Part of a larger study-in-progress on radical queer Black composer-improviser Cecil Taylor’s relationship with jazz standards, this paper focuses on Taylor’s 1960 recording of Richard Rodgers and Oscar Hammerstein’s “This Nearly Was Mine” (from South Pacific, 1949). It stages Taylor’s rendition as a superimposition of four dynamic encounters. The first encounter is with jazz and American popular song syntax, which forms one of what I will call “syntactic surfaces” in Taylor’s interpretation. Following imperatives in recent African philosophies of art (e.g. Diagne 2011), I will suggest that Taylor’s is a music of manifold, interpenetrating, “proto-geometric” surfaces (Stover 2024), and that meaning is found in the conjunctions where surface topographies bend toward one another. The second encounter is with the song’s (absent) lyrics about dreams, love, and paradise always just slipping away. Taylor’s interpretation queers textual and intertextual codes that flow from the original song and its musical-theater origins, playing with fluid notions like the expressive valences of musical sound and noise (Glissant 1976) to do so. The third encounter is with Taylor’s bandmates—bassist Buell Neidlinger and drummer Denis Charles—whose fragile interactive dialogue maps precarious pathways through the song’s harmonic and melodic structure. And the fourth encounter involves Taylor’s own relation with jazz history, Blackness, and the emergence of what would become his ‘mature’ improvisational style. Many commentators describe an epistemic break between early and mature Taylor (marked by a several-year gap in recorded output), but I argue that the ideas Taylor was working out during this period were essential for the directions he would embark on beginning with his celebratred 1966 album Unit Structures and continuing for nearly five decades.

Jazz standards are inherently flexible prototypes. This fact is reflected in how melodies are rhythmically depicted in fakebook lead sheets: Instead of detailed rhythms, many standards are deliberately notated using simplified rhythms. When jazz musicians perform these melodies, they bring them to life with a variety of expressive transformations. These transformations fall under two distinct categories depending on their relations to both the ontological prototype of the melody and the prevailing metric hierarchy. The first of these, expressive timing, involves displacements of onsets that are so small—usually in the order of milliseconds—that they do not constitute a change in metric-hierarchic position; they fall below the level of syntax. Conversely, thematic transformation often involves displacing notes to a different metric position. Put simply, thematic transformation would conventionally warrant a change in notation; expressive timing would not. More often than not, jazz improvisers simultaneously incorporate both kinds of transformations in their performances of standard melodies, resulting in utterances that bear little resemblance to their lead-sheet representations.

In this paper, I contend that expressive timing and thematic transformation are interrelated improvisational processes that are carefully coordinated in performances of jazz standards to produce dialogical play between the two categories. I begin by demonstrating the abstract differences between thematic transformation and expressive timing before exploring the various ways that these two techniques combine in several analytic vignettes. Next, I connect these techniques to recent work on jazz ontology and referents, arguing that the ambiguous relationships between these transformational categories is the result of the ontological flexibility of jazz tune melodies. Finally, I reflect on the aesthetic ramifications of this categorical ambiguity, observing that both techniques serve complementary strategic purposes and therefore become involved in an ongoing give-and-take as the improvisational process unfolds. While the stylistic scope of this study is limited to jazz, its implications are easily extensible to other repertories where melodies are performed flexibly.

The last game show to employ an in-studio organist was the syndicated Beat the Clock (1969–74), for which legendary jazz musician Dick Hyman provided all music and sound effects. Hyman, then, had the task of constructing and improvising music that could accompany events of varying lengths, including different stunts, host banter, and opening and closing credits. I argue that the improvised organ music for Beat the Clock employs harmonic and formal ambiguity to fill varying lengths of time as required by gameplay. These techniques include the open-ended vamp, variations in repetition, and formal disruptions. The open-ended vamp avoids closure or typical harmonic structure to allow it to end at any time, such as one 1972 improvisation, which ends in a half cadence before looping back to the beginning. Variations in repetition facilite flexibility by loosening rigid expectations: a vamp that at first appears only to have two chords morphs into a longer, more complex progression on its third playing, and these two forms of the vamp alternate. Formal disruptions occur frequently in the theme song depending on the episode for which it is used; measures are added, subtracted, and modified at will to accommodate varying lengths of closing credits. The overall effect is a remarkable union of music and show, one that can only be achieved by these techniques.