Memory and Mindfulness in the Musical Rituals of the Necks

Author(s): Jeremy Rose and Christopher Coady

Source: Jazz & Culture , 2021, Vol. 4, No. 1 (2021), pp. 68-86

Published by: University of Illinois Press Stable

URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/10.5406/jazzculture.4.1.0068

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Historically, scholarship on jazz rituals has tended to focus on how jazz performers draw audience members together into transcendent reflection through the playful deployment of musical symbols. This rhetorical practice is widely understood as being endemic to African American expressive culture. Recent scholarship on jazz and spirituality has however shifted our gaze to ritualistic practices beyond the African American expressive realm capable of scaffolding transcendent experience. In this article, we examine the interplay of the rhetorical gestures both Frank Salamone and Travis Jackson locate at the centre of jazz rituals and the ritualistic mindfulness practices Jason Bivin and Franya Berkman identify as energizing a range of modern jazz performance in a case study of the musical procedures utilized by the Australian jazz trio The Necks. Drawing together interview data and critical writing about The Necks, we demonstrate that the band and its audience are routinely embroiled in a collective transcendent exercise valued for both its implicit critique of jazz norms and the way it opens up space for erasing oneself from the world. We end by arguing that it is the weave of memory and mindfulness rituals during this exercise that gives The Necks’ music its social saliency.

Keywords: jazz, ritual, transcendence, improvisation, The Necks, mindfulness, minimalism, spirituality