In this fresh and stimulating book, the author analyzes African American prose through the lens of a literary jazz aesthetic. While there is a substantial body of jazz criticism of poetry, African ...American narrative has not drawn as much critical attention. Kinds of Blue probes not how African American authors write about jazz, but how African American narratives are jazz—in other words, how they attempt to wrest beautiful art from the terrors of American history, to improvise a meaningful narrative of freedom over the dissonant sound clusters of the American experience. This book combines analyses of select jazz performances with close readings of literary works by Sidney Bechet, Ann Petry, Langston Hughes, Ralph Ellison, Amiri Baraka, Hans Janowitz, and Toni Morrison. The jazz aesthetic is inextricably grounded in the black experience in America—and yet, at the same time, its inherent hybridity challenges the received categories of white and black, oppression and freedom, the past and the present, the New World and the Old (Europe, Africa, even Asia), the individual and the collective, tradition and innovation, even jazz and “non-jazz.” Considering the frequency with which musicians, critics, and musicologists reference the two major tropes of storytelling and language acquisition when discussing the art of jazz improvisation, it appears that this music can offer heretofore untapped opportunities to further our understanding of the African American literary tradition as a whole.
Beyond the Sound Barrier examines twentieth-century fictional representations of popular music-particularly jazz-in the fiction of James Weldon Johnson, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Langston Hughes, and Toni ...Morrison. Kristin K. Henson argues that an analysis of musical tropes in the work of these four authors suggests that cultural "mixing" constitutes one of the central preoccupations of modernist literature. Valuable for any reader interested in the intersections between American literature and the history of American popular music, Henson situates the literary use of popular music as a culturally amalgamated, boundary-crossing form of expression that reflects and defines modern American identities.
How have American writers written about jazz, and how has jazz influenced American literature? In Fascinating Rhythm, David Yaffe explores the relationship and interplay between jazz and literature, ...looking at jazz musicians and the themes literature has garnered from them by appropriating the style, tones, and innovations of jazz, and demonstrating that the poetics of jazz has both been assimilated into, and deeply affected, the development of twentieth-century American literature. Yaffe explores how Jewish novelists such as Norman Mailer, J. D. Salinger, and Philip Roth engaged issues of racial, ethnic, and American authenticity by way of jazz; how Ralph Ellison's descriptions of Louis Armstrong led to a "neoconservative" movement in contemporary jazz; how poets such as Wallace Stevens, Hart Crane, Langston Hughes, and Frank O'Hara were variously inspired by the music; and how memoirs by Billie Holiday, Charles Mingus, and Miles Davis both reinforced and redeemed the red light origins of jazz. The book confronts the current jazz discourse and shows how poets and novelists can be placed in it--often with problematic results. Fascinating Rhythm stops to listen for the music, demonstrating how jazz continues to speak for the American writer.
Horace Porter is the chair of African American World Studies and professor of English at the University of Iowa. He is the author ofStealing Fire: The Art and Protest of James Baldwinand one of the ...editors ofCall and Response: The Riverside Anthology of the African American Literary Tradition.
The first book to reassess Ralph Ellison after his death and the posthumous publication ofJuneteenth,his second novel,Jazz Country: Ralph Ellison in Americaexplores Ellison's writings and views on American culture through the lens of jazz music.
Horace Porter's groundbreaking study addresses Ellison's jazz background, including his essays and comments about jazz musicians such as Louis Armstrong, Duke Ellington, and Charlie Parker. Porter further examines the influences of Ellington and Armstrong as sources of the writer's personal and artistic inspiration and highlights the significance of Ellison's camaraderie with two African American friends and fellow jazz fans-the writer Albert Murray and the painter Romare Bearden. Most notably,Jazz Countrydemonstrates how Ellison appropriated jazz techniques in his two novels,Invisible ManandJuneteenth.
Using jazz as the key metaphor, Porter refocuses old interpretations of Ellison by placing jazz in the foreground and by emphasizing, especially as revealed in his essays, the power of Ellison's thought and cultural perception. The self-proclaimed "custodian of American culture," Ellison offers a vision of "jazz-shaped" America-a world of improvisation, individualism, and infinite possibility.
