Structure in the Moment: Rhythm Section Responsivity

Author(s): Maya Kronfeld

Source: Jazz & Culture , 2021, Vol. 4, No. 2, Jazz in the Present Tense (2021), pp. 14-22
Published by: University of Illinois Press

Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/10.5406/jazzculture.4.2.0014

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 Structure in the Moment:
Rhythm Section Responsivity
Maya Kronfeld

Look where your hands are. Now.

—Toni Morrison, Jazz1

Musicians’ silence about improvisation is almost guaranteed to be more truthful

than speaking. Back when we were playing for crowds, questions about improvisa-
tion put to musicians after shows by certain well-meaning listeners could be painful
because it would take so much work to undo the presuppositions inherent in the
question, “Were you improvising when you did that?” To say “yes” would be to
capitulate to the primitivist assumption that jazz is a form of nonstructured magic
where anything goes; to say “no” would be to give in to the contrary assumption
that it’s all planned out in advance. According to this logical bind, the music is
legible as creation only on the assumption that it is premeditated—a sinister view
from which it follows that structured forms by definition are doomed to miss the
moment. But Tony Williams’s ride cymbal on “Nefertiti” still answering our now
with fluid precision demonstrates that feelings are more than devalued ephemera,
that thought can be something other than a horrific freezer of time.2 It is as if
something in the colonial tongues, and their attendant intellectual cultures through
which many Americans must speak, makes it difficult to specify an intermediary
position between a scripted score and the subjective play of “anything goes,” be-
tween fixed structure and arbitrary flow. Indeed, codified musicological discourse
in the West, especially when it comes to discussions of Black music, has often
had a thinly disguised colonizing function. Saxophonist, educator, and cultural
historian Howard Wiley, from whom I learned enough critical theory to fill many
a philosophy course, when asked about the prewritten script called The Real Book
(a compilation of lead sheets for jazz standards famous for its errors), is known to

Jazz & Culture  Volume 4, Number 2  Fall/Winter 2021

© 2021 by the Board of Trustees of the University of Illinois

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Structure in the Moment    Maya Kronfeld 15

ask, “Would you trust a plumber who showed up to your house with a manual?”3
The music sometimes called “jazz” shows that one can play, speak, or think in a
structured manner in the moment.
What forms of erasure are laid bare in those musicians’ silences, those pauses,
what one scholar calls “rhetorical refusals”?4 To what extent are they a reaction to
living in a racist society that has routinely tried to destroy or at least delegitimize
ways of knowing that are nonviolent, nonreductionist, nonsentimentalizing? In such
an environment, isn’t the music itself an expression of the possibility of concepts
that are noncoercive, funky, truthful—the kind of abstraction that takes us closer to
experience rather than away from it?

Mediated “Nows”

James Baldwin opens his essay “Take Me to the Water” by describing an early child-
hood memory:
“That is a good idea,” I heard my mother say. She was staring at a wad of black
velvet, which she held in her hand, and she carefully placed this bit of cloth in a
closet. We can guess how old I must have been from the fact that for years after-
ward I thought that an “idea” was a piece of black velvet.5

Maybe all thoughts have color and texture before these are cut out of them. When I
played with Georgia Anne Muldrow at SESC Pompéia Cultural Center in São Paulo,
Brazil, last year, I started understanding the black velvet that is proper to ideas.6 You
can’t hear Muldrow’s music without expanding your conceptual toolkit for navigat-
ing reality and its fragmentation. The interstitial funk of “Hard Bap Duke” from her
2020 release Mama You Can Bet!, recorded under the name of Jyoti, a one-woman
jazz ensemble, reopens the listener’s most minute inner rhythmic crevices, with a
music that affirms and questions at the same time by revealing new facets of swing
(Ellingtonian triplet funk) in a kaleidoscopic array of the present.7 The disaggregation
and reconstitution of the beat makes fragmentation into something expressively real.
The track ends with over a minute of silence.
Around the time that jazz first started asserting its presentness, philosophers
of language like Bertrand Russell became a bit obsessed with capturing immediate
experience in the moment, but their inherited intellectual traditions made sure that
the possibility of accessing the colorful and textured “now” directly foreclosed the
very moment it was given. For Russell, who distinguished knowledge by acquaintance
from knowledge by description, one immediate consequence—and cost—of the
“now” of direct experience is that literally nothing can be said about, or predicated
of, it.8 The “now” strikes you before you can account for it.

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16 Structure in the Moment    Maya Kronfeld

The ineffability of live musical experience, musicians’ charged silences about

the “now” of improvisational practice, are so valuable because they signal that a
conceptual impasse is afoot, letting us know exactly where we are: the coordinates
of “now” are rhythmically specifiable even as the contents of the present moment
are defined by their defiance of description.
James Baldwin writes: “Americans are able to admire [Black music] only to the
extent that “a protective sentimentality limits their understanding of it.”9 To actually
“be here now,” the way the music is, would require shrugging off repeatedly, and as
a constant practice, the forces of “protective sentimentality” that Baldwin diagnosed
as so typically white American—to hear the music without recourse to the clichés,
falsifying resolutions, and Hollywood endings so characteristic of the American
celebration of ignorance. But it also means hearing it without the vehement over-
categorization that has all too often debased the possibility of true “inquiry” (to use
one of Toni Morrison’s key words) by twisting knowledge into a method of control.10
Indeed, “we live in a country in which words are mostly used to cover the sleeper,
not to wake him up,” as Baldwin, in 1962, so devastatingly theorized it.11 No wonder
that what some call art, others call information.12

Piano

Take, for example, what Steve Lacy once described as “the bad habit of thinking in
chords.”13 I love chords as much as the next piano player, but I understand why they
have come to represent a characteristically American paint-by-numbers epistemol-
ogy. The “chord” creates a static combination out of the free-flowing separateness of
components that need to be given credence and discrete attention in the “now” of
their coming together. This is especially striking when attempting to play composi-
tions by Thelonious Monk. With Monk, it becomes necessary to hear and interpret
what’s in front of you without reducing it to a preexisting concept (“oh, it’s a Bb
dominant chord”).14 Instead of trying to fit the first bar of “Straight No Chaser” into
prevailing concepts of “a Bb7 chord,” I could inquire how the very category of Bb7
is revised, subtracted not only by Monk’s composition but by every single one of his
performances. Here is one way drummer Savannah Harris puts into words rhythm
section responsivity: “I am called to action by the specificity of what is in front of
me.”15 That specificity can be occluded by the very labels that purport to illuminate
sound. In the intro to a famous recording of “Straight No Chaser” I thought I knew,
I suddenly hear Monk playing only an Ab and a B with his left hand, a stark interval
that by being exactly itself puts my existing concepts into crisis, letting more real-
ity in, in just the way that Robin D. G. Kelley has documented.16 Nicholas Payton
has written on the subject of Charlie Parker and the institutionalization of bebop:

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Structure in the Moment    Maya Kronfeld 17

“it’s his rhythmic placement, but you can’t codify free rhythmic thought.”17 Even to
specify those two notes is only to address the most easily specifiable content, not the
previously unavailable form.
Consider Miles Davis’s critique of categorization, for example, in the follow-
ing statement: “I always hated categories. Always. Never thought it had any place
in music.”18 It’s a lot like what Theodor Adorno was saying when he argued that the
mind preemptively stamps onto the world the form of everything it has seen already,
an understanding that makes sure to “imprint” its own conditions of intelligibility
on the object before having to “face it,” as Baldwin would put it.19

Bass

Gerald Brown’s epoch-making live funk bass playing, at age twenty-two, on Marvin
Gaye’s “All the Way Around,” Live at London Palladium (1977), which I’ve been lis-
tening to over and over during quarantine, still routinely calls into question for me
virtually every intellectual binary in the literary and philosophical traditions that I
have been teaching (“You did not understand my philosophy,” sings Marvin to his
lover on this track).20 Contra Adorno, Brown’s bass playing is replete with concepts
that take you into the moment, not out of it. At the same time, the bass movement
thematizes the pain and trauma of eternal return, each chorus beginning anew, right
on the crisis of the tritone. Each new bass note helps construct a series of momentary
interventions, which are also structures of support. But the form acknowledges and
folds in an awareness of stasis to be perpetually overcome, gesturing toward a cul-
tural need to still deal with unacknowledged cycles of violence and their traumatic
repetition. Janis Gaye, who was present at the recording of I Want You, describes “All
the Way Around” as an example of a composition that is deliberately open ended:
“[Marvin] was a master of interpretation and allowing people to interpret for them-
selves. What do you mean by ‘All the Way Around?’ It was another song that had a
hidden, double meaning, and it was appealing. This is how brave he was.”21
My colleague, keyboardist, composer, and producer Paris Nicole Strother,
founder of the groundbreaking, Grammy-nominated group KING with her sister
Amber, writes in her essay “On Minneapolis” (2020), following the murder of George
Floyd in her hometown, about the triumphs of Black American imagination over
white supremacy. But Strother acknowledges the ways in which the racist violence
of the perpetual “now” destroys cultural treasures of both yesterday and tomorrow:
“We lost stories, songs, and poems.”22 The fact that the music is never finished being
known renders it answerable to unforeseen future circumstances, as well as to past
and present experiences that have been occluded from view by structures of oppres-
sion and domination.

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18 Structure in the Moment    Maya Kronfeld

Drums

From Morrison’s Jazz:

What was possible to say was already in print on a banner that repeated a couple
of promises from the Declaration of Independence and waved over the head of
its bearer. But what was meant came from the drums.

Now, down Fifth Avenue from curb to curb, came a tide of cold black faces,
speechless and unblinking because what they meant to say but did not trust
themselves to say the drums said for them, and what they had seen with their
own eyes and through the eyes of others the drums described to a T.23

Not much jazz is played in Morrison’s novel Jazz. Instead, Morrison’s novel makes
it possible to strip back the clichés that have impeded the registering of subversive
sound in the American historical imagination. Stephen Best has shown how Mor-
rison’s novel A Mercy radically defamiliarizes the concept of race by returning to a
moment in time when the concept was not yet fully consolidated.24 Perhaps Jazz
performs a similar function but begins at a moment when the concept of “jazz” had
not yet been fully recruited to the music’s erasure.25 The only sustained dramatic
situation in which live music is found occurs in the “Fifth Avenue March” scene, a
fictional rewriting of the 1917 Negro Silent Protest Parade. The 1917 Protest Parade,
one of the most important events in African American (read: American) history, and
what James Weldon Johnson describes as “one of the strangest and most impressive
sights New York has witnessed,” was organized by the NAACP in response to an
explosion of white racist violence against Black people in St. Louis; it is not usually
considered part of “jazz history.” And yet, a whole epistemology of jazz—a theory
of knowledge, musical and otherwise—could be gleaned from Morrison’s rendering
of the scene, and her focus on the drumming, despite the fact that no “jazz” hap-
pens in it. Indeed, we seem to find “jazz” just where it is nowhere to be found. The
drums in the Fifth Avenue March scene model what it means to hold the fragments
of the “now” together, without falsification. Even (the devastatingly missed) Mor-
rison, under whose pen language could not have been more vibrant, made it very
clear that the music stepped in where the language of official history had failed, the
rhythm of the drums taking on the burden of the linguistic. The silent resistance of
the protesters resounds through the instruments. Language, in becoming more like
music, becomes itself again.

Piano/Drum Duet

From my dialogue with drummer Savannah Harris:

MK:I once overheard a musician at Small’s [Jazz Club in New York City] trying to
work out the puzzle of describing what makes jazz improvisation really happen: “it’s

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Structure in the Moment    Maya Kronfeld 19

not predictable, and yet that sh*t is right.” By the way, this is a one-sentence gloss
on Kantian aesthetics: it’s a philosophically nuanced, still countercultural position:
we must play correctly what could never be prescribed by a formula. There’s no rule
that tells you how to do it, and yet it can be right or wrong.
SH: Not only can it be; it really is right or wrong. There really is a right or wrong binary
here.
MK: The hard thing for the white/western intellectual mindset is that jazz forces you to
think about rightness/appropriateness beyond predetermination.
SH: Yeah, it’s actually a completely different structural agreement that we have.
MK: Structural agreement—that’s brilliant. You have to give up on the predetermina-
tion, but you can’t give up on the rightness!
SH: But what is the criterion for the rightness? I think in music, from the perspective
of playing drums . . . I have to be able to hear as much as I can. I never can hear ev-
erything.26 But even if I can hear 80 or 90 percent of what is happening in the milli-
second, the second that it takes to say “in” . . . that is the only space where anything
can come from. This goes back to [drummer] Kendrick Scott’s lesson to me early
on: if you think it, don’t play it. By the time you’ve thought it, it’s no longer appro-
priate. It’s no longer an appropriate addition.”27

As dwelling in the space of the millisecond demonstrates, being present means pre-
cisely that you can’t hear everything. Rolf-Peter Horstmann, a Kantian philosopher I
love, writes that at the initial stages of putting our experience together into coherent
objects, the job of the imagination is to “synthesize” into a unified intuition as much
as it can of the diverse perceptions that surround us—but with the caveat that it will
let into the field of perception only as much as it can, without shattering our sense of
self.28 “Otherwise,” Kant says with some trepidation, “I would have as multicolored,
diverse a self as I have representations of which I am conscious.”29 To me, this sounds
a lot like Baldwin’s “as much truth as one can bear,” understanding that we live in a
country that can’t seem to bear very much truth at all.30

Voice

In Michael Tilson Thomas’s 2006 interview with James Brown, Thomas turns, rightly,
to the funk icon as the expert on what makes “now” a musical, perceptual, spiritual
challenge.31
MTT: So I was driving along and on came I Got You, or Papa’s Got a Brand New Bag.
I was so struck by it that I actually had to pull to the side of the road, because I
thought, I can’t concentrate on my driving and listen to this. It was such a defini-
tion of things I was trying to work on as a musician, especially when I heard Cold
Sweat for the very first time. It was so together; it was so exact . . . and I say this to
my young conductors I work with: being a conductor means you’re trying to get a
lot of people to agree on where now is.
JB: Now is right!

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20 Structure in the Moment    Maya Kronfeld

MTT: And boy, do you do that!

JB: I’m glad you use the word now, cause now is, you can’t put your hand down and
catch now. And if you say that, you’re the man for me! . . . I haven’t been able to
find how to master when I got to it. Because . . . if I say, “now,” then I just missed it.
It’s missed. It was missed because when I said now, it was now.

Thomas goes on to remark: “After a lifetime of playing Stravinsky’s music, it still

astonishes me how much of that same groove, that same abstraction, James Brown’s
music gets to.” One small correction, with all due respect to Thomas. It is not only
James Brown that got to the same abstraction as Stravinsky; it is also and perhaps
rather Stravinsky who managed to get (finally) to Afro-diasporic “groove and abstrac-
tion,” what Savannah Harris and I refer to as the “global pocket,” demonstrated most
saliently today in the work of Georgia Anne Muldrow.32 Whereas Black American
music is as fluent in the aesthetics of Romanticism as it is in Afro-diasporic abstraction
and groove, this capaciousness is not always reciprocated by the self-titled “Western
canon.” Thomas’s remarkable tribute to Brown notwithstanding, the inability to
grapple with funk (that is, with jazz absent the “protective sentimentality”) is not
only an index of structural racism but also a clue to the ways in which the Western
philosophical tradition is still deformed by its own exclusions.

Notes
1. Toni Morrison, Jazz (New York: Vintage, 2004), 229. I am grateful to Michael Sawyer
for our ongoing dialogue on Morrison. For Sawyer on the relationship between jazz and
Black political thought in the present moment, see his collaboration, a sonic art instal-
lation, with Nicholas Payton: Stop RESIST(ing)/Start RECLAIMING: Eight Minutes and
Forty-Six Seconds. Colorado Springs Fine Arts Center at Colorado College, October 29,
2020.
2. These theoretical possibilities that have proven unreachable for many of the most search-
ing works in the Western tradition are among many philosophical lessons owed to Black
American music. I’m adopting Nicholas Payton’s usage from “An Open Letter to My
Dissenters on Why Jazz Isn’t Cool Anymore” (December 2, 2011), quoted in Thomas
Zlabinger, “Jazz,” in The Palgrave Encyclopedia of Imperialism and Anti-Imperialism, ed.
Immanuel Ness and Zak Cope (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2016), 502.
3. For a major musical and ethnographic intervention in the historiography of swing, based
on his research at the Louisiana State Penitentiary at Angola, see Howard Wiley & The
Angola Project, 12 Gates to the City, CD (2010).
4. John Schilb, Rhetorical Refusals: Defying Audiences’ Expectations (Carbondale: Southern Il-
linois University Press, 2007).
5. James Baldwin, Collected Essays, ed. Toni Morrison (New York: Library of America, 1998),
353. For an intertextual dialogue with this moment, see Morrison’s Jazz. The character
who, from a young age, calls himself Joe Trace after misunderstanding the story of his
parents’ disappearance recalls: “She told me . . . O honey, they disappeared without a
trace. The way I heard it I understood her to mean the ‘trace’ they disappeared without
was me . . . I’m Trace, what they went off without” (Jazz, 124). The abstraction of loss,
displacement, as well as of intellectual creativity are made experientially palpable.

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Structure in the Moment    Maya Kronfeld 21

6. On SESC, see Larry Rohter, “Brazil’s Unique Culture Group Stays Busy Sharing the
Wealth,” New York Times, March 27, 2012, https://www.nytimes.com/2012/03/27/arts
/brazils-leading-arts-financing-group-shares-the-wealth.html.
7. Jyoti, Mama You Can Bet!, written, produced, and arranged by Georgia Anne Muldrow,
SomeOthaShip Connect, August 28, 2020.
8. Bertrand Russell, “Knowledge by Acquaintance and Knowledge by Description” in The
Problems of Philosophy (Mineola, NY: Dover, 1999), 31–48.
9. Baldwin, Collected Essays, 19. Emphasis added.
10. “[The novel] Jazz was my attempt to reclaim the era from F. Scott Fitzgerald, but it also
uses the techniques of jazz—improvisation, listening—to ask questions that I want to ask
myself.” Toni Morrison, Conversations, ed. Carolyn C. Denard (Jackson: University Press
of Mississippi, 2008), 204.
11. James Baldwin, The Cross of Redemption: Uncollected Writings (New York: Pantheon,
2010), 36.
12. It is what esteemed poet, multi-instrumentalist, and radio producer Avotcja Jiltonilro
calls “Bebop, Cubop and the Musical Truth,” https://kpfa.org/program/bebop-cubop-and
-the-musical-truth/.
13. “Steve Lacy Speaks,” interview with Paul Gros-Claude, in Steve Lacy: Conversations, ed.
Jason Weiss (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2006), 44. Quoted in Howard Eiland,
Notes on Literature, Film and Jazz (New York: Spuyten Duyvil, 2019), 95.
14. I am indebted to drummer Ruthie Price and vocalist-composer Valerie Troutt for their
artistic and critical perspectives on Monk specifically and on being oneself generally.
15. Personal interview, January 27, 2021.
16. “Monk’s radical idea was not to add more notes to chords but rather take them away, cre-
ating much more dissonance.” Robin D. G. Kelley, interview with Douglas Gorney, The
Atlantic, March 29 2010, https://www.theatlantic.com/entertainment/archive/2010/03/the
-secret-life-of-thelonious-monk/38128/.
17. Nicholas Payton, interview with Richard Scheinin, Nicholas Payton (blog), October 8,
2013, https://nicholaspayton.wordpress.com/2013/10/08/the-complete-nicholas-payton
-interview-with-richard-scheinin/.
18. Miles Davis, Miles: The Autobiography: Miles Davis with Quincy Troupe (New York: Simon
and Schuster, 2011), 205.
19. Max Horkheimer and Theodor W. Adorno, Dialectic of Enlightenment: Philosophical
Fragments, ed. Gunzelin Schmid Noerr, trans. Edmund Jephcott (Stanford, CA: Stanford
University Press, 2002), 64.
20. Marvin Gaye, “All the Way Round” on Live at London Palladium, recorded in October
1976, Tamla Records (1976).
21. Janis Gaye and Leon Ware, interview with Chris Williams, Red Bull Music Academy Lec-
tures, April 1, 2016, https://daily.redbullmusicacademy.com/2016/04/interview-leon-ware
-janis-gaye-on-marvin-gaye-s-i-want-you.
22. Paris Nicole Strother, “On Minneapolis,” Medium, June 3, 2020, https://medium.com
/@kingparisnicole/i-started-trying-to-find-words-to-say-about-minneapolis-my-hometown
-e101eb74d864.
23. Morrison, Jazz, 53, 54.
24. See Stephen M. Best, “On Failing to Make the Past Present,” Modern Language Quarterly
73 no. 3 (2012): 453–474.

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22 Structure in the Moment    Maya Kronfeld

25. See, for example, Max Roach, “What Jazz Means to Me,” The Black Scholar (Summer
1972).
26. See also Ralph Gleason’s interview with John Lewis about Milt Jackson’s musicality:
“There’s more going on there . . . than you absorb, than you know, than the ear actually
absorbs from what he’s doing.” Gleason, Conversations in Jazz, ed. Toby Gleason (New
Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2016), 93.
27. Personal interview, January 27, 2021.
28. “Only those collections of perceptions . . . that do not interfere with my being able to
think of myself as an identical subject” are allowed. Rolf-Peter Horstmann, “Kant on
Imagination and Object Constitution,” in Kant on Freedom and Spontaneity, ed. Kate A.
Moran (Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press, 2018), 26.
29. Immanuel Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, trans. Paul Guyer and Allen Wood (Cambridge,
England: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 247 (B134).
30. Baldwin, The Cross of Redemption, 34–43.
31. “We Were Playing Boulez, but We Were Listening to James Brown!,” The MTT Files,
https://michaeltilsonthomas.com/mtt-files/program-7-we-were-playing-boulez-but-we
-were-listening-to-james-brown/. Transcript adapted from “The Maestro and the Godfa-
ther,” San Francisco Classical Voice, April 17, 2007, https://www.sfcv.org/content
/maestro-godfather.
32. For this particular insight I am indebted to a conversation with Muldrow about Paul
Hindemith, as well as to Muldrow’s entire corpus of artistic innovations and critical re-
flections on the legacy of funk. See, for example, “Let the Record Show,” interview with
Georgia Anne Muldrow, March 24, 2019, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Vh3zVx
CJQh0.

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