What is This Thing Called Jazz?
Afro-American Sound Between Orality, Literacy and «Audiotactility»
Giancarlo Siciliano
Mobilizing resources from ethnomusicology and philosophy, this contribution attempts to encapsulate various issues around the troubling, «intermediary» identity of jazz practice, which can be apprehended properly only as this mixed space where literacy and orality merge, which Vincenzo Caporaletti tried to grasp with the term «audiotactility».
The processes of Jazz can then be approached both with respect to its specific medial status, not dominated bywriting, yet not pure orality, whose reinterpretative essence (through the presence of the standards) can be read as the perpetual reactualisation of an absent model or origin (following Nancy, Stiegler, Szendy): an act of subversion of Western «scriptocentrism» at the heart of this very culture, and, hereby, a profound questioning of its identity.
