Rethinking Interaction in Jazz Improvisation

Abstract

In recent years, the notion that “good jazz improvisation is sociable and interactive just like a conversation” (Monson 1996, 84) has become near-conventional wisdom in jazz scholarship. This paper revisits this assumption and considers some cases in which certain sorts of interactions may not always be present or desirable in jazz performance. Three types of improvised interaction are defined: (1) “microinteraction,” which occurs at a very small scale (e.g. participatory discrepancies) and is not specific to jazz; (2) “macrointeraction,” which concerns general levels of musical intensity; and (3) “motivic interaction”—players exchanging identifiable motivic figures—which is a chief concern of today’s jazz researchers. Further, motivic interaction can be either dialogic, when two or more musicians interact with one another, or monologic, when one player pursues a given musical strategy and others respond but the first player does not reciprocate (as in “call and response”). The paper concludes by briefly considering some of the reasons for, and implications of, the emergence of interaction-oriented jazz scholarship during the late twentieth century.