Bebop and Deconstruction: The Philosophy of the Harmonic Limit
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.
2. Chords and Scales.
To begin, a favorite phrase of Thelonious Monk's, usually used for introductions and endings:
This figure is easily described using the standard framework of chord-scale relationships: it's a whole tone scale played over a dominant seventh chord, but this description says little about why this riff sounds interesting.
The right hand line can be considered in two ways, horizontally and vertically. Horizontally, the relationship of the melody notes to the underlying harmony is: 9, 3, b5, #5, 7, 1, repeating in higher octaves. This line navigates a limit of the chord, cycling from notes which clearly belong to the material expected to be played (1, 3, 7, 9) and those more dissonant (the altered fifths). Since the whole tone scale is symmetrical, it frustrates cadential expectations. This pattern repeats the same ambiguous movement throughout.
More interesting is the vertical character of the line, it can be read as arpeggiating a Faug9#11 chord. This exotic extension of the marked F7 is an example of the variety of chord extensions and substitutions which bebop brought to jazz. Bebop pianists began adding upper intervals to chords, and often chromatically altering them for coloristic or melodic purposes. Playing a chord exactly as written would strike a bebop pianist as hopelessly corny. The more bizarre the substitutions and extensions employed, the hipper the player is.
Here is a C7 chord, and two ways of interpreting it.
Neither of these voicings include the natural eleventh. When it is used, the major third is usually omitted, and chords are usually voiced mostly in fourths. Here are some typical guitar chords with elevenths.
Looking at these last two examples, it becomes clear that jazz theory can give no authoritative answer as to what notes one can and cannot play over a given chord. While prescriptive chord/scale relationships are a useful tool for teaching beginners, bebop performance practice deconstructs them. While the C mixolydian scale is recommended for use over the C7 chord, these extensions and alterations make it possible for improvisers to justify any combination of notes. For example, the top three notes of the C7b9#11 chord, plus the E which is the third of the C triad, spell a Gb7, and other combinations of notes from this chord imply other tonalities: E diminished, C augmented, etc. Each of these can be used as a substitution by the soloist and accompanists. Combining the notes of the scales usually used over the Gb7 and C7 chords yields the entire chromatic scale. Without delving too deeply into bebop harmony, the system has already deconstructed itself. It has already provided a way to explain the use of any note over any chord by a soloist and the use of any combination of notes to express any chord by an accompanist.
If this is true, then what prevents a player from performing at random? Without a prescriptive system, how is chaos avoided? What defines a song if the form of the song does not dictate its performance?
3. Three Alto Saxophonists
To begin to show how signification at the limit of harmony differs from chaos, I have chosen examples from improvised solos by three alto saxophonists: Charlie Parker, Eric Dolphy, and Anthony Braxton. Each of these players navigates the boundary between inside and outside, between what the laws of Western harmony and the traditions of African-American music allow and something other.
My first example comes from Charlie Parker's recording of "Billie's Bounce" from his first recording session under his own name, in 1945. As previously mentioned, Parker was the leading figure in defining the bebop style. This figure is one which reoccurs frequently in his playing as a way of navigating the ubiquitous ii-V-I progression.
While contemporary improvisation primers recommend the G Dorian and C Mixolydian scales (the same notes: C D E F G A Bb, but starting on G for the G Dorian scale) over a ii-V-I progression in F, Parker uses nearly all the notes of the chromatic scale in this phrase. However, he keeps very close to the basic chord changes throughout. Each bar can be seen as an ornamented arpeggio of the basic chord. In the first measure, the chromatic notes clearly function to lead up to very consonant, "inside," notes. The F# is an ornament to the G Bb D F arpeggio, which explicitly spells the basic Gm7 chord, and then Bird descends from the F through E and D, each of which is led into chromatically from a whole step below. In bar two, all the notes except the Db are from the C Mixolydian, and the Db is the flat ninth, a common extension which immediately settles down to the tonic C.
While Parker's rhythmic phrasing is very creative and his technical proficiency unprecedented, his harmonic practice in this particular example is not much more complex than that of, say, Coleman Hawkins. Parker uses extended harmonies here only to ornament lines which stay clearly within conventional scale to chord relationships.
In the late 1950s, after Parker's innovations had become formulae, players such as Sonny Rollins, John Coltrane, Booker Little, Freddie Hubbard, and others began further explorations. Parker and his followers had moved the limit of harmonic sense, had shifted the ground, so that the next generation of players could take the harmonic deconstructions of Parker et al. as the objects of their new critiques. Rather than playing off of the song, they could play off the expectations listeners accustomed to Parker-style jazz brought to a performance.
For example, the Eric Dolphy phrase below (recorded in 1960) clearly follows a Parker-like rhythm for the first three bars, with a fundamentally different harmonic strategy. 
In bar 2, Dolphy superimposes a C minor seventh arpeggio over the written B7. This partially functions as a substitution for the B7, since the notes of the C minor triad: C, Eb, G, are the flat ninth, third, and augmented fifth of the B7, all acceptable extensions. Dolphy is working in an alternate space from the rest of the band here, developing a tangent from the original piece by taking a fairly distant relation of the written harmony as his center. This move becomes questionable when he adds the Bb, the seventh of the C minor seventh, at the end of bar two and the start of bar three. Playing the Bb (or A#), the major seventh in the key of B against the B7 chord, which functionally must contain the dominant seventh A, is not acceptable, so Dolphy concludes bar three with a Parker-like phrase that clearly relates to the B7 tonality. He resolves his earlier use of the augmented fifth G by bringing it up through more consonant intervals: the sixth, G#, and the seventh, A, then using the fifth and sixth to begin the long glissando of bars four and five, a figure whose function is more gestural and timbral than harmonic.
In this brief excerpt, Dolphy asks a question about harmony, "Can I play a Cm7 over a B7?" and answers it, "Yes, but only in certain ways." This is clearly a form of limit-work. Rather than obeying a harmonic system, Dolphy is testing the boundaries of that system. The pleasure of his playing here comes from its pushing against the boundary of harmonic sense.
Anthony Braxton represents a still later generation of improvisers, one influenced by Parker and Dolphy. My final excerpt is from his solo on a performance of the standard "(There is) No Greater Love" with the avant-garde collective Circle in 1972. While his rhythms are somewhat Parker-like and his use of wide intervals reminiscent of Dolphy, his harmonic thinking follows a different path.
It is difficult to find any logic to Braxton's note choices from a scalar or chordal viewpoint. For each note that relates to the underlying harmony in a conventional way there are several that have no business being there at all.
There are two complimentary ways to explain what Braxton is doing in this passage. First, he may be selecting notes from a coloristic viewpoint, experimenting with the sound of different flavors of "wrong" notes, or he may be thinking in terms of the intervallic relations within his improvised line and not of the supporting harmony at all. Second, and more significantly given the thesis of this paper, Circle's performance of "(There is) No Greater Love" is an extension of the "silent theme" tradition in jazz.
In the "silent theme" tradition, musicians improvise on the harmonic structure of a song whose melody is never played (often to avoid paying royalties to the original composer). What Circle does to "No Greater Love" is an extension of this technique resulting from the deconstruction of harmony begun by bebop (and most clearly defined by the Miles Davis Quintet of the mid to late 1960s), what might be called the "silent form" technique.
In Circle's performance, none of the players may be directly expressing the written form of the tune, instead playing altered and substitute chords and rhythmic figures which contradict the 4/4 tempo and thirty-two bar structure. However, the band is still thinking of "No Greater Love" and shaping their performance in response to it. Their performance is a critical reading of the text which pushes the boundaries of the text which functions as the absent center. This clearly evokes the practices of deconstructive criticism.
4. Text and Tradition
However, as I stated in my introduction, it is Henry Louis Gates's post-structuralist interpretation of the African-American rhetorical practice of signifyin(g), and not deconstruction per se which has gained favor with jazz critics. While deconstruction is somewhat open to charges of ignoring context and history (a debate I will not engage here), signifyin(g) is directly tied to those things. My readings of musical excerpts above have concentrated on how jazz soloing, at its best, is a form of deconstructive analysis of harmony, while jazz criticism centered around the idea of signifyin(g), particularly that of Walser and Monson, has put as much emphasis on jazz soloists' critiques of lyrics and earlier performances. If one plays "My Funny Valentine," that performance will likely have a relation to Miles Davis's classic recordings of the song, to the lyrics (even if they are not sung), and to the structure of the piece.
What distinguishes signifyin(g) from the purely formal way I have been using deconstruction is the centrality of community. For a soloist to signify in Gates's sense requires an engagement with codes with which the audience is familiar. Even in an avant-garde performance such as that of Circle, there is a commitment to a tradition of jazz and to the group as a community. It is this commitment alone which keeps their performance of "No Greater Love" from devolving into chaos.
In conclusion, it is this potential of jazz to signify, to perform deconstructive critique, which is missing from much contemporary jazz pedagogy. Improvisation becomes a merely formal exercise is it is conceived as happening within borders instead of on them.
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