen for the prophetic foreshadowing in even the simplest phrase. Improvisational art questions surface appearances. It cultivates the capacity, as Robert Farris Thompson (1984, p.19) explains, to “view things from all sides before we make a judgment.” This ability guided Johnny Otis’s response to the riot. At a time when most outsiders considered the Black community in Los Angeles to be serene, satisfied, and submissive, the music that Otis played taught him to look beyond appearances, to see that his community was critical, resentful, and filled with rage. When the riot came, Otis was not caught off guard. He simply wondered why others had not heard the cries of the oppressed or recognised what they foreshadowed as he had. How could people not know that the very longevity and continuity of white supremacy required its victims to improvise, to interrupt the status quo and challenge its legitimacy?

In the wake of this violent rebellion that convulsed Watts, Otis offered an improvisational response. He published a book titled Listen to the Lambs that challenged dominant understandings of the past, present, and future. Because white Americans had not listened to the lambs, he argued, they lacked the prophetic vision that would have enabled them to know that the riots were coming, to see that one day the suppressed anger and frustration of an oppressed people would erupt into violence. Otis had been predicting just such a conflagration for years. He had warned about it in newspaper columns, radio broadcasts, speeches, and direct action demonstrations. He developed his insight and foresight, this ability to listen to the lambs, from his experiences as an improvising musician. Afro-diasporic improvisation is an art of interruption. It teaches performers to prepare for rupture and to respond to it. It is not simply an aesthetic practice but rather an epistemological and ontological imperative. Improvisation entails distinct ways of knowing and ways of being. It emerges from insubordinate spaces and creates emancipatory temporalities. Playing improvised music enabled Otis to discern multiple futures latent inside the constrained present, to recognise how the blasted hopes and cumulative frustrations of the past pervade the present in covert yet powerful ways.

In the year that he published Listen to the Lambs, Otis was a high school dropout in his mid-thirties. He held no elected or appointed office. He represented no organised political group. But he had learned how to listen as a working musician and improviser, and that ability positioned him to write a profound and insightful book. The intergenerational networks of musical instruction and apprenticeship that had guided him as an artist helped make him a perceptive and prescient political thinker. Just as Otis recognised the great potential latent in unrecognised and untrained artists, he recognised enormous untapped possibilities in people trapped inside ghetto neighborhoods. As a musician, Otis often attributed his success as a talent scout and producer to his ability to hear what was not yet evident to others. He discovered and developed an astounding number of talented artists including Etta James, Little Esther Phillips, Charles Brown, Sugar Pie DeSanto, Linda Hopkins, Barbara Morrison, and Hank Ballard. This was not a matter of luck, but rather of recognising latent potential. “I can hear the raw talent before it develops,” he explained (qtd. in Lipsitz, 2010, p.37). Similarly, he perceived the ghetto to be filled with talent, seeing it as a repository of social insights, ideas, and abilities that society sorely needed. In both cultural and social life, Otis found great value in listening to what Fred Moten (2003, p.223) describes as “the piercing insistence of the excluded.”

Johnny Otis spoke out for and from that insistence in his music and in Listen to the Lambs. Resonant with what Cedric Johnson aptly describes as the culture of the soapbox, the pamphlet, and the bullhorn, Listen to the Lambs placed blame for the riots on the very existence of ghetto conditions rather than on the alleged deficiencies of ghetto residents. Otis argued that while Black people certainly needed and deserved improved opportunities and life chances, the ghetto was not simply a zone of deprivation. Instead, he explained, the ghetto was home to valuable alternative academies, to sites of instruction and apprenticeship replete with knowledge that white society sorely needed. From his perspective, the shortcomings of dominant groups were most evident to their aggrieved victims. White society, he argued, needed to learn about itself from the perspective of ghetto residents. But to do so, whites had to learn to listen. They did not yet realise what Otis believed to be the importance of their historical moment. To him, the riots announced that the nation had come to a crossroads and had to make a choice: “It is either really the beginning of the end of the color line and all its ramifications, or race war. Anything short of full freedom is unacceptable” (Otis, 2009, p.238).

Johnny Otis knew that in social life as well as in musical life much can be lost by not listening. Hearing just happens, but listening entails attention and interpretation. Listening is an act of deliberation and discernment, a capacity that gets cultivated through experience. Music is an interactive practice. It is a dialogue, not a monologue. There can be no good players unless there are good listeners. Improvisation plays a crucial role in creating the capacity for an augmented sense of listening because at its core, improvisation is an art that opens doors. It creates new understandings of previousness and futurity in order to explore hidden possibilities. It privileges temporary and ephemeral resolutions over permanent and set in stone closures, recognising that yesterday’s solutions always require renegotiation and adaptation tomorrow as situations and conditions change (Small, 1998, p.44). Armed with improvisational knowledge, trash can become treasure. For example, Afro-diasporic quilt makers, yard decorators, and assemblage artists rescue objects that have been discarded by their original owners who view them as useless. Spare rags, empty bottles, and broken ceramic pieces no longer function as clothing, beverage containers, or pottery. But cultural creators able to imagine multiple uses for the same object give them new life through imaginative repositioning. Similarly, musical improvisers constantly explore the hidden possibilities inside conventional notes, chords, harmonies, and rhythms (Thompson, 1984, p.158). The unpredictable creativity of improvisation that can forge new relationships among different sounds in music serves as an alternative academy teaching people ways of envisioning and enacting new relationships among different people (Small, 1998, p.63).

An ethics of co-creation emerges out of the aptitude for improvisation (Fischlin, Heble, and Lipsitz, 2013). Johnny Otis learned about this many times during his years as a working musician. In the mid-1940s, for instance, his band’s lead alto saxophone player, Rene Bloch, suggested that Otis add Earle Hagen’s composition “Harlem Nocturne” to their ensemble’s repertoire. Bloch had enjoyed the opportunity the song offered for a saxophone solo when he played it previously with a band in Seattle, so he suggested that Otis place the Ray Noble arrangement of the tune in the band’s “book.” Initially, Otis thought that Bloch had brought him a “Mickey Mouse arrangement of a Mickey Mouse song.” But as he practised the number with his orchestra, Otis thought that if he slowed down the pace of the song and added blues chords to the arrangement, the number might work for his group. One night when the band played the song live at the Club Alabam on Central Avenue, however, something unexpected happened. When the music started, many of the chorus girls and shake dancers in the room flocked to the stage and surrounded the musicians. They swayed slowly and sensuously to the song. Following their lead, Otis slowed down the rhythm even more to match the moves of the dancers. Couples in the audience quickly got up to move to the slow beat. Soon, Johnny Otis’s version of “Harlem Nocturne” became a national hit record and the basis for many subsequent covers of the song by other artists (Bloch, 1995, p.45; Robinson, 1997). To this day, the version of “Harlem Nocturne” that popular music listeners know is the one improvised in the Club Alabam by the dancers, Otis, and Bloch, not the original composition by Hagen or the arrangement by Noble.

Otis recognised that improvisational co-creation also could draw on extra-musical experiences and interactions. Looking back in 1993 on his more than fifty years as a working musician, Otis recalled that he never once had to tell his horn players how to phrase a passage, that he never had to instruct a singer how to phrase a song. Once he provided them with the basic musical elements, the band members improvised on the basis of what they had learned from their lives in vibrant Black communities. Their art, Otis explained (1993), came from listening and watching “the African American way of life” which he encapsulated as:

The way Mama cooked, the Black English grandmother and grandfather spoke, the way Daddy disciplined the kids—the emphasis on spiritual values, the way Reverend Jones preached, the way Sister Williams sang in the choir, the way the old brother down the street played the slide guitar and crooned the blues, the very special way the people danced, walked, laughed, cried, joked, got happy, shouted in church.

(Otis, 1993, 117)

An emphasis on improvisation e...