Group Creativity

[…] Ingrid Monson’s 1996 book Saying Something analyzed many examples of musical collaboration in jazz, along with transcribed musical notation that demonstrated in wonderful detail how musicians converse in a jazz improvisation. Monson described an interview with drummer Ralph Peterson in which she played a tape of a live performance of Peterson’s composition ‘Princess’ with pianist Geri Allen and bassist Essiet Okon Essiet. During Allen’s solo, Peterson’s drum accompaniment was very dense, and there were several instances in which Allen and Peterson traded ideas with each other. During the interview, Monson and Peterson sat together and listened closely to the tape. Monson recognized that one of the conversational exchanges seemed to be based on the distinctive, catchy pattern from Dizzy Gillespie’s famous performance of ‘Salt Peanuts’ and noted this to Peterson. He replied:

Yeah! ‘Salt Peanuts’ and ‘Looney Tunes’ – kind of a combination of the two. [Drummer] Art Blakey has a thing he plays. It’s like: [he sings a rhythmic phrase from the song]. And [pianist] Geri played: [he sings Allen’s standard response]. So I played the second half of the Art Blakey phrase: [he sings the second part of Blakey’s drum pattern].

(Monson, 1996: 77) Geri Allen immediately recognized the musical quotation from her performances with Blakey and then responded with her usual response, indicating that she recognized and appreciated Peterson’s communication (musical transcripts can be found in Monson, 1996: 78–79). As in this example, musical communication in jazz depends on all of the musicians knowing the ‘language’ extremely well — not only the notes of the songs, but even knowing how a certain performer typically plays a certain song with a specific other performer. Peterson then told Monson:

But you see what happens is, a lot of times when you get into a musical conversation, one person in the group will state an idea or the beginning of an idea and another person will complete the idea or their interpretation of the same idea, how they hear it. So the conversation happens in fragments and comes from different parts, different voices.

(Monson, 1996: 78) Monson, herself a jazz drummer and trumpet player, concluded her example by writing ‘There is a great deal of give and take in such improvisational interaction, and such moments are often cited by musicians as aesthetic high points of performances’ (1996: 80).