In Nigerian pidgin, especially the urban slang of young men in the informal settlements of cities such as Port Harcourt, the word ‘jazz’ is not often used to refer to music. Rather, jazz is most commonly understood as magic, as a ruse, a trick, a hustle. To ‘jazz’ someone, or to be ‘jazzed’, is to dupe or to be duped. Jazz, then, is typically used to express the frustrations of the poor and marginalized at having done the bidding of those smarter, harder or stronger than themselves. To benefit from others’ labour without payment, food without reciprocity, status without effort, is jazzing. In this vernacular there is something powerful connecting improvisations in urban life with improvisations in music, connecting hustling and jazz.
AbdouMaliq Simone's Improvised Lives is a geography of black cities inspired in its analysis of social interaction and agency by the ‘cool’ jazz of John Coltrane and Miles Davis. It is a theory, an illusion, made almost incidentally across autobiography, ethnography and filmography. Scholars of urban life will focus on other ideas woven into this text – spiralling, districting, quilting – but I would like to explore what improvisation means when it is pitched musically as the rhythms of endurance. The music Simone carried from Detroit to Freetown as he was growing up presents him with the ideas of ensemble, rhythm, contingency and improvisation that he transports to his prose about the subalterns of Freetown, Jakarta, Hyderabad and Delhi. People's unorthodox interdependencies, their off-beat relations to order, the patterns of their silences, and the unpredictability of their life courses are likened to a jazz ensemble's set. What he loved of Ornette Coleman's album The Shape of Jazz to Come was its harmolodics, a ‘real democracy’ in which each player could deliver the melody in their own configuration of rhythms and chord changes (p. 41).
So how does musical ‘improv’ help us appreciate these improvised lives and how does it compare with other metaphors of social agency? How does this musical metaphor differ from metaphors of military tactics, nautical navigation and medical suturing? On the surface, Simone's illusion of jazz offers a model of improvisation, a conception of agency that sounds familiar. Its focus is the hustler as hero: a model of social agency based on wit and conviviality. In the book's most fascinating vignette, Simone's ideas about hustling are linked back to his childhood career in Freetown as a go-between, conveying messages between ward leaders, pastors and Lebanese merchants. Passing notes produced a map of social networks, and of the city's uneven opportunities; it also produced the methodology of a scholar specializing in ‘the conjunctions of the disconsonant’ (p. 45).
Perhaps improv as illusion is also more than this familiar sense of hustling and bluffing. Scripts (Geertz), styles (Ferguson), strategies (de Certeau), sutures (De Boeck) and steering (Vigh and Utas), all familiar metaphors for individual agency, have developed to accommodate improvisation, complexity and contingency. Syncopation, in Simone's usage, however, points to dimensions that are otherwise hard to fathom – the dual dynamics of living together as an ensemble within differently punctuated routines. As an example of improvisation, drawing upon cross-cutting social and temporal trajectories, the daily routine of Shahid Ahmed, the Delhi delivery driver, is perfect. Anticipating delays with clairvoyant precision, navigating friends who hold goods for a few minutes so that he can stagger multiple drops to prioritize urgency – this is the improvisation of a precariat that exists across all urban spaces. Shahid's customers ascribe almost supernatural powers to his punctuality, and he himself senses the potencies of a dark parallel world. Shahid's ‘improv’ is not so far removed from Port Harcourt's ‘jazz’.
These dual axes of temporality/rhythm and sociality/interdependence are combined, ensembled and syncopated in Simone's writing. The familiar illusions are about individual agency, being discrete and biographical with constant schedules angled towards near and distant futures. But the jazz rhythms of urban improvisation circulate, overlap, deconstruct and re-form – for the Chicago street enforcers Simone later grew up around, progress in the mob was ‘nothing like a ladder’. It allows for motion that missteps and is simultaneous and sideways.
And, as such, syncopated agency also recognizes its own incompleteness. The ‘intricate sutures of money, land, labour technology, rules and political deals’ (p. 135) that compose the city are supercomplex, as are the lives inhabiting and improvising their way through them. Consequently, our methods to trace the outline of these relations and trajectories are impossible: ‘It is dizzying to try to figure out how these multiple itineraries, circuits and weak intersections operate in any kind of concert’ (p. 133). We must therefore depend on illusion and metaphor – and perhaps on the harmolodics of jazz.
