There are few areas of music where repetition in its myriad forms assumes a greater significance -- and holds greater promises of joy -- than jazz. Despite the changes presented and challenges posed by many jazz recordings released in and after 1959 (Miles Davis's Kind of Blue, Dave Brubeck's Time Out, Charles Mingus's Mingus Ah Um, Ornette Coleman's The Shape of Jazz to Come and John Coltrane's Giant Steps were all released that year), the essential core of jazz coalesces around group interplay over successive sonic cycles from twelve or thirty-two bars in length. The repetition and moment-to-moment alteration of harmonic progressions and melodic fragments, even when they recur in tunes with different names, provide a ground for further exploration. When alto saxophonist Julian "Cannonball" Adderley begins his fourth solo chorus on "Straight, No Chaser" (from the Davis album Milestones) with a blustery one-bar figure that Charlie Parker frequently used on blues-based tunes, we hear both possible results of repetition at work. Adderley doesn't merely reproduce Bird's tones and phrasing: he worries the line, twisting and transforming it almost as though he has caught himself falling back into old habits and is trying to break their hold.
