Philosophy of the Performing Arts

performance i: improvisation and rehearsal 163
the same considerations apply to non-improvisational but highly inflected
interpretations of performable works, since they also involve real-time, if
not spontaneous, actions. Stephen Davies has responded that the listener’s
knowledge that she is hearing a recording of an improvised performance can
inform her listening, thereby enabling her to appreciate those features of the
performance that, as seen in Chapter 7, bear upon the proper appreciation
of an improvisation qua activity of the performer. (2001, 305–306).
Brown, however, raises some additional concerns about the impact of
recording technology on improvisational performance. First, he notes that it
is only with the resources provided by recording technology that it becomes
possible to analyze jazz performance. “Traditional jazz analysis” can proceed
only if the analyst has the ability to listen repeatedly to the improvised per-
formance. This might suggest that recording technology makes a positive
contribution towards a better understanding and appreciation of improvised
music. But Brown sympathizes with what he terms “postmodernist” critics
of traditional jazz analysis who argue that, in their concern with structural
features of improvised performances, analysts treat such performances as if
they were pieces of pre-composed music, ignoring thereby the very sponta-
neity that makes them improvisations in the first place.
A second concern expressed by Brown is that the availability of recording
technology has influenced jazz practice in ways that run counter to the ideal
of improvisation. Whereas one might assume that, in jazz at least, the goal
of recording is to capture the spontaneity of live performance, jazz musi-
cians are increasingly using studio techniques such as overdubbing in their
own recordings. This, in turn, is having an effect on the way that audiences
listen to jazz, both live and recorded, making them more interested in the
sonic possibilities of the recordings and less interested in the rawness and
spontaneity of live performance.^12 Not only, then, are recordings an unsat-
isfactory medium for the appreciation of jazz performance, but the kinds of
recordings being made by many jazz musicians are undermining the proper
medium for such appreciation, the live concert in which musicians make
real-time choices in their playing and audience members see these choices as
essential to the appreciation of the performance.
However, it would be wrong to paint too negative a picture of the place
of recordings in the jazz tradition.^13 First, as noted above, Brown grants
that recordings have made possible the analysis and understanding of struc-
tural features of jazz improvisations. This understanding surely has a place
in our appreciation of jazz performance, even if, with Brown, we insist on
the importance of the spontaneity of such performances. To appreciate the
spontaneity of a particular performance is to appreciate something specific
that was done spontaneously, and this appreciation can only be sharpened by
the kind of structural insights into that “doing” that analysis makes possible.