and unconsciously, for future events.
In contrast, many of the writers whose histories, essays, and analyses I have read have either been interested primarily in musical analysis focused on “great men” in jazz history (Schuller 1968, 1989), have concerned themselves with exploring connections between music and cultural history (Tirro 1977; Collier 1978; Kenney 1993; Stowe 1994), or—in extreme cases—have subjected musicians to psychoanalytic scrutiny (Collier 1987; cf. Carner 1991). In other words, these writers have taken as their object a static conception of “the music” and/or the individual and have relied upon the standard tools and methodologies of musicological and historical investigation. If they have widened their scope to encompass anything comparable to musical events, to see music ontologically as process as well as product (Bohlman 1999), they have done so only as a secondary concern. Their modes of inquiry are heavily dependent on documents, entities whose isolatability and seeming fixity make them amenable to textual interpretation.
As such documents, audio recordings have been valuable sources for scholars interested in jazz performance. By facilitating repeated listening, they enable a researcher to grasp performative and textu(r)al nuances that might otherwise pass unnoticed. They also make possible comparative projects, so that one might examine the two complete takes of “Parker’s Mood” from Charlie Parker: The Complete Savoy Sessions or use Thelonious Monk’s numerous takes of “’Round Midnight” on Thelonious Monk: The Complete Riverside Recordings as a basis for understanding jazz improvisation as practice and process.9 At the same time, recordings also minimize the importance of the researcher being in close physical proximity to the musicians at a given performance, “live” or recorded, and that lack of proximity often creates interpretive blind spots. Performances, after all, are multitextured events, filled with proxemic, kinesthetic, visual, and other contextual stimuli and information. Recordings containing only the audio information are unique but ultimately incomplete representations of them.
Despite such obvious limitations, some of jazz’s most influential analysts have written as though recordings were transparent windows into the past or into performance practice. In the preface to Jazz: Its Evolution and Essence (1956), for example, André Hodeir explains his reliance on recordings for research by emphasizing their fixity: “The judgments of jazz in this book are based on recordings, which have reached a state of technical perfection that makes such an approach valid. Besides, the recording is the most trustworthy witness we have in dealing with an art form of which nothing that is essential can be set down on paper. The reader should not be surprised, therefore, if the words work and record are used interchangeably throughout” (2). While acknowledging the limited efficacy of notation, Hodeir asserts that recordings are similar to written scores in that they offer analysts access to musical works.10 Like Hodeir, Gunther Schuller posits an equivalence between recordings and works when he writes that the jazz historian must evaluate “the only thing that is available to him: the recording” (1968, x).11 Schuller does question whether such “one-time affairs” can be viewed as definitive, but he feels that—in absence of other texts—they, as “primary source[s],” are all that historically minded analysts have at their disposal. And since the most prominent methods of musical analysis were developed for notated music, jazz researchers who want their work to be intelligible have to transcribe music from a recording—to transform it into a score/work, and in the process reduce complex sonic events to the parameters of pitch, rhythm, and volume—before analyzing it.12
The work perspective, though, founders partly because recordings are not “acoustic window[s] giving access to how the music really sounded” (Rasula 1995, 135). Or, as Anthony Seeger explains, “[no recording] preserves sounds. What it preserves are [selective] interpretations of sounds—interpretations made by the people who did the recordings and their equipment” (Seeger 1986, 270, emphasis in original; see Jairazbhoy and Balyoz 1977). Microphone selection and placement, recording media, room construction, frequency equalization, dynamic range compression, and countless other choices affect what we hear on a recording. A change in any one of them can appreciably alter the final product.13 Each of these choices constitutes a human decision, whether a producer’s, engineer’s, or performer’s, oriented toward getting a specific kind of sound, doing something in one way rather than in others.14
Indeed, based on evidence from a number of recordings in the 1990s, one might assert that the now-standard reliance on multitrack recording and on digital editing has led to a broader anxiety regarding the fidelity of recordings to a live performance ideal.15 In the notes for pianist Jacky Terrasson’s 1995 release Reach, for example, Mark Levinson offers the following account of the CD’s recording:
Years ago, musicians recorded music as they played—informally, in close physical proximity, without much editing. What they played was what people heard on the record. Today that approach has been all but lost. Studios separate the musicians, put them behind glass booths, give them headphones and cue tracks, and leave most of the production decisions to engineers in the post-production process—mixing, editing, and mastering.… [In my approach, only] two microphones are used, positioned carefully in the optimum location. The balance between instruments is therefore created by the musicians themselves. There is no opportunity later to change this balance…. Musicians and engineer are in the same room with no glass windows or partitions between them. No headphones or monitors are used by the musicians.16
Here, again, the assumption is that recordings, at least when done well, can provide direct access to what musicians do. Many other releases from the 1980s and ’90s contain similar statements, such as “recorded live to 2-track,” perhaps intended to make them seem more authentically representative of live jazz performance and more accurate as historical documents.
In that capacity, they might also give us privileged access to the authorial intentions of individual musicians. This second kind of fidelity is compromised when we take account of how musicians decide what and when to record (see DeVeaux 1988, 127, 135). In his autobiography Reminiscing in Tempo (1990), for example, producer Teddy Reig explains that he allowed Charlie Parker to choose all of the tunes recorded during his sessions for Savoy—provided they were “original” compositions, that is, ones that did not require the record label to pay royalties to other composers. Orrin Keepnews, however, took a more hands-on approach in recording Thelonious Monk for Riverside:
My partner [Bill Grauer] and I had decided that our initial goal was to try to reverse the widely held belief that our new pianist was an impossibly obscure artist; therefore, we would start by avoiding bebop horns and intricate original tunes. We proposed an all-Ellington trio date: certainly Duke was a universally respected figure and major composer…. [Monk] agreed without hesitation, despite claiming to be largely unfamiliar with Ellington’s music. I insisted that Thelonious pick out the specific repertoire, and eventually he requested several pieces of sheet music. (Keepnews 1988, 122–23)
Monk’s second session for Riverside produced another album of jazz standards, again at the request of Grauer and Keepnews. It was only with his third release that Monk was allowed to record his own compositions.17 Likewise, Joshua Redman (1995a) told me that his decision to record Eric Clapton’s “Tears in Heaven” for the album Wish (1993) came after he listened to a cassette compilation suggestively given to him by Matt Pierson, his producer.18
Finally, it is rarely clear whether the compositions on a given release were rehearsed by a band prior to recording or whether they were created in the studio. Charlie Parker’s most celebrated quintet—with Miles Davis, Duke Jordan, Tommy Potter, and Max Roach—was a working band that almost certainly had performed some of the tunes they recorded in live settings before entering the studio. At the very least, they had performed tunes with similar harmonic progressions. But according to both Teddy Reig (Reig and Berger 1990, 22) and Miles Davis (Davis and Troupe 1989, 88–89), there were also numerous tunes recorded by Parker and his groups whose melodies were composed and learned by musicians on the spot. Such instant composition and
