The Perception of Time in Jazz Music

If you ask people that don´t like jazz for the reasons of their rejection, you often get the answer: “The improvisations are always too long!” It´s interesting, that they don´t critisize the harmonic or rhythmic tension, or the complexity of the music, but it´s formal structure and it´s developement in the flow of time. So the difficulties that many people have in hearing jazz are not based in an intellectual misunderstanding of the music, but in a different way to experience time. For me that was a reason to think a bit about this phenomenon.

The european classical music is written down in scores. This had the consequence, that the european composers developed a strong interest in the formal aspects of music. The composers spent a lot of their creative energy in creating interesting courses for their musical pieces. During the centuries, they invented dramatic forms with planned progressions like the sonata, the symphony, or the opera, which deeply influenced the hearing conventions of european audiences. This can be called a dramatic time perception.

In an often flat and trivial way also hit-songs and pop-music follow this kind of time structure. Here too the compositions have different formal parts and a simple tension curve, that holds the song together for three minutes.(An exeption is Hip-Hop with it´s often unstructured flow of groove and lyrics, but this is surely a very “black” form of pop-music.)

In Jazz, the musical progression is left to the flow of improvisation. The simple arrangements (theme, solo order, theme) have more practical than artistical reasons, and neither have the ability nor the intention to create interest for an audience. The crucial points for the consistency of the music are aspects, that are not so closely related to the time course: the individual sound of the musicians; the balance of the timing in the band; the energy created by the interplay of the musicians. So, each moment of an improvisation is equally important. Therefore, an improvised piece of Jazz music can last very long without important formal cuts. It is true that in an improvisation there are also developements, ups and downs of tension, and musical motives, that are used for a while. But all of this doesn´t follow a detailed plan. It can happen or not and has a right in itself at every moment of the piece. This can be called an epic perception of time.

A listener that is used to music with a dramatic time perception will expect from artistic valuable music primarily a complex formal structure. So probably he will be disappointed by a jazz improvisation. This is of course in the first place the problem of the listener, not the musician´s. Since in Jazz the relation between musician and audience has an important role (see “Jazz Musicians and their Audience” ), it seems to be important for me to realise the reasons for this disappointment. Only then Jazz musicians can explain, that the epic, flowing time perception and the long periods belong to the essence of Jazz. And they can emphasize to the elements, that are really the base of this music: sound, individual timing and improvisational interplay within the band.

Matthias Petzold (September 2000)

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