The origins of riff as a musical concept in jazz are hard to place. It has been widely used by jazz musicians since the 1920s and is indispensable in talking and writing about jazz. Of the different explanations of its origin, the one that seems most plausible to me is that it is a playful abbreviation of refrain, a common musical term based on the Old French word refraindre, which simply means to repeat. A musical refrain or riff is a repeated musical element, figure, or theme. As a musical phrase that the song returns to and repeats, it challenges the player to play. Consider the common expression ‘that old refrain’ for an idea that has been repeated too many times without innovation or nuance. There is always the danger of repetition that it becomes repetitive.
A riff as a repeated element in jazz, and by extension now in rock and R&B, can likewise become banal and repetitive. The challenge to the musician is always to bring life to the riff, to “make it new,” as Ezra Pound wrote, quoting an ancient Chinese proverb about the challenge to the poet. Quoting the ancients in a new context, creating a new sense, is itself a riff.
To riff, as an action, is to do something precisely opposite to playing that same old refrain. Rather than playing a tired repetition, riffing creates playful variations on a theme in a way that generates new versions: making it new. To riff is never merely to play the riff but always to play with it.
As a noun, a riff means both the repeated element and the new variation on that repeated element. It switches meaning depending on its use. This switch is not incidental. Repetition provokes the relation between sameness and difference, the dialectic of the new, as Kierkegaard showed in his essay On Repetition (1843).
The riff is the dialectic of the new. It is about play and signification, about the interplay of repetition and innovation. It is essential not only to art
but to speaking and listening as well. This dialectic is the key to Jane Hall's discussion about Jazz and Psychoanalysis and the relationship between them.
It is not incidental to this discussion that Freud considered the compulsion to repeat to be a fundamental expression of the Death Drive. He then went on to say that this drive was never found on its own but always intertwined with the Erotic Drive to create and to play. The intertwining of repetition and innovation is at the heart of psychoanalytic theory and the practice of psychoanalysis, as any analysand knows well from experience.
Riffing on a theme is an essential part of jazz. I suspect that jazz musicians coined the term riff because one of the things that distinguishes what they do is to repeat the refrain by playing with it, to improvise variations on the theme, to repeat a musical idea or phrase in a new way, however paradoxical that may be. How a repetition can be new and still a repetition is at the heart of jazz improvisation. And although improvisation is not unique to jazz, there was a great deal of improvisation in European classical music and certainly in African and Asian musical traditions, it is at the heart of jazz in a way that is new in the history of music and essential to the idiom.
The word riff itself is autological. It is an instance of what it means. That is, it is itself a playful riff on the word refrain and on the conceptual interplay of repetition and innovation. As a signifier formed by its own meaning, it demonstrates that we riff in language just as we riff in music. Jazz musicians often riffed in their speech to the point where this became as much a part of the jazz scene as the improvisatory character of the music. The frequent use of neologism, onomatopoeia, and autology, such as be-bop, Scat, or Jam, suggests that Jazz is also a mode of expression beyond music. Jazz culture is a celebration of improvisation and a playful relation to language, not simply a school of music that employs improvisation. Indeed, the term jazz itself, apart from the music, has a range of meanings around play, vigor, vitality, and sex.
That there is a relationship between play and sex is another truth shared by jazz and psychoanalysis. It is not just sex play but the challenge and pleasure in finding something new in the repetition of the physical act
that is essential to how the ‘talking cure’ works. Sex and love might be an old refrain unless riffing brings them back to life. Indeed, that riffing with one's analyst can bring life to one's loving is certainly at the heart of Freud's great discovery.
What is essential in psychoanalysis is to be found in the act of saying, in its playful and risky improvisation in the face of repetition, more than in the resulting text of what is said. In other words, the discursive act is the key to the psychoanalytic process more than the accumulated knowledge of self that results from the saying. The change that comes about in psychoanalysis is less about knowing more than it is about a different kind of knowing, one that comes into being through the act of speaking, indeed through riffing on memories and events, and especially on the moment of speaking and being heard in itself. If it works, psychoanalysis jazzes our experience of being as a being with and for the other.
Being heard suggests that the other is listening and that is not self-evident. In the fullest sense listening is as sensitive to the process of play and repetition that I am discussing here as is speaking. This is where Jane Hall's essay really takes off. It is not simply a riff on jazz and psychoanalysis, but a riff on listening and its functions in jazz and psychoanalysis, indeed its functions precisely in relation to the play of improvisation. How to hear the play, the riffing that is going on, is a sort of counterplay. Hall's title, Riff on Listening, suggests that in the counterplay that is listening, there is a kind of riffing as well. Freud called this ‘evenly suspended attention,’ but that overly technical phrase only begins to capture the complex activity of psychoanalytic listening. I would suggest that the key to psychoanalytic listening is hearing the play in speaking that the speaker is not necessarily aware of, caught up as s(he) is in the speech act itself. It is hearing the riffs, in both senses, the repeated themes, and the play on those themes in the analytic discourse.
Hall's Riff on Listening is not only a playful examination of the art of listening in jazz and psychoanalysis but also an invitation to a series of listening experiences. She provides a wonderfully curated series of links that show what she is saying. It is only in the act of listening that meaning can be encountered. Hall makes the fundamental point that a psychoanalyst, first and foremost, needs to know how to listen but to listen in a distinctive way that is more akin to being another player in a musical
ensemble than to being a rational agent seeking to clarify symptoms, lapses, and inhibitions as a removed observer.
This is an innovative and somewhat controversial view of the analyst's function. It suggests an interplay on the level of the discourse that makes the analyst's function as that of one who hears and supports the play in discourse. Hall's essay is called a Riff on Listening, but it could be a Riff on Hearing. It is possible to listen and not hear. To know how to listen is to understand what is to hear.
Hall opens her essay with a quote from Duke Ellington, viz. “The most important thing I look for in a musician is whether he knows how to listen.” What does it mean to ‘know how to listen’? Surely, this is about keeping your ears open to the play of the sounds and their meaning effects. A Riff on Listening is about listening to the riff.
She concludes her essay with the following statement about psychoanalysis:
In sum, if we listen to and play with each other over time, we hear all kinds of utterances, moods, styles, contradictions, emotions, rigidities that shift, all making prediction dangerous. It is the surprises in analytic work and in music that have kept me going—and I wish the same for you.
Hall offers several links to what she tells is her favorite song, All the Things You Are (Kern/ Hammerstein, 1939), as perhaps the central illustration of her ideas. She also provides links to two discussions of the song's structure, one by the great guitarist Jim Hall, who was Jane's husband. This personal dimension of the essay adds another layer of significance to the discussion. This is not an academic essay but a deeply personal one about both music and psychoanalysis.
As Hall's essay shows us, a riff is not merely a demonstration of technical skill or theoretical sophistication but a deeply personal engagement with the Other, whether as the voice in the music or the unknown resonances in the analysand's speech.