Drifting on a Read

As the first entry of this blog, representing my virgin foray into the virtual world of blogging, I have Michael Jarrett's "cadenza" section of Drifting on a Read to focus on. Admittedly, I spent a fair amount of time looking up words that were not in my vocabulary (glossolalia, hermeneutic, exegetical, heuristic...) but I believe I was able to grasp onto the overall idea of the text and found the implications of troping interesting in its relation to both jazz music and creative writing. There is a playful quality behind tropes and it is reflected in Jarrett's writing as well, particularly when he explores the different pathways one can take in analyzing the reply Louis Armstrong gave to a woman socialite, "Lady, if you gotta ask what it is, you'll never know." The different Armstrongs (the Zen Master, the Phenomenologist, the Saussurean...) all teased out the idea of ambiguity contained within tropes and which helped me connect Jazz improvisation, which is based in an individuals point of view to express divergent musical thoughts, with that of writing and the wealth of possibilities that lay in the symbols of text. It will be interesting to delve into the next chapters to see how Jarrett develops his ideas on writing creatively based upon his observations and study of Jazz- "I want to show readers how to turn (or trope) an art form into a paradigm for creative invention." Sounds interesting to me...