Kinds of Blue

Play it, jazz band! You've got seven languages to speak in And then some ... (Langston Hughes, Band in a Parisian Cabaret) In 1951, James Baldwin wrote ... it is only in his music ... that Negro of America has been able to tell his story' (24). But that same year, British jazz critic Leonard Feather published in pages of Down Beat magazine a blindfold test with jazz trumpeter Roy Eldridge. Throughout his distinguished career, Eldridge had repeatedly expressed his firm belief that white and black jazz musicians had distinctly different styles and that he could easily distinguish between them. When Feather took him at his word and administered test, results were somewhat astonishing: The musician, nicknamed Little by his peers, was either noncommittal or wrong much more often than he was right (Feather, Book 47). Listening to Billy Taylor's recording of, ironically, All Ears, seventh of ten selections, Eldridge's irritation mounted: liked pianist. Couldn't tell who was colored and who was white. They could be Eskimos for all I know, he admitted and had to concede defeat in end (Feather, Little 12). (1) Eldridge's blindfold test again raises old yet still provocative question: Can white folks play blues? If indeed end product of a jazz performance transcends what W. E. B. Du Bois called the problem of color-line (v)--can jazz itself still provide a useful critical framework for study of black American cultural expressions? To be sure, instrumental music at least, is a much more abstract art form than literature, but contemporary critic still faces same dilemma that confronted Roy Eldridge: apparent paradox that jazz music is at once a distinctly black American art form as well as a cultural hybrid. Some of challenges inherent in formulating a literary critical jazz aesthetic may be clarified by comparison of two novels, both of which bear title Jazz. The first one, published in 1992, is Toni Morrison's Jazz, set during Harlem Renaissance. The second was originally published in 1927, a year after Morrison's Violet Trace mutilates face of a dead girl at a Harlem funeral. Also entitled Jazz, this novel's plot is set in London and Paris, does not contain any major characters who are black, and was written by Hans Janowitz, a German-speaking Jew born in southern Bohemia. (2) Despite obvious and enormous differences between Morrison and Janowitz and their books, both employ virtually identical techniques to achieve the translation of world into jazz music, as Janowitz puts it (24). (3) In theme, cast of characters, and setting, two novels diverge dramatically: Morrison's grand, epic sweep interrogating meanings of history and identity contrasts sharply with Janowitz's short, light-hearted comedy of errors. It is therefore all more significant that both texts, in striving to forge an aesthetic of literary jazz, employ same narrative strategies of style and structure. This, then, suggests need for a new critical template that is not predicated primarily on form and language, as most contemporary jazz critiques are. If a critical jazz aesthetic is to be useful for study of African American literature, it must incorporate a firm knowledge of music's technical aspects as well as an equally firm sense of history of both music and people who have been creating it. Toni Morrison's novel Jazz is not, strictly speaking, about jazz at all. Its very first paragraph sounds basic theme: A woman named Violet went to a funeral to mutilate face of a dead eighteen-year-old girl who had been shot by Violet's husband in a desperate act of misguided love. This, then, is melody on which disembodied first-person narrative voice improvises a story, or several stories, constantly adding, revising, inventing, shifting back and forth among various characters, going back in time as far as antebellum Virginia

Art · Art history · Jazz · History · Music History and Culture · Musicology and Musical Analysis · Poetry Analysis and Criticism

• The Modality of Toni Morrison's Jazz

  Chad Jewett•African American Review•2015

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