Lifting the veil on ‘a good jam’: describing the coordination dynamics of an acoustic jazz trio

Abstract

As a professional bass player and teacher I have experienced various instances of musicians interacting with one another in a group setting. These interactions varied from school ensembles, music students at a tertiary level, to professional musicians. Through my own teaching and playing career, I have noticed that certain groups of musicians are better than others at communicating their ideas and to coordinate as a group during a musical performance. Meadows(2008, 2) explains that a system is "a set of things – people, cells, molecules, or whatever – interconnected in such a way that they produce their own pattern over time" while Kelso (2009, 1539) states that coordination dynamics aims to identify and describe the nature of coordination within a part of a system. With these statements in mind, Bishop (2018, 4) argues that a musical ensemble can be regarded as a system in which the individual musicians, their instruments, the audience, and the performance space, are components that are interacting as a system. There is an apparent gap in the literature as authoritative texts on improvisation and coordination within the jazz rhythm section such as Saying Something by Ingrid Monson (1996) and Thinking in Jazz by Paul Berliner (1994) mainly focus on musicians in the United States. This study examines the interaction and coordination of a South African jazz trio during a musical performance to address the apparent shortfall in the literature in a South African context. This lack of depth in the literature leads to the research question: What are the main methods of communication and coordination within the Charl du Plessis Trio during a performance? A summary of the history and circumstances that led to the formation of the jazz piano trio as a group format is included in this study. It highlights the work of prominent trios and compares them to the work of the trio led by Charl du Plessis, examining the ways that his trio performs traditional jazz works and how their interaction and coordination methods differ from traditional jazz performance conventions. I undertook to describe the main communication and coordination dynamics to determine whether a jazz group in the South African context functions similarly to their American counterparts. This dissertation aims to contribute to the scholarly literature about the lived experience of musicians in such a trio. The Charl du Plessis Trio, of which I am a member, was chosen as a sample group, considering its critical acclaim (see Section 2.2.4 Charl du Plessis sample group), its South African context, and its history of actively performing as a jazz trio between 2006 and 2021. This history is in contrast with the ad hoc zero history of groups studied by Bastien and Hostager (1988) in a jazz context. This study describes the differences and similarities in each musician’s viewpoint or experience in the trio, specifically examining the work of the Charl du Plessis Trio, drawing on the work by Kelso (2003, 45) on how patterns of coordinated behaviour emerge from each member’s musical contributions over time. Due to the small sample group, the research design of this study consists mainly of structured interviews with the participants using the Interpretive Phenomenological Analysis framework. The participants’ interviews were transcribed and analysed to identify which of the Wittenbaum et al. (2002, 178–80) coordination methods (pre-plans, tacit pre-coordination, in-process planning, or in-process tacit coordination) were most relevant for describing the coordination between participants during a performance. This study finds that in-process tacit coordination (members making mutual strategy adjustments tacitly while working to fit the observed behaviour of others) is the most common method of coordination during a performance within the sample group. Other methods of coordination that were also found to contribute to the group's performance were pre-plans (members making explicit their planned actions), tacit pre-coordination (where members make assumptions about what is expected of them), and in-process planning (where members define their roles explicitly communicating their planned strategy).