Varieties of Literary Interpretations of Jazz
in American Writings
of the 1950s and 1960s

Magisterarbeit zur Erlangung
des Grades Magistra Artium der
Heinrich-Heine-Universität Düsseldorf

Christine Recker

13. Oktober 2006

Table of Contents

Table of Contents ... III

List of Abbreviations ... IV

1 Introduction ... 5

2 Features of Jazz Music ... 10

3 The Jazz-Literature Connection ... 12

4 James Baldwin: “Sonny’s Blues” ... 15

4.1 Overview ... 15

4.2 “Sonny’s Blues” ... 16
4.2.1 Synopsis ... 16
4.2.2 The Story and its Characters ... 17
4.2.3 The Jazz and Blues Motif in “Sonny’s Blues” ... 26

5 John Clellon Holmes: The Horn ... 31

5.1 Overview ... 31

5.2 The Horn ... 32
5.2.1 Synopsis ... 32
5.2.2 The Story and its Characters ... 35
5.2.3 Jazz Music in The Horn ... 44

6 Jack Kerouac, Jazz, and the Method of Spontaneous Prose ... 48

6.1 Overview ... 48

6.2 Spontaneous Prose and Jazz ... 50
6.2.1 On the Road ... 53
6.2.2 The Subterraneans ... 57
6.2.3 Visions of Cody ... 60

7 The Jazz Poetry of Amiri Baraka ... 64

7.1 Overview ... 64

7.2 Baraka’s Jazz Poetry: Selected Examples ... 68

8 Conclusion ... 84

References ... 87

1 Introduction

Following the flowering of African American arts and culture during the Harlem Renaissance, black musical forms experienced a fast stylistic development and an increasing popularity amongst a wide audience of artists and youngsters inclined to American subculture all through the 1940s, ‘50s, and ‘60s. One of the most influential and significant among these musical forms was jazz music. It offered a revolutionary model for the re-evaluation of societal values and artistic expression, as Kathy J. Ogren remarks:

America chose this powerful new music – characterized by improvised melodies, syncopated rhythms and a strong beat – to represent fundamental cultural changes they experienced in the early twentieth century. Detractors criticized both its musical characteristics and its origins in lower-class black culture. Jazz-lovers hailed it as everything from exciting entertainment to an antidote for repressive industrial society. In either case, Americans found jazz symbolic of fundamental changes they identified in postwar life. Participation in jazz performance provided an opportunity to experience, celebrate, and perhaps cope with change.¹

Jazz music began to evolve into a more distinctive form in the first decades of the 20th century and it did not take long until writers applied it to their own work in manifold ways. From a retrospective, the effect of this convergence of jazz and literature, which is now commonly referred to as ‘jazz literature’, was mostly structural or thematic (and sometimes even both) and would soon cover a great variety of different genres.²

The first writings in which an influence of blues and jazz music can be observed date back to the 1920s and 1930s and embrace blues and jazz as integral parts of African American culture and identity.³ Numerous poets incorporated into their writing the syncopated rhythms and repetitive phrases of the music or applied it otherwise to express their individual artistic vision. With the commencing of WW II and American GIs frequenting urban jazz clubs, jazz reporters contributed to a wider circulation of stories of the jazz world by writing about what they heard and experienced at the clubs. Meanwhile, the music itself was undergoing a major transition: in the early 1940s, jazz musician Charlie “The Bird” Parker was among the first to explore new areas of jazz, “long rippling reaches of sound, pulsing the blues idiom into rich new heights.”⁴ With Parker’s stylistic inventions, Dizzy Gillespie’s unconventional playing of the trumpet and Thelonious Monk’s unorthodox style at the piano it was around the mid-1940s that this new style of jazz, which was to be called bebop, “forged into the jazz consciousness, shattering the reign of swing, opening new vistas of sound, expanding the language of jazz”⁵, to quote from critic Jason Berry. Bebop is a jazz style that is characterized by fast tempi, improvisation on chords rather than on melody, and the frequent use of upper chord tones. The new style was synonymous for a rebellion against the rhythmic regularity and melodic predictability of earlier swing music. It was

a reaction of young musicians against the sterility and formality of Swing (…) in celebration of energies that had been neutralized when channelled into the well-made, easily assimilated, arranger-dominated musical pattern of swing”.⁶

Unsurprisingly, both writers and other artists of the decade favoured jazz as it provided

with its heavy emphasis on individual freedom within a collectively improvised context (…) a model social order, an ideal, even utopic balance between personal impulse and group demands. The musicians’ exhilaration at contributing to evolving musical orders rather than conforming to an already existing one seemed to anticipate the freedom of some future communalist ethic.⁷

Bebop musicians soon became the new idols of America’s youth - not only because of radical musical improvements but because of life style, outer appearance, as well as habits: the ‘beboppers’ dressed with disregard for social manners, and the spoken language of jazz culture soon reflected their radical impact on American culture. In need for an individual voice that would match their personal experiences and also their feelings of discontent with post WW II culture, the new idiom offered musicians and artists alike a clear distinction between the jazz community and the rest of society, as jazz historian Neil Leonard points out:

Jazz talk has been highly eclectic, combining black English with the jargons of gambling, prostitution, larceny, music, and dance. Successive versions of this rapidly changing parlance started as semi-secret codes, vocational idioms which were proud symbols of the jazz community’s identity and separateness.⁸

More and more writers felt attracted to bebop, with its jargon offering them a “potent force, a magical language”⁹. At the beginning of the 1950s, there were consequently already a large number of black as well as white writers who embraced in various ways these aspects of African American culture. The poetry and prose of white writers, however, shifted its focus from racial pride towards more general issues such as individuality, freedom, and spontaneity. Among these are especially remarkable the members of the Beat Generation who were greatly affected by bebop and often chose Charlie Parker as an inspiration for their life and work.

A recurrent increase of racial issues marked the 1960s and ‘70s. In these times writers focussed more on John Coltrane as their spiritual leader, equating his music with Malcolm X and the Black Civil Rights movement. The former Beat poet LeRoi Jones renamed himself Amiri Baraka and became one of the major proponents of the revival of jazz poetry as a source of black pride. Various political, musical, and literary issues finally merged into the “cultural polyrhythm”¹⁰ of a new black aesthetics, the Black Arts Movement. The quest of this movement included the search for a new black cultural consciousness that would as well embrace the heritage of African Americans.¹¹

In conclusion, the heritage and social background of an author played a significant role in his choice of jazz as a model for his literary work. White writers were mostly fascinated by the radicalization of traditional literary forms and the issues of individuality that bebop embodied. The deconstruction of traditional forms also attracted black writers, but, furthermore, they understood the music as epitomizing a link to their racial heritage as well. For them, the music was one of the most unique forms of African American artistic expression and was, thus, often applied as an opposing gesture towards the dominant (white) culture.

Before the background of this multifaceted diversity, it appears that a coherent definition and understanding of jazz literature is still outstanding. This thesis seeks to countervail the trend towards divergence in conceptions of jazz literature by analysing, and reconciling, selected works of authors indicative and representative of this genre. Within the respective analyses (chapters 4 to 7), each author’s personal view and use of jazz music in their literature will be considered

The main focus will be on the determination of a possible definition of ‘jazz literature’ and its characteristic features to then examine selected works of the 1950s and 1960s and evaluate whether these suit the proposed definition. With regard to the abovementioned complex societal changes and artistic inventions, the present thesis features the analysis of the works of four different authors who appeared most representative of the variety of literary interpretations of jazz in the 1950s and 1960s in the United States. These are (in order of their treatment in this thesis) James Baldwin, John Clellon Holmes, Jack Kerouac, and Amiri Baraka.

In his short story “Sonny’s Blues” African American author James Baldwin draws on blues music to express both the emotional state of his protagonists and to underline the importance of the African American heritage reflected in the music. Furthermore, he applies the jazz motif to suggest the importance of individuality within the context of one’s integration in a community. Due to the fact that jazz music derives from the blues form, Baldwin was selected first in the sequence of portrayed authors as he can be considered closest to the musical reference disciplines of jazz. Following this is an analysis of John Clellon Holmes’ The Horn (1958), one of the first novels concerned with jazz. The novel depicts various fictional jazz musicians struggling in 1950’s New York, whereby the author creates a vivid description of the jazz world at that time. He symbolically uses the jazz musician as being representative for the American artist struggling to find his voice and place in post World War II society. Holmes and Baldwin feature a similar approach to jazz insofar that both use it symbolically rather than formally. The following two authors, on the other hand, use the music mainly on because of its formal aesthetics, although they make symbolic implications as well. Jack Kerouac in his various novels seeks to imitate features characteristic of jazz music in order to oppose former literary traditions via his method of ‘spontaneous prose’. Implicitly, he aims at proposing an (artistic) alternative to societal problems and questions of identity in post-war culture. The African American writer Amiri Baraka is concerned with the issue of identity as well, which, however, emerges from another point of view than Kerouac’s. Especially through the use of diverse formal characteristics of jazz he attempts to create in his poetry a distinct African American voice that is able to at the same time question and re-define traditional American artistic forms.

This thesis is structured as follows. Chapter 2 presents some of jazz’s most significant characteristics to allow the reader a brief insight into the stylistics and implications of the music. This discussion will later be used as a reference framework for a more in-depth discussion of selected jazz texts. With regard to the numerous approaches concerned with this complex interdisciplinary field of study, ‘jazz literature’ as a genre of its own standing will be defined in chapter 3. Selected approaches of post-1950s literary criticism will be briefly presented to then appoint an appropriate advancing of the multifaceted issue of literary interpretations of jazz. Thereafter, the works of the four abovementioned authors will be analysed (chapters 4 to 7). As will be shown, the influence of jazz on literature was symbolic or representative (Baldwin and Holmes), formal (Kerouac and Baraka), and ideological (all). This thesis also proves that the representation of jazz in literature was not only bound to a single genre but can be observed in a variety of literary forms. This thesis concludes in chapter 8 with a recapitulation of the main findings.

[...]

1 Kathy J. Ogren, “Controversial Sounds: Jazz Performance as Theme and Language in the Harlem Renaissance”, The Harlem Renaissance: Revaluations, eds. A. Singh, S. Shiver & S. Brodwin (New York: Garland Press, 1989): 160.

2 Since the 1950s, there has been a steady controversy amongst critics about whether a text may be allocated to the genre jazz literature, which will be dealt with in subsection 2.1.

3 Notable among these are, for instance, James Weldon Johnson’s Autobiography of an Ex-Coloured Man (1928), Claude McKay’s Home to Harlem (1928), and the poetry of Langston Hughes and Sterling Brown. Another early example for jazz literature is Dorothy Baker’s award-winning novel Young Man with a Horn (1938) that opened the world of the jazz musician for the novelist. According to Hugh Smith, “its romantic theme – the struggle of the jazz musician to produce his art creatively in an alien, commercial world – was to become the norm.” Ibid., “Jazz in the American Novel”, English Journal XLVII, 8 (1958): 470.

4 Jason Berry, “Jazz Literature”, Southern Exposure 6, 3 (1978): 46. Charlie Parker (1920-1955) was a talented jazz saxophonist and great improvisor and is one the major figures in the introduction and further development of a new stylistic invention in jazz called bebop. The name ‘bebop’ (or ‘rebop’, as it was sometimes called) is an onomatopoeic approximation of a two-note phrase played by the lead instruments to introduce a solo or the closing of a tune.

5 Berry, 46. John Birks “Dizzy” Gillespie (1917-1993) was a virtuoso on the trumpet, a singer, composer, and a gifted improvisor. Alongside with Parker and others he was an important figure in the development of bebop. Thelonious Sphere Monk (1917-1982) was a jazz pianist and composer and is also regarded as one of the main contributors to the development of bebop, although his style rather soon moved away from it.

6 Julian Cowley, “The Art of the Improvisers”, New Comparison: A Journal of Comparative and General Literary Studies 6 (1988): 194.

7 Nathaniel Mackey, qtd. in Kimberly W. Benston (ed.), Imamu Amiri Baraka (LeRoi Jones): A Collection of Critical Essays (Englewood Cliffs, New Jersey: Prentice-Hall Inc., 1978) 122-23.

8 Neil Leonard., qtd. in Barry Wallenstein, “Poetry and Jazz: A Twentieth-Century Wedding”, Black American Literature Forum 25, 3 (Literature of Jazz Issue) (1991): 599.

9 Wallenstein, 604.

10 Berry, 48.

11 Berry states that by incorporating into their writing the musical quality of jazz and blues, African American writers brought to the surface the unwritten legacy of black speech, which was their attempt at creating a new reality. Cf. ibid, 48.