Song, Beat, Sound, and Solo: Production, Musical Style, and a Recording-Oriented Aesthetic of Jazz

ABSTRACT Jazz musicians have increasingly incorporated advanced recording techniques like overdubbing, sampling, and virtual instrument programming into their creative processes. While some of these techniques are not new to jazz, their recent use is often distinguished by transparency – musicians make little effort to conceal their use and may, in fact, foreground it – and, relatedly, by the extent to which they have been accepted as legitimate creative practices. Indeed, many musicians identify with music “production” as it is practiced in contemporaneous recording-oriented genres like hip-hop, electronic music, and pop. Further, the ascendency of this type of production in jazz has been concomitant with new approaches to text, melody, rhythm, timbre, and form. In this article, I identify several technologies and techniques of production in jazz, and I organize related stylistic trends under the frameworks of song, beat, and sound, concepts drawn from the discourses of musicians that have deliberate valences to other genres of production-based music; I also briefly consider how these stylistic trends accommodate the improvised solo. Ultimately, I identify a recording-oriented aesthetic of jazz, which runs contrary to a dominant jazz aesthetic that privileges traditionally “live” performance, wherein recording is figured largely as a means of “capturing” otherwise unmediated performances.