Ka-Knowledge, Deixis and Bird

Hey, sorry I missed everyone on Monday.

As I read Jeff Rice’s article and Collin Brooke’s discussion of deixis, I kept circling back to Charlie Parker (I could say to “jazz” or even “Bebop,” but to keep this example under some control, I’ll stick with Parker). I thought of the fusion of quotations that became the "assemblages" of Bird’s solos, especially when Rice was making a case for hip-hop’s “sounding out” as rhapsodizing, which Ong “places at the center of Homeric poetry and the Greek rhetorical tradition” (Rice). While I see that "hip-hop as an assemblage" affords us a means of discussing "different ways of knowing through digital writing," it seems like the fusion (or rhapsodizing) in hip-hop lyrics is often less interesting than the fusion of sounds sampled. I’m guilty of generalizing here, but it seems like a wider variety of cultures are assembled at the turn-table than at the mic. That said, I’ve already seen textbooks and readers that present Tupac lyrics alongside other “gritty, urban social commentaries” like Marge Piercy’s “Rape Poem”. Now, of course, it’s not Tupac’s or Jeff Rice’s fault that the full aurality of hip-hop gets canonized as--or flattened into--mere lyrics, and it doesn’t mean that hip-hop can’t help us imagine or illustrate Havelock’s (1986) aural/oral writer building “his own semi-connected discourse out of disconnected bits and pieces contained in oral discourse” (as quoted in Rice). I just think that Parker’s “recompositional” decisions in the moment of improvisation--improvising against the inherited charts and time signatures of old standards, “reimprovising” in set pieces performed nightly with “variations in the stitching [that] led to variations in rhetorical output”-- may provide a useful analog to Rice’s example of the Homeric poet. I guess I just have an easier time thinking of the “aural practice of rhapsodizing” when I think of the sampled beats, hooks, grooves, etc. without the accompanying visual rhetoric of lyrics on a lyrics sheet or in a “social commentary” section of a Bedford collection of “Minority Voices.”

Parker’s improvisations (like the solos of those he influenced) also offer an opportunity to discuss deictic systems. In one sense, Parker became a resource as a pioneering "expert": he absorbed not only the history of jazz but the history of western music and was willing to quote Bartok, Stravinsky, etc. in his playing, in a way that purportedly schooled younger musicians. In another sense he was an "intelligent agent" (the younger musicians took what they wanted or could hear from Parker’s solos, from the way he mixed and matched and seemed to create the new from classical and pop cultural sources, something that also gave expression to his ethos and pathos). For all of its solos, jazz is deeply reliant on collaboration and communication, a reliance that allowed James Baldwin a device for making his narrator finally listen to his brother Sonny "sounding out" and entering a conversation in the epiphanic close of “Sonny’s Blues”. Again, I’m only offering Charlie Parker as a metaphor for discussing deictic systems, “sounding out,” or as an alternative to expert mastery of a subject; I’m not arguing, as it seems Rice is with hip-hop, that a sustained analysis of Parker’s abilities will provide insight into digital networks or ka-knowledge.

I'm also considering Parker's impact on a “small network” of jazz buffs who had tired—at least in Harlem and a few progressive clubs on the west coast—of the influence of swing. Parker’s agency in the evolution of “bebop” is tricky to explore for the same reason it's ideal for discussing small networks: many of his innovations came during the recording strike in the early 1940s, so there was a delay between limited audiences learning to hear jazz a new way in a few clubs on either coast and the mass audiences who purchased a later “now” on recordings that tried to capture—-a few years after the fact-—the spontaneity of the “now” of small club improvisations that had already spawned legions of imitators. As early as 1939 Parker’s devotees “learned” to listen for the origo of a song like “Cherokee” even as they heard it in the “now” context of Parker re-assembling “Cherokee” into his signature tune “KoKo”. Parker’s innovation, or his “recompositional” decisions, led him to play past the original time signatures, improvise new melody lines against older songs’ chord changes, and later snag copyrights for these new songs that became, with each performance, less recognizable. That is, “Cherokee” is certainly harder to hear in “KoKo” than The Police’s “Every Breath You Take” is in Diddy’s tribute to his pal Biggie. By the time much of the country-between-the-coasts got to hear the “revolution” that was “KoKo,” the “now” of that 1944 recording had multiple layers of context: how the old standard once sounded—or at least how its underlying structure was preserved—a collage of what Parker added in the moments of, say, specific club dates in 1941, 42, 43, etc., and what Parker’s “comments” on his own solos were on the day of the studio recording (does this make bebop an example of both the deictic and palimpsestic?).

Ultimately, Rice wants to find ka-knowledge “in the mix,” or as he describes it:
“The result of this stitching (described aptly in McLuhanist terms of bodily extension) is a new type of knowledge where the personal and the multiple events/ideas/moments engaged by the personal (i.e., voice) come together. Not quite autobiography, not quite technological reflection, not quite cultural critique, not quite argument, it is somehow a bit of all the above and something else. . . .this combination of actions through rhapsodizing is indicative of the ka-knowledge of digital writing I am uncovering. In digital culture, the process of interweaving composition and identity, of becoming an extension of one's own writing, of assembling various genres of discourse, has come to be known not as the stitch, but the mix.”

Somewhat relatedly, jazz critics often struggle to find a rhetoric that doesn’t just add to a hagiography of the individual autonomous icon nor discredit the icon's "pioneering work" in favor of LaTour-be-damned “social forces” that contributed to post-World-War-II revolutions in jazz. Take the following quote by Stanley Crouch, writing about Parker in a 1989 article. After referring to Parker as “the self-made creator of a vital and breathtakingly structured jazz vernacular,” Crouch observes,

“[Parker’s] prodigious facility was used not only for exhibition or revenge, moreover, but primarily for the expression of melodic, harmonic, and rhythmic inventions, at velocities that extended the intimidating relationship of thought and action that forms the mastery of improvisation in jazz.” (“Bird Land” 255)
Crouch goes on to make points about the way we begin to learn and intuit an emotional understanding of the performer (sounding out, in his own way) as he makes sampled lines and conjured riffs from the past his own—in the moment, in the “now” that doesn’t get to come back in just the same context at future gigs, recording dates, or when Parker’s solos were “digitally lifted” from their “original context” (Crouch’s terms) so that modern performers could “swing” with him on the poorly received soundtrack to Clint Eastwood’s biopic Bird (1988).

In a transcript of an interview Parker gave in the last year of his life (he died at 34), Paul Desmond and John Fitch seemed to be pressuring him into defining a way of knowing and communicating that music provided (Parker’s elliptical answers, with his false starts and halting phrasing sounds like Sonny when he is pressed to describe his anger with words instead of music in Baldwin’s long middle dialogue). Thirty-five years before the Beasties start droppin’ science in favor of ka-knowledge, Parker tries putting something similar (to me) in his own words:

“There’s definitely—there’s stories and stories and stories and stories that can be told in the musical idiom, you know? You wouldn’t say idiom, either, it’s—it’s so hard to describe music other than the basic way to describe it: music is basically melody, harmony, and rhythm. But I mean, people can do much more with music than that—it can be very descriptive in all kinds of ways, you know? [It can include] All walks of life.”

Back to deixis, I realize I’ve left out the context for this quote: interviewers were pushing him to promote “book study” of jazz to kids who think you’re either born with knowledge and “mastery” or not. All of which leads me back to Rice’s concluding explanations of Ka-Knowledge, in which he asserts:

“To enact a theory and pedagogy of the aural (i.e., sounding out), we also are inventing new forms of knowledge acquisition, forms traditional studies of literacy cannot accommodate. Ka-knowledge as digital knowledge is a mixing, a usage of a variety of ideas, events, moments, and texts for the mix and the subsequent identity of “being mixed,” not for the demonstration of expertise (a fixed, topos-bound concept)”

It seems that most jazz critics and casual fans of Parker often cite his solos--or sample them--for the “demonstration of expertise” (“hey, listen to how Bird mastered the e-flat alto sax like no one else!”), while some, like Gary Woideck, are more interested in the way Parker’s solos, his sense of what was possible musically or aurally, led him to defy traditional musical composition, the limits of structure. I guess in the context of our recent readings, I’m interested in how those like Parker retrained listeners to appreciate, decode, reconsider a high speed “variety of ideas, events, moments, and texts for the mix” (Rice). Again, I would favor including aural knowledge that doesn’t include lyrics—or an easily separated “text” for inclusion in textbooks—to illustrate many of the same points Rice seems to be getting at in his argument for ka-knowledge.

Or, whew, that could just be the cough syrup talking.