The Problem of Sonny Stitt

The problem is not with his playing. Few would question that he was a master of his instrument and possessed the highest musicianship. The problem is whether people really hear—and truly recognize—Sonny Stitt.

Stitt uses melodic material that seems to have originated with Charlie Parker. It’s hard for listeners, even knowledgeable ones, to refer to Stitt without referring to Bird. If you sat down and transcribed enough solos by both of them, you would surely find some of the same notes, or rather the same melodic figures, turning up on the pages. The basic problem is one Stitt himself may have played into by paying explicit tribute to the slightly older man, who was a friend and mentor.

Stitt and Parker don’t have the same tone on their instrument, though, nor the same rhythmic approach, nor the same way of putting phrases together, nor do they hit the same kind of groove within a combo setting. They’re different musicians.

In fact there is a great deal, even on paper, that Stitt plays and that Parker did not play and probably never would have. I can suggest what those are in another post, but the point is that there are real and important differences. Different riffs. We who can hear so much in the discourse of jazz cannot hear these valuable and intriguing differences in the gestalt of their playing if we are too focused on the similarity between discrete musical figures as they might appear abstracted out of the flow of a performance.

The soul of jazz, and the root of its soulfulness, is that it is not intended as a fixed work following the standard of paper notation. It is not a music of texts, but of performance. European art music developed around the idea of a finished, notated text whose existence stood outside of any individual performance. (That idea has come under criticism from many sides, but when true “classical” music was germinating, the idea was explicit and normative.) Jazz motifs, licks, or tropes are not handed down from God, and then communicated to us, qua mortals, through the vessel of Great Men like Parker, as the notion of the "supremacy of the work" might be (and has been) applied to jazz. The idea that music represents some absolute truth that is out there ignores the participatory and public nature that most music thrives on, to name only one problem. The opportunity for audience members to say “amen” to a performance is a key motivation to attend. But that requires a performer. 


Try instead watching the many videos that exist of Sonny Stitt, reading first-hand accounts of his performances or his activities as a musician, or looking at pictures of him. Then go back and listen to both Parker and Stitt; the more solos by each one the better. I guarantee you will hear Stitt in a new light, and in his own light, if you had not before. It happened to me when I saw him live in 1982, which sadly is not possible today. But the point is that I myself was converted in the way I am now preaching.

Stitt and Parker are different people, they’re different performers. Improvisation only has its own musical value if it is viewed as a “performance,” in the sense of the word both as an execution of a task, and of the dramatic realization of a compelling idea. Each solo is—and should be understood as—an action, an act, an actualization of self in the moment.  It’s a performance as well in the sense of performance art: a representation and realization of self in a dramatic setting, in the case of jazz pitched as a heroic struggle against the onslaught of group pulse and resulting entropy. Please allow Vijay Iyer to speak on this: “Musicians tell their stories, but not in the traditional linear sense: an exploded narrative is conveyed through a holistic musical personality or dramatic attitude.” Chorus by chorus, note by note, Stitt had another narrative, and alternative explosions. 

So it is not only the flamboyant Stuff Smith or Sun Ra but the suave, controlled Sonny Stitt as well who highlights the performative dimension in jazz as music and as art form. Stitt artistic identify poses this problem for us, and represents a critical challenge: to evaluate a jazz artist not as producer of a fixed work, or a static set of melodic tropes, but as a performer.