ABSTRACT
This chapter addresses a number of Gilles Deleuzian categories, including assemblage, machine, affect, expression, and above all law, to argue that expression in jazz is a coefficient not of spontaneity but rather of the well-constructed musical agencement, what Bruno Latour has called a 'laboratory', for the creative assemblage and musical expression. The mythology of jazz, if the various musics assembled under that name can be said to have anything in common, is founded upon the putatively spontaneous expression of affect. Jazz as unbounded freedom, a freedom fundamentally linked to a phenomenological, existentialist understanding of the improvising subject as intentional creator of a composition/project. The chapter argues that musical creation and expression, whether improvised or not, should instead be conceived as the immanent assemblage of a subjective sounding machines that can unleash literally immeasurable potentials for expressivity. Brian Hulse's article 'Improvisation as an Analytic Category' offers a compelling overview of recent critique of the category of improvisation.
