ABSTRACT
While there are different ways of thinking about jazz, in my work I’ve used the metaphor of conversation (and I’ve even extended this to classical music). Hans-Georg Gadamer tells us that a genuine conversation is always open—you never know exactly what will arise out of them. As he puts it, “a genuine conversation is never the one that we wanted to conduct” (Truth and Method 383). Of course, not many conversations are genuine: we often know exactly what will be said. Although the aspect of spontaneity is greatly overemphasized in discourse about jazz, it is truly a central feature. Some jazz is considerably more determinate than others. But, even when musicians have played the same tune many times, there are always what the phenomenologist Roman Ingarden called “places of indeterminacy” (Umbestimmtheitsstellen). What makes all of this particularly interesting is that, as I will argue, jazz can easily be seen as a metaphor for life itself. It is remarkable just how indeterminate human existence is. We make plans and sometimes succeed in carrying them out, but much of what happens to us is “unforeseen” (the original meaning of the term “improvisation”). In this chapter, I will work out the relation of the indeterminacy in jazz and life via Gadamer.
