In jazz research and performance practice, emphasis has long been awarded to musicians who exhibit virtuosity or mastery of solo improvisation. Whether Louis Armstrong’s assertive solo cadenza on West End Blues or John Coltrane’s blazing acrobatics on Giant Steps, select recordings, such as these, have come to represent the genius of iconic individuals. As a result, generations of scholars, performers, and pedagogues have turned to jazz recording transcriptions to gain insight into the improvisatory techniques and practices of the jazz masters. Because emphasis tends to fall on solo improvisation alone, transcriptions typically neglect one of the most important characteristics of jazz performance: communication. Studying a musician’s solo and the accompanying rhythm section as mutually exclusive entities inadvertently disengages the improvised processes of interaction that reciprocally inform and inspire both solo and accompaniment through various aural cues employed during performance. By analyzing all components of improvised performance as interdependent entities, we may ascertain the communicative dialogue coded in the melodic, harmonic, and/or rhythmic content.

Paul Berliner’s monumental Thinking in Jazz: The Infinite Art of Improvisation (1994) is perhaps the first major scholarly work to specifically investigate the collective aspects of improvisation at length. Berliner employs ethnographic practices to examine musicians’ decisions in rehearsal arranging practices, the conventional roles of instruments, and the collective conversations between musicians in performance. Drawing attention to how rhythm sections improvise accompaniment within the context of the groove, he notes how musicians constantly shift between complementary positions in performance, as they negotiate between harmonic/rhythmic responsibilities and improvised/complementary interactions, for the sake of group unity and musical cohesiveness.

Ethnomusicologist Ingrid Monson uses Berliner as a point of departure in her influential study on the sociocultural dialogics of improvised jazz performance, Saying Something: Jazz Improvisation and Interaction (1996). Monson asserts that the interactive role of improvisation in jazz performance lends itself specifically to the metaphor of conversation and reveals much about the musical process, explaining that “the conversation metaphor used by jazz musicians operates on two levels: it simultaneously suggests structural analogies between music and talk and emphasizes the sociability of jazz performance.” Taking cues from W.E.B. DuBois’ notion of African-American double- consciousness and Henry Louis Gates, Jr.’s Theory of Signifyin(g), she considers how the musical, cultural, and linguistic systems of diasporic Africans in America affect how jazz is perceived and understood by performers and listeners alike, in terms of metaphors and tropes. Monson posits that analyzing the interaction between improvising musicians in performance reveals that musical sounds can refer to the past and offer social commentary through cultural irony or parody. Through what she calls intermusicality, musicians convey both cross-cultural and intra-cultural ironies by manipulating previous forms, whether in transforming European-American popular song, referencing classical repertoire, inserting humor, or quoting other musicians and styles within or outside the jazz tradition.

In this presentation, I draw from Ingrid Monson’s theory of intermusicality in order to untangle the complex web of musical and sociocultural interplay inherent in the sonic material of collaborative improvisation, as exhibited by piano trios during the late 1950s and early 1960s. With particular emphasis on piano trios led by pianists Ahmad Jamal and Bill Evans, these groups inspired seismic shifts in jazz during this period by challenging conventional practices pertaining to instrumental roles, structural framework, and harmonic and metric freedom, and redefining the ways in which musicians utilize improvisation as a vehicle for interaction in jazz performance. I reference my personal transcriptions of three live performances of Cole Porter’s All of You to delineate the overall conceptual framework employed by each trio and notate the improvised interplay between piano, bass, and drums for intermusical analysis. With emphasis on the communicative properties of improvised performance, the musical analysis of this study pivots on instrumental relations within the context of the trio, rather than individual displays of virtuosity. In doing so, I hope to entice further considerations of intermusical concepts in jazz scholarship, pedagogy, and performance, so to better comprehend the musical, social, and cultural relationships enacted between improvising musicians, their audience, and the tradition of jazz performance itself.