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ABSTRACT
Jerome Kern's “All the Things You Are” has enjoyed a lengthy and varied history as a jazz standard. Like many other standards, hundreds of recordings of the tune exist, each rendition different from the last. This radically pluralistic identity makes it difficult to pin down what exactly “All the Things You Are” is. In this article, I argue that the notion of an avant-texte may be used to engage with the pluralistic identity of the jazz tune. Originally developed by literary scholars dealing with authors’ sketches, the term avant-texte describes a network of documents that can be traced in order to determine how the identity of a text is constituted and changes over time. I argue that improvisers construct such networks based on the versions of a tune with which they become familiar, eventually forming a referent for improvisation. By analyzing some of the manifold relations between various recordings of Kern's composition across history, I demonstrate how particular creative choices proliferate throughout the network and gradually alter not only the tune's current identity as a referent but also the future paths the tune's identity might take.
Acknowledgements
This article is based on chapter 2 of my dissertation; see Sean R. Smither, “Conceptualizing Tunes: Avant-textes, Referents, and the Analysis of Musical Structure in Jazz,” PhD diss. Rutgers University, 2020. Earlier versions of this paper were presented at annual meetings of the New England Conference of Music Theorists (2018), the Music Theory Society of the Mid-Atlantic (2018), and the American Musicological Society (2019). I extend my gratitude to those who offered helpful comments and suggestions along the way. I would especially like to thank Nancy Yunhwa Rao, Henry Martin, and the anonymous reviewers at Jazz Perspectives for their generous feedback.
Disclosure Statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).
Correction Statement
This article has been republished with minor changes. These changes do not impact the academic content of the article.
Notes
1 This introduction also appears before Billy Eckstine's 1944 recording “Good Jelly Blues” (on which Gillespie played) and may have been intended as a parody of Sergei Rachmaninoff's famous Prelude Op. 3 no. 2; see Scott Deveaux, The Birth of Bebop: A Social and Musical History (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1999), 342. As Henry Martin notes, the two chords in the intro of “Good Jelly Blues” differ not by a half step but a whole step; see Henry Martin, Charlie Parker, Composer (New York: Oxford University Press, 2020).
2 The term “remembered innovations” is borrowed from José A. Bowen, “The History of Remembered Innovation: Tradition and its Role in the Relationship between Musical Works and their Performances,” The Journal of Musicology 11, no. 2 (1993): 164.
3 Adapted from The Real Book, Vol. 1, Sixth Edition (Milwaukee, WI: Hal Leonard, 2004), 22.
4 Gates identifies this impulse in jazz performance, writing that “Signifyin(g) in jazz performances […] is a mode of formal revision, it depends for its effects on troping, it is often characterized by pastiche, and, most crucially, it turns on repetition of formal structures and their differences.” Henry Louis Gates, Jr., The Signifying Monkey: A Theory of Afro-American Literary Criticism (New York: Oxford University Press, 1988), 52. Many subsequent studies have further applied Gates's theory to the ways in which jazz improvisers interpret jazz tunes and interact with their varied histories; see especially Ingrid Monson, Sayin’ Something: Jazz Improvisation and Interaction (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996); and Lawrence Zbikowski, Conceptualizing Music: Cognitive Structure, Theory, and Analysis (New York, NY: Oxford University Press, 2002), 223–42.
5 Gates, Signifying Monkey, 64.
6 It is important to note that Walser's application of Gates's theory serves as part of a broader polemic against analyses of jazz that only reinforce the aesthetic values and priorities of Western art music. Walser's argument is that analyses of jazz performances must consider the Black cultural aesthetics and values that guide jazz practitioners and audiences.
7 Robert Walser, “Out of Notes: Signification, Interpretation, and the Problem of Miles Davis,” Musical Quarterly 77, no. 2 (1993), 351.
8 Ibid., emphasis mine.
9 For an overview of some of the philosophical issues surrounding the ontological status of jazz tunes, see Brian Kane, “Jazz, Mediation, Ontology,” Contemporary Music Review 37, nos. 5–6 (2018): 507–28; Stefan Love, “The Jazz Solo as Virtuous Act,” The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 74, no. 1 (2016): 61–74; and Andrew Kania, “All Play and No Work: An Ontology of Jazz,” The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 69, no. 4 (2011): 391–403. Some of these ontological issues are addressed from a music-theoretical standpoint in Henry Martin, “Four Studies of Charlie Parker's Compositional Processes,” Music Theory Online 24, no. 2 (2018); Idem., “Prolongation and Its Limits: The Compositions of Wayne Shorter,” Music Theory Spectrum 40, no. 1 (2018): 1–22; Idem., Charlie Parker, Composer (New York: Oxford University Press, 2020); Chris Stover, “Time, Territorialization, and Improvisational Spaces,” Music Theory Online 23, no. 1 (2017); Steven Strunk, “Wayne Shorter's Yes and No: An Analysis,” Tijdschrift voor Muziektheorie 8, no. 1 (2003): 40–56; and Zbikowski, Conceptualizing Music, 201–42.
10 Georgina Born, “On Musical Mediation: Ontology, Technology, and Creativity,” Twentieth-Century Music 2, no. 1 (2005), 27.
11 It is this observation which leads Brian Kane to a network-based ontology of jazz standards; see Kane, “Jazz, Mediation, Ontology,” 524.
12 The mediation of jazz performances is discussed in Born, “On Musical Mediation” and Kane, “Jazz, Mediation, Ontology.” Both of these accounts are examined in more detail below. Mediation is discussed by Kane in even greater detail in Kane, Hearing Double: Jazz, Ontology, Auditory Culture (New York: Oxford University Press, Forthcoming).
13 See for example William Kinderman and Joseph E. Jones, Genetic Criticism and the Creative Process (Rochester: University of Rochester Press, 2009); William Kinderman, The Creative Process in Music from Mozart to Kurtág (Urbana, Chicago, and Springfield: University of Illinois Press, 2012); and Friedemann Sallis, Music Sketches (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2015).
14 Used in this way, the term referent originates in the writings of Jeff Pressing. For Pressing, a referent is “an underlying formal scheme or guiding image specific to a given piece, used by the improviser to facilitate the generation and editing of improvised behaviour on an intermediate time scale.” Pressing, “Improvisation: Methods and Models,” in Generative Processes in Music: The Psychology of Performance, Improvisation, and Composition, ed. John Sloboda (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1988), 153. Stefan Love uses the ecological concept of affordances as a lens through which to view the referent in Stefan Love, “An Ecological Description of Jazz Improvisation,” Psychomusicology: Music, Mind, and Brain 27, no. 1 (2017): 31–44. Pressing's notion of a referent is very similar to Bruno Nettl's use of the term “model” in Nettl, “Thoughts on Improvisation: A Comparative Approach,” The Musical Quarterly 60, no. 1 (1974): 1–19.
15 For an overview of the field, see Jed Deppman, Daniel Ferrer, and Michael Groden, Genetic Criticism: Texts and Avant-textes (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2004).
16 See Bellemin-Noël, Le texte et l'avant-texte: Les brouillons d'un poème de Milosz (Paris: Libr. Larousse, 1972). Although some scholars use the English translations “pretext” or “pre-text,” most translations retain the original French term to avoid confusion with other familiar definitions of pretext.
17 See Kinderman, “Genetic Criticism as an Integrating Focus for Musicology and Music Analysis,” Revue de musicologie 98, no. 1 (2012): 15–42.
18 Maureen Ramsden, “Jean Santeuil and the Notion of avant-texte: A Case for an Extension of the Term?” Dalhousie French Studies 58 (2002): 40.
19 Note that the term “tune” is used not in reference to a recording but to the underlying piece instantiated by a recorded performance. For more on the use of the term “tune” by jazz practitioners, see Paul Berliner, Thinking in Jazz: The Infinite Art of Improvisation (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994), Chapter 3.
20 This cyclical process is discussed by Georgina Born as the result of the commodification of recorded improvisations; see Born, “On Musical Mediation,” 27.
21 Jean Bellemin-Noël, “Psychoanalytic Reading and the Avant-texte,” in Genetic Criticism: Texts and Avant-textes, ed. Jed Deppman, Daniel Ferrer, and Michael Groden (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2004), 31.
22 I am grateful to an anonymous reviewer at Jazz Perspectives for suggesting this term.
23 This assumption of single authorship is based on an ontological model of nineteenth-century Western European art music; for an overview of this model, see Lydia Goehr, The Imaginary Museum of Musical Works: An Essay in the Philosophy of Music (New York: Oxford University Press, 1994).
24 Tracy McMullen, Haunthenticity: Musical Replay and the Fear of the Real (Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 2019), 98.
25 Nonetheless, throughout this article I will at times refer to ensemble performances as though they are the product of a single author. Besides reflecting discursive norms, this approach also acknowledges that the creative labor of a musical ensemble is not necessarily divisible into discrete parts. This observation is what leads Garry Hagberg to identify the jazz ensemble as a “plural subject”; see Hagberg, “The Ensemble as Plural Subject,” in Distributed Creativity: Collaboration and Improvisation in Contemporary Music, ed. Eric F. Clarke and Mark Doffman (New York: Oxford University Press, 2017).
26 Distributed creativity in musical (and especially improvisational) practice is the subject of Clarke and Doffman, eds., Distributed Creativity. While the distribution of creativity across time and space complicates this study, the premise of the avant-texte concept does not change: the work is still conceived as comprising a broad array of creative decisions evidenced by a variety of material manifestations (in literature, drafts and sketches; in jazz, composed and improvised utterances).
27 Ingrid Monson, Freedom Sounds: Civil Rights Calls Out to Jazz and Africa (New York: Oxford University Press, 2007), 29–30. For more on the relationship between race and musical economics, see especially Monson's Chapter 3, “Jim Crow, Economics, and the Politics of Musicianship.”
28 Gary Giddins, “All the Things He Was,” The Village Voice, November 28, 2000, https://www.villagevoice.com/2000/11/28/all-the-things-he-was/, accessed July 26, 2020.
29 Ibid.
30 In the course of his attempt to explicate an Afrological ontology of musical works and improvisation, Eric Lewis notes that copyright law assumes a certain metaphysics of music centered around musical elements that are notatable using Western notation, such as pitch, harmony, and rhythm. He argues that courts are generally unwilling to consider that alternative conceptions of musical works exist and are valid. In his discussion of the court case James Newton vs. Michael Diamond et al., Lewis describes “a classic case of how a dominant viewpoint on a contentious issue—here what are the pertinent parts of a musical work—is presented as if it is ‘natural’ and not in fact theory-driven, while competing opinions are seen as pandering to inappropriate theoretical speculation” (see Eric Lewis, Intents and Purposes: Philosophy and the Aesthetics of Improvisation (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2019), 42).
31 See Stephen Davies, Musical Works and Performances: A Philosophical Exploration (New York: Oxford University Press, 2001), 3.
32 Particularly influential examples of network based ontological models in music scholarship include the concepts of “family resemblance” (see Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigation (London: Basil Blackwell, 1953); Nicholas Cook, “At the Borders of Musical Identity: Schenker, Corelli and the Graces,” Music Analysis 18, no. 2 (1999): 179–233, and Bowen, “Remembered Innovation”), “rhizome” (see Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, trans. Brian Massumi (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987 [1980])), and actor-network theory (for an introduction, see Bruno Latour, Reassembling the Social: An Introduction to Actor-Network-Theory (New York: Oxford University Press, 2005); for a musicological discussion, see Benjamin Piekut, “Actor Networks in Music History: Clarifications and Critiques,” Twentieth-Century Music 11, no. 2 (2014): 191–215). Although these models all have much to offer, a fuller engagement of their potential in modeling networks of versions of jazz tunes is outside the scope of the present paper.
33 Kane, “Jazz, Mediation, Ontology,” 524, emphasis in original.
34 Kane's account of replication is drawn from the work of Whitney Davis. According to Davis, replication describes “the sequential production of similar material morphologies … that are substitutable for one another in specific social contexts of use.” Whitney Davis, Replications: Archaeology, Art History, Psychoanalysis (University Park, PA: Penn State University Press, 1996), 1. As Kane acknowledges, it also bears resemblance to Georgina Born's account of the social and technological mediation of works in jazz (see Born, “On Musical Mediation”).
35 Kane hints at a more nuanced account when he writes that “a standard is not (or not simply) a thin work but rather a thick musical network.” Kane, “Jazz, Mediation, Ontology,” 524, emphasis in original.
36 The terms “thick” and “thin” are developed in Stephen Davies, Musical Works and Performances. Davies uses these terms to describe the extent to which works are more or less determinate, respectively. Kane positions his ontological model against “realist” ontologies, as characterized by Davies's account.
37 See Bowen, “Remembered Innovation” and Cook, “Borders of Musical Identity.” Bowen's model, which Kane acknowledges as a precedent, is implicitly two-tiered, with a thick network of family resemblances giving rise to a thin “blurred concept” (Bowen, “Remembered Innovation,” 147). Bowen followed up on his earlier work with a near-exhaustive tracing of the recorded history of “Body and Soul” in “Who Plays the Tune in ‘Body and Soul’? A Performance History Using Recorded Sources,” Journal of the Society for American Music 9, no. 3 (2015): 259–92. Cook's model, which he reluctantly but provocatively calls a multitext, is developed to describe the relationship between various graces on Corelli's Op. 5, yet has many resonances with jazz practice.
38 Kane argues as much when he writes that “to follow a standard is to trace its network of replications.” Kane, “Jazz, Mediation, Ontology,” 519.
39 Pierre-Marc de Biasi, “Toward a Science of Literature: Manuscript Analysis and the Genesis of the Work,” in Genetic Criticism: Texts and Avant-textes, ed. Jed Deppman, Daniel Ferrer, and Michael Groden (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2004), 43.
40 Although de Biasi stipulates that the Manuscript must be “fixed, reproduced, and published” (de Biasi, “Toward a Science of Literature,” 43), the absolute fixity of a text seems unnecessary and contradicts the calls many scholars have made in favor of problematizing fixity. It may, instead, be better to think of the Manuscript as not necessarily reproduced but replicable (cf. Kane “Jazz, Mediation, Ontology”; Davis, Replications), not fixed but fluid (see John Bryant, The Fluid Text: A Theory of Revision and Editing for Book and Screen (Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press, 2002)).
41 Ibid.
42 See Born, “On Musical Mediation.”
43 Kania, “All Play and No Work,” 397.
44 Whether or not the stability of the final work can be disputed, there often stands a relatively fixed text in the position of the Manuscript.
45 Bowen writes that “while the lead sheet is an attempt to specify all of the characteristics of a jazz tune, it is really just another type of version, performance or utterance” (“Remembered Innovation,” 148).
46 Gérard Genette, The Architext: An Introduction, trans. Jane E. Lewin (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1992 [1979]).
47 See Kane, “Jazz, Mediation, Ontology,” 522. For Kane, contrafacts are one of four possible categories—identity, revision, contrafact, individuation—of ontological relationships obtained through varying combinations of replication and nomination.
48 Gérard Genette, Paratexts: Thresholds of Interpretation (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1997 [1987]).
49 For more on fakebooks and their histories, especially the notorious underground publication known as the Real Book, see Barry Kernfeld, The Story of Fakebooks: Bootlegging Songs to Musicians (Lanham, MD: Scarecrow Press, 2006).
50 Philip Gossett, “Afterword,” in Genetic Criticism and the Creative Process, ed. William Kinderman and Joseph E. Jones (Rochester: University of Rochester Press, 2009), 218.
51 Deppman, et al., Genetic Criticism, 8.
52 Thomas Clifton, Music as Heard: A Study in Applied Phenomenology (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1983), 99, emphasis added.
53 The use of consistent metrics for determining popularity and influence poses a tough, though not insurmountable, problem. While we might use hard data like record sales, radio and streaming service plays or views, and book sales, these versions have all become known through different means of access. In addition, many members of the jazz community would likely have trouble identifying the circumstances through which they became exposed to each version. If all of this makes proving popularity difficult, proving influence is even more challenging. I argue, however, that influence, rather than popularity, is not only the more important of these questions, but also the more tangible for the purposes of the present project, in that influence may be suggested by tracing similarities between the idiosyncrasies of particular versions.
54 It should be noted that the referents of audience members are of some consequence in this proliferation, for improvisers must often navigate the constraints set up by a normative understanding of the tune. In other words, if a performance should fail to adequately align with the audience's referents of the tune, the improvisation may be considered at best not to be a proper performance of the tune, and at worst aesthetically unsatisfactory. For example, Eric Lewis notes that, when teaching John Coltrane's later performances of “My Favorite Things,” his students would frequently insist that the improvisations simply were simply not performances of the Rodgers and Hart composition; see Lewis, Intents and Purposes, viii, 105–28. Although outside the scope of the present study, future research could consider of how audiences construct their own avant-textes and then use the resulting referents to make sense of and judge new performances.
55 A number of published studies that examine the relationships between versions of a tune may also serve implicitly as avant-texte tracings. These include Bowen's “Remembered Innovation,” which traces the history of Thelonious Monk's “Round Midnight”; Garth Alper, “‘What is This Thing Called Love?’ as Conceptualized by Nine Jazz Pianists,” Jazz Perspectives 5, no. 2 (2011): 115–34., which uses “What is This Thing Called Love?” as a lens through which to view styles of pianism; Garrett Michaelsen “Analyzing Musical Interaction in Jazz Improvisations of the 1960s,” PhD diss., Indiana University, 2013, which traces Miles Davis's history with “My Funny Valentine”; John Paul Meyers, “Standards and Signification between Jazz and Fusion: Miles Davis and ‘I Fall in Love Too Easily,’ 1963–1970,” Jazz Perspectives 9, no. 2 (2015): 113–36, which considers stylistic changes in Miles Davis's performances of “I Fall in Love Too Easily;” and Bowen, “Who Plays the Tune?” and Kane, “Jazz, Mediation, Ontology,” both of which examine “Body and Soul.” Bowen's study provides an especially detailed account and is probably the closest any extant study has come to a complete genetic-critical account of a jazz tune. By reading these studies as tracings of avant-textes, we may glean from them a sense of how each version contributes to the tune's identity.
56 Nate Chinen, Playing Changes: Jazz for the New Century (New York: Penguin Random House LLC, 2018), 32.
57 See Kane, “Jazz, Mediation, Ontology,” 523.
58 For more on the concept of metric entrainment, see Justin London, Hearing in Time: Psychological Aspects of Musical Meter (New York: Oxford University Press, 2004).
59 This way of thinking about features resonates with Kane's theory that, in jazz, work-determinative properties may be considered “sufficient but not necessary” for establishing work identity; see Kane, “Jazz, Mediation, Ontology,” 507.
60 An internet search for performances of “All the Things You Are” in 7/8 or 7/4 yields dozens of amateur recordings, some explicitly acknowledging the influence of Mehldau.
61 In a blindfold test for DownBeat conducted by Dan Ouellette, Clayton remarked, “I don't know a single modern pianist who hasn't taken something from Brad. I told him that I should be arrested for all the stuff I've stolen from him.” Ouellette, "Blindfold Test," DownBeat Magazine, January 2013, 106.
62 Despite this seemingly clear line of influence, however, it is worth noting that such procedures are common in Clayton's music, and especially his interpretations of standard tunes. For example, his recording of the standard “If I Were A Bell” (from the same album) groups sixteen beats into 3+3+10 and reharmonizes the tune's typical Broadway harmonies using gestures drawn from blues and gospel music.
63 This includes what is often called a knowledge base. For an in-depth discussion of this aspect of the improvisational process, see Aaron Berkowitz, The Improvising Mind: Cognition and Creativity in the Musical Moment (New York: Oxford University Press, 2010), Chapter 3.
64 Indeed, the authors argue that their transcriptions (and the comparisons that emerge between them) constitute a “rich plural analysis.” René Rusch, Keith Salley, and Chris Stover, “Capturing the Ineffable: Three Transcriptions of a Jazz Solo by Sonny Rollins,” Music Theory Online 22, no. 3 (2016): 5.8.
65 Ibid., 2.1.
66 Ibid., 3.1.
67 Ibid., 2.1.
68 Ibid., 4.6. See Stover's Figure 9, which is a transcription of mm. 4A2.3–6 of Rollins's solo, where Rollins suddenly “recalibrates” and clearly outlines the changes with a phrasing more typical of his usual style.
69 Norman Meehan, “After the Melody: Paul Bley and Jazz Piano After Ornette Coleman,” Annual Review of Jazz Studies 12 (2002): 92.
70 Adapted from Meehan, “After the Melody,” 109-10. Meehan's published transcription makes use of a one-flat key signature, though it is unclear why since the performance does not at any point tonicize F major or D minor.
71 The terms poiesis and esthesis are borrowed from Jean-Jacques Nattiez, who in turn adopted them from semiologist Jean Molino; see Jean-Jacques Nattiez, Music and Discourse: Toward a Semiology of Music, trans. Carolyn Abbate (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1990). As Robert Hodson argues, the fact that improvisers are also listeners has important ramifications for our understanding of the creative process in jazz, because the poietic and esthesic become enjoined in a feedback loop. See Robert Hodson, Interaction, Improvisation, and Interplay in Jazz (New York: Routledge, 2007), 15–6.
72 Throughout this article, I have emphasized the differences that emerge between versions of a tune, rather than the similarities that help establish tune identity. While it may be tempting to cast the jazz tune as a radically unstable alternative to the fixed composition, it is worth noting that something like an “essential” version can emerge in certain cases where sets of defaults are especially widely agreed upon. I suspect that many, if not most, jazz musicians, listeners, and critics would be able to identify renditions of “All the Things You Are” that are more or less “typical,” and that versions that are especially unusual (e.g. Kris Davis's recording) would be considered interesting outliers, and as such unlikely to alter the way improvisers think about the tune. Indeed, Henry Martin notes that “without a certain fixity, a certain ‘thingness’ in our conception of the original piece, […] discussions of ‘revision’ or ‘borrowing’ would be meaningless.” (Martin, “Four Studies,” 5.15). And although no clear essential version of “All the Things You Are” exists, some jazz tunes are closely identified with recordings (and, less frequently, lead sheets) that may be considered to be what Martin calls “authoritative,” and therefore hold more weight ontologically. This is especially so for tunes both composed and recorded by jazz improvisers, such as Charlie Parker's “Ornithology,” John Coltrane's “Giant Steps,” Horace Silver's “Song for My Father,” Wayne Shorter's “Juju,” and so on. Martin lists desiderata for authoritative recordings of jazz tunes, arguing that in such cases where one or more of these desiderata are satisfied, a lead sheet representing the harmonic, melodic, and formal features of the authoritative recording may be considered a more or less definitive (albeit ontologically thin) version of the tune that will hold far more weight than other versions
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Sean R. Smither
Sean R. Smither is Instructor of Jazz Theory at the Juilliard School and Part-Time Lecturer in Music Theory at Rutgers University. He received his PhD in music theory from Rutgers University and holds a degree in jazz drumming from the New School for Jazz and Contemporary Music. His research focuses on the analysis of jazz standards, improvisation, and group interaction and has been published in Music Theory Online and Theory and Practice.