All the Things Tunes Are: Avant-Textes and Referents in Jazz Improvisation

Jerome Kern's “All the Things You Are” has enjoyed a lengthy and varied history as a jazz standard. Like many other standards, hundreds of recordings of the tune exist, each rendition different from the last. This radically pluralistic identity makes it difficult to pin down what exactly “All the Things You Are” is. In this article, I argue that the notion of an avant-texte may be used to engage with the pluralistic identity of the jazz tune. Originally developed by literary scholars dealing with authors’ sketches, the term avant-texte describes a network of documents that can be traced in order to determine how the identity of a text is constituted and changes over time. I argue that improvisers construct such networks based on the versions of a tune with which they become familiar, eventually forming a referent for improvisation. By analyzing some of the manifold relations between various recordings of Kern's composition across history, I demonstrate how particular creative choices proliferate throughout the network and gradually alter not only the tune's current identity as a referent but also the future paths the tune's identity might take.