Jazz and Semiotics

From Sean Singer’s article, Velocity of Celebration: Jazz and Semiotics:

The jazz musician is intimately involved in the life of signs. There is never a wrong note in jazz, the photographer Roy DeCarava said, because each note can be redeemed by the next note [my emphasis]. The connection between jazz and semiotics, simplified, is this: the meaning and feeling behind each note, each chord, each chorus, and each improvisation, are not given. They, like the signifier and the signified, are arbitrarily formed. They arrive at their meaning within the context of the notes that surround it.

I’ve been thinking about how jazz improvisation isn’t completely free form. There are rules and structures. Singer writes that “there is a system of unstated, predetermined rules a jazz musician must comprehend and utilize to be a successful improviser, this system of use or competence is parallel to the system of internal coherence in speaking.”