I - The Novel Based on a Musical Genre: Jazz Novels

Summary

In the realm of musico-literary studies, very little attention has been paid to the role of jazz in prose. In African American studies, on the other hand, there is a wealth of criticism on a “jazz style” or “jazz aesthetic,” the “blues idiom,” and the significance of black music for black writing. Most studies of jazz in fiction have concentrated on individual authors (especially Ralph Ellison, Langston Hughes, and Toni Morrison) or works, with varying degrees of precision in their application of musical terminology to literary texts. Alan Munton's essay “Misreading Morrison, Mishearing Jazz” is an astute (if somewhat exaggerated) attack on the frequently dilettantish and impressionistic criticism of individual works of jazz fiction. A large body of work on jazz and fiction or poetry has been published in the last fifteen years or so. Examples of this trend include several articles on jazz and literature in The Jazz Cadence of American Culture, edited by Robert G. O'Meally (1998); the 2000 collection Black Orpheus, edited by Saadi A. Simawe; Wilfried Raussert's Negotiating Temporal Differences: Blues, Jazz, and Narrativity in African American Culture (2000); the two issues of the journal Genre in 2004 devoted to the topic Blue Notes: Toward a New Jazz Discourse, edited by Mark Osteen; Robert Cataliotti's 2007 collection of essays on jazz fiction, The Songs Became the Stories: The Music in African-American Fiction, 1970– 2005; and most recently, the 2009 collection Thriving on a Riff: Jazz and Blues Influences in African American Literature and Film, edited by Graham Lock and David Murray, which collects essays presented at the “Criss Cross Conferences” in Nottingham in 2003 and 2004. Still, the bulk of this work focuses on jazz as a symbol of black culture and remains on the level of the stories’ content. There have been very few overarching theories of the phenomenon of jazz prose as such.

Despite LeRoi Jones's (Amiri Baraka's) assertion in Blues People that “blues is not, nor was it ever meant to be, a strictly social phenomenon, but is primarily a verse form and secondarily a way of making music” (50, italics original), his well-known book on the history of African Americans as seen through their musical traditions places a “tremendous burden of sociology” (Ralph Ellison, “Blues People,” 249) on that music.