I think about Smalls Jazz Club frequently, often in the same manner in which I did in 2017. I initially wrote this post for an old attempt at Think Rot’s “thing” (RIP, DANGER ZONE PROJECT). I still believe in the body as jazz. And what better way to get this site in gear than revisiting something in which I believe?
Thoughts after seeing a show at Smalls Jazz Club in Greenwich Village, NYC.
The empty, worn chair of the ticket taker—leather cracked—the resonating metal and the sound of wine glasses behind the bar. A brassy trumpet throwing notes into the ceiling, hanging by their stems. The cool breeze collecting by your ankles, a stranger’s voice asking for directions outside. “I don’t think I can accommodate all the people in this hallway,” the doorman says. Breath of life flow over the reed of your saxophone. There it is—soul. A small, basement jazz club in Greenwich Village, NYC: a belly filled to the brim with people in baseball caps, fur-lined, over-sized winter jackets; backpacks and thick vertical striped pants; more spectacles than an optical store. There I am, the late-comer, sitting by the stairway, hearing the music mix with the traffic outside.
The couple next to me sit on the shallow bar top, their colorful ponchos and cowboy boots mismatched to the buttery smell of their wine. Shouldn’t there be smoke caressing the lights?
Tonight’s first set is a free jazz/post-bop group called Marquis Hill Blacktet, and I can’t see a thing of the stage.
It’s because there’s this guy dancing in front of me with his eyes closed in the little space he has to himself. He isn’t swing jazz dancing, he has no partner, doesn’t seem to be moving to impress—usually I’d be annoyed that someone is blocking my view, but he’s grooving. I don’t want to interrupt that. While everyone else is sitting down or leaning against a wall, hypnotically bobbing their heads—as experienced so many times in this type of setting—his entire body is engaged in the music. Moving to the brass solos, the vibraphone solos, the bass solos, the drum solos—not just the steady beat, but to the notes; even when the arrangement grows its fingers and it feels like every musician is on different planets, he’s still dancing. He only stops to applaud between numbers.
Oh, oh, oh, our grooving man.
He stands on two feet, facing the bar. His head is tilted down, his cap is covering his eyes. He does not see the band, he feels the band; he digests the music and metabolizes the noise. First stop, he is Against the Methods of Western Spectatorship: Undoing the Hierarchy of the Senses.
Sometimes his feet are together, sometimes his feet are apart, it all depends on where he wants to go. His movements are not large, but his arms, they do not stay by his sides. His head, it does not stay in one place. His shoulders, they move back and forth. His chest, it pushes forward and back, side to side. He rocks, rocks, rocks on his two legs and when the vibraphone rings he lifts his chin and purses his lips and he stretches his palms. The beat goes on. The rim-click snaps his shoulders forward, his head back down, and as Marquis plays the trumpet out of the side of his mouth, our dancer finds the bass line in his legs.
Second stop, No One Tells Him What To Do, He Decides What to Follow. His movements are improvised, he is not mechanized. He is the master of his body and he can do what he will with it. He can change its mood, its tempo—he can have his hand speak with his hip, or his hip speak with his foot, or his foot speak with his chin. The movement he creates belongs to him as he internalizes the improvisations of the moods blanketing the club.
So this is jazz: an experience of sound and people; of synchronizing improvisations between body and sound. The grooving man, he moved, moved, moved me.
As I collect my belongings and walk back up the stairs at the end of the set I see the grooving man has taken the seat I used to occupy. My ears readjust to ambient noise decibels, my stomach grumbles. Maybe another slice of pizza… But as I process the music I just listened to, my mind switches over to the grooving man once more. He has left me with a lingering question: how is the body jazz?
Improvise (im-pruh-vize) verb, from the Latin improvisus, ‘unforeseen.’ According to Merriam-Webster it means “to compose, recite, play, or sing extemporaneously.” Can also mean ‘musical conversation.’
Improvisation is not one of those things that can be brushed off as “easy.” There is such a thing as being good at it. It is a conversation. In jazz, improvisation is taught just as we learn to speak to one another. However, speaking from an outsider’s point of view, this conversation is not necessarily meant to maintain the structure of something, but to deviate away from the expected. Jazz musicians are trained in their education—whether through school, experience and encounters, or as an autodidact—to abstract the concrete; to generate possibilities, and to be quilters of music. Like any good conversationalist, the improviser reads the moods of others and the atmosphere; it is not just theory being practiced, but a deep understanding of feeling. In improvisation, a musician may hear what to respond to, but it is the gut that determines the story the notes will tell.
As Richard Schechner writes of Western theatre, it is a place for and of seeing (27). But there are other traditions, Schechner continues, that do not rely on the eyes. “The performance of the snout-to-belly-to-bowel is an ongoing interlinked muscular, cellular, and neurological process of testing-tasting, separating nourishment from waste, distributing nourishment throughout the body, and eliminating waste” (27). In this type of performance and spectatorship, there is a constant circulation of something being offered and extended to the audience and received back to the performer. Let’s think of our grooving man in conversation with the musicians, taking in what the musicians put out; the musician taking in what he creates in movement. Both moved by improvisation — the gut response to the emotional atmosphere of the club.
It would seem as though the body would naturally be in-tune to its own improvisation, to this gut process, but it increasingly gets harder to go by one’s gut, to “loosen up,” the more we grow up into the Western world of work and industry. Now I have a second question: how can the body as jazz resist the mechanizations of mass production and absolutes?
In order to see how this relates to our dancer, I’d like to talk about the history of a particular aspect of jazz’s pal, the blues.
Coined by the Father of the Blues, W.C. Handy—composer of “Memphis Blues”—the “blues note” is an expressive note that is typically written at a different pitch than what is standard within a scale. In the early 1900s, black dialect specialists—white men who were brought in to record folk blues at the height of the initial “blues craze”—through their performance of how they perceived the blues, ultimately locked in these blues notes with an associative linguistics that profiled blackness in music and generated a cultural guidebook to playing the blues based on blacksound (as opposed to blackface). This means imitating anything that is considered by the Linguistic Society of America as African American English.
This form of minstrelsy carried into the 1960s blues revival, as the basis of Handy’s blues continued to turn from one of expressive suggestion, to one of white, sonic imitations of minstrel understandings of the blues. What fills the sonic space of the blues, then, when a white performer deliberately and grossly imitates dialect in a blues cover, are assumed colonized absolutes and ways of being. The emphasis is so much on the imitation of the language that the song loses its emotional expressivity and is alienated from a long origin story—from actual feeling bodies. It becomes cultural appropriation as opposed to cultural appreciation and intersection.
The initial blues craze meant mass distribution of the form, so when producers hired dialect specialists, it was not a matter of capturing the sonic “aura” in the recording process—especially in low-fi—but of producing and reproducing and selling. This production required that man become mechanized, an absolute product while creating absolute products.
If Handy’s blues note is what could potentially reconnect the worker to the product–genre to origin–so to speak, then experimenting with this note in improvisation is one way to keep listeners and performers from assuming what is and rather provides a space to grasp what is possible.
Jazz inherently offers the space for fostering this expressive, undefinable possibility. There is particular democratic agency in jazz, where a good band leader will allow each musician to have their moment of possibility, their conversation. The musician is able to fill the sonic space with his own notes, his own blues notes—the suggestion of the human as brassy, bold, soft, deep, frantic, unexpected; the emotional language of the moment, capturing himself and the vibe of the audience.
These notes move forward, always a future, always a spark jumping to the next conductor, never looking back, the pattern repeated but with different air. As Crystal Pite, a choreographer and performer, said of dance, it “creates and destroys itself.” So we see the connection between jazz and dance—the improvisation of spirit—the possibilities which bodies are offered when allowed to follow their gut, and the resistance to oppressive, defined ways of being.
Introducing the blues note into our bodies, a little improvisation—becoming jazz—could help us from becoming the absolute product—not necessarily resisting and redefining surface encounters with absolutes, but resisting the internalization of those surface encounters by engaging the body in this simultaneous self-destruction/reconstruction/futuristic (re)thinking.
My third question: how do we become jazz? Perhaps there’s something in not always going by the Western hierarchy of senses we are taught. Remember, the assumption is that our groover was reacting using gut-improvisation–his body was feeling and following his gut. Now let’s think about this in our everyday life. We don’t always go by what we see. Sometimes we have to improvise or go with our gut. Yet, when the gut is right, we still tend to go right back to what we see, because “seeing is believing,” right?
Having the body as jazz means relying on the improvisation of our actions, especially when the eyes and ears take in questionable images. It is reacting to situations in a way that does not always accept what it is given. It is not letting ourselves become locked down to one way of being. It is having control enough over our movements and (re)actions that we are not what they expect us to be. In free jazz, “nothing is written and everything can be changed.” Why only limit this to what we produce? Why not see ourselves as this as well?
Why not be jazz?
Jazz, as a concept, is a way to resist the normalization of this administration; don’t always trust what you see or hear—improvise.
Palmer, Robert. Deep Blues. New York: Viking, 1981. Print.
Schechner, Richard. “Rasaesthetics.” TDR 45.3 (2001): 27-50.
“What Is Jazz?” Jazz in America. Thelonius Monk Institute of Jazz, n.d. Web. 24 Feb. 2017.
Special thanks to music master Mikhail Pivovarov.
Written by Contributor 1 & 2. Amelia Ellis. 2017.
