All symphonic musicians are improvising to some degree when they interpret a written score, and with very few exceptions, jazz musicians are drawing on a reservoir of written music when they improvise. Improvisation and fidelity to a written text represent a continuum, not a dichotomy. But for most white Americans and for most of the twentieth century, improvisation was black and the disciplined reproduction of a written score was white, just as jazz was black and classical was white. With these distinctions comes a long tradition of financial support, institutionalized education, canon building, and the rest.
Nevertheless, if you think about the history of jazz and American popular music, black people clearly have something that white people want. From the 1830s until the middle of the twentieth century, the most popular form of entertainment in the United States was the minstrel show. When white men put on burnt cork to impersonate African-Americans, they were portraying them as simple, childlike, and endowed with natural musical ability. Think of Jolson singing “Mammy,” but think also of Birth of a Nation in which white actors in blackface aggressively pursue innocent white women. The white minstrel men, like the white men playing blacks in Birth of a Nation, were inhabiting the fantasy of blacks as more sexual, more transgressive, more emotional, and more spontaneous.
In the middle of the twentieth century, however, white performers began channeling blackness without blacking up. White entertainers such as Benny Goodman had been doing this for several years. Marlon Brando, however, may be the first white American performer outside of jazz to practice minstrelsy in white face. Although not every aspect of it is appealing, Brando's performance in A Streetcar Named Desire embodies, on several levels, what we might call an aesthetic of jazz improvisation. Both jazz and the Method Acting of this period were part of a modernist mix that included a romance with psychoanalysis, new forms of racial imitation, and a fascination with improvisation. Significantly, in 1951, when Streetcar was released, blackface performance was disappearing from the American cinema. Al Jolson, Judy Garland, Mickey Rooney, Bing Crosby, Fred Astaire, and many others had all blacked up for movie roles. The practice came to an end in 1952 after Joan Crawford appeared in dusky body paint in Torch Song. African-American performance styles had been so integrated into American entertainment that blackface was no longer necessary. Elvis Presley made his first records in 1953.
It was also in the 1950s that specific connections between jazz artists and the unconscious mind began appearing in the psychoanalytic literature. For example, an analyst with the jazzy name Miles Miller wrote in 1958 that jazz functions “as a sublimated means of releasing tension associated with repressed hostile and aggressive impulses.” More specifically, Miller associated the sounds of the jazz trombone with “anal expulsive components” that bring delight to audiences who would surely find such sounds objectionable in other situations.
The Method Acting that enjoyed a vogue in the 1950s was also promoted in terms of what is ordinarily repressed and ignored. Like patients in therapy working through repressed moments in the past, Method actors looked back to incidents in their own lives to find the emotional key to constructing a character. Indeed, the Actors' Studio, the home of the Method in postwar New York, has been conceptualized as a therapeutic institution with its leader Lee Strasberg playing the role of psychoanalyst and his actors the role of analysands. With the help of elaborate exercises, frequently built around improvisation, actors sought to “unblock” themselves and connect with their inner selves in hopes of bringing authenticity and immediacy to their performances. Some jazz artists were intrigued by psychoanalysis at the same time that Method Acting was gaining in popularity. In his writings from this time, the great composer and bassist Charles Mingus seemed to understand jazz and improvisation as psychoanalysis “by other means.”
Marlon Brando's most famous piece of apparently improvised business involves Eva Marie Saint's glove in On the Waterfront (1954). The scene is regularly cited as the locus classicus of Brando's improvisatory style in particular and of Method Acting in general. Brando picks up the white glove that Saint seems to have dropped by accident. While sitting on a child's swing, he absentmindedly toys with the glove, eventually putting it on his own hand. Brando actually improvised with the glove after Saint accidentally dropped it
Krin Gabbard, Ph.D., is professor of comparative literature and English at Stony Brook University. His most recent book, Hotter Than That: The Trumpet, Jazz, and American Culture, will be published by Farrar, Straus & Giroux in 2008.
during a rehearsal with director Elia Kazan. At Kazan's urging, the business was preserved when the scene was shot. When Brando toyed with the glove, seemingly without artifice, many were convinced that he was letting his unconscious do the work for him and that he was drawing on training that was heavily inflected by psychoanalysis.
The incident with the glove in On the Waterfront was not just a bravura piece of improvisation, if indeed it was by the time the film was shot; it also allowed Brando to reveal a feminine side—by putting on the clothing of a woman—as well as an innocent, childlike quality by sitting on the swing. In A Streetcar Named Desire, when Brando as Stanley Kowalski inspects the items in the trunk belonging to his sister-in-law Blanche that has recently been deposited in the dining room, he is once again unafraid to handle female garments. He also sulks like a child and plays the boys' game of keep-away whenever Stella tries to grab back whatever Stanley has unceremoniously plucked from the trunk.
Several incidents in Brando's biography reveal a deep fascination with black sexuality. It may explain his rejection of the conventional poses of male stars such as Wayne, Gable, and Bogart, and his appropriation of a more sensual masculine presentation. He was also affecting behavior more typical of children and adolescents than of grown-up men. Again, think of Jolson singing about his Mammy. But Brando was also in touch with a generation of jazz artists, both black and white, who acted out their gender in more subtle ways. The ability of Miles Davis to project vulnerability and even to “cry” with his trumpet became as essential to his gender presentation as his “manly” fascination with boxing and expensive sports cars.
We can also see the influence of the jazz improviser in Streetcar when Stanley rifles through Blanche's possessions. Toward the end of the scene, when white feathers drift away from the stole that Brando has been manhandling, he picks them out of the air with the purposeful purposelessness of a child. Once again he has ingeniously found a way to react “in character” outside of any scripted directions. In this context, the myth of the jazz improviser as an inspired primitive or as a bold explorer of the unconscious should be placed alongside the equally powerful myth of jazz soloists as disciplined artists in full control of their craft.
Accomplished jazz artists have large bodies of music under their fingers and can insert favorite motifs, bits of exercises learned in practicing, and fragments of familiar melodies into a performance. They also have different strategies for deploying this material or “running the changes” so that each improvised performance will be different from what they played in the past.
Accomplished jazz artists have large bodies of music under their fingers and can insert favorite motifs, bits of exercises learned in practicing, and fragments of familiar melodies into a performance. They also have different strategies for deploying this material or “running the changes” so that each improvised performance will be different from what they played in the past. But the best jazz improvisers do more than simply run the changes. They also know how to build a solo with structure and logic. As many musicians and scholars agree, there also comes a point when the musician's unconscious takes over, when the musician is “in the groove,” no longer thinking through each step in the improvisation. Nevertheless, some jazz scholars have developed carpal tunnel syndrome transcribing recorded solos in order to demonstrate the structural elegance of a jazz musician's improvisations. In a book about Charlie Parker, for example, Henry Martin takes the different versions of the same song that Parker recorded in a single recording session and then shows how Parker was effectively presenting a more rigorously logical composition in each successive version of the tune. By using the methods of the German musicologist Schenker, Henry Martin gives us a Charlie Parker more like Johannes Brahms than Ornette Coleman.
And yet, to the uninitiated, jazz musicians seem to be making all of it up as they go along. The accomplished improviser has also learned the codes that connote freshness, looseness, and a feeling of spontaneity. When Marlon Brando as Stanley Kowalski picks feathers out of the air in A Streetcar Named Desire, he may be letting his unconscious mind do the work. But he also has much in common with accomplished jazz musicians, dipping into a large reservoir of formulas and gestures acquired through years of training and practicing. And like the great jazz artists, Brando makes it all seem as if it's coming to him out of the air—just like the feathers.