Learning Jazz Language by Aural Imitation: A Usage-Based Communicative Jazz Theory (Part 1)

1. Bjørn Alterhaug, “Improvisation on a Triple Theme: Creativity, Jazz Improvisation and Communication,” Studia Musicologica Norwegia 30, no. 2 (2004): 97–118; Paul Franklin Berliner, Thinking in Jazz (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994); Andy Hamilton, Lee Konitz: Conversations on the Improviser’s Art (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2007); Ingrid Monson, Saying Something: Jazz Improvisation and Interaction (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996); Ben Ratliff, The Jazz Ear: Conversations over Music (New York: Times Books, 2008); David Schroeder, From the Minds of Jazz Musicians: Conversations with the Creative and Inspired (New York: Routledge, 2018); Eitan Y. Wilf, School for Cool: The Academic Jazz Program and the Paradox of Institutionalized Creativity (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2014); George Lipsitz, “Improvised Listening: Opening Statements Listening to the Lambs,” in The Improvisation Studies Reader: Spontaneous Acts, ed. Ajay Heble and Rebecca Caines (New York: Routledge, 2014), 27–34.

2. Berliner, Thinking in Jazz, 92.

3. Simha Arom, African Polyphony and Polyrhythm: Musical Structure and Methodology (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991); Hal Galper, “The Oral Tradition,” Hal Galper, http://www.halgalper.com/articles/the-oral-tradition/2012/, accessed May 21, 2021; Kenneth E. Prouty, “Orality, Literacy, and Mediating Musical Experience: Rethinking Oral Tradition in the Learning of Jazz Improvisation,” Popular Music and Society 29 (2006): 317–34, https://doi.org/10.1080/03007760600670372, accessed May 21, 2021; Ben Sidran, Black Talk: How the Music of Black America Created a Radical Alternative to the Values of Western Literary Tradition (New York: Payback Press, 1981); LeRoi Jones, Blues People: Negro Music in White America (New York: Harper Perennial, 2002).

4. Ross Russell, Bird Lives! The High Life and Hard Times of Charlie (Yardbird) Parker (Boston: Da Capo Press, 1996); Paul Maher and Michael K. Dorr, eds., Miles on Miles: Interviews and Encounters with Miles Davis (Chicago: Lawrence Hill Books, 2009); Chris DeVito, ed., Coltrane on Coltrane: The John Coltrane Interviews (Chicago: Chicago Review Press, 2010); Eunmi Shim, Lennie Tristano: His Life in Music (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2007).

5. Alfred Bennet Spellman, Four Jazz Lives (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2004); Schroeder, From the Minds of Jazz Musicians; Jan Garbarek, “The Garbarek Sound,” Irish Times, June 30, 2001, https://www.irishtimes.com/news/the-garbarek-sound-1.315743, accessed May 21, 2021.

6. Hal Galper, “Able Bodied—An Interview with Hal Galper,” JazzImprov Magazine 3, no. 3 (2001), Hal Galper, https://www.halgalper.com/interviews-2/jazzimprov-magazine-interview/, accessed May 21, 2021.

7. Berliner, Thinking in Jazz, 96.

8. Wilf, School for Cool.

9. Elin Angelo, “Music Education as a Dialogue between the Outer and the Inner: A Jazz Pedagogue’s Philosophy of Music Education,” in Philosophy of Music Education Challenged: Heideggerian Inspirations, ed. Øyvind Varkøy and Frederik Pio (New York: Springer, 2015), 169–84.

10. Roland Baggenaes, Jazz Greats Speak: Interviews with Master Musicians (Lanham, MD: Scarecrow Press, 2008); Chris Clarke, “An Oral History of Jazz in Britain,” Oral History 18, no. 1 (1990): 66–72; Barry Velleman, “Speaking of Jazz: Jazz Improvisation through Linguistic Methods,” Music Educators Journal 65, no. 2 (1978): 28–31; Wayne D. Bowman, “Doctoral Research in Jazz Improvisation Pedagogy: An Overview,” Bulletin of the Council for Research in Music Education/Research in Jazz Education 96 (1988): 47–76; Guro Gravem Johansen, “Learning from Musicians Better Than Me: The Practice of Copying from Recordings in Jazz Students’ Instrumental Practise,” in Aural Perspectives: On Musical Learning and Practice in Higher Music Education, ed. Inger Elise Reitan (Oslo: Norwegian Academy of Music, 2013), 75–96.

11. Berliner, Thinking in Jazz. Also reflected in Monson, Saying Something; Ratliff, The Jazz Ear; Schroeder, From the Minds of Jazz Musicians; Wilf, School for Cool.

12. Berliner, Thinking in Jazz, 95.

13. Mellonee V. Burnim and Portia K. Maultsby, eds., African American Music: An Introduction (New York: Routledge, 2014); Monson, Saying Something; Shane White and Graham White, The Sounds of Slavery: Discovering African American History through Songs, Sermons, and Speech, Volume 1 (Boston: Beacon Press, 2005).

14. Stephen Malloch and Colwyn Trevarthen, “Musicality: Communicating the Vitality and Interests of Life,” in Communicative Musicality: Exploring the Basis of Human Companionship, ed. Stephen Malloch and Colwyn Trevarthen (New York: Oxford University Press, 2009), 1–11; Stephen Malloch, “Mother and Infants and Communicative Musicality,” Musicae Scientificae Musicae Scientificae 3, no. 1 (1999–2000), 29–57; Colwyn Trevarthen and Stephen Malloch, “The Dance of Wellbeing: Defining the Musical Therapeutic Effect,” Nordisk Tidsskrift for Musikkterapi 9, no. 2 (2000): 3–17; Colwyn Trevarthen, “The Musical Art of Infant Conversation: Narrating in the Time of Sympathetic Experience, without Rational Interpretation, before Words,” Musicae Scientiae 12, no. 2 suppl. (2008): 15–46.

15. Terrence William Deacon, The Symbolic Species: The Co-Evolution of Language and Brain (London: Norton, 1997); Steven Mithen, The Singing Neanderthals: The Origins of Music, Language, Mind and Body (London: Orion Books, 2011); Oliver Sacks, Musicophilia: Tales of Music and the Brain (New York: Pan Macmillan, 2018); Fred Cummins, “The Territory between Speech and Song: A Joint Speech Perspective,” Music Perception 37, no. 4 (2020): 347–58, https://doi.org/10.1525/mp.2020.37.4.347, accessed May 21, 2021; Jon Roar Bjorkvold, The Muse Within: Creativity and Communication, Song and Play from Childhood through Maturity (New York: HarperCollins, 1992).

16. Colwyn Trevarthen, “Musicality and the Intrinsic Motive Pulse: Evidence from Human Psychobiology and Infant Communication,” Musicae Scientiae 3, no. 1 suppl. (1999): 155–215, 158.

17. Trevarthen, “Musicality and the Intrinsic Motive Pulse,” 157.

18. Malloch and Trevarthen, “Musicality,” 4.

19. Colwyn Trevarthen, “The Self Born in Intersubjectivity: The Psychology of an Infant Communicating,” in The Perceived Self: Ecological and Interpersonal Sources of Self-Knowledge, ed. Ulric Neisser (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), 121–73, 121.

20. Berliner, Thinking in Jazz, 97.

21. See Roger Scruton, The Aesthetics of Music (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1997).

22. The investigated aspects are important enough, but the aural-communicative dimension distinguished for jazz-musicianship is left more or less unvisited. See, for instance, Richard Ashley, “Musical Improvisation,” in Oxford Handbook of Music Psychology, ed. Susan Hallam, Ian Cross, and Michael Thaut (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), 413–20; David Borgo, Sync and Swarm; Improvising Music in a Complex Age (New York: Continuum, 2005); Peter Culicover, “Linguistics, Cognitive Science, and All That Jazz,” The Linguistic Review 22, nos. 2–4 (2005): 227–48, https://doi.org/10.1515/tlir.2005.22.2-4.227, accessed May 21, 2021; Bill Dobbins, “Jazz and Academia: Street Music in the Ivory Tower,” Bulletin of the Council for Research in Music Education 96 (Spring 1988): 30–41; Frederick Seddon and Michele Biasutti, “A Comparison of Modes of Communication between Members of a String Quartet and a Jazz Sextet,” Psychology of Music 37, no. 4 (2009): 395–415, https://doi.org/10.1177/0305735608100375, accessed May 21, 2021; Steve Torrance and Frank Schuman, “The Spur of the Moment: What Jazz Improvisation Tells Cognitive Science,” AI & Society 34, no. 2 (2019): 251–68, https://doi.org/10.1007/s00146-018-0838-4, accessed May 21, 2021; Benjamin Givan, “Rethinking Interaction in Jazz Improvisation,” Music Theory Online 22, no. 3 (2016): 1–24; Jeff Pressing, “Improvisation: Methods and Models,” in Generative Processes in Music: The Psychology of Performance, Improvisation, and Composition, ed. John Sloboda (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1988), 129–78; Philip N. Johnson-Laird, “How Jazz Musicians Improvise,” Music Perception 19, no. 3 (2002): 425–42; Alfred Pike, “A Phenomenology of Jazz,” Journal of Jazz Studies 50 (1974): 88–94; Gary Potter, “Analyzing Improvised Jazz,” College Music Symposium 30, no. 1 (1990): 64–74; Charles Suhor, “Jazz Improvisation and Language Performance: Parallel Competencies,” ETC: A Review of General Semantics 42, no. 2 (1986): 133–40; Mark J. Steedman, “A Generative Grammar for Jazz Chord Sequences,” Music Perception 2, no. 1 (1982): 52–77; Bruno Nettl, “Thoughts on Improvisation: A Comparative Approach,” The Musical Quarterly 60, no. 1 (1974), 1–19; Bruce Ellis Benson, The Improvisation of Musical Dialogue: A Phenomenology of Music (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003); Julie Dawn Smith, “Playing like a Girl: The Queer Laughter of the Feminist Improvising Group,” in The Other Side of Nowhere: Jazz, Improvisation and Communities in Dialogue, ed. Daniel Fischlin and Ajay Heble (Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 2004), 279–95; David Borgo, “The Ghost in the Music, or the Perspective of an Improvising Ant,” in The Oxford Handbook of Critical Improvisation Studies, ed. George E. Lewis and Benjamin Piekut (New York: Oxford University Press, 2014), 91–114.

23. See, for instance, interviews with Keith Jarrett and associates in Mike Dibb, Keith Jarrett: The Art of Improvisation (Euro Arts, 2005), DVD. Explored here are topics related to high-skilled artistic accomplishment but not the fundamental aural abilities enabling the artistic practice in the first place. The aural abilities are just taken for granted.

24. Beatrice Beebe, Dorienne Sorter, Judith Rustin, and Steven Knoblauch, “A Comparison of Meltzoff, Trevarthen, and Stern,” Psychoanalytic Dialogues online, 13, no. 6 (2008): 777–804, https://doi.org/10.1080/10481881309348768, accessed May 21, 2021; Talia Welsh, The Child as Natural Phenomenologist: Primal and Primary Experience in Merleau-Ponty’s Psychology (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 2013).

25. Andrea Schiavio, Dylan van der Schyff, Silke Kruse-Weber, and Renee Timmers, “When the Sound Becomes the Goal: 4e Cognition and Teleomusicality in Early Infancy,” Frontiers in Psychology 8, no. 1585 (Sept. 25, 2017), https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2017.01585, accessed May 21, 2021; Shaun Gallagher, How the Body Shapes the Mind (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2005); Maxine Sheets-Johnstone, The Primacy of Movement: Expanded Second Edition (Amsterdam: John Benjamins Publishing Company, 2011); Mattias Solli, “Towards an Embodied Hermeneutics: Gadamer, Merleau-Ponty, and Nondirective Meditation” (PhD diss., Norwegian University of Science and Technology, 2017), https://ntnuopen.ntnu.no/ntnu-xmlui/bitstream/handle/11250/2433436/Mattias%20Solli_PhD.pdf?sequence=1, accessed May 21, 2021; Evan Thompson, Mind in Life (Cambridge, MA: The Belknap Press of Harvard University, 2007).

26. Michael Tomasello, Constructing a Language: A Usage-Based Theory of Language (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2003).

27. Noam Chomsky, Language and Mind (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1972); Noam Chomsky, Reflections on Language (New York: Pantheon, 1976).

28. Maurice Merleau-Ponty, “Eye and Mind,” in The Merleau-Ponty Reader, ed. Ted Toadwine and Leonard Lawlor (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 2007), 352–78.

29. Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception, ed. Donald Landes (London: Routledge, 2012).

30. Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology, 137.

31. Maurice Merleau-Ponty, The Primacy of Perception, ed. James Edie (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1964), 5.

32. Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology, 212.

33. Shaun Gallagher, “Body Image and Body Schema: A Conceptual Clarification,” The Journal of Mind and Behavior 7, no. 4 (1986): 541–54; Shaun Gallagher, “Body Schema and Intentionality,” in The Body and the Self, ed. José Luis Bermúdez, Anthony Marcel, and Naomi Eilan (Cambridge: The MIT Press, 1995), 225–44; Gallagher, How the Body Shapes the Mind.

34. Gallagher, “Body Image and Body Schema,” 546.

35. Gallagher, How the Body Shapes the Mind, 24.

36. This citation is from the 1958 translation of Merleau-Ponty’s Phenomenology of Perception (London: Routledge, 2003), 160–61. All other citations are from the 2012 edition with Donald Landes’s new translation.

37. Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Signs, trans. Richard McCleary (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1987).

38. We disagree with contemporary attempts to reduce improvised music to the auditory result of movement, as suggested by Iyer, who states, “Music is understood as the sound of human bodies in motion.” Vijay Iyer, “Improvisation, Action Understanding, and Music Cognition with and without Bodies,” in The Oxford Handbook of Critical Improvisation Studies, ed. George E. Lewis and Benjamin Piekut (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014), 1–13, 3. We also take issue with the empiristic theory of Pressing, “Improvisation.”

39. Bengt Molander, “Tacit Knowledge and Silenced Knowledge: Fundamental Problems and Controversies,” in Skill and Education: Reflection and Experience. Artificial Intelligence and Society, ed. Göranzon B. and Florin M. (London: Springer, 1992), 9–31; Michael Polanyi, The Tacit Dimension (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2009).

40. Berliner, Thinking in Jazz.

41. John Dewey, Art as Experience (New York: Perigee, 2005), 47.

42. Berliner, Thinking in Jazz; Hamilton, Lee Konitz; Monson, Saying Something; Ratliff, The Jazz Ear; Schroeder, From the Minds of Jazz Musicians; Wilf, School for Cool.

43. See, for instance, Greg Corness, “The Musical Experience through the Lens of Embodiment,” Leonardo Music Journal 18, no. 1 (2008): 21–24; Amy Cimini, “Vibrating Colors and Silent Bodies: Music, Sound and Silence in Maurice-Merleau-Ponty’s Critique of Dualism,” Contemporary Music Review 31, nos. 5–6 (2012): 353–70; Kirsten Fink-Jensen, “Attunement and Bodily Dialogues in Music Education,” Philosophy of Music Education Review 15, no. 1 (2007): 53–68; Cecilia Ferm and Ketil Thorgersen, “Aesthetic Communication in Music Education: Student’s Awareness,” International Symposium on the Philosophy of Music Education, Ontario, Canada, 2007; Mariusz Kozak, “Listeners’ Bodies in Music Analysis: Gestures, Motor Intentionality, and Models,” Music Theory Online 21, no. 3 (2015), https://mtosmt.org/issues/mto.15.21.3/mto.15.21.3.kozak.html, accessed May 21, 2021; Simon Høffding, A Phenomenology of Musical Absorption (Cham: Palgrave, 2018); Andrea Schiavio and Simon Høffding, “Playing Together without Communicating? A Pre-Reflective and Enactive Account of Joint Musical Performance,” Musicae Scientiae 19, no. 4 (2015): 366–88, https://doi.org/10.1177/1029864915593333, accessed May 21, 2021.

44. Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology, 32.

45. Daniel N. Stern, The Interpersonal World of the Infant: A View from Psychoanalysis and Developmental Psychology (London: Karnac, 1998).

46. Welsh, The Child as Natural Phenomenologist, 57.

47. Mark Gridley, Robert Maxham, and Robert Hoff, “Three Approaches to Defining Jazz,” The Musical Quarterly 73, no. 4 (1989): 513–31.

48. We do not claim that the Western tonal language is better or “more universal” than other musical languages, only that it has a certain hegemonic status in the Western context.

49. Eric A. Havelock, Preface to Plato (Cambridge, MA: The Belknap Press of Harvard University, 1963); Walter Jackson Ong, Interfaces of the Word: Studies in the Evolution of Consciousness and Culture (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2013); Walter Jackson Ong, Orality and Literacy: the Technologizing of the Word (London: Routledge, 2012).

50. Ong, Interfaces of the Word.

51. Richard Taruskin, The Oxford History of Western Music, vol. 1 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005), Chapter 1.

52. Havelock, Preface to Plato; Ong, Interfaces of the Word; Ong, Orality and Literacy.

53. Ong, Interfaces of the Word, 21.

54. For an overview, see Robert Witmer and James Robbins, “A Historical and Critical Survey of Recent Pedagogical Materials for the Teaching and Learning of Jazz,” Bulletin of the Council for Research in Music Education 96 (1988): 7–29.

55. Anita Prest, “The Importance of Context, Reflection, Interaction, and Consequence in Rural Music Education Practice,” Journal of Research in Rural Education 28, no. 14 (2013): 1–13; Eva Georgii-Hemming, Karin Johansson, and Nadia Moberg, “Reflection in Higher Music Education: What, Why, Wherefore?” Music Education Research 22, no. 3 (2020): 1–12.

56. Mine Dogantan-Dack, ed., Artistic Practice as Research in Music: Theory, Criticism, Practice (London: Routledge, 2016).

57. Sidran, Black Talk; William Howland Kenney, Recorded Music in American Life: The Phonograph and Popular Memory, 1890–1945 (Oxford: Oxford University Press on Demand, 2003); Jones, Blues People.

58. Sidran, Black Talk.

59. Linda Hunter, “Transformation in African Verbal Art: Voice, Speech, Language,” The Journal of African Folklore 109, no. 432 (1996): 178–92; Doris Green, “African Oral Tradition Literacy,” Journal of Black Studies 15, no. 4 (1985): 405–25; Harold Scheub, “A Review of African Oral Traditions and Literature,” African Studies Review 28, no. 2–3 (1985): 1–72.

60. Paraphrasing Ong, Interfaces of the Word, 21.

61. Hans-Georg Gadamer, Truth and Method, trans. Joel Weinsheimer and Donald G. Marshall (London: Continuum, 2004), 15. “The universal viewpoints to which the cultivated [gebildet] man keeps himself open are not a fixed applicable yardstick, but are present to him only as a viewpoint of possible others” (15–16).

62. Sidran, Black Talk. A philosophical consideration of what happens when the oral tradition’s music transforms into art is extrapolated in Mattias Solli, “Tradisjon, Individualitet og Spontanitet: Gadamer og jazz,” in Oppløsningen av det Estetiske. Kunstteori og Estetisk Praksis, ed. Ståle Finke and Mattias Solli (Oslo: Universitetsforlaget, 2021), 151–72.

63. Berliner, Thinking in Jazz, 92.

64. For a blatant example of how representatives from the literary tradition find themselves unable to write down the intonations developed in the African tradition, see William Francis Allen, Charles Pickard Ware, and Lucy McKim Garrison, eds., Slave Songs of the United States (New York: A. Simpson and Company, 1867), v–vi. This text also demonstrates a racist and imperialist attitude vis-á-vis the African and oral tradition.

65. Tiger Roholt, Groove: A Phenomenology of Rhythmic Nuance (New York: Bloomsbury Publishing, 2014).

66. Galper, The Oral Tradition.

67. Russell, Bird Lives.

68. Here, we differ from Wilf, School for Cool, who describes the aural imitation method as a way to identify oneself as much as possible with the master’s creative mind. For a critique of similar ways of conceiving hermeneutical processes, see Gadamer, Truth and Method, Part II.

69. Wilf, School for Cool, 122.

70. David C. Rubin, “Oral Traditions as Collective Memories: Implications for a General Theory of Individual and Collective Memory,” in Memory in Mind and Culture, ed. P. Boyer and J. V. Wertsch (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009), 273–87; Ong, Orality and Literacy.

71. Borgo, “The Ghost in the Music”; Smith, “Playing like a Girl”; Marshall Soules, “Improvising Character: Jazz, the Actor, and Protocols for Improvisation,” in The Other Side of Nowhere: Jazz, Improvisation, and Communities in Dialogue, ed. Daniel Fischlin and Ajay Heble (Middletown, CT: Wesley University Press, 2004), 268–97.

72. Rubin, “Oral Traditions.”

73. Johan Huizinga, Homo Ludens: A Study of the Play Element in Culture (Boston: Beacon Press, 1970); Gadamer, Truth and Method; Bjorkvold, The Muse Within.

74. Sidran, Black Talk.

75. Wilf, School for Cool.

76. Kenneth E. Prouty, Knowing Jazz: Community, Pedagogy, and Canon in the Information Age (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2013); Prouty, “Orality, Literacy, and Mediating Musical Experience”; Dobbins, “Jazz and Academia.”

77. Malloch and Trevarthen, “Musicality.”

78. Hal Galper, “What Is Practicing? Masterclass with Hal Galper,” filmed Dec. 17, 2013, available on Youtube.com, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rPovnp3Dly42013, accessed May 21, 2021.

79. Immanuel Kant, Critique of Judgement, trans. Paul Guyer (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008); Gadamer, Truth and Method.

80. Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology, 108.

81. Julian “Cannonball” Adderly, “Autumn Leaves,” from the album Somethin’ Else (Blue Note, 1958). In accordance with what we said earlier, this article lets practice suggest the theoretical perspectives. That is, rather than relying on autobiographic interviews with actual subjects, we will try to model the structures of behavior emerging around the aural-imitative practice itself. What this means will be clearer in the analysis of Tables 1–3.

82. Arom, African Polyphony and Polyrhythm; John Miller Chernoff, African Rhythm and African Sensibility: Aesthetics and Social Action in African Musical Idioms (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1979); Jones, Blues People.

83. James Barbour, Tuning and Temperament (New York: Da Capo Press, 1972).

84. Olly Wilson, “The Significance of the Relationship between Afro-American Music and West-African Music,” The Black Perspective in Music 2, no. 1 (1974): 3–22.

85. Ross W. Duffin, How Equal Temperament Ruined Harmony (and Why You Should Care) (New York: W.W. Norton, 2007).

86. Arom, African Polyphony and Polyrhythm.

87. Robert R. Foulkner and Howard Becker, “Do You Know ...” (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2009); Vijay Iyer, “Exploding the Narrative in Jazz Improvisation,” in Uptown Conversation: The New Jazz Studies, ed. Robert O’Meally, Brent Edwards Hayes, and Farah Jasmine Griffin (New York: Colombia University Press, 2004), 393–403.

88. Gregory D. Booth, “The North Indian Oral Tradition: Lessons for Music Education,” International Journal of Music Education 9, no. 1 (1987): 7–9; Philip V. Bohlman, The Study of Folk Music in the Modern World (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1988); Chris Goertzen, “The Norwegian Folk Revival and the Gammeldans Controversy,” Ethnomusicology 42, no. 1(1998): 99–127.

89. Tables 1–3 are suggested by John Pål Inderberg, “Er det mulig å gi undervisning i musikalsk improvisasjon? Et forsøk på å beskrive en metode,” unpublished handout (1996).

90. Shelly Berg, Alfred’s Essentials of Jazz Theory: Lessons, Ear Training (Van Nuys, CA: Alfred Music Publishing, 2004).

91. For a relevant analysis of the nonconceptual yet organized nature of the aesthetic phenomenon, see Kant, Critique of Judgement, 45–50, where he describes the free play [Spiel] of the cognitive powers initiated by aesthetic phenomena. In encountering beauty, the power of imagination [Einbildungskraft], understood as the spontaneous organization of plurality of impressions into unity, on the one hand, and the general power of subsuming diversity under a unitary concept, on the other, are brought into a dynamic and reviving harmony. No rule or concept can capture the free play.

92. Trevarthen, “The Self Born in Intersubjectivity,” 121.

93. Wilf, School for Cool, 19.

94. Louis Cavrell, “The Universal Mind of Bill Evans,” TV documentary, 1966, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QwXAqIaUahI1966, accessed May 21, 2021.

95. Berliner, Thinking in Jazz, 63.

96. See, for instance, Derek Bailey, Improvisation: Its Nature and Practice in Music (Ashbourne, UK: Da Capo Press, 1993); Ratliff, The Jazz Ear; Schroeder, From the Minds of Jazz Musicians.

97. Monson, Saying Something, 29.

98. Tiger Roholt, Groove: A Phenomenology of Rhythmic Nuance (New York: Bloomsbury Publishing, 2014), 6.

99. Scruton, The Aesthetics of Music, 19–20. Admittedly, Scruton’s description has a certain formalist ring to it. But formalism is not relevant in the current context. We use the phrase to describe music as thick perceptual sense, as elaborated below.

100. Vijay Iyer, “Embodied Mind, Situated Cognition, and Expressive Micro-Timing in African-American Music,” Music Perception 19, no. 3 (2002): 387–414.

101. Roholt thus expands on Merleau-Ponty’s conception of perceptual indeterminacy; see Merleau-Ponty, Phenonemology; Shaun Kelly, “Seeing Things in Merleau-Ponty,” in The Cambridge Companion to Merleau-Ponty, ed. Taylor Carman and Mark B. N. Hansen (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), 74–110.

102. Monson, Saying Something; Berliner, Thinking in Jazz.

103. Monson, Saying Something, 28.

104. Berliner, Thinking in Jazz, 151.

105. Thompson, Mind in Life, 38.

106. Scruton, The Aesthetics of Music, 234. Again, the point is not to evoke formalism but to describe the relatively autonomous force of music qua perceptual sense.

107. Irene Deliege, “Grouping Conditions in Listening to Music: An Approach to Lerdahl & Jackendoff’s Grouping Preference Rules,” Music Perception 4, no. 4 (1987): 325–59; Fred Lerdahl and Ray Jackendoff, A Generative Theory of Tonal Music (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1990); John Sloboda, ed., Generative Processes in Music: The Psychology of Performance, Improvisation, and Composition (New York: Clarendon Press, 1988); Steedman, “A Generative Grammar.”

108. Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception, 192.

109. Joel Krueger, “Affordances and the Musically Extended Mind,” Frontiers in Psychology 4, no. 1003 (2014), 1–6, https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2013.01003, accessed May 21, 2021; Micheline Lesaffre et al., “Participatory Sense-Making in Joint Musical Practice,” in The Routledge Companion to Embodied Music Interaction, ed. Micheline Lesaffre, Pieter-Jan Maes, and Marc Leman (New York: Routledge, 2019), 31–39; Jakub Ryszard Matyja and Andrea Schiavio, “Enactive Music Cognition: Background and Research Themes,” Constructivist Foundations 8, no. 3 (2013): 351–57; Simon Høffding and Andrea Schiavio, “Exploratory Expertise and the Dual Intentionality of Music-Making,” Phenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences (2019), https://doi.org/10.1007/s11097-019-09626-5, accessed May 21, 2021; Joel Krueger, “Enacting Musical Experience,” Journal of Consciousness Studies 16, nos. 2–3 (2009): 98–123; Andrea Schiavio, Dylan van der Schyff, Julian Cespedes-Guevara, and Mark Reybrouck, “Enacting Musical Emotions: Sense-Making, Dynamic Systems, and the Embodied Mind,” Phenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences 16, no. 5 (2017): 785–809; Mark Reybrouck, “Music as Environment: An Ecological and Biosemiotic Approach,” Behavioral Sciences 5, no. 1 (2015): 1–26.

110. Schiavio and Høffding, “Playing Together without Communicating,” 370. Italics original.

111. Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Institution and Passivity: Course Notes from the Collège De France (1954–1955), trans. Leonard Lawler and Heath Massey (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 2010), 18–20.

112. Cavrell, The Universal Mind.

113. Berliner, Thinking in Jazz, 63.

114. Thomas Fuchs and Hanne De Jaegher, “Enactive Intersubjectivity: Participatory Sense-Making and Mutual Incorporation,” Phenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences 8, no. 4 (2009): 465–86, https://doi.org/10.1007/s11097-009-9136-4, accessed May 21, 2021; Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception; Charles Keil, “Participatory Discrepancies and the Power of Music,” Cultural Anthropology 2, no. 3 (1987): 275–83; Roholt, Groove.

115. Gadamer, Truth and Method; David McNeill, Gesture and Thought (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005); Merleau-Ponty, Signs.

116. Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology, 100ff.

117. Galper, The Oral Tradition.

118. Quoted in Berliner, Thinking in Jazz, 152.

119. Roholt, Groove, 4. Italics original

120. Roholt, Groove, 4. Italics original.

121. Trevarthen, “The Self Born in Intersubjectivity,” 121.

122. Gadamer, Truth and Method.

123. Stern, The Interpersonal World of the Infant, xviii.

124. Stern, The Interpersonal World of the Infant, 46. Italics original.

125. Stern, The Interpersonal World of the Infant, 128.

126. Colwyn Trevarthen, “First Things First: Infants Make Good Use of the Sympathetic Rhythm of Imitation, without Reason or Language,” Journal of Child Psychotherapy 31, no. 1 (2005): 91–113, https://doi.org/10.1080/00754170500079651, accessed May 21, 2021; Trevarthen, “Musicality and the Intrinsic Motive Pulse.”

127. Fuchs and De Jaegher, “Enactive Intersubjectivity,” 479.

128. Edward Tronick and M. Kathrine Weinberg, “Depressed Mothers and Infants: Failure to Form Dyadic States of Consciousness,” in Postpartum Depression and Child Development, ed. L. Murray and P. J. Cooper (New York: Guilford, 1997), 54–84; Edward Tronick and Jeffrey Cohn, “Infant–Mother Face-to-Face-Interaction: Age and Gender Differences in Coordination and the Occurrences of Mismatches,” Child Development 60, no. 1 (1989): 85–92.

129. Fuchs and De Jaegher, “Enactive Intersubjectivity,” 479.

130. Trevarthen, “First Things First.”

131. Maurice Merleau-Ponty, The Structure of Behavior, trans. A. L. Fisher (Pittsburgh, PA: Duquesne University Press, 2011); Daniel N. Stern, Forms of Vitality (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010).

132. Trevarthen, “Musicality and the Intrinsic Motive Pulse,” 178.

133. Trevarthen, “First Things First,” 92.

134. Trevarthen, “The Self Born in Intersubjectivity,” 151.

135. Trevarthen, “The Self Born in Intersubjectivity,” 135.

136. Trevarthen, “Musicality and the Intrinsic Motive Pulse,” 180.

137. Colwyn Trevarthen, “Play with Infants: The Impulse for Human Storytelling,” in The Routledge International Handbook of Early Childhood Play, ed. Tina Bruce, Pentti Hakkarainen, and Milda Bredikyte (London: Routledge, 2017), 198–215.

138. Jessica Benjamin, “Beyond Doer and Done: An Intersubjective View of Thirdness,” The Psychoanalytic Quarterly 73, no. 1 (2004): 5–46.

139. Trevarthen, “First Things First.”

140. Gadamer, Truth and Method.

141. Merleau-Ponty, Institution and Passivity, 18–19.

142. Daniel N. Stern, “Face-to-Face Play: Its Temporal Structure as Predictor of Socio-affective Development,” in Rhythms of Dialogue in Infancy: Coordinated Timing in Development, ed. Joseph Jaffe et al. (Boston: Wiley/Society for Research in Child Development, 2001), 144–49, 147.

143. David Morris, Merleau-Ponty’s Developmental Ontology (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 2018); Merleau-Ponty, The Structure of Behavior.

144. Stern, The Interpersonal World of the Infant, 85.

145. Stern, Forms of Vitality, 7.

146. Stern, The Interpersonal World of the Infant, 49.

147. Stern, The Interpersonal World of the Infant, 48.

148. Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Child Psychology and Pedagogy: The Sorbonne Lectures, 1949–1952, trans. Talia Welsh (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 2010), 255ff.

149. Stern, Forms of Vitality, 3.

150. Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology, 102.

151. Gadamer, Truth and Method.

152. Roholt, Groove, 41. Italics original.

153. Stern, Forms of Vitality, 84.

154. Merleau-Ponty, The Structure of Behavior, 121.