Recapturing the Sound of Surprise:Jazz History, Contemporary Science and the Critical State
...tists and scholars must also engage with the tradition of history, that is, how we arrive at (and often construct) historical understandings about the music's development and its social, cultural, political, and even spiritual meanings. [some specific historical examples in this context would help. The author should perhaps see Graham Lock's book Blutopia in which he suggests that the music of Duke Ellington, Sun Ra and Anthony Braxton (and African American expressive culture in general) are predicated on two impulses: one impulse to remember (the blues" impulse) and another impulse to construct through music a vision of the future (the utopic impulse) - hence Lock's use of the term "Blutopia"] In more mainstream jazz settings, the balance of order and chaos represented by a "critical state" is apparent in the balance between preconceived aspects of a tune's formal structure, and the improvisatory treatment of harmony, melody, and rhythm by all of the players involved. For a performance to be both successful and surprising, there also must be a balance between the players at any given moment conforming to and exceeding the expectations of the specific song, the specific context for performance, and the tradition of stylistically-appropriate playing. Even in freer improvised music settings, musicians aim to reach a critical state with their own performance and within an improvising unit. Davey Williams writes that “free improvisation is not an action resulting from freedom; it is an action directed towards freedom.” [I would like to see the use of the term freedom unpacked here] The "critical state" I have been describing is not a defacto condition, but instead something that must be actively pursued and preserved. It turns out that an initial flaw in the sand pile game may provide some additional insight on the critical state and how it might further apply to jazz and improvised music performance. In 1995, a team of researchers in London discovered that the sand pile game does not, in fact, accurately describe the behavior of growing piles of real sand; but it does describe the behavior of piles of rice or other grains with similar qualities. The quality that was missing from real-world sand piles appears to be inertia. Sand grains are relatively heavy and slippery. Once they start to slide, they can easily bring the whole pile down. Rice grains, on the other hand, are relatively lighter and have more “stickiness.” They will only slide far enough until the next barely stable condition is reached. One additional element that affected the development of criticality in actual laboratory experiments was the speed at which the grains were dropped. In turns out that the grains must be dropped slowly enough that the triggered avalanches have time to come to rest before the next grain falls. According to Buchanan, “Self-organized criticality seems to show up only in things that are driven very slowly away from equilibrium, and in which the actions of any individual piece are dominated by its interactions with other elements.” How might this new insight apply to improvised performance? The “stickiness” or inertia may relate to the fact that players must not allow themselves to be overwhelmed by the speed of interaction and availability of options in order to avoid the potentially crippling states of oversaturation and indecision. Both inexperienced and overbearing improvisers tend to focus too much attention on what they, as individuals, are responsible for. The inexperienced improvisor can, through indecision or a reliance on overly simple cat-and-mouse type interactions, cripple the critical state by offering too much “inertia” and not enough “weight” to the situation. Steve Lacy recounted in a NPR interview that during his time spent performing with Thelonious Monk, "He mostly told me what not to do." Monk would remind Lacy to "play your part, I'm accompanying you. Don't pick up on my things." The overbearing improvisor, however, can offer too much “weight”–in the overpowering strength of his or her ideas and convictions–and not enough “inertia” in the form of measured interactions so that the metaphorical pile crumbles prematurely. Monk also told Lacy to "make the drummer sound good… Don't play everything. Just play certain things, let other things go by." The idea that avalanches must run their course before the next grain falls also applies to freer improvisational settings. Although dramatic transitions can conceivably occur at any moment in improvised performance, in practice, experienced improvisers tend to explore ideas, identities, and relationships for considerable stretches of time to avoid the crippling state of oversaturation. [It seems to me that there are many exceptions to this. Indeed, much of John Zorn's work deliberately attempts to create a feeling of "oversaturation" it seems to me. In fact, the aesthetic orientation of the "Downtown School" in general seems to be predicated on this. Again, specific musical examples are needed to substantiate the claims that are being made.] If distantly related ideas were circulating at every moment, the critical state might never be achieved. While at times intentional dissociation may be a useful tool in free improvisation, it cannot be a default circumstance. Are there insights from the study of self-organized criticality that might also affect our understandings of history and the narratives we choose to tell? While human history is infinitely more complex than a sand pile, can thinking about sand pile dynamics and the critical state influence the ways in which we discuss historical movements or causal threads? According to the power law distribution, large avalanches and great upheavals are no more likely than smaller ones to occur. Perhaps great revolutions in history and in art are not necessarily unique in terms of their causes, but instead are simply the large fluctuations expected from a system poised in a critical state? One of my favorite quotes is from Gustave Flaubert who said, “writing history is like drinking an ocean and pissing a cupful." Each historian definitely ends up with something very personal in his or her cup. We have probably all had the experience of having lived through the same events or having had access to the same exact documents, and yet other involved people arrived at very different conclusions or told very different stories. Can we get at the deeper historical processes that lie behind the various narratives? Imagine an historian of the sand pile who one day finds her community swept up in an enormous avalanche. She may try to highlight the causal threads that gave way to the accident: the slope was too steep or improperly maintained, or a smaller avalanche in another community was allowed to go unchecked until it triggered the current disaster. While these may be compelling proximate causes and of certain interest to those affected by the disaster, would they help to explain what made it possible for one grain of sand to trigger a pile-wide catastrophe? Perhaps she would criticize the authorities from the other side of the pile that failed to foresee this catastrophe and take proper steps to remove sand from the original location. But they would have no way to predict an impending danger, for if the pile was steep there, it was certainly steep at other locations as well. Even if they had decided to displace sand in advance from the site where the original grain fell, to where in the pile would they displace it without endangering another location? Even in the simple dynamics of the sand pile, it is not difficult to see the workings of wars, revolutions and other dramatic social upheavals, events that reflect the gradual build-up and release of stress and have a telling effect on the tempo and character of history. While these surprising turn-of-events may be of the less desirable type¬–ones whose damaging or disrupting effects we seek to reduce or avoid–can sand pile dynamics also provide insight on the welcomed surprises that add innovation and enjoyment to our lives? Remarkably, a recent study showed that the number of citations that a scientific paper receives–a crude but telling criteria for the size of the intellectual “earthquake” that it triggered¬–follows a scale-invariant power law. Double the number of citations a paper receives and the number of papers of that type falls off by about eight. Similar power laws may exist in the realm of music recordings across various styles and categories. [they may but they may not. I would like to see some ort of evidence for this claim which, as it stands, is entirely unsubstantiated] This suggests that the fabric of scientific knowledge–and possibly musical creativity–may also be poised in a critical state. [an interesting idea but it is not, in my view, sufficiently supported in this paper] Every new idea may be akin to a grain falling on the pile of knowledge, and once the critical state has been achieved, it is impossible to predict which ideas will simply stick and which ideas will topple the paradigm. In a nutshell, intellectual inertia holds the network of ideas in place and ongoing curiosity and creativity put it under stress. One approach to history that is so common as to often pass without question has been called the “great person” approach. British historian Thomas Carlyle first declared, “the history of the world is but the biography of great men." For other historians, however, the really important forces in history were the social movements, initiated perhaps [in part?] by individuals, but important only because they involve huge numbers. [social movements, including "important" ones, often do not involve huge numbers.] Edward Hallet Carr criticized the “great person” theory of history as lazy and childish: It is easier to call communism the “brain-child” of Karl Marx… than to analyze its origin and character, to attribute the Bolshevik Revolution to the stupidity of Nicholas II or to German gold than to study its profound social causes, and to see in the two world wars of this century the results of the individual wickedness of Wilhelm II and Hitler rather than of some deep-seated breakdown in the system of international relations. For jazz historians and educators, it is often easier to attribute a shift towards greater individualism and virtuosity in jazz to Louis Armstrong alone; compositional complexity to Jelly Roll Morton or Duke Ellington; and newer jazz techniques to Charlie Parker, Thelonious Monk, or Ornette Coleman without detailing the specific cultural climate of New Orleans, Chicago, Los Angeles, Washington D.C., or New York or the various social, political, and economic forces that impacted musical developments. We should, however, be interested not just in the much-celebrated heroes of jazz and in the specific sounds that they produced, but rather in the ongoing processes involved in making jazz sounds, communities, and meanings. Another recent scientific approach, often called network or "small world" theory, has brought new techniques and technologies to bear on the study of complex, evolving networks from the human genome to the world-wide-web. This approach is based not only on investigating the mappings of network-style organization, but also on the realization that some bonds are inherently stronger or weaker than others. Closed networks, those in which the number of elements is relatively fixed, often exhibit an "egalitarian" organization. For example, neurons in the brain appear each to have roughly the same number of connections. Yet for these egalitarian networks a few "weak links" that bridge together distant regions can create a "small world" dynamic in which every node, while principally clustered to others in its close vicinity, is also connected to all others with only a few degrees of separation. Networks in which new connections and nodes frequently form, however, tend to evolve towards an "aristocratic" or "scale-free" organization. Aristocratic networks exhibit power law...