Jacques Derrida Interviewing Ornette Coleman

A friend sent me this transcript of French philosopher Jacques Derrida interviewing Ornette Coleman in 1997. Here are a couple of highlights:

On improvisation

JD: What do you think of the relationship between the precise event that constitutes the concert and pre-written music or improvised music? Do you think that prewritten

music prevents the event from taking place?

OC: No. I don't know if it's true for language, but in jazz you can take a very old piece and do another version of it. What's exciting is the memory that you bring to the present. What you're talking about, the form that metamorphoses into other

forms, I think it's something healthy, but very rare.

JD: Perhaps you will agree with me on the fact that the very concept of improvisation verges upon reading, since what we often understand by improvisation is the

creation of something new, yet something which doesn't exclude the pre-written framework that makes it possible.

OC: That's true.

JD: I am not an "Ornette Coleman expert," but if I translate what you are doing into a domain that I know better, that of written language, the unique event that is produced only one time is nevertheless repeated in its very structure. Thus there is a repetition, in the work, that is intrinsic to the initial creation—that which compromises or complicates the concept of improvisation. Repetition is already in improvisation: thus when people want to trap you between improvisation and the pre-written, they are wrong.

OC: Repetition is as natural as the fact that the earth rotates.

On Language

OC: Do you ever ask yourself if the language that you speak now interferes with your actual thoughts? Can a language of origin influence your thoughts?

JD: It is an enigma for me. I cannot know it. I know that something speaks through me, a language that I don't understand, that I sometimes translate more or less easily

into my "language." I am of course a French intellectual, I teach in French-speaking schools, but I have the impression that something is forcing me to do something

for the French language...

A Thing the Existence of Which: Jacques Derrida interviews Ornette Coleman

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