Playing Together: Analyzing Jazz Improvisation to Improve the Multiframe

Musical terminology is often used when discussing narrative forms of art. However, this is seldom accompanied by a systematic application of musical concepts for use by artists in these other mediums. Comics, in particular, parallel music in terms of the multiframe, where various individual elements are perceived at once. Therefore, a useful analogy can be made between the multiframe and thematic and vertical musical construction. The interactivity among jazz musicians during a collective improvisation exemplifies this musical simultaneity, and this article creates an analogy between improvisation and narrative comics, deriving several analytical tools that can be used to inform the creation of more meaningful multiframes.

All music, with the obvious exception of a solo performance, has interaction between different instruments. In jazz, however, the defining feature is the will of multiple individual musicians in shaping the improvised composition from moment to moment. This is opposed to an orchestral score, which reflects but a single composer's will. What an orchestral score lacks, when compared to jazz, is responsiveness. An individual orchestral musician is necessarily restricted in how they react to the performance of another musician in the orchestra. In jazz, however, 'we find ourselves attending to the work in the moment in a way that is, although possible, not required by nonimprovisational forms of art' (Hagberg 2000, 95-96). It should be noted that while there are scored and orchestrated portions of most jazz performances, the general consensus among jazz instrumentalists is that improvisation is required for a particular song to truly be considered jazz. A vocal performance by Ella Fitzgerald, for example, might be in a jazz style, but would not be considered true jazz unless it contained an improvised element, such as scat or an instrumental interlude. For the purposes of this article, we will assume that the term jazz implies a performance that features improvised material.
Our goal in comparing comics pages to jazz performances is less theoretical and more analytical, laying out an approach to page creation that will allow writers and illustrators to strategize more meaningful interactions among panels. We have chosen our visual examples from classic and contemporary American superhero comics. As jazz is the most distinctive American realization of Western art music, the superhero comic is a distinctively American visual art. Again, the point of this article is not to advance this argument, but for our purposes, these constraints supply a useful limiting framework.
In addition to their superhero origins, the visual examples that we have chosen adhere to a simple grid layout. This allows us to discuss interactions among panels in a simplified fashion. However, the techniques we propose could be applied to any multiframe. It should also be noted that the particular parallels that we point out are not the only parallels possible. As with any analogy, there is a degree of arbitrariness to our interpretation. The value of our process is not in the analysis, but in the act Powers and Grimm: Playing Together 3 of analyzing. Approaching the multiframe as a collection of interacting panels can strengthen both narrative and visual composition.

Jazz Basics for Comics Creators
Before comparing jazz to comics, a few key elements of improvisation should be clarified and myths dispelled. In a standard jazz improvisation from the bebop and post-bop eras, an instrument takes a solo over a predetermined harmonic and rhythmic form maintained by the rhythm section of the ensemble. Improvisation is not an anything-goes performance. This point often seems to be misunderstood, and at least at the semantic level might rightly be contradicted by the phrase 'to improvise.' However, there is little contention among established jazz musicians that while extemporaneous performance is the defining element of the music, this extemporaneousness is based on an underlying structure. If an ensemble performs the jazz standard How High the Moon (Lewis et al 1985), for example, after the melody, or 'head,' of the song is stated, then the harmonic structure is repeated as the form over which the solos are performed (Oakland 1998: 8). The notes a soloist chooses to play must work within that harmonic structure. The importance of such limitation shouldn't be understated.
This would seem to imply that jazz improvisation is a process of in-the-moment composition little different from a composer scoring a symphony. There are two key differences, however. A composer in the classical tradition ' enters the "timescape" of a work, and yet may also step back to isolate, reflect upon, and possibly revise any given moment, all toward fashioning a structure for performance at a time other than that at which it is created' (Sarath 1996: 3). An improvised solo offers no opportunity for reflection or revision. Just as importantly, jazz improvisation is a communal activity. While the focus is on the soloist, the rest of the band, the rhythm section that accompanies the soloist, improvises as well. The soloist, then, receives constant feedback from other musicians throughout the performance. It is from this interaction that we will draw our second analogy to the comics multiframe.
It should be noted that there are counterexamples for every 'rule' of jazz improvisation that we will address. We do not mean to deny alternative approaches Powers and Grimm: Playing Together 4 or to champion particular conventions as superior. In the same way that we have chosen superhero comics pages with simple layouts, we have chosen jazz performances with typical structures for the sake of clarity. The ideas we present could be easily expanded and applied to any collective improvisation and any comics page.

Sonny Rollins vs. Green Lantern
While our ultimate goal is to compare the multiframe to collective improvisation, we will start with a single melodic line to establish some of the premises of our analogy. The most obvious element of a jazz improvisation is the melody created by the soloing instrument (even polyphonic instruments produce one line that could be identified as melody). This improvised melody is analogous to the narrative of a comic book. Melody is story. In fact, the term 'storytelling' has often been used by jazz musicians to describe their improvisatory process (Berliner 1994: 20). To put it another way, in wordless music the melody is what the song is about. A jazz musician is judged by their ability to tell a compelling story while improvising.
Saxophonist Sonny Rollins is often acknowledged as a master of thematic improvisation. More so than his mid-century contemporaries, his improvisations featured deliberate, intellectual development on recurrent themes.
'Intellectualism here does not mean a cold mathematical or unemotional approach. It does mean, as by definition, the power of reason and comprehension as distinguished from purely emotional outpouring' (Schuller 1958: 8). Perhaps the most famous example of Rollins' intellect comes in his solo on the song 'St. Thomas' from the album Saxophone Colossus. After the song's head is repeated twice, Rollins begins his solo with a simple two-note statement, A-D (all notation is presented in the tenor saxophone's native key of B-flat). In the next bar, using the same rhythm, he varies this to A-D#. In the next bar, he alters the rhythm and adds a third note, creating the pattern A-E-A. With this simple pattern established, he then plays with and develops it over the next six bars, before using a three-note variation as the starting point of his first extended eighth note lick, which carries the solo through the first four bars of the song's B section, before returning again to simple two-and three-note variations on his initial theme for the final four bars of the form (Figure 1). Powers  to Rollins' variations on his two-note theme. Each successive variation is instantly recognizable as related to the initial theme, but also recognizable as distinct. The value of this style of improvisation is in how each instance of the theme relates to the others. Two or three notes alone constitute such a basic musical unit that they could hardly be called a melody. However, when taken as part of a developing string of two-and three-note variations, the initial instance is given meaning after the fact.
Similarly, if we were to take the initial panel from Figure 2, it would not contain enough information to be interesting. Superheroes boldly entering buildings is not the stuff of narrative. However, when the reader reflects on that first panel after absorbing the information in each successive panel, a progression is revealed. By panel 9, the figure of Green Lantern is almost completely distorted by flames. He's gone from hero to potential victim. Each panel shows an instance of Lantern utilizing his ring's powers. In the first two panels, the green energy is angled upward, and in the last downward, which works much like the added third note of Rollins' second variation, shifting the direction of the musical line.
With all these possible comparisons, and with all of them arbitrary, the point we wish to illustrate is not that comics should be drawn according to a preexisting musical structure, but that an understanding of motivic development can inform and enhance the effectiveness of a visual layout on a page. Creators like O'Neil and Adams seem to do this intuitively, but even in their case, one could point out ways in which inter-panel relationships could be made stronger, perhaps to greater visual effect. Comics creators can use this idea of thematic development to introduce alterations, inversions, extensions, and recapitulations in a way that is not explicitly addressed in the usual discussion of page layout.

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Furthermore, there is a theoretical consideration here that is exemplified by an improviser like Rollins: Derrida's concept of the supplement. 'The supplement adds itself, it is a surplus, a plenitude enriching another plenitude, the fullest measure of presence. It cumulates and accumulates presence. It is thus that art, technè, image, representation, convention, etc., come as supplements to nature and are rich with this entire cumulating function' (Derrida 1994: 144-145). Each variation on Rollins' theme is a supplement to all previous instances. Each new panel of a multiframe is a supplement to the frames before it. While Derrida goes on to argue that a supplement necessarily replaces that which is supplements, this is not the case within a multiframe, where the supplemented material is always a leftward glance away.

Katherine Haake uses Derrida's supplement to inform her own instruction of creative
writing. She proposes that writing should be a backward-looking act, the previous sentence dictating, in large part, the content of the sentence currently being composed. 'It is a way of writing that relieves us of the obligation to know what's coming next and gives us permissions to play' (Haake 2000: 186). Rollins was certainly a playful improviser. And a similar compositional style could be applied to the multiframe, providing a freer framework within which comics artists can practice their art, while at the same time enhancing the final product.

Joshua Redman vs. The Flash
We have examined how a linear musical line relates to itself over time, and applied that to sequential panels within the multiframe. However, as Groensteen argues, 'successive images do not just make up a string, they comprise, from the outset, a totality. Readers approach the page both as a fraction of a story and as a visual unit' (Groensteen 2013: 135-136). If this is the case, we need to move beyond a single melodic line to collective improvisation to fully appreciate the potential of the jazz/ comics analogy. The process of collective improvisation 'is a fundamentally pedagogical one, in which musicians actively learn from their collaborators during performance. Thus, ongoing pedagogical engagement is a necessary trait of a responsive, responsible improviser' (Thompson 2007). The analogy here is tricky. A comic can have several creators (writer, illustrator, inker, colorist, letterer) or a single author.
We are not concerned with the creators, however, but with the content on the page.  There are several other elements that could be added to this list of thematic visuals, including color and motion, but it should be clear enough already that Cooke's deliberate inter-panel relationships turn a small moment of action-for Flash, all this happens in no time at all-into a visually compelling, tense, meaningful multiframe.
It is telling that the best example of the collective improvisation analogy was found in a rather abstract comics page. In superhero comics, in particular, visual considerations such as these are often subordinated to narrative concerns. Inter-panel relationships, when they are explicitly designed in a thematic manner, focus on action in favor of image. In Figure 2, narrative dictates the content of the panels, but the visual variety of each panel, even when echoing other panels, lacks the deliberate repetition of form and shape found in Cooke's multiframe. This should not imply that narrative and visualization are mutually exclusive when it comes to informing the contents of a panel. Quite the opposite. The strongest multiframe would be one in which many elements appear from panel to panel, in variation, and respond to and resonate with one another. This is an extension of Groensteen's concept of accentuation, in which ' different kinds of accentuation can be used at the same time.
The more of them the author brings together to make an image or a stanza stand out, the more remarkable the cumulative effect of the scansion will be' (Groensteen 2013: 153). Similarly, interactivity and thematic development among the multiframe increase the cumulative effect of individual panels.
As a jazz solo is enhanced by an attuned and responsive accompaniment-it might be argued that a standard improvisation is less a solo than a feature, one instrument temporarily taking the lead-so too does each panel in a comic gain meaning and visual integrity through its relationships to and among the other panels in the multiframe. To enhance these relationships, the analogy of panel to performer in a collective improvisation provides a useful analytical tool.

An Arbitrary Analogy
There are countless analogies that might be identified between musical elements in a jazz performance and visual elements in a comics multiframe. The point of this exercise is not to create a universal method for comparing the two mediums. The comparison is undeniably arbitrary. However, we believe that from a practical analytical standpoint, such comparisons are useful, with theoretical cross-pollination being one of the best ways to make original contributions in various artistic fields. This is particularly true in the case of jazz and comics.
The two mediums already share terminology such as rhythm and beat, and musical terms in general have been adopted into the language of analysis in other art forms with narrative elements. However, one area where this comparison has been lacking is with relationships that occur simultaneously. 'Recurring relationships serve to define and delimit parts, giving them individuality of their own. But they also connect; the individual entities they mark off demand, because of the relations, association and interaction with other individuals. Thus the parts vitally serve in the construction of an expanded whole' (Dewey 2005: 172-173). So it is essential that when individual elements of an artistic work exist simultaneously, they are crafted and arranged with deliberation and intellect in regard to each other.
At the same time, letting future decisions be informed by past occurrencesthe contents of the next panel decided, in part, by the contents of the previous one(s)-can be a liberating practice. To reiterate Hagberg: 'In the perception of an improvisational work we find ourselves attending to the work in the moment in a way that is, although possible, not required by nonimprovisational forms of art' (Hagberg 2000, 95-96). For all the scripting, thumbnailing, sketching, and other preplanning needed to execute a comic successfully, giving in to improvisational impulses allows a comics creator to tap into a sense of play that, far from being arbitrary, imbues the multiframe with increased depth of meaning.
What happens in the moment, the surprise of many parts coming together, can transcend the will of the creator, and might serve as a primary goal in comics creation.