Capturing the Ineffable: Three Transcriptions of a Jazz Solo by Sonny Rollins

What purpose does a jazz transcription serve? What is at stake in a jazz transcription? What is being represented and how? This article considers these questions, drawing from three independently-conceived transcriptions of the same jazz solo by tenor saxophonist Sonny Rollins. Following an introduction that situates our views of jazz transcription within the context of recent discourse on transcription and notation, we present our transcriptions, each of which is accompanied by a narrative that describes the transcriber’s aims, approach, and rationale for certain notational choices. In the last section of our paper, we compare select passages from our transcriptions of Rollins’s solo as a means to substantiate our conclusion, that (1) jazz transcriptions simultaneously serve descriptive and prescriptive purposes; (2) transcriptions reflect the strategic needs of the analyst and intended audience; (3) transcriptions are interpretive acts that contain the traces of one’s individualized experience of acoustical objects; (4) when transcriptions of the same performance are read side by side, they coalesce into a plural analysis, highlighting the complexity of the performance.