This article presents an analytical paradigm that employs the repetitive musical cycle known as “the vamp” to illuminate the interrelation of form, experience, and meaning in African American gospel music, focusing on music performed by gospel choirs with soloists. I argue that, more than just a ubiquitous musical procedure, the gospel vamp functions as a ritual technology, a resource many African American Christians use to experience with their bodies what they believe in their hearts. As they perform and perceive the gospel vamp's characteristic combination of repetition and escalation, these believers coproduce sonic environments that facilitate the communal experience of a given song's textual message. Through close readings of four canonical songs from the gospel choir repertoire—Kurt Carr's “For Every Mountain,” Brenda Joyce Moore's “Perfect Praise,” Richard Smallwood's “I Will Sing Praises,” and Thomas Whitfield's “I Shall Wear a Crown”—the article examines the phenomenological implications of gospel's communal orientation, outlines the relationship between musical syntax, musical experience, formal convention, and lyrical content in this genre, and suggests that analyzing gospel offers a way of studying how many black Christians come into contact with the invisible subjects of their belief.

Scholarly opinion has for many years been divided over Gunther Schuller's landmark 1958 article, “Sonny Rollins and the Challenge of Thematic Improvisation.” Jazz theorists view the article's close analysis of Rollins's 1956 jazz saxophone improvisation “Blue 7” as one of their discipline's founding statements; historians and ethnomusicologists meanwhile tend to fault it for neglecting cultural context. In either instance the specific details of Schuller's analysis have been largely accepted as being internally consistent. The present study proposes that the analysis of jazz improvisation ought to engage more extensively with broader stylistic issues in addition to the specifics of isolated individual performances. Such a musically contextualized perspective reveals that Schuller's principal argument—that, in this particular improvisation, Rollins developed motivic elements of a composed theme—is false. “Blue 7” was in fact improvised in its entirety, and the melodic pattern that Schuller cited as a thematic motive was one of Rollins's habitual improvisational formulas, heard on many of the saxophonist's other 1950s recordings. This canonic recording, as well as the notion of Rollins as a “thematic” improviser, therefore needs to be reconsidered.