What Can Jazz Say to Us About Doctoral Thesis Construction?

22/12/2023  -  2.18

Dr Ben Halligan

What Can Jazz Say to Us About Doctoral Thesis Construction?

I’ve always typically listened to modern jazz when I’m working: it’s loose, improvisatory, expansive, revises and regenerates familiar ideas, places different voices in dialogue with each other, and you don’t know where you’re going to end up... take a listen, for example, to John Coltrane’s version of “My Favourite Things”. In terms of academic writing, these approaches are not a bad state of mind to be in! And, recently, it occurred to me that many jazz album titles seem to speak to elements of PhD thesis construction. How could that be? I would speculate that modern jazz musicians – often working at the cutting-edges of music – and indeed Black musicians generally, often had to justify their work to the wider world. Those album titles indicated something of that justification: the key to understanding the sometimes challenging music to come, and an invitation to approach that music with that guidance.

When we think about doctoral thesis construction, we often think about the way in which each new section follows and builds on the previous sections, while at the same time engaging with a task that is particular to that new  section. Some jazz albums seem to speak to this dynamic in their titles: the flow, the development, the dynamic, the particularity. So, for this blog post, I’ll name a few such albums – and draw some (I hope!) useful parallels, and even suggest some terminology that it may be helpful to utilise yourself.

First up: Sonny Clark’s My Conception, recorded for Blue Note in 1959. In this title, Clark announces that he is presenting his idea – his conception. One ought not to be afraid of that! Often in literature reviews and methodology sections, you’ll engage with existing ideas and definitions (that is: the ideas and definitions of other people). But one can, once the confidence is there, take the next step: this is my interpretation, my modification,  my reading, which will then represent the foundation of the work to come. So sometimes you encounter formulations like “In this thesis, X will be defined as…”; “For the purposes of this study, I will apply this revised idea to…”. But “conception” also means procreation (conception, leading to birth)… and indeed it can be that the particularity of the ideas that you develop and present then give birth to the thesis, and its own set of unique characteristics. Therefore: “this thesis works with / expands / revised / updates the ideas of…” Again, this reinterpretation is a typical move in jazz: to take the classics and rework them, and to make them your own. How many albums of Ella Fitzgerald’s were titled in just such a way? Ella Sings Gershwin, The Cole Porter Songbook, Ella Fitzgerald Sings the Rogers and Hart Songbook and many, many more. And Sonny is unapologetic about it: in this album, you will get my conception of music. We should be emboldened by this!

We can’t avoid Miles Davis. Seven Steps to Heaven was recorded for Columbia in 1963. I like the precision here: the album will cover seven moments or stages. One thinks about that middle section of the thesis: the determination, and justification, of the number of experiments or case studies that will follow. Why six isn’t enough, why eight would be too many: what will that precise number yield that is sufficient to fully answer the research questions, to achieve the scope of the thesis? And, in preparing this, the maths you need to do: if seven, what word count can be afforded for each? Another Miles classic, Sketches of Spain, created with the great conductor / composer Gil Evans in 1959/60, points to an element of some steps: sketches. Sometimes you have to reign yourself in a bit: it’s a classic thesis mistake to think you’re writing on everything… sometimes a sketch, looking only to the pertinent issues, and announced as a quick, overview-type engagement, and with further reading cited in footnotes or endnotes, is enough. What can be sketched out, so as not to burn valuable word count? And what needs a full, expanded, ordered exploration – to think of Art Blakey and the Jazz Messengers: The Big Beat.

Dexter Gordon has long been a jazz great for me, ever since seeing Bertrand Tavernier’s  film ’Round Midnight. He did some of his best work in Europe, in exile; like Miles, he found European audiences more receptive to and appreciative of jazz. Dexter’s Our Man in Paris from 1963 reflects just that: one of the great post-war American musicians and interpreters of American music transplanted to a different continent. Chet Baker has many albums titled in such a way: the West Coast sounds and lilt of his trumpet and voice many miles from the actual West Coast: Chet Baker in Europe, Memories: Chet Baker in Tokyo, Chet in Paris (volumes 1-4). It’s just that kind of counterintuitive friction, from relocation, that adds freshness and sharpness to PhD writing, engendering originality: let us take this set of ideas, and see how they play out in a very different location or context. Again, one thinks of writing formulations: “However, if we now turn to subjects in different parts of the UK, we find that, surprisingly…”; “This theory functions well in terms of standard experimental conditions, but what if one of these variables was changed in order to reflect…”; “Such assumptions, however, cease to function logically once applied to different climes…” The work then becomes coloured by the way in which familiar ideas are placed in unfamiliar contexts, and by the expanded view the research gains from looking at the unfamiliar through the lens of the familiar. As per Miles’s 1972 album On the Corner, the arresting vantage point is to be situated at the junction (… in Miles’s case: the fusion that occurred as avant-garde jazz intersects with psychedelic rock).

I hope some of these unusual encounters, and arresting parallels, will stir a few thoughts! Inspiration can be everywhere.

21 December 2023