1. Is jazz structured like a language?

It is widely believed by performers and scholars that jazz is like a language, as

exemplified by the famous quotation attributed to Lester Young: "A solo should tell
a story." Paul Berliner's recent study of how jazz musicians learn their art,
Thinking in Jazz, relies on language acquisition models, and constantly refers to
improvisational skills as "vocabulary." Thomas Owens's book Bebop also is informed
by a linguistic model. Owens catalogs motifs from Charlie Parker's playing (30-40)
and shows how they formed a common vocabulary which defined bebop for other
players: Sonny Stitt (47) and Cannonball Adderley (55-56) in particular.

Owens's earlier dissertation on Parker is certainly the most impressive work of

jazz scholarship to date. He has transcribed every note Parker ever recorded and
developed a generative grammar of Parker's improvising: what Parker's
improvisational vocabulary was, and what syntactical rules applied to its use.
Owens's work here anticipates that of David Cope, who has developed similar
grammars for various composers and converted them to computer programs, so that
Cope's computer can produce endless fake Joplin rags and Mozart piano sonatas.

Obviously, this is important work, but in the case of jazz improvisation, it is not
enough. The language metaphor has not been sufficiently examined. Owens doesn't
theorize his method at all, and Berliner only cites Alfred Lord's The Singer of
Tales. In the musicological tradition, this is not unusual, but it is not
acceptable in a cultural studies context.

The best attempt to define the relation of jazz studies and linguistics is Perlman
and Greenblatt's essay "Miles Davis Meets Noam Chomsky." Like Owens, they identify
motifs and discuss how songs' harmonic form and players' personal taste govern
their combination. Also like Owens, their work is clearly defined by Chomsky's
concept of generative grammar: that it is possible to develop a complete, logical
explanatory system.

However, they do finally, acknowledge that jazz cannot be fully grammatically

mapped (181-182), as does Berliner (205, 249), though in neither text do the
authors see this as requiring them to rethink their relation to the linguistic
model.

It is telling that, while Miles Davis appears in the title of Perlman and
Greenblatt's article, his playing is not analyzed, because Davis was not a
formulaic player. The dominance of the Chomskian linguistic model in jazz studies
promotes the study of players whose work fits well with the model, and encourages
student musicians to develop in similar ways, both of which fit well with the
thriving neo-conservative movement in jazz.

In the remainder of this essay, I attempt to trouble this model by establishing a

relation between bebop performance practices and Derridian deconstruction,
particular as reformulated by Gayatri Spivak and Drucilla Cornell. Much of this
work has already been carried out in articles by Ingrid Monson, Gary Tomlinson, and
Rob Walser, all of which significantly center on the music of Miles Davis. However,
their work relies primarily on Henry Louis Gates's concept of signifyin(g). While
this is a crucial concept, particularly for the study of African-American music and
I will return to it, I will deal primarily with deconstruction, in order to
concentrate on formal characteristics of musical texts and to insist on the
continuing importance of deconstruction in cultural studies.

While the Chomskian approach to jazz study has created an environment for neo-
conservative players, my sympathies are with the avant-garde. If jazz is structured
like a language, it is not one governed by prescriptive or generative rules, but
one resembling an experimental poetics, which values the invention of new words,
new structures, and forms of reflexivity and auto-critique.

This is why Cornell's renaming of deconstruction as "the philosophy of the limit"

is significant. There is a widespread misperception that deconstruction is a
negative procedure, an un-construction or destruction. I frequently hear colleagues
speak of deconstructing power, racism, sexism, homophobia, etc., as if that meant
that those things would then be gone. This is clearly a misunderstanding, but a
pervasive one. Spivak repeatedly insists in an interview on the problem of
essentialism in feminist theory that deconstructive critique does not dismantle its
object, but rather recognizes its "unavoidable usefulness" and its "danger" (129,
also 134). Deconstruction is about the necessity and impossibility of
metadiscursive concepts such as ontology and essentialism. The understanding of
harmony in bebop and post-bop improvisation must work along these same lines. I
will demonstrate this in two ways: first, by arguing that bebop increased the
complexity of jazz harmony to the point that it could no longer serve a
prescriptive function, defining certain "right" and "wrong" notes, and second, by
examining how three alto saxophonists apply this freedom while remaining within
song form and the tradition of jazz. In bebop, the logic of harmony is carried to a
limit where it can no longer dictate what is played, but harmony is not abandoned.
Indeed, it is more important than ever.