Jazz and the Material TurnFloris Schuiling (Utrecht University)

This is a pre-publication version of a chapter published in The Routledge Companion to Jazz

Studies. This document presents the original manuscript as submitted to the editors of that

work, but before any editorial work by them or the work’s publisher. To cite this document,

please consult the published version.

“When you hear music, after it’s over, it’s gone, in the air; you can never capture it again.”

(Dolphy 1964) Eric Dolphy’s statement signifies a common understanding of music as

intangible and immaterial. Because of its emphasis on improvisation, this discourse of

immateriality has been particularly influential in jazz. As the music where notes are “picked

out of thin air” (Berliner 1994: 1), it has become “a kind of language for expressing the

ineffable.” (Bivins 2015: 199) Jazz performance is often described, both by musicians and

more recently by music theorists, as a “conversation” (Monson 1996), suggesting ideas of

orality and immediacy—despite prevailing notions that “real” jazz is instrumental. The very

definition of jazz has been described as “if you have to ask, you’ll never know”, making its

elusiveness and intangibility essential to the genre. However, we only know Dolphy’s words

because they were recorded in 1964, suggesting that even such transient and immaterial

experiences are mediated through material practices and technologies.

A growing number of scholars in the humanities and social sciences are turning their

attention to such forms of material mediation of cultural expression and experience, and are

increasingly finding their materiality to be non-trivial. The study of “material culture”, as two

of its major proponents write, “may be most broadly defined as the investigation of the

relationship between people and things irrespective of time and space.” (Miller and Tilley

1996: 5) Thus, in practice, it is the study of the role played by material objects, artefacts, and

technologies in the shaping of human societies, cultures, identities, and knowledge. The

authors continue that “the potential range of contemporary disciplines involved in some way

or other in studying material culture is effectively as wide as the human and cultural sciences

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themselves.” (Ibid.) Twenty years later, this appears as a prophetic statement, as the “material

turn” has made a big impact beyond its origins in anthropology and archaeology, with

important influences from media studies and science and technology studies, to fields such as

history, sociology, literature, art history, gender studies, philosophy, and many others.1

Interdisciplinary work is being carried out under the banners of “thing theory” (Brown 2001)

and “new materialism” (Coole and Frost 2010; Dolphijn and Van der Tuin 2012) as well as

that of material culture, and important work on materiality and embodiment is also being done

in adjacent interdisciplinary fields such as performance studies, sensory studies, and cultural

and political ecology.

The study of material culture, understood broadly, is thus a diverse and vibrant

academic field, and it has offered a number of important challenges to traditional approaches

in the social sciences and humanities. As archaeologist Dan Hicks writes, in the intertwining

of human and material lives “things themselves can come to constitute contexts, which are by

no means purely human or social contexts” (Hicks 2010: 83, my emphasis), thus nicely

capturing the way in which material culture studies has often led to reconsiderations of

standard assumptions of meaning and sociality. A main concern of the field has been how to

account for this interpenetration of humans and things. Instead of a traditional humanist

understanding of agency as independence from material and social constraints, scholars

increasingly understand human agency and cognition to be relational, leading to what Jane

Bennett calls a “congregational” rather than an “atomistic” understanding of agency, wherein

agency is not located in a particular subject but formed through a reciprocal relation with the

substances, artefacts, and technologies that fill the material world (Bennett 2009: 20). Agency

and cognition are often said to be “distributed” over what are variously called “networks”

(Latour 2005), “assemblages” (Bennett 2009), or “meshworks” (Ingold 2011b). This

reciprocal relation implies, first, that such networks are contingent and dynamic, and second,

that the material world is active rather than passive—an idea that some scholars express with

the concept of “material agency” (Latour 2005; Knappett and Malafouris 2008; for alternative

views see Pinch 2010; Ingold 2011).

In music scholarship, such ideas have been explored in depth in the field of music

technology (Théberge 1997; Taylor 2001; Straw 2000, 2012; Sterne 2003; Born 2005; Katz

2010) and more recently have also been applied to musical instruments (Dolan 2012; Tresch

and Dolan 2013; Bates 2012; Roda 2014; Moseley 2016; Rehding 2016) and music notation

(Orden 2015; Schuiling 2016). Hence, it would seem that a “material turn” in music

scholarship is gaining some momentum. Its late arrival may have to do with the elusive

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materiality of music itself. Indeed, much of the critical musicological literature since the late

twentieth century has precisely argued against the “reifying” notion of music as an object,

proposing instead to see it as a form of practice (Cook 2001, 2013; DeNora 2003; Goehr

2007). However, this practice is mediated through various material objects and formations:

instruments, concert venues, recording and playback technologies, scores, the bodies of

musicians and listeners, advertising and promotional material, music videos, and so on. I

would therefore argue, with Straw (2012), Georgina Born (2005), and Antoine Hennion

(2015), that precisely because of this “paradigmatic multiply-mediated” nature, music in fact

presents a unique opportunity for conceptualizing the role of material objects in cultural

expression and experience.

Jazz, with its emphasis on its own intangibility and elusiveness, is a case in point.

Apart from this existence “between process and product” (Cook 2001), which it shares with

all other forms of music, there are two more particular reasons why the question of jazz’s

materiality is significant. The first is historical. As a product of African-American culture and

history, jazz is to an important extent the expression of a people who have themselves been

treated as objects to be exploited or sold for profit, rather than fully acknowledged as human

subjects, and ongoing systemic racism suggests that this acknowledgement is still not

universally shared. As the work of Fred Moten (2003) and Alexander Weheliye (2005)

suggests, it is precisely because of this historical background that black popular music has

employed sound, as the technological mediation of subjective expression, to subvert

traditional distinctions between subject and object, negotiate the historical intangibility and

invisibility of black subjectivity, and project what Weheliye calls a “sonic Afro-modernity”.

The second reason, while less overtly political, is directly related to the first, and has to do

with the important role of improvisation in jazz performance. The discourse on jazz

improvisation, with its emphasis on personal expression and “finding your own voice”, seems

to suggest an ideal of conquering one’s material limitations in order to express a (black)

subjectivity. However, if Moten and Weheliye are correct, there is rather more to this idea,

and the concept of material culture may help us to reconsider how we conceptualize agency in

improvised music.

Genre as Material Culture

The “new” jazz studies came into focus in the 1990s partly through the critical writings of

Scott DeVeaux (1991), Krin Gabbard (1995), and John Gennari (1991, 2007) on the jazz

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canon and the assumption that jazz is a uniform musical category. Particularly DeVeaux’s

emphasis on the fact that jazz history is in fact filled with disputes about whether or not new,

old, or revivalist styles could still be called “jazz” seems to foreshadow more recent work on

genre as “assemblage”, in that it aims to describe a process of categorization that does not

presume an analytic totality but rather proceeds by negotiating difference (see for instance

Brackett 2016). Such work approaches genre not in terms of musical characteristics, or even

as a discourse of identity and distinction, but as a dynamic process of grouping, of

establishing and blurring connections and distinctions; a process made up of human actors as

well as objects and technologies of aggregation and dissemination. Benjamin Piekut for

instance, in his work on experimental music, argues that genre is not “something that

magically coalesced around shared [musical] qualities”, but “a network, arranged, and

fabricated through the hard work of composers, critics, scholars, performers, audiences,

students, and a host of other elements including texts, scores, articles, curricula, patronage

systems, and discourses of race, gender, class and nation.” (Piekut 2011: 19)

In various ways, jazz scholars have implicitly addressed the material culture of jazz.

Particularly the importance of recordings has been noted, not just because they are the object

of study for most jazz scholars, but because listening to records, playing along with them, and

copying solos has been an important part of how many jazz musicians have learned to play

and develop their own idiom (Berliner 1994; Monson 1996; Born 2005). As a technology of

memory, recordings have thus played an important part in jazz history not just as documents

of this history, but as common points of reference for musicians to “signify” on and in doing

so give new meaning to them (Gates 1988; Tomlinson 1991; Walser 1995; Monson 1996).2

Arguably just as important for the development of the jazz repertoire has been the role of the

Fake (and Real) Books that have been the subject of codification, clandestine exchange,

debates over accuracy, and various legal disputes (Kernfeld 2006; Faulkner and Becker 2009).

Another way in which the material culture of jazz has been addressed is through the lens of

visual studies, where particularly jazz and film, but also jazz photography and the design of

record sleeves have been important areas of investigation (Gabbard 1995b, 1996; Heile,

Elsdon, and Doctor 2016).

From a new materialist perspective, these objects are not just representations or

reflections of jazz, contributing to a discourse around jazz while never permeating it, but

integral elements of the jazz assemblage. Jed Rasula, in a classic paper on the “seductive

menace” of jazz recordings (1995), argues that recordings, because of technological

limitations, are unreliable sources to serve as “primary evidence” of actual performing

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practices, especially in early jazz. As such, recordings constitute myths of an authentic “living

reality” of which they can only be inauthentic and partial representations. As a medium of

inscription, recordings constitute their own history of jazz in comparison with which the

historian’s account can only be “a surrogate act masquerading as authority.” (135) Jazz thus

comes to be characterized by a nostalgia for presence: “Jazz has been a constant testimony to

things that will never be known, people that will forever go unheard, words that will remain

unsaid.” (152)

Rasula certainly identifies an important part of jazz aesthetics, and it is striking how

many jazz lovers still primarily approach recordings as representations of performances rather

than works in their own right—which is how most people today usually listen to recordings.

Indeed, John Gennari calls it “the most fundamental and enduring article of faith in jazz” that

“its truth is located in its live performance aesthetic, its multitextual, non-recordable qualities

of emotional expressiveness and response.” (Gennari 1991: 459) However, from this

perspective, the “real” jazz is always somewhere else, always just out of reach. Instead, to

paraphrase Piekut, I would argue that jazz is exactly what scholars and recordings have

construed it to be, just not for the reasons Rasula gives (Piekut 2011: 18). Much of the jazz

literature continues to focus on this logic of rift and rupture, the “schizophonic” condition of

separation of sound from its source, while popular music studies has long moved to

investigate what Piekut and Jason Stanyek call the “rhizophonic” structures emerging from

the “fundamentally fragmented yet proliferative condition of sound reproduction and

recording, where sounds and bodies are constantly dislocated, relocated, and co-located in

temporary aural configurations.” (Stanyek and Piekut 2010: 19)

In fact, following anthropologist Alfred Gell (Gell 1992, 1996, 1998), we might say

that the way technology intervenes in the “indexical” relations of cause and effect, thus

trapping, suspending, redirecting, and translating actions and intentions, is essentially what

makes art captivating.3 Born, commenting on Gell, writes that “the objects that result from

creative agency condense or embody social relations, and […] they do so by spinning forms

of connectedness across time and space.” (Born 2005: 16) Born uses Gell’s ideas to highlight

the “lateral and processual” nature of jazz, where a recording of one performance might

influence the style of someone else’s performance, the recording of which in turn influences

others, meaning there is “no split between ideal musical object and mere instantiation, no

hierarchy between composer and Creator and performer as interpreter of the Word.” (27)

However, the real force of Gell’s approach is that it draws attention to how such arrangements

may change, and what such changes reveal about the composition of social and musical

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relationships—and fundamentally, conceptions of agency—in a particular musical culture. As

Born writes, “to draw out the full theoretical interest of [Gell’s] insight, it is imperative to see

how this process [of indexical mediation] varies, how it can be systematized or negated”.

(Born 2005: 25) Such an approach could also avoid the technological determinism inherent in

Rasula’s argument; he does not take into account the diversity of recording and playback

technologies, nor the particular contexts in which they are used, what Jonathan Sterne calls

the “fields of combined cultural, social, and physical activity—what other authors have called

networks or assemblages—from which technologies emerge and of which they are part.”

(Sterne 2003, 8; see also Solis 2004; Tackley 2010 for similar responses to Rasula) It is

through their entanglement in such networks that the essences and boundaries of objects are

determined (Miller 1987; Haraway 1988; Henare, Holbraad, and Wastell 2007).

By way of illustration, consider the album Blue by New York-based quartet Mostly

Other People Do The Killing (2014). Blue is an exact, note-for-note replication of Miles

Davis’ Kind of Blue (1959), to the extent that the difference is only really audible in small

details of timing and timbre when one listens very closely. The album intentionally plays with

the kinds of indexical relations described by Gell. Kind of Blue owes much of its attraction to

the way it appears to “capture” a pure moment of musical interaction, seemingly belying

Rasula’s schizophonic angst. Of course, this informal and immediate effect is, paradoxically,

achieved precisely because of the technological know-how of producer Teo Macero (Kahn

2000), a knowledge partly developed by Rudy Van Gelder (Skea 2001), who experimented

with principles of sound engineering in recording the more extensive and unpredictable

improvisations that musicians were increasingly recording thanks to the possibilities of the LP

record. Blue indexes not only Kind of Blue and its iconic status, and the meticulous

transcription and rehearsal of the musicians as well as the overdubbing techniques of the

producers, but also broader cultural constructs such as the classicizing tendencies in

contemporary jazz culture (including the demand to play transcriptions on one’s conservatory

recital, which is how the group came up with the idea). Paradoxically it simultaneously

indexes the currency of poststructuralist ideas in jazz culture that emerged with the

intellectualization of the jazz climate—the liner notes feature Jorge Luis Borges’ short story

about the fictional author Pierre Menard who replicated Cervantes’ Don Quixote word-for-

word thus creating an entirely different novel.

Obviously, the album created some controversy; the Estate of Miles Davis issued a

statement from Vince Wilburn Jr., Davis’ nephew, that it did not support the project (Miles

Davis Estate 2014). Wilburn Jr. himself expressed himself more vividly on his Facebook

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page: “#BULLSHIT….Yes I Said It!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! stay original Motherfuckers FUCK

THIS……Pro-tools … auto-tune now this BULLSHIT ….Jimmy Cobb should kick Your

ass……..” (Wilburn Jr. 2014) Wilburn Jr.’s comments, in comparing Blue to the use of Pro-

tools and auto-tune, two forms of technology that supposedly stand in the way of “true

artistry” and authenticity, highlight how notions of agency are central to the appreciation of

jazz. In fact, bassist Matthew Elliott of MOPDTK says of the album that “the sound is clearly

jazz, but because of the process that went into it, it magically becomes ‘not jazz’.” (Elliott

2014) He goes on to compare the album to the work of Wynton Marsalis—consider for

instance his Mr. Jelly Lord (1999) which features not only very accurate renditions of pieces

previously recorded by Jelly Roll Morton, but even a recording of “Tom Cat Blues” made on

a phonograph cylinder, making it sonically indistinguishable from early jazz. The differences

in reception are striking: both Wynton Marsalis and MOPDTK are criticized for being

unoriginal, but where Marsalis is praised for paying tribute to the jazz greats, MOPDTK is

praised for its iconoclastic, postmodernist gesture. These differences may not only have to do

with the different public images of Marsalis and MOPDTK (in which the politics of race

undoubtedly plays a role), but also because of the indexical quality of the reproduced

recordings; we tend to perceive the recordings of Morton as incomplete renditions of a

mythical past, while Kind of Blue is perceived as an accurate document of a spontaneous and

authentic performance.4 More than a form of “signifying” on a shared history, Blue brings into

play not just notions of iteration and authorship, but the way in which the genre of jazz

implies particular configurations of agency, technology, and creativity that can be brought

into focus using Gell’s model of indexicality.

Because of the way the notion of the assemblage blurs the distinction between

production and consumption, it suggests we might also ask how listeners, not just musicians,

have mediated and assembled the genre of jazz. A significant part of these “acts of

assemblage” (Drott 2013) was performed, quite literally, by collectors of recordings since the

1920s. Jazz is, perhaps more than any other twentieth-century music, a real collector’s music,

as listeners collect not only recordings, but also photographs, films, paintings, sculptures and

other memorabilia.5 Early collectors aimed to salvage recordings that were frequently of low

quality and were becoming unplayable because of heavy use (Cummings 2010: 95). These

communities of collectors constructed an ideal of connoisseurship around jazz recordings,

where each collector had their own specialism (99). This culture of connoisseurship, together

with the emerging jazz criticism in the newly founded periodicals (partly aimed at these

collectors) did much for the gradual social acceptance for jazz as an art form. They did not

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only instigate the practice of reproduction, because of which many of these recordings remain

available today, but because of their aim for completeness also initiated the practice of jazz

discography (Epperson 2013). These collections and discographies constitute the material

history of many jazz archives, which suggests that to only see these discographers and their

canons as the perpetrators of ideology is a rather limited perspective. Rather, their efforts and

obsessions emerge as a significant part of jazz history in their own right. As Ken Prouty

writes: “moves towards canon, and reactions against them, are part of the history of jazz

itself.”6 (Prouty 2012: 6) This does not necessarily mitigate these practices; Alex Cummings

describes how white collectors would go into poor black neighbourhoods to buy records for

prices far below their actual worth, making palpable the forms of appropriation that are

inevitably part of the history of the jazz canon (Cummings 2010: 97-98). However, it does

make these histories more concrete, and makes clear the contingencies and contradictions

inherent in the formation of genre.

Another example of the material history of jazz listening practices suggests that these

may not necessarily revolve around connoisseurship and canon formation (or may configure

these concepts in a different way). The fact that the early jazz collectors were all men might

obscure the fact that the phonograph, from the late nineteenth century to the middle of the

twentieth, was mostly used by women. While Sherrie Tucker (2000) and Kristin McGee

(McGee 2009) have highlighted the role of female musicians in the Swing era, they may also

have played a vital role in the domestication of jazz and in its dissemination as a public form

of entertainment.7 As a product intended for domestic consumption, it entered into a social

sphere in which women maintained the household, and music was an integral part of this

domestic sphere (traditionally played on the piano, in relation to which the early phonograph

was often advertised). (Kenney 2003: 88-108; Barnett 2006; Gitelman 2006: 59-86) During

World War I, women gained more employment, also in the music industry, and they played

an important role not just in the consumption of recordings, but also in their manufacturing

and distribution (Kenney 2003: 97). After the war, as the cities were increasingly inhabited by

working women, and with the emergence of recorded jazz and other dance music, these

women played an important role in the upcoming “social dance craze” that was not only

taking place in dance parlours, but was also brought into the home (101-2). With the

development of loudspeakers and jukeboxes, the phonograph also offered new modes of

public consumption (Stowe 1996: 107-121; Devine 2013). These developments have usually

been described in jazz scholarship in terms of commercialization and the appropriation of

African-American music. Although this is undoubtedly correct, these histories of listening

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suggest that, as Sterne writes, the history of phonography (and thus part of the history of jazz)

is “at least as much about the changing home and working lives of the middle class as it is

about corporate planning and experimentation.” (Sterne 2003: 197)

Other technological and material developments lead to other cultural practices of

listening: Tom Perchard has recently described the visual and sonic role of jazz records as part

of the “sensorium” of modernist interior design, and various scholars have investigated how

the world wide web has created new forms of jazz community (Perchard 2017). Further

investigations of the histories and practices of listening that have shaped the jazz assemblage

may reveal further actors in jazz history that have heretofore been neglected, as well as the

conceptions of agency that are itself part of jazz history, uncovering the discourses and

practices because of which these agencies have not yet been articulated. Moreover, the

descriptions of these histories would not just historicize the jazz canon and show its

contingency, but also indicate new ways of describing its history.

The Materiality of Making Music Together

In the previous section I suggested that technological mediation is not external to jazz as a

musical and cultural practice, but an integral part of it. This implies the need for a

reconsideration of the role that instruments and other objects and technologies play in jazz

performance and particularly improvisation. Given the central importance of performance,

creativity, and musical interaction in jazz studies since the 1990s, it is surprising that the role

of instruments has not been a sustained area of investigation. This is not to say that

instruments have been neglected. Certainly not: Ingrid Monson’s (1996) influential account of

musical interaction was predicated on highlighting the role of the rhythm section instead of

maintaining an exclusive focus on the improvising soloist, and there have been various studies

of particular musicians that explicitly discuss their playing style in terms of instrumental

technique (M. Tucker 1985; Givan 2003, 2009; Lash 2011). Taking a slightly different

approach, Krin Gabbard’s early work on jazz and visual culture included an essay on the

phallic connotations of the trumpet (Gabbard 1992). However, many descriptions of jazz

improvisation and expression—such as metaphors of conversation, telling a story, or the

concept of signifying—have been cast in terms of “orality”, which has been very important

for addressing the interactive and processual quality of jazz as opposed to the traditional text-

based approaches of music scholarship, but which does seem to dismiss the role of

instruments and other forms of media and technology as a peripheral consideration, as it

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portrays expression in jazz as immediate (or mediated only by discourse—on this point see

also Prouty 2006; Cook 2007). Lydia Goehr’s (2016) discussion of how to respond to a

sudden broken string indicates how objects can subvert common assumptions about the nature

of improvisation. Rather than an understanding of improvisation as intangible and immaterial,

we might reconsider it in terms of what Claude Lévi-Strauss calls “bricolage”, a way of

making do with whatever is at hand to achieve present needs (as opposed to the careful

planning involved in “engineering”, Lévi-Strauss 1966).

The point made in the previous section, about the “multiple mediation” that forms the

basis of music’s existence, applies here with equal force. Emily Dolan nicely captures the

challenge to traditional understandings of music when she questions the notion that “music’s

medium is sound”, comparing it to the statement that the medium of painting or cinema is

light (Dolan 2012: 2-3). Dolan is one of the proponents of a nascent “new organology”, which

is developing ways in which music scholarship might take the role of instruments more

seriously (Tresch and Dolan 2013). There is of course a longer tradition of studying musical

instruments from an ethnomusicological point of view, examining how they disseminate

musical knowledge and traditions, and discipline musicians’ bodies (Merriam 1964; Berliner

1978; Baily 1995; Dawe 1996, 2001; Doubleday 1999; Qureshi 2000; Waksman 2001; see

also Pinch and Trocco 2002 for a perspective from technology studies). More recently,

however, various scholars have more ambitiously suggested that the study of musical

instruments might reconfigure our understanding of musical knowledge, analysis,

performance, history, ethnography, and ontology more generally (Bates 2012; Roda 2014;

Moseley 2016; Rehding 2016).

If agency is defined as the ability to act, then instruments clearly have significant

influence on the musician’s agency. Instruments are not just “tools” for achieving given ends;

as Aden Evens points out: “they do not serve an interest that could have pre-existed them.”

(Evens 2005: 129) By themselves, however, they are strikingly “unmusical” and require a

musician to become musical instruments (Burrows 1987). Moreover, instruments condition

the means of expression and the role in the ensemble of the musician, and as such constructs a

persona (Auslander 2006) for her that could not have existed without the instrument. The

musician, immersed or possessed by the music she plays, is a categorically different kind of

actor than the person she is in everyday life. We might characterize this mutual co-

dependence with philosopher Karen Barad’s term “intra-agency” (2003), which connotes an

interdependence not just of two formerly independent entities, but a process by which two

actors emerge as separate entities.

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The instrument’s interface, in such an approach, is an important point of focus as it is

the main aspect with regard to which musicians develop these skills. Roger Moseley has

written a media archaeology of the keyboard as a field of play, in which he describes the

history of Western musical thought in terms of the “ludo-musical” structures and possibilities

offered by the interface (Moseley 2016).8 He cites Hans-Georg Gadamer who writes that “all

playing is a being-played” to argue for the centrality to play of the “reciprocity between the

animate and the inanimate world” (Moseley 2016: 4; see Gadamer 2013: 111). Instruments,

like all media, involve “protocols” of use (Gitelman 2006: 7); norms and standards that,

according to a medium’s technological affordances, emerge around that medium to give it a

particular function and meaning in society.9 The incorporation (Hayles 1997) of an

instrument’s interface thus constructs the musical knowledge and imagination of the

musician, and by virtue of its technological construction the interface constrains and suggests

particular musical possibilities within particular musical situations. Musicians might be said

to think with their instruments; they do not just develop their musical thought in relation to

their instruments, but in performance the interaction with the instrument forms an integral part

of the development of musical thought and the expression of musical ideas (De Souza 2017).

Alfred Gell, whose work I discussed in the previous section, similarly describes the oeuvre of

an artist not only as a “distributed object”, highlighting the interrelated qualities of the works

of a particular artist, but also as an extension of the artist’s mind, implying that creating these

works is also a way of developing her stylistic ideas (Gell 1998).

An approach to the analysis of jazz improvisation grounded in such ideas might

understand it less as the construction of musical structures in relation to a chord scheme and

the playing of fellow musicians, but primarily as the application of skills learned in interaction

with the particular construction and interface of an instrument. In other words, it would no

longer take particular recordings as the primary unit of analysis, but see these only as

particular instances of a musician’s idiom in development. Benjamin Givan’s recent analysis

of Sonny Rollins Blue 7 shows that the “motivic relationships” praised so famously by

Gunther Schuller are in fact more accurately described as licks that formed part of Rollins’

stylistic idiom at the time, something he illustrates with a comparison of Blue 7 to other

recordings made around the same time (Givan 2014). Moreover, he does not just restrict his

discussion to Rollins, but shows that these and similar motives were in fact used by various

other musicians at this time, showing that this idiom is itself part of the style and musical

conventions of a wider jazz community. Although Givan uses none of the theories of

methodologies outlined here, he does come quite close to Gell’s argument when he quotes

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Paul Bley saying “you might think of one’s oeuvre as a single piece, and the oeuvre is a

lifetime” (228). A stronger engagement with new organological and materialist literature

might take such arguments a step further than examining the corpus of a particular musician,

and investigate reciprocal relations between instruments and the particular musical

conventions of a given jazz community, or, by comparing the use of different instruments

within a given community, how people have negotiated the material affordances of particular

instruments to express similar musical ideas.

Such examples suggest that the social life of instruments is contingent on the skills

that musicians develop in reciprocal relation with them (W. Gibson 2006), and given the

detailed knowledge of jazz scholars about the development of musical skills, their work is

highly pertinent to the ongoing debates about material agency, which is sometimes perceived

to sideline the social and embodied processes by which this agency is realized. In addition, the

development of skills may also lead us to rethink what an instrument is in the first place. So

far, I have been concentrating on how the construction and interface of an instruments

constructs particular ways of knowing and acting in the musician. However, the primary focus

on the instrument’s interface in new organological scholarship might thus represent what

philosopher Alfred North Whitehead would call a “fallacy of misplaced concreteness”

(Whitehead 1926). To illustrate, I recently heard Wilbert de Joode, a Dutch double bass player

operating in the field of improvised music, explain at length why he preferred to use thick

catgut strings instead of steel:

Such strings have to be made especially, they’re not of a standard thickness. One

string may be made from around twenty intestines, which have to be wound together,

which is a very slow process—it’s not very vegan. I also want strings with little

winding. In baroque music people play catgut strings, but those are extremely flexible

strings. I like strings that offer resistance, that can create tension. This is a harp string,

so it’s coloured because you have to know where the F is among all the hundred

thousand strings on a harp, but I’ve tuned it higher, to a G. […] I use catgut strings

because they don’t break; in improvised music you want to be an equal partner, and to

be able to sound out your voice. A large bass is always a little slow, which is great

when you play tempo, but if you suddenly want to make a shift, do something else,

then you need the sound to be able to pierce through everything else. I tried to do that

with steel but they just broke. It also wasn’t the sound I was looking for. (De Joode

and Vingerhoeds 2016)

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His comments show the various considerations and actors that come into play only because of

a string, which is after all only one part of his relation to his instrument but brings into play

concerns with style, interaction with fellow musicians, knowledge of other instruments, genre,

even animal rights—the sound of the material is almost a mere afterthought. Professional

musicians frequently have an intimate knowledge of their instrument that goes far beyond the

interface as a site of interaction, and concerns the properties and behaviours of the materials

of which they are made up. Anthropologist Tim Ingold argues that the focus of material

culture studies on “materiality” has resulted in a neglect of materials, which include not only

wood, textiles, or stone, but also air and water, and the forces of pressure and gravity that

move them (Ingold 2007). Creative work, for him, is not an engagement with finished and

stable objects, but with materials that are always in motion; developing creative skill is a

matter of learning to work with these unfolding qualities (Ingold 2010).

Although I have concentrated here on musical instruments, there are of course various

other ways in which technologies can be seen to mediate modes of musical creativity. Marian

Jago discusses the overdubbing practices of Lennie Tristano in the early 1950s, which were

obviously an important element of his musicianship, but are not easily accounted for in terms

of improvisation as a “live” and interactive event (Jago 2013). In my own research on Dutch

improvising collective the Instant Composers Pool, I found that their approach to improvised

music included the use of a large notated repertoire that offered different creative possibilities

in performance, and were thus integral to their way of working. This directly confronts more

or less standard definitions of improvisation in terms of its opposition to the use of music

notation (Schuiling 2016). As in the example of Blue, such reconfigurations of creative

agency are entangled in the dynamics of genre; Jago recounts how the production and

reception of Tristano’s experiments involved a negotiation of perceived genre boundaries, and

in the case of the ICP their practice resulted from a cultural position in between free jazz,

contemporary art music, and the experimental performance art of Fluxus (Schuiling

forthcoming).

Further research into topics like these might lead to a reconsideration of improvisation,

to use Moseley’s words, as “a response as well as a call”, in ways that “challenge distinctions

between action and reaction” (Moseley 2016: 177). The concept of “bricolage” is enjoying

renewed attention in anthropology, as scholars are becoming increasingly aware of the

importance and ubiquity of improvisation, not only in creative practices (Hallam and Ingold

2007; Wilf 2014), but to account for the relational dynamics by which objects accrue their

cultural significance more generally, as well as to characterize the process by which people

13

negotiate the variously fluid, resistant, and emergent properties of material objects (Suchman

2007; Ingold 2012). Jazz scholars, who have developed a detailed and sophisticated

vocabulary for speaking about improvisation, have much to contribute to such discussions.

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Notes

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1 For a detailed overview of the history of material culture in Archaeology and Anthropology, see

Hicks 2010. In these fields, the topic of materiality enjoyed a surge of interest through the work of

people such as Ian Hodder (1982), Arjun Appadurai (1986) Daniel Miller (1987) and Christopher

Tilley (1991). Around the same time, the topic was also being discussed in media studies

(Gumbrecht and Pfeiffer 1988; Kittler 1999) and science and technology studies (Pinch and Bijker

1984; Latour 1987; Bijker and Law 1992). It is mainly to the interdisciplinary spread of these

subdisciplinary movements that we can trace back the current “material turn”. Of course, there are

important differences between them; for one, in anthropology scholars argued that objects are not

just what humans make of them, and there was a reorientation towards the “materiality” of objects

(Buchli 1995; Olsen 2003; Miller 2005), while scholars in media studies and science and

technology studies, moving in the opposite direction, increasingly turned against the perceived

“technological determinism” of such important figures like Marshall McLuhan and Langdon

Winner (Smith and Marx 1994; Wyatt 2008). In this chapter I will generally refer to

interdisciplinary work in the “material turn” as studies of “material culture”, even though many of

the authors and approaches I discuss would not usually be categorized under the concept, or indeed

have positioned themselves against the traditional archaeological concept of material culture. This

also implies my discussion represents the field as being rather more homogeneous than it actually is

(somebody like Graham Harman [2002] would disagree with virtually every point mentioned in my

summary above). I will be theoretically and methodologically promiscuous and draw on ideas that

are sometimes deemed to be incompatible. That being said, I do think there is much to be gained

from a stronger engagement with some of the proposed methodologies—for instance, it is striking

how despite the currency of actor-network theory and its concept of material agency, very few

scholars have employed the technical vocabulary for describing its various ways in which agency

might be mediated by material objects (Akrich and Latour 1992). At the same time, the engagement

of humans with material objects is always situated and specific to particular contexts, and so are our

theories about them, and so rather than engaging too much in theoretical speculation I would

advocate a commitment to empirical, ethnographic, and historical investigation of these situated

practices.2 On sound recording and memory see Kenney 2003; Bijsterveld and Dijck 2009; Roy 2016.3 The “index” is a semiotic concept drawn from the work of C.S. Peirce (Peirce 1991), signifying a

relation of sign to signified dependent on causation or contiguity; smoke is an index of fire

(causation), but a pointing finger is also an index of the thing at which it points (contiguity).4 Of course such concepts of realism and fidelity are themselves subject to historical variation, see

for instance Thompson 1995.

5 This may has to do with the nostalgia and fantasy identified by Rasula; nostalgia and colonial

fantasies are important themes in studies of collection as they represent a “longing for an

impossibly pure context of lived experience at a place of origin, […] a past which has only

ideological reality.” (Stewart 1984: 23, see also Clifford 1988; Elsner and Cardinal 2004; Pearce

2013).6 Recent work on the materiality of photography, which concerns itself not with photography as

representation but with photographs as objects that are cherished, collected, and exchanged, has

similarly sought such a grounded understanding of archives. From this work, the photographic

archive—as might the jazz archive—emerges not just as a site of “disciplinary regulation and

enclosure” (Edwards 2001: 4) or “an agent of surveillance and oppression” (Vestberg 2008: 58) but

(also) as a more heterogeneous, dynamic, and contingent space that is not only itself dependent on

networks of exchange that imbue objects with meaning, but may because of this contingency also

be the source of new ways of writing history.7 Studies of domestication, which investigate how technologies become embedded in everyday

practices, have been an important source of arguments against technological determinism, see

Silverstone and Hirsch 1992; Berker et al. 2006.8 Media archaeology studies the cultural “remains” of old media in the present, for instance through

the “excavation” of new media to uncover their historical predecessors (Kittler 1990; Zielinski

2008; Huhtamo and Parikka 2011; Parikka 2012).9 The term “affordance” derives from James Gibson’s (2014) ecological approach to psychology,

and serves to emphasize the reciprocal and mutual relation between perception, cognition, and

action and the material environments in which these take place. Affordances are defined as

“possibilities for action” and are always relationally determined—dependent on both the material

properties of an object and the physical abilities of an organism.