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This article examines three improvisations by the Miles Davis Quintet from their recording The Complete Live at the Plugged Nickel 1965 through the lens of a new theory of musical interaction. It shows how the quintet favored divergent over convergent interactional strategies in the interpersonal, referent, role, and style domains in its quest to create what one band member called “anti-music.” Volume 25, Number 3, September 2019 Copyright © 2019 Society for Music Theory [1] Miles Davis’s second “great” quintet, which consisted of Davis on trumpet, Wayne Shorter on tenor sax, Herbie Hancock on piano, Ron Carter on bass, and Tony Williams on drums, reassembled at the end of 1965 after a seven-month hiatus. During their break, Shorter, Hancock, Carter, and Williams had a creative outlet composing new music and recording for Blue Note Records. When the quintet began performing again in November, Davis’s bandmates found themselves dissatisfied with the band’s touring repertoire, which consisted mostly of jazz standards and original compositions popularized by Davis’s earlier ensembles. According to Hancock, “even within our very creative and loose approach to the music, everybody did things according to certain kinds of expectations. I knew if I did this, Ron would do that, or Tony knew that if he did this, I would do that. It became so easy to do that it was almost boring” (Mercer 2004, 108–9). As a result, Davis’s bandmates decided to approach a set of late December dates at Chicago’s Plugged Nickel club with the goal of subverting each other’s typical expectations as much as possible. Williams described this approach as “anti-music”: “whatever someone expects you to play, that’s the last thing you play” (Mercer 2004, 109; italics original).(1) By happenstance, Davis’s producer Teo Macero recorded seven sets over two nights, December 22 and 23, at the club, which were released in 1995 as The Complete Live at the Plugged Nickel 1965. (2) [2] In this article, I will examine three improvisations from the Plugged Nickel recordings through the lens of a new theory of musical interaction. This theory is based on a way of hearing a musical source as being composed of separate parts that influence or intervene in each other’s paths. The processes of influence and intervention that occur between these parts are based on each part’s projection of similar or dissimilar continuative events, or what I call convergence and divergence. These analyses of convergence and divergence will often occupy the immediate back-and-forth occurring between different players—the interpersonal domain—but they can also extend to three other interactional domains: referent, role, and style. In this way, musical interaction can be understood not only as a process of motivic exchange, but also as a negotiation of surrounding musical and social structures. Using this framework, I describe how the quintet often adopted divergent interactional strategies in these domains. In the three analyses, I will show how the quintet chose to depart from, yet still retain traditional aspects of, jazz practice in their search for “anti-music.” Before and After the Plugged Nickel [3] It took Davis some time to form his new quintet, and his process of doing so reveals much about his goals. (3) In response to two-thirds of his previous rhythm section departing to form their own group in late 1962, Davis first focused his efforts on finding their replacements, with Carter joining first, and then Williams and Hancock by the end of 1963 (Szwed 2002, 235–38). With these selections, Davis had, for the first time, hired musicians of a younger generation in an attempt to harness their creativity and willingness to embrace the burgeoning avant-garde jazz style (Carr 1998, 187).(4) On their first few gigs, the new rhythm section approached their accompaniment of George Coleman, Davis’s tenor saxophonist at the time, differently than their accompaniment of Davis. Davis quickly noticed, as Hancock described in an interview with Ben Sidran: I remember, before we recorded the album E.S.P., . . . Tony Williams, Ron and I would play differently behind George than we would behind Miles. Behind Miles, we would play in a way that was more reminiscent of what we were accustomed to hearing behind Miles. . . . [T]his one gig we’re playing in Detroit, and behind George we would really open up. Sometimes not even play the time. We’d play all kinds of figures and things, rhythmic figures behind George, do things that were considered more toward the avant-garde. . . . And one day Miles said, “Why don't you play behind me the way you play behind George?” . . . So we started doing that stuff. I mean, playing with the rhythms and doing all kinds of wild things behind Miles. Things that we never heard on Miles’s records before. And in the beginning, I remember, Miles started bobbing and weaving and trying to find a place in that stuff. . . . By the third day, not only was he not bobbing and weaving, I was the one bobbing and weaving, and trying to find my place, ’cause Miles had it then. He found a way to play in that context that had me trying to figure out what he was doing. (Sidran 1995, 265; italics original) In selecting these musicians for his new rhythm section, Davis desired the discomfort that it caused him, which in turn would provoke change after his comparatively fallow period of the early 1960s.(5) [4] After settling on his new rhythm section, Davis spent some time deciding on the fifth member, a seat he wanted filled by a tenor saxophonist in the mold of his first “great” quintet of the mid 1950s. While Coleman had been with Davis since just prior to Carter’s joining in 1963, by 1964 Coleman was growing weary of Davis’s profligate lifestyle and intensive touring schedule, and the new rhythm section, in particular Williams, did not find Coleman’s playing adventurous enough (Szwed 2002, 241). At Williams’s urging, Davis next hired Sam Rivers, “an acknowledged figure in the avant-garde” who proved a bit too experimental for Davis’s tastes (Szwed 2002, 245). When Davis heard that Wayne Shorter was dissatisfied with his work with Art Blakey’s Jazz Messengers, he convinced the tenor player to join his band, and by September 1964 the quintet was fully formed. With Shorter, Davis found a middle path between Coleman and Rivers: “Wayne had always been someone who experimented with form instead of someone who did it without form. That’s why I thought he was perfect for where I wanted to see the music I played go” (Davis 1989, 273).(6) Davis wanted experimentation, but he wanted experimentation within, not outside of, the constraints of contemporary jazz style. [5] The new quintet recorded their first studio album, E.S.P., in January 1965. While heralded at the time as an important change of direction for Davis, the album received a somewhat mixed review in Down Beat magazine from trumpeter Kenny Dorham (Waters 2011, 83–84; Szwed 2002, 252–53). Waters characterizes the album as revealing a group in transition: “many of the celebrated facets of the later studio recordings are not yet in evidence on E.S.P. There are no examples of ‘time, no changes,’ compositions, which began to appear only on the quintet’s second studio recording, Miles Smiles” (2011, 83),(7) and which was more widely praised (127).(8) Soon after recording E.S.P., Davis was forced to put the group on leave while he recovered from a series of operations to alleviate persistent hip ailments. During this break, Davis’s bandmates would, in concentrated sessions, rehearse new music for three or four days and record an album for Blue Note on one final day (Mercer 2004, 104). The personnel on each recording varied widely, but Shorter, Hancock, Carter, and Williams frequently appeared on one another’s records (Waters 2011, 125). Herbie Hancock recorded his influential album Maiden Voyage (1965) during the quintet’s hiatus, as did Tony Williams Spring (1966), and Shorter The All Seeing Eye (1966), The Soothsayer (1979), and Etcetera (1980). These recordings gave the four younger members of the quintet a venue for their new compositions and a taste of full creative control over their music. [6] After reassembling in November 1965 for a series of live club dates, the quintet returned to Davis’s staple repertoire, abandoning the new music they had recorded on E.S.P. As they traveled to Chicago for an engagement at the Plugged Nickel,(9) Davis’s bandmates began to feel constrained, which Davis acknowledged in his autobiography: My playbook, the songs we would play every night, started to wear down the band. People were coming to hear those tunes that they had heard on my albums; that’s what was packing them in the door: “Milestones,” “’Round Midnight,” “My Funny Valentine,” “Kind of Blue.” But the band wanted to play the tunes we were recording which we never did live, and I know that was a sore point with them. (1989, 278) It is possible to imagine an alternative history in which the group disbanded at this point. Given the creative freedom Shorter, Hancock, Carter, and Williams had just experienced, as well as their excitement around the new material they had recorded for E.S.P., returning to Davis’s old repertoire, even if financially expedient, might have been too much for them to bear. Their decision, then, to take on Williams’s “anti-music” for the Plugged Nickel dates, came at a critical juncture.(10) By making their mantra “whatever someone expects you to play, that’s the last thing you play” (Mercer 2004, 109; italics original), the quintet adopted an interactional stance that I will characterize as “divergent” rather than “convergent.” While their studio recordings removed many of the constraints of contemporary jazz styles, their live performances maintained these constraints but interacted divergently with them. As Davis put it, “[i]nstead of developing the new music live which we were playing on records, we found ways to ma

Making “Anti-Music”: Divergent Interactional Strategies in the Miles Davis Quintet’sThe Complete Live at the Plugged Nickel 1965