Chapter 3: Radio as Collective Improvisation

Ahh, whatever. You won’t give me a script until the day of the show, anyway, right? Yeah, yeah. Improvisation. How very jazzy of you…

—Koda Minare, Nami yo Kiitekure (Wave, Listen to Me!) chapter 15, “I Won’t Connect with You,” 2020

“Open Ears”

In the manga series Nami yo Kiitekure, translated as Wave, Listen to Me!, restaurant server and main protagonist Koda Minare finds herself thrust into the realm of late-night radio after meeting and drunkenly ranting to a producer at fictional Moiwayama Radio Station and giving permission for the station to record and air her impromptu diatribe, framed as radio theater. With no prior broadcast experience and no financial sponsors for her time slot, Minare’s start at MRS is not dissimilar from that of a new community radio programmer, albeit with a meager paycheck. In the epigraph to this chapter, she speaks on the phone with her producer, who has been supervising edits of pre-recorded segments for her second show. Even early in her career, Minare knows that her producer will provide her with at most a skimpy, last-minute cue sheet filled with directions to her to ad-lib. She sardonically refers to the situation as “jazzy.” It’s a humorous remark in keeping with Minare’s feisty personality, but it also mirrors a common discursive trope behind the scenes of radio: the invocation of jazz.

Jazz looms large in many of my conversations with radio colleagues, both as genre and metaphor. Many of WFHB’s first participants point to jazz as being a cultural form foundational to their creative worldviews. For one founder, it was the starting point of both our interview and my colleague’s broadcasting career:

I’ve been thinking about… my first exposure to the concept of radio. And what it was, was when I was about six years old, we… actually, I don’t remember radio being on in the house. In the ‘60s, my mom was a jazz fan… [my dad] made my mom her first stereo system, which is pretty cool, because I got to hear stereo jazz records starting at about 1963, and a lot of cool stuff. And my mom was able, and could afford getting new records… she told me about going and seeing a double feature movie [as a teenager in the 1940s] and Dizzy Gillespie would play during the intermission. Saturday afternoon matinee. And her open ears from being a jazz fan is a throughline through my whole story. (Interview 25)

Another colleague, born and raised in Bloomington, offered insight into Indiana University’s historical relationship with jazz, noting a distinct tension between the many talented jazz musicians connected to the school and the institution’s devaluing of the genre:

My parents, my father, especially, was a real jazz enthusiast, had been a jazz musician. And he had a great record collection of all the great early music. Louis Armstrong and Billie Holliday and Duke Ellington… my first introduction was the old 78s. And then there’s IU music. When I was young, they had no jazz program there. In fact, jazz was sort of the bastard stepchild of IU. They had a big band, which they, which was legal, and they would let them rehearse and have dances in the Alumni Hall. But outside of that, jazz was not to be played… There were a lot of jazz jam sessions… we’d always have to go around and hide someplace and find a different room. (Interview 21)

My colleague specifically named David Baker and Larry Ridley, both accomplished jazz musicians and educators born in Indianapolis, as examples of jazz luminaries of Indiana University. They are especially consequential to many WFHB programmers. A picture of David Baker, who founded Indiana University’s formal jazz studies program, is posted on the wall of the WFHB air room (Figure 3.1) and has been there since shortly after his death in 2016.

A third colleague, who has hosted jazz radio programs since before arriving in Bloomington, offered a deeply philosophical perspective on the form:

My first love is the music of jazz… I love improvisation. The whole concept of jazz, to me, it’s freedom. Musicians are free to produce what sounds they want to produce at their time… Most musicians are performing what’s been written. Do they go off on tangents? Rarely. Rarely. But in jazz… It’s an ensemble. But you’re individual. So you maintain your individuality. That’s what I mean by the freedom. There’s a certain aspect of freedom in jazz that I don’t see that much in other kinds of music. (Interview 22)

Figure 3.1: A picture of composer, conductor, musician, and educator David Baker, who established the jazz studies program at Indiana University’s Jacobs School of Music, pinned to the wall of WFHB’s air room.

All three of these colleagues highlight the interconnectedness of sound and sociality in jazz as a cultural phenomenon by underscoring equally musical and social values of flexibility, anti-authoritarianism, and creative freedom, which they perceive as integral to the genre.

It is noteworthy that so many of my colleagues talked specifically about jazz directly in relation to their involvement in community radio. Jazz is often imagined as a practice meant to “encourage individual voices to speak (and be listened to) within a relatively non-hierarchical, democratic group dynamic” (Waterman 2019, 156). This has as much to do with its sonic structure as its historical inseparability from U.S. American social and specifically racial dynamics. Jazz, writes Mark Anthony Neal, emerged in the 1920s as “the first major form of black art, readily accessible and thus commodified and appropriated by a willing and needy white public” (1999, 19). William Barlow notes that radio and jazz both burst into mainstream consumer culture during the Roaring Twenties, “a period of significant cultural upheaval on both sides of the color line” in which white, middle-class Americans appropriated Black cultural forms as they “openly revolted against the repressive moral codes at the foundation of their parents’ strait-laced culture” (1999, 20). Continued innovation in jazz by way of free jazz and open-form improvisation that “developed in tandem with the American Civil Rights movement” has nonetheless modeled more equitable and egalitarian social structures that provide a direct counterpoint to the racialized exploitation that takes place in consumer culture (Waterman 2019, 156). There has been no shortage of extrapolations from this model in the worlds of ethnomusicology, performance, and beyond.

To frame community radio as analogous to jazz would be a glib overextension of the affinity between them as social/sonic movements, and one doing a disservice to dimensions of race, class, location, and sex that have been crucial in jazz histories and activism. David Borgo, who theorizes jazz and improvisatory performance from a vantage point explicitly influenced by complex systems, writes that the “jazz metaphor” and other “comparisons authors frequently make to improvising music from within other fields and pursuits can illuminate, but also obfuscate” the practices being compared to jazz for their improvisatory aspects (2022, 19). In this chapter, I argue for understanding community radio aesthetics as shaped by some of the same values that shape jazz and other improvisatory performances, and so, like some of my colleagues, I find it difficult to avoid jazz metaphors.

Following Borgo’s warnings against imprecision, I begin by offering specifics of what I see as the implications and values of “jazzy” improvisation as I apply them to my experiences with radio. In doing so, I bring works of specific thinkers from improvisatory musicking spaces into dialogue with work in complexity theory. I draw on two particular theories of improvisational practice from specific jazz artists that to me exemplify the importance of relation and experimentation as I explore them in community radio: Ornette Coleman’s Harmolodics and Hermeto Pascoal’s música universal. Both Coleman and Pascoal have been formative for me in my own improvisatory musical practices, which I have largely taken part in under the guidance of my father. My father, in turn, has long discussed Harmolodics, música universal, and improvisation in general in terms of complex adaptive systems. In my mind, they thus come together in a coherent framework that I attempt to clarify and apply in this chapter.