A New Kind of Music
Jazz Improvisation and the Diasporic Dissonance of Paule Marshall's The Fisher King
Bibliographic Data
| ID | 11271867 |
|---|---|
| Authors | John Lowney (St. John's University, corresponding author) |
| Year | 2015 |
| Volume | 40 |
| Issue | 1 |
| Pages | 99-123 |
| Publication date | 2015-03-01 |
| Peer Reviewed | Yes |
| Open Access | No |
| Type | ARTICLE |
| Venue | MELUS Multi-Ethnic Literature of the United States (JOURNAL) |
| Journal identifiers | ISSN: 0163-755X • E-ISSN: 1946-3170 |
| Publisher | Oxford University Press (PUBLISHER • GB) |
| DOI | 10.1093/melus/mlu056 |
| OpenAlex | W2040591235 |
| Language | EN |
| Citations received | 3 |
| References cited | 6 |
This essay argues that Paule Marshall's The Fisher King extends our expectations of jazz fiction through its exploration of the intercultural significance of jazz. Like Marshall's previous novels, The Fisher King represents a black Atlantic geography of migration. It covers a greater expanse of history than much of her fiction, however, and it also traces several different geographies of migration, from the US South and the Caribbean to New York in the early twentieth century, and from New York to Paris in the post- World War II years. Narrating the ascent and decline of a black jazz musician who leaves New York to find temporary fulfillment in Paris, The Fisher King dramatizes the link between African diasporic improvisatory music and improvisatory social practices, between the group improvisation associated with jazz and new social formations. Jazz improvisation informs both the narration of The Fisher King and the creative social relationships enacted in the novel—sexual, familial, and intercultural. At the same time, the novel's persistent gendered, class, and cultural conflicts delimit the utopian appeal of jazz, underscoring how these improvisatory relationships are subject to patriarchal, capitalist, and nationalist structures. By interweaving narratives of African American and Caribbean migration with mythic narratives of African American expatriation and jazz history, Marshall, like the jazz pianist featured in The Fisher King , creates “a new kind of music: splintered, atonal, profane, and possessing a wonderful dissonance,” a music of utopian desire that is, at the same time, “earthbound” in its expression of the “hard, pure lyricism of the blues” ( The Fisher King 137).
Aesthetics · Art · Art history · Cognitive dissonance · Improvisation · Jazz · Literature · Musical · Narrative · Sociology · Visual arts · Caribbean history, culture, and politics · History · Music History and Culture · Psychology · Race, History, and American Society
| Unique citing works | 3 |
|---|---|
| Citations per year | 0,33 |
| Citation span | 2017 - 2017 (1) |
| Citation velocity | historical |
| Highly cited | No |