ABSTRACT
Pat Martino ranks among the outstanding jazz guitarists of the last few decades: a gifted player with a keen grasp of mainstream jazz. The imagery is hardly confined to performers: jazz writers, noting the constant interplay and feedback sustaining the collaborative improvisational process, inevitably lapse into a "linguistic" perspective. Jazz provides a compelling source of evidence for the aesthetic hypothesis that art is language-like. Languages require a well-defined, countable lexicon, plus a set of syntactic rules for generating well-formed sequences, plus a set of semantic rules for interpreting well-formed sequences, plus a set of pragmatic rules for interpreting indexical constructions. The theoretical interest of jazz is that it strikes so many performers and sophisticated observers as a form of discursive practice, thereby rendering more urgent the theorist's need to explain these "art-as-language" ways of speaking. Jazz matters to aesthetic theory by foregrounding the need to take seriously the dialogical, art-as-language paradigm: to explain its prevalence and explain its utility.
