Contemporary Music Review

ISSN: 0749-4467 (Print) 1477-2256 (Online) Journal homepage: https://www.tandfonline.com/loi/gcmr20

‘A Bunch of Riffs’: Language, Post-Modernity, and

the Politics of Inclusion in Improvised Music

Wendy Eisenberg

To cite this article: Wendy Eisenberg (2019): ‘A Bunch of Riffs’: Language, Post-Modernity,
and the Politics of Inclusion in Improvised Music, Contemporary Music Review, DOI:
10.1080/07494467.2019.1684060

To link to this article: https://doi.org/10.1080/07494467.2019.1684060

Published online: 25 Nov 2019.

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Contemporary Music Review, 2019
https://doi.org/10.1080/07494467.2019.1684060

‘A Bunch of Riffs’: Language, Post-

Modernity, and the Politics of Inclusion
in Improvised Music
Wendy Eisenberg

Jazz improvisation is as dependent on the use of pre-existing riffs as it is on extemporaneous

creation. These riffs create, establish, and reference genres, and provide an extra-temporal
aspect to the moment of performance. The re-appropriation of these musical fragments
transforms their meaning and purpose in jazz convention. This paper looks toward the
work of Anthony Braxton, Cecil Taylor, Sun Ra, Marilyn Crispell, and Charlie Parker
in order to clarify how the cultural context of particular riffs influences which
improvisational languages are deemed ‘legitimate’. It also questions how such
‘legitimacy’ functions in a genre defined by constant evolution. Using writings from
Frederic Jameson, Rosalind Krauss, LeRoi Jones, Donna Haraway, and Jürgen
Habermas, I consider the riff as postmodernist tool, a repetitious device that speaks not
to the dream of a common language, but the unity or crisis of differing voices.

Keywords: Jazz; Improvisation; Riff; Repetition; Postmodernism; Cyborg

Improvisation is as dependent on the uses of extant language forms as extemporaneous

creation. The prioritisation and reassertion of certain key phrases within languages
determine the ‘essence’ and politics of a genre. Much like the performance of
certain political identities, the performance of these key phrases, or ‘riffs’, within an
improvisation sets the performer in a larger and often contrary context to their iden-
tity. As such, both the human body and performed linguistic and semiotic material
function as signifying riffs within the larger framework of historical context.
This paper hinges on my musical definition of riffs as recycled musical quotations and
bite-sized organisations of sound that have been handed down long enough to become
both culturally situated and a-historical. They are defined as much by their origins as
by their repetitious formal function. This paper questions how riffs become situated in
particular musical languages, and explores how both riffs and political identities act as

© 2019 Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group

2 W. Eisenberg
signifiers. It examines how riffs are techniques of post-modernity, and how such tech-
niques function in the modernist languages and landscapes of jazz and improvised
music. Finally, this paper uses Haraway’s conception of cyborgs to clarify and emphasise
how essential cultural identity is to the evolution of both performer and riff.
In her cult-classic novel I Love Dick, author Chris Kraus, with a nod to Donna
Haraway, wonders if ‘all female lived experience is a bunch of riffs, completely fake’. I
Love Dick, a novel that is equal parts memoir, art criticism, and love letter, is concerned
with the role of the woman in love, and the definition of the abject. This particular
thought about riffs comes toward the end of a section about sincerity in art. Kraus’s
beloved, Dick, thinks that she is ‘insincere’ because her work is more varied and exten-
sive than that of a rival filmmaker, Nick Zedd, whose work draws on a clear lineage of
gore. Zedd’s work performs a creative function that is situated in an existing aesthetic
context, while Kraus’s work deals with the many and complicated, a polymorphism
more comprehensive than and more distant from the ‘authentic’ voice of a familiar
genre. Then, glancing toward Haraway, Kraus considers both her filmmaking and her
lived experience to be a glossary of feminine ‘riffs’, an antithesis to the simplicity and
familiarity of what is considered ‘authentic’ in our male-dominated world.
Those self-affirmed gatekeepers of an improvisational lineage demand that those who
carry on its tradition familiarise themselves with their chosen vocabulary, techniques,
and aesthetics. These materials are not defined by their origins, but by the frequency
with which they are repeated while the genre and social landscape around them continue
to evolve. As jazz music evolved blues semiotics, its performers rewarded audience
members who were familiar with ‘the blues’ with consistent references to the particular
musical aesthetics that survived that evolution. The most innovative jazz improvisers
relied on this blues content because it served as cultural shorthand for its performers
—a blues riff sounded like something they knew, and this recognition helped to establish
musical form. Blues signs became essential to emergent jazz languages, while simul-
taneously solidifying the sound of a subculture. While present-day jazz improvisers
use blues gestures to speak to an older subculture, the free improviser has to deal with
shifting definitions of ‘culture’ such that their embodied identity can become their ‘riff’.
A convention is the formal musical function that situates a riff. Susan McClary
defines a convention as ‘a procedure that has ossified into a formula that needs no
further explanation’ (McClary 2009, 2) These procedures tend to be formal or harmo-
nic in nature, and range from blues AAB forms to the common head-solo-head
formula of conservative jazz performances. McClary asserts that these normative
forms are somewhat antithetical to artistry:

We commonly exalt as ‘purely musical’ the procedures that appear to have trans-
cended significations, and we scorn conventions as devices that have hardened to
the point where they no longer can mean anything at all. (2009, 3)

At the same historical moment that jazz started to establish its most idiomatic struc-
tures, modernists began to consider the necessity of a personal, subjective vision to be
 Contemporary Music Review 3
their convention. Jazz used formal convention the way some of these modernists used
the grid: as a structure emblematic of the ‘sheer disinterestedness of the work of art, its
absolute purposelessness from which it derived the promise of its autonomy’, as Rosa-
lind Krauss says in her essay The Originality of the Avant-Garde (1986). While the most
conservative jazz forms might be analogous to Krauss’s grid, they tend to give the best
improvisers a familiar framework that offsets the power of their most personal
material. We can also see the grid-structure in the conventionality of jazz culture.
When a musician’s body defies the convention of their genre, it becomes both genera-
tor and signifier of the work they make.
This is particularly evident in discussions about female jazz musicians. Though the cul-
tural politics of female blues singers have been studied at length, the female instrumen-
talist is typically given the smallest section of whatever improvisational history is being
documented. Though men outnumber non-male jazz improvisers, the erasure of most
non-male influence from the historical narrative of ‘improvisation’ can deter future
alternative voices, and further establish the genre as male. I consider the masculinity of
jazz culture to be a convention of the genre, largely because no matter how conservative
her performance of the jazz genre might sound, any female improviser looks subversive.
Forces in Motion, Graham Lock’s (1989) meta-travelogue on Anthony Braxton, con-
tains a notable discussion regarding the tendency of male musicians to praise some-
thing they call the ‘feminine aesthetic’ in music. Braxton meets pianist/composer
Katy Zeserson, who tells him that she and her peers actively try to discern ‘which, if
any, facets of the tradition are inherently masculine, which can be appropriated by
women and which have to be rejected. We need to try, just to find out who we are,
musically’ (Lock 1989, 59). This inquisition into the socio-cultural history of this
music evolves the genre called jazz into the practical musical function called improvi-
sation. In an improvisational context, riffs are vestiges of a problematic musical essen-
tialism that comes about when external forces codify a genre. This same essentialism,
that allows for a musician to be female first and a musician second, is the conceptual
leap that waters down the whole genre of blues into a stock blues riff. In a jazz context,
that essentialism is a structure and requirement of its propagation.
A free improviser has license to use whichever musical sounds are attractive and auth-
entic to them. In these open contexts, the danger of riffs is that their underlying cultural
affects tend to trivialise or negate experiences of the ‘other’. Zeserson continues:

We have to be very careful how we use terms like masculine and feminine. The
danger is we’ll exclude whole areas of experience, like violence, which women do
feel but which are traditionally deemed not feminine. (Lock 1989, 59)

Marilyn Crispell, one of Braxton’s most accomplished collaborators, and one of free
improvisation’s most important pianists, has a complicated relationship to the intersec-
tions of music and gender. In Forces in Motion, she says that she is not a feminist, that no
social forces prevented her from making her music, and that her music is not ‘essentially’
feminine. When asked about sexist assumptions about her music, she demurs: ‘I sort of
4 W. Eisenberg
get a kick out of it, like I’m shocking people’ (Lock 1989, 186). Her body, not her music, is
the riff; the other musical body-object in a prescribed context. She continues:

I have noticed that people tend to equate abstraction with negativity. Sometimes
people’ll say, oh I can really feel how angry you are when you play, and I look at
them in amazement because I wasn’t angry at all. They look at it in this very simplis-
tic way, like you’re playing something intense therefore you’re expressing anger. I
don’t feel I’m expressing anger, I feel I’m expressing energy, a moving energy that
falls into certain patterns and rhythms, and all your life experiences are in there
—pain, anger, joy … (1989, 187)

Where the grid ‘collapsed the spatiality of nature onto the bounded surface of a purely
cultural object (Krauss 2006, 158)’, jazz forms bonded the energy and humanity of
extemporaneous improvisation onto the twin cultural objects of ‘body’ and body of
work. Improvisational musical practices position unique voices into pre-existing,
repeatable forms, and those voices perform a modernist function of otherness.
While grids have a strange, neutral consistency that can lie almost undetected
beneath certain artistic decisions, formal conventions offset the riff’s aesthetic and
functional signification of place, history, and narrative nonlinearity.
Where conventions signify the performance of particular types of music, riffs in an
improvisation provide an extra-temporal presence wherever they arise. This is because
their origins are outside of the present improvised moment. A performer using a riff
brings back a kind of souvenir for the listener, a representation of a past musical situ-
ation. This past-tense function reasserts the time of the improvisation.
In many histories of ‘blues language’, specialists like Gunther Schuller and Henry
Louis Gates consider particular musical elements that they deem ‘essential’ to blues
aesthetics to be specific to the collective memory of a West African homeland. Musi-
cologists like Schuller tend to map these sounds within European musical systems: a
blues scale is reduced to a pentatonic scale with a flatted third, and the irregular
forms of early blues performances are transcribed as though they were intentional sub-
versions of common Western musical forms. Such musicologists often ignore the fact
that the blues is an African-American creation, not the linear transmission of African
music onto American soil. In Blues People, Amiri Baraka writes:

We know that West Africans … did not sing blues. Undoubtedly, none of the
African prisoners broke out into St. James Infirmary the minute the first of them
was herded off the ship … there are no records of 12-bar, AAB songs in those
languages—at least none that would show a direct interest in social or agricultural
problems in the Southern U.S. (1963, 3)

This Eurocentric reading of the blues finds a peak in Ernest Borneman’s 1940s essay
‘The Roots of Jazz’

While the whole European tradition strives for regularity—of pitch, of time, of
timbre and vibrato—the African tradition strives precisely for the negation of
 Contemporary Music Review 5
these elements. In language, the African tradition aims at circumlocution rather than
at the exact definition. (1959, 12)

Borneman defines the African tradition as one that transcends European standardis-
ation, yet the European standardisation of African-American music creates those
sonic conventions by which people continue to ascertain which music is authentically
‘jazz’. Baraka again, in his essay Jazz and the White Critic, said as much:

In jazz criticism, no reliance on European tradition or theory will help at all. Negro
music, like the Negro himself, is strictly an American phenomenon, and we have got
to set up our standards of judgment and aesthetic excellence that depend on our
native knowledge and understanding of the underlying philosophies and local cul-
tural references that produced blues and jazz in order to produce valid critical
writing or commentary about it. (1963, 26)

In Free Jazz and Black Power, scholars Philippe Carles and Jean-Louis Comolli (2015)
discuss how the emergence of jazz as an ‘African tradition’ became an exotic touch-
stone for American audiences, who demanded that jazz music ‘speak about Negroes
and please whites’ (115). The interest in such doublespeak, performed so well by
such jazz-integrationists as Louis Armstrong, speaks to America’s desire for black
exotica. Much like the way the female body is an attractive curiosity within jazz
culture due to its otherness to jazz’s predominantly male tradition, the black musician
was an attractive other to the white American. Anthony Braxton:

Europeans have historically been interested in keeping black people in the ‘exotic
zone’ as a means not to deal with the significance of Africa. It is important to under-
stand that the mantle of ‘black exotica’ is not separate from the notion that black
people are not thinking human beings. (Lock 1989, 313)

Free jazz saxophonist Marion Brown defined the reign of swing in Depression-era
big bands as: ‘The time when jazz conformed to Western ideas of metric division
the most’ (Carles and Comolli 2015, 118). Dance band music prioritised ‘swing’
over improvisation, and tended to repeat a riff as either shout chorus or whole
piece. While attractive to dancers, the limitations of form and interpretation in
swing erased the most intimate elements of blues performance in favour of the
unified spectacle of the jazz orchestra, out of whom only a few chosen voices
could improvise. As this music gained cultural and economic power, critics and per-
formers alike began to distil these concepts of ‘swing’ and ‘riff’ into a concentrated
definition of jazz.
The great pianist Cecil Taylor had a complex musical identity, as informed by jazz as
by his contentious relationship with European art music. Many critics continue to
write off his music as ‘not-jazz’, due to the ways in which his advanced harmonic
and technical abilities appeared to come less from the twin vocabularies of 30s blues
and swing. However, his self-conception was grounded in a less dialectical, more onto-
logical jazz narrative, and situated ‘swing’ into the physical body of the musician:
6 W. Eisenberg
Composition is subjugated to the feeling of jazz—they swung, ‘swing’ meaning the
traditional coloring of the energy that moves the music. It is the physicality of the
musician, and the physicality of the musician is determined by the particular tra-
dition that he comes out of—by the blues. (Spellman 1994, 71)

Swing is at once more conceptual and conventional, less repetitious and more founda-
tional to a conservative definition of jazz. Fans of swing tend to define it with that
vague axiom: ‘I know it when I see it’. This non-specificity allows jazz purists to
label those musicians with less danceable, different time-feels or conventions as
‘not-jazz’. Musicians who do not fit the more marketable conventions of jazz, either
because they do not desire complicity within an exploitative dance-band industry or
because they desire more musical flexibility, tend to be cast as avant-garde improvisers,
not jazz musicians. They are defined by their practice as it evolves, rather than their
position as re-enactors of a codified genre.
Exclusion from the jazz hegemony pushes improvised music into further out
musical and conceptual spaces. Often critics tend to reaffirm these improvisers as
‘jazz’ musicians after a certain measure of time has passed, and their influence on
more mainstream jazz became more obvious. The music looked upon as ‘anti-jazz’
has only a matter of time before it is considered jazz’s most important vanguard.
This constant aesthetic upheaval in freely improvised music is an expression of the
modernist temperament. As Jürgen Habermas states:

Modernity revolts against the normalizing functions of tradition; modernity lives on

the experience of rebelling against all that is normative. This revolt is one way to
neutralize the standards of both morality and utilities. This aesthetic consciousness
continually stages a dialectical play between secrecy and public scandal; it is addicted
to a fascination with that horror which accompanies the act of profaning, and yet is
always in flight from the trivial results of profanation. (2002, 5)

Or, more succinctly, ‘anyone who considers himself avant-garde can read his own
death warrant’ (2002, 7).
Avant-garde jazz musicians are those who warp the cultural hallmarks of a genre
into an extension of their politics. An early avant-garde was bebop, whose swing feel
is played unbelievably fast, and whose harmonic innovations were often advanced
readings of pop standards. Perhaps the most archetypal musical avant-garde is free-
jazz, an improvised genre steeped in black American cultural references and marked
by the erasure of detectable formal conventions in favour of a holistic, often communal
expression.
While Cecil Taylor subverted the music industry’s image of the jazz-man as other by
embracing his conservatory training and fusing it with his organic, nuanced feeling of
the blues, Sun Ra did the same by being as ‘other’ as you could get; by literally alienat-
ing himself. Sun Ra’s voyage from Saturn to Earth may have been an extended meta-
phor for his escape from the considerable hardship of being black in 20th-century
America, but his ultimate art was the synthesis of musical-cultural languages such as
 Contemporary Music Review 7
big band music, funk, experimental electronic music, and mystic forms such as Egyp-
tian hieroglyphics into the earliest expression of afro-futurism. Still, in most record
stores, he is categorised a jazz musician. This is likely because Sun Ra’s music could
not have happened without reference to the phenomenon and cultural references
that produced the identity of the mid-late century black American. It is also likely
because he is an African American improviser.
Carles and Comolli believe that ‘jazz criticism has remained blind to its own com-
plicity with a dominant ideology that on the one hand focuses on aesthetic issues, and
on the other is concerned with commercial and advertising issues’ (2015, 39). They
argue that the placement of jazz music as high art renders jazz ‘palatable’ to the domi-
nant culture as something exotic and therefore easier to exploit. The improviser values
the process of the moment of improvisation such that that process becomes the ‘genre’.
Therefore, the improvisers who truly reject the recapitulation of jazz or blues riffs in
favour of their own languages are less likely to establish any new genre, but instead
mark the sonic landscape with their own tastes, including both their own riffs and
the riffs from other landscapes that they like—from blues as much as from metal,
klezmer, or the second Viennese school.
Purist jazz gatekeepers ignore the fact that we are embodied in a pluralistic present
that speaks ‘in all languages’. In this way, the jazz cognoscenti has become a breeding
ground for Jamesonian pastiche: ‘A world in which stylistic innovation is no longer
possible, all that is left is to imitate dead styles, to speak through the masks and
with the voices of the styles in the imaginary museum’ (Jameson 2002, 115–16).
The choice of which ‘dead’ styles endure these shifts in jazz has everything to do
with the identity of its originators, because riffs are the epithets that simultaneously
define and qualify the ‘essence’ of their context. The historical narrative that codifies
jazz as a specific aesthetic and formal genre demands that such riffs be played as pre-
cisely as possible by the bodies that most resemble its originators.
Riffs solidify through repeated presentation in both live performances and the
record industry. Live performances only truly happen once, and when recorded,
each subsequent listen is a simulacrum of the heat of the original performance. Riffs
function similarly: any sample-based groove finds a mirror in Depression-era swing
band songs, or in Sun Ra’s Walkin on the Moon, where the riff is both the melody
and the form of the whole song. Both riffs and recordings create and repeat a
musical memory that allows the listener to travel through musical time.
Riffs, as performed in standardised jazz environments, function similarly to a
Homeric epithet. Because both improvised music and Homeric epics were originally
non-written traditions, epithets and riffs both serve as mnemonic aids as much as a
convenience for extemporaneous performance. It is convenient to have a stock
phrase at hand that fits the constraints of the performance, specifically when that
phrase alters the meaning of the noun, chord change, or compositional moment in
question.
These epithets can be used so frequently that they establish a consistent state of their
‘noun’. The sea cannot always be ‘wine-dark’, nor the dawn consistently ‘rosy-
8 W. Eisenberg
fingered’, but those phrases are so deeply Homeric that they become as important to
the world that he builds as the characters themselves. In jazz’s early avant-garde,
Charlie Parker’s language functions similarly to these epithets, due to how often his
harmonic discoveries and voice leading gestures are repeated. Often these riffs are
fairly traditional, scalar solutions to common jazz harmonic structures, but so many
of Bird’s methods were so ruthlessly copied by his followers that even his direct quota-
tions have endured long after the songs they came from faded into obscurity. When
Charlie Parker inserts a little reference from Star Eyes, into one of his improvisations,
that gesture has transcended its original melodic purpose to become a ‘bebop quote’.
Such a musical pastiche can become the basis for a riff that can reference two genres at
once: pop and bebop. When a musician performs a harmonic minor scale over a ii-V-I
progression with that speedy swing feel, they can evoke the whole bebop era. A riff as
simple as a scale or that first little melody of Star Eyes, can evoke a decade-long musical
moment.
Quotations are a technique that calls attention to the separation between high and
popular culture. The bebopper’s use of quotations then becomes a postmodern strategy;
a parody. Frederic Jameson makes clear, when he defines postmodernism in his classic
essay ‘Postmodernism and Consumer Society’, that it is a not merely a descriptor of a
kind of style, but a ‘periodizing concept whose function is to correlate the emergence
of new formal features in culture with the emergence of a new type of social life and a
new economic order’ (2002, 113). The riff and the context both come from particular
periods in time with varying levels of accessibility. Where the popular standard came
from the radio or record industries as a mass-produced object, and the harmonic super-
structures that began to function as bebop riffs originated in the Western European tra-
dition, the improvised music context is always situated in its cultural present.
The re-appropriation of particular musical fragments suggests that those fragments
had something unmistakable to them that gave strength and plasticity to their sub-
sequent copies; that which allows them to be riffs. I find something of Walter Benja-
min’s ‘The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction’ here:

The uniqueness of a work of art is inseparable from its being imbedded in the fabric
of tradition. This tradition itself is thoroughly alive and extremely changeable. An
ancient statue of Venus, for example, stood in a different traditional context with
the Greeks, who made it an object of veneration, than with the clerics of the
Middle Ages, who viewed it as an ominous idol. Both of them, however, were
equally confronted with its uniqueness, that is, its aura. (Benjamin 1936)

Riffs have aura, otherwise they wouldn’t have achieved such ubiquity without the
characteristics that made them so charismatic. Just like Benjamin’s ancient statue,
the riffs do not change their form with the passage of time, and time does not
change the material itself. When Benjamin says, ‘the existence of the work of art
with reference to its aura is never entirely separated from its ritual function’, he
allows the ritual function to change and the work to remain a ‘root’. I share this
view with Baraka, who as early as 1961, described bebop and blues as roots music:
 Contemporary Music Review 9
They are understandable as they sit: without the barest discussion of their origins.
And the reason I think for this is that they are origins, themselves. Blues is a begin-
ning. Bebop, a beginning. They define other varieties of music that come after them.
If a man had not heard blues, there is no reason to assume that he would even be
slightly interested in, say, Joe Oliver (except perhaps as a curio or from some
obscure social conviction). Cannonball Adderley is only interesting because of
bebop. And not because he plays bebop, but because he will occasionally repeat
an idea that bop once presented as profound. An idea that we love, no matter
what the subsequent disfigurement. (Baraka 1970, 72)

The ritual function of blues ‘material’ changes in tandem with American cultural
history. Though blues was some of the earliest recorded music, it has always been fun-
damentally a live art, whose living context gives the performer the space to play out
how exactly they feel in that given moment. The bebopper’s ‘fabric of tradition’ is
the genre of bebop itself, where riff is as much reference as compositional tool. Con-
sequently, the work of art being quoted in bebop becomes bebop.
When known riffs are performed within the best sets of improvised music, they do
not feel obligatory. A riff in an improvisation often feels like a reference to the recent
social or presentational history of a genre. Such a reference focuses the audience on the
present because they might remember having heard it elsewhere before. The sense of
‘elsewhere’ colours the affect of the riff by appealing to the memory of when that riff
was first encountered. Whether reverent or ironic, the riff is paying tribute to the his-
torical precedents that created its present context.
That tribute can sometimes feel more like an imitative appropriation than an inno-
vative restatement. When the musician uses a riff as an end to itself, with limited
awareness of the compositional or social ramifications of that gesture beyond that
‘other musicians have played it successfully before’, the riff sounds like a vapid tool
for appearing fluent in a genre’s language. When used as a last-ditch effort, a riff
can contain an implicit value judgment of the work it apes. This restatement of a
riff no longer functions as a gloss on the musical present or on the historical shifts
that have happened since that riff first started to solidify, and instead becomes a
material ‘product’, as if its reorientation into the improvised music happened just
because the riff was ‘around at the right time’, or easily within an uncreative musician’s
fingers. This happens both with riffs that directly appropriate the work of other artists,
and with riffs the composer or improviser may have created and used solely as filler,
rather than as a real-time reaction to the musical present.
As a collegiate jazz student support, I saw the ‘riff’ function as an uncontested tech-
nique and function. Faculty and graduate students demonstrated a categorical disinter-
est in an examination of the riff as postmodern element. During my time at the
Eastman School of Music, my professors demanded that I familiarise myself with
those riffs that functioned as epithetic solutions to harmonic problems. I was told to
perform them in the spirit of the genre as performed nearly 60 years ago—a time
period and a genre that had nothing to do with my lifetime or body. To be conversant
in this language was to be like Nick Zedd—to perform a creative function that,
10 W. Eisenberg
however unique, served a pre-existing musical context, and could be judged accord-
ingly. My queer, femme body loved these pre-existing sounds and contexts, and
desired fluency within their frameworks, but was never successful at performing
them as my professors wanted. I never ‘swung’ hard enough, and if you ‘know it
[swing] when you see it’, I never would be able to, not unless I played with ‘balls’.
My alienation in this way created space for my later achievements in free improvisa-
tion, where my personal creative practice uses riffs on the genre but does not have a
static, gendered convention outside of my own.
Students were encouraged to find different phrases that we could organise in real
time, practicing improvising arrangements of blocks of pre-approved, epithetic
material rather than extemporaneous musical expressions. The goal was not to
create anything that could be ‘exalted as “purely musical,”’ but instead to regurgitate
that which could be considered accurate. These educators valued the voices and tech-
niques of particular musicians, particularly those who generated riffs strong enough to
have become almost their own genre: a ‘Bird’ lick, or a ‘Monk’ sound. Those more cri-
tically engaged with the jazz-hierarchical narrative tended not to imitate Bird or Monk.
They were busy creating their own musical systems. The convention within ‘non-jazz’
improvised music became to be ‘purely musical’; to possess an inimitable musical
voice. By contrast, jazz arbiters demanded that jazz performers regurgitate these
once-personal riffs and techniques in order to show familiarity with and therefore
respect for the genre, while erasing the potential of a personal voice from anything
that they would consider to be authentic within the genre.
Jazz historical re-enactment is sometimes considered more artistically or historically
‘correct’ as a practice unto itself than any inquiry as to what jazz references from these
‘roots’ musics mean in our postmodern landscape. If we are to assert that bebop
improvisations show an early predilection of improvised music toward postmodernist
techniques, ‘speaking’ within a genre serves more of a high modernist function. The
singularity of an artistic voice is the material that the postmodernist can parody,
and riff parodies itself at the same time it parrots an earlier genre or sound. Riffs
are genre signifying itself. Not merely convention, riffs simultaneously transcend
and ossify original voices, where that voice always comes from and therefore signifies
a body in history.
The critics who categorise unfamiliar sounds in improvised music to be ‘not jazz’
uphold jazz as the standard for legitimacy. The concept ‘legitimacy’ is linked with the
erasure of particular bodies or eccentricities from historical narratives. Legitimacy is
also antithetical to any truly experimental music, because that concept denies the per-
sonal realities of the musical present in favour of a historicised and therefore more ‘cred-
ible’ past. A personal voice is embodied in a singular experience that might speak a
multiplicity of languages. Those familiar with riffs from different traditions threaten
the accessibility of their main genre because they engage with obscure sounds in
much the same the way that more traditional genre musicians use riffs. However,
where conservative musicians use riffs to establish kinship with a lineage, the pluralism
 Contemporary Music Review 11
of identities in our cultural moment is such that the contemporary improviser needs to
be aware of the social ramifications of which languages they profess to speak.
Musicians aware of this pluralism tend to make explicit their essentialist views on
the origins of music. Certain subgenres within jazz are given much more politically
informed names: Black American Music, à la Nicholas Payton, and other micro-
genres that are more Eurocentric or pan-Latin. The musicians who name these
micro-genres are the only ones capable of performing them or naming their succes-
sors. This kind of tribalism tends to exalt not the multiplicity of possible artistic
voices, but mirrors instead the dominant evaluative cultural forces by codifying and
standardising its own subculture. These might possess their own riffs, but they
speak to only one fragment of the musical world, not the shared collective memory
of more ancient musical sounds.
In her seminal work, A Cyborg Manifesto, Donna Haraway comes to a similar con-
clusion about the naming of fractured identities that I find useful as a framework for
examining improvisation:

With the hard won recognition of their social and historical constitution, gender,
race, and class cannot provide the basis for belief in ‘essential’ unity. There is
nothing about being ‘female’ that naturally binds women. There is not even such
a state as ‘being’ female, itself a highly complex category constructed in contested
sexual scientific discourses and other social practices … painful fragmentation
among feminists (not to mention among women) along every possible fault line
has made the concept of woman elusive, an excuse for the matrix of women’s dom-
inations of each other. (2016, 17)

Taking seriously the notion that improvised music is as much an outgrowth of social
caste as aesthetic taste, we see that this fragmentation heads not towards the dream of a
common language but towards either a unity or crisis of differing voices. The riff, as
repetition of a shared past, creates a form in the present, unified by two listeners
dreaming with the same material, while keeping their aesthetic appraisal of that
material their own.
It is easy to prioritise riff-based musical languages because they make the art form
approachable to discern and qualify. The speaker of any language prioritises the
materials that best echo their experiences. As social identities splinter into increasingly
tiny subgroups, those hybridised subgroups are often unable to speak authoritatively to
all the social histories at once. Haraway:

A Chicana or U.S. black woman has not been able to speak as a woman or a black
person or a Chicano. Thus, she was at the bottom of a cascade of negative identities
… this identity marks out a self-consciously constructed space that cannot affirm the
capacity to act on the basis of natural identification, but only on the basis of con-
scious coalition, of affinity, of political kinship. (2016, 18)

The performance of identity is like the performance of a riff: it uses certain properties
of a genre in order to show affinity. Riffs fix what is ‘essential’ to a genre into a gesture
12 W. Eisenberg
that can be infinitely repeated, just as particular musicians view their cultural identity
as essential to their practice. However, the non-corporeality of a riff affords it a politi-
cal fluidity: any improviser can use any riff and that riff will still speak to its context(s).
In this way, the riff becomes as much an extension of the performer’s body as their
material. Not merely time-travel, a riff, like Haraway’s cyborg, is ‘a condensed
image of both imagination and material reality, the two joined centres structuring
any possibility of historical transformation’ (2016, 7).
Improvisational languages that are less concerned with riff and restatement appear
to provide more space for inclusivity, but the question of broader social access to this
kind of free music still haunts the largely cisgendered male improvisation concert
setting. When a genre like free improvisation purports not to have any ‘riffs’ of its
own, the repetitions that structure the moment’s form take on another meaning
entirely. Just as ‘the cyborg is a kind of disassembled and reassembled, postmodern col-
lective and personal self’ (2016, 33), the improviser fuses any references implicit in
their chosen material with the pressure to invent in real time while still possessing a
visible body in space.
The cyborg is the individual fused with their instrument as much as it is the riff
material sounding over the fluid social interactions that are the ‘product’ of free
music. Toward the end of Cyborg Manifesto, Haraway gives an ultimate definition of
cyborg, as the

people who refuse to disappear on cue, no matter how many times a ‘Western’ com-
mentator remarks on the sad passing of another primitive, another organic group
done in by ‘Western’ technology. (2016, 59)

This sets forth a duality that improvisation as a technique and riff as generalising,
essentializing function work together to question: between Western cultural domina-
tion and its subversion by those othered ‘organic’ people who regularly rewrite their
bodies and societies in order to survive.
The free improviser refuses ideological victimisation at the hands of their most
beloved musical systems while continuing to perform, consciously and subconsciously,
the riffs most emblematic of the social aesthetics that established improvisation as both
function and product. The specific language of the blues might not enter particular
improvisational contexts, but improvisation as a wider genre contains atavistic
conventions of the blues, from the individuality of improvised musical expressions
to the social unity and shared memory of its performers. In this way, the riff
structures the improvisation, in the way that they can create or disrupt form, that
they speak to modernism and postmodernist techniques at once, and the way they
set their performer in a singular cultural moment while speaking to a shared aesthetic
memory.

Disclosure Statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.
 Contemporary Music Review 13
Notes on Contributor
Wendy Eisenberg is a guitarist, banjo-player, and poet. Using the languages of free jazz, metal, and
contemporary art song, her music challenges the representational and technical demands placed on a
guitar and a banjo in contemporary music. Wendy’s debut record as a solo improviser, ‘Its Shape is
Your Touch’, came out in October 2018. Her trio, The Machinic Unconscious, with Ches Smith and
Trevor Dunn, released an album on Tzadik that same month. Both records made Billboard’s Top Ten
Jazz Records year end list, and received coverage from NPR, Downbeat, and National Sawdust.
Wendy has written and performed in numerous projects, including the critically acclaimed exper-
imental band Birthing Hips, described by NPR as ‘brainy, noisy punk based in sonic adventure, tech-
nical mastery, and rejection of the status quo’. Her work as an improviser has led her to collaborate
with Matt Mitchell, Ted Reichman, Joe Morris, Weasel Walter and Shane Parrish. She has premiered
work by Zorn, Maria Schneider, and Bill Holman, and performed original works at The Stone, Nublu
151, The New School, the Hartt School of Music, and New England Conservatory. Her poetry has
been set into two large scale orchestral works by Matt Curlee. Her writings on music can be
found in John Zorn’s Arcana VIII: Musicians on Music.

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