Paris, July 1997. Famed jazz saxophonist Ornette Coleman has just invited French philosopher Jacques Derrida to share the stage with him at the Paris La Villette jazz festival for an improvised jazz-text collaboration. Coleman “blows” while Derrida “reads”. The audience members, “intolerant of this unaccustomed form,” drive Derrida off the stage before he can “get into his stride”. His contribution to the event is “pathetically foreshortened” and Derrida is left shaken by the “painful experience”. Of particular interest to this article is the willingness of Derrida to collaborate with Coleman in this manner – especially when his arguments against the possibility of “spontaneity, improvisation and unmediated expression” are often cited in order to critique jazz and jazz improvisation. Coleman, in contrast, attempts everything Derrida says is impossible in relation to improvisation: “Breaking out of the prison bars of rigid meters and conventional harmonic or structural expectations”; resisting “hierarchical distinctions between improvisation and inscription”. His “harmolodic” musical form taunts the laws governing the system of Western tonal music, “encouraging the improviser to be freer, and not obey a pre-conceived chord-pattern according to set ideas of ‘proper’ harmony and tonality”. Throughout his performances, “harmony becomes melody becomes harmony” and the division between the melodic and harmonic forms is effectively ignored, transgressed. As Coleman is quoted as saying in the liner notes of his Free Jazz album: “Let’s try to play the music and not the background”. By “background,” Coleman is referring to the “general framework of jazz improvisation which had established itself soon after the birth of jazz as a more or less incontestable norm”. This “framework,” Jost claims, “consisted of a code of agreements which made up […] the ‘musically universal’ in jazz, and remained constant throughout the years of jazz evolution, while the ‘musically particular’ changed”. Driving this discussion is a deep scepticism, fuelled by Derrida, as to whether jazz improvisation can actually transgress or ignore the “background” of which Coleman speaks. Can it, borrowing from Haldar, “properly” escape jazz’s law, the law of jazz, which “hums in the background”? Or, far from “bringing down the law”, is improvisation “nothing more than the law of law”, “nothing more than the repetition of man’s vertical aspirations?”. Before attempting to answer these questions, I must briefly address a preliminary matter about which many readers may be curious, namely what is this “law of jazz” mentioned above? Or, more pointedly, what is “law”? Although the aim of this article is to locate it not as unity, but as “irresolution”, law persists in the West as a unified subject, a subject that is “‘out there’, perfectly formed, complete and coherent, waiting to be discovered”. It persists, at least in its generic sense, as “a body of rules of action or conduct prescribed by controlling authority, and having legal binding force”. The ideal of the rule of law in Western democratic society means that “everyone is bound by the law”: “the very nature of law is that it applies to us all” (“Head-to-head”). Moreover, it is “presumed that before citizens’ liberties and freedoms are restricted, the full protection of constitutional rights and the political protections provided by our parliamentary system of government will be brought into play”. Determinations of what is and what is not lawful remain under the control of the democratically-elected legislature; police are employed to enforce these laws and courts adjudicate any alleged infractions or disputes over meaning. [...]
