Outside Forces: “Autumn Leaves” in the 1960s

• Main Author: Keith Waters
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Published: Columbia University Libraries 2001-02-01
• Series: Current Musicology
• Online Access: https://journals.library.columbia.edu/index.php/currentmusicology/article/view/4827

Is there a problem of form in the jazz tradition? Does the reliance upon repeated 32-bar frameworks create an unavoidable formal, harmonic, and metric redundancy? How do jazz improvisers transcend or evade this cyclic regularity? These are crucial questions. Jazz players have extended privilege to the 32-bar AABA and ABAC song form (along with 12-bar blues structures) since at least the 1930s, when the 32-bar song form replaced the 16-bar sectional forms of ragtime and early jazz. Yet repeated cycles of thirty-two bars result in a hypermetric consistency on several levels: single measures group into four-measure units, which then combine into eight measure sections; the four eight-measure sections comprise the 32-bar form, which becomes repeated, normally for the duration of the composition. In the Western European tradition (with the occasional exception of the theme and variations genre and dance forms) form is typically not generated by regularly repeating structures, structures that are consistently built from measure groups of 4, 8, 16, and 32 bars. Yet this formal model, with its foursquare regularity and its repeated harmonic and metric organization, has been one of the primary vehicles for jazz improvisers and composers. Historically, jazz players have kept the structure, merely renovating it periodically through stylistic change. Thus, while stylistic development and evolution has rapidly taken place in the area of instrumental technique, harmony, and rhythm, the domain of form has remained relatively static.