Varieties of literary interpretations of jazz in American writings of the 1950s and 1960s


Thesis (M.A.), 2006

94 Pages, Grade: 1,0


Excerpt


Table of Contents

List of Abbreviations

1 Introduction

2 Features of Jazz Music

3 The Jazz-Literature Connection

4 James Baldwin: “Sonny’s Blues”
4.1 Overview
4.2 “Sonny’s Blues”
4.2.1 Synopsis
4.2.2 The Story and its Characters
4.2.3 The Jazz and Blues Motif in “Sonny’s Blues”

5 John Clellon Holmes: The Horn
5.1 Overview
5.2 The Horn
5.2.1 Synopsis
5.2.2 The Story and its Characters
5.2.3 Jazz Music in The Horn

6 Jack Kerouac, Jazz, and the Method of Spontaneous Prose
6.1 Overview
6.2 Spontaneous Prose and Jazz
6.2.1 On the Road
6.2.2 The Subterraneans
6.2.3 Visions of Cody

7 The Jazz Poetry of Amiri Baraka
7.1 Overview
7.2 Baraka’s Jazz Poetry: Selected Examples

8 Conclusion

References

List of Abbreviations

Abbildung in dieser Leseprobe nicht enthalten

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.

2 Features of Jazz Music

In the following, selected characteristics of jazz music will be recapitulated in order to allow the reader to form an appreciation of the most significant features of the music. This in turn will allow the reader to develop a comprehensive understanding of the background on which the subsequent elaborations in this thesis will be based.

In general terms, formal characteristics of jazz include syncopation (‘off-beat’), the use of polyrhythmic patterns, and, if a singer is included, scat singing (the use of nonsense syllables to imitate an instrument). Especially the use of the abovementioned rhythmic patterns are a distinct characteristic of jazz.

Probably the music’s most exceptional characteristic, however, is improvisation. Although jazz music certainly obeys some form of standard or structure,[12] it is the feature of improvisation that clearly distinguishes jazz from other styles of music, which is especially the case with a style like bebop.[13] In improvisation, one or more parts of a band improvise over the melody or chord structures of a tune, responding to the other musicians in adding a new element but still correlating to the given basis. The structure of a tune, which has been previously agreed upon, most often incorporates basic chord progressions of a popular tune on which musicians then improvise.[14] Thereby, it contributes to the flow of ideas during a performance. Improvisation may occur by the use of a single phrase, a whole musical idea through repetition or variation (of more than one phrase), or at the level of an entire solo.[15]

Improvisation yields towards another important element in jazz performance. By fusing temporal continuity as well as discontinuity, jazz addresses diverse levels of time in composition and performance alike. The music deals with different conceptions of time that are rooted in the African holistic view yet influenced by Western notions as well, remarks Wilfried Raussert: “Both musical and cultural notions of time clash in the development of jazz. As an intercultural art form, jazz translates the tensions between an African and a Western sense of time rhythmically.”[16]

During a live jazz performance, the audience and its immediate reaction to the performance on stage exemplifies another important feature of jazz. The musical creation can be directly influenced in its development on stage, either through an audience’s appreciation or their disapproval. The audience of a jazz improvisation thus attains an unusually high degree of intimacy with the music that can often not be achieved in any other situation.

Aside from the abovementioned features, jazz is also significant on an ideological, cultural, and socio-political level. To post World War II society, it offered a model for the radical improvement of rigid societal structures, as Raussert remarks:

Every renewal has brought about harmonic and rhythmic expansions as the music retained ‘its immediacy and its emotional concurrency with contemporary life’. Through a series of fast-paced changes in style - New Orleans jazz, swing, bebop, cool jazz, free jazz - jazz embodied the spirit of the avant-garde with its yearning for constant renewal.[17]

The rapidly developing jazz scene with bebop’s radical innovations in style, ever holding an air of mysticism, embodied rebellion against society’s conformities. Writers welcomed the music enthusiastically and responded to it with highly personal poetry and prose. Jazz music left its inextinguishable traces on the art of word, with the effect that it is still evident in contemporary artistic expression.

3 The Jazz-Literature Connection

The discussion about what exactly the definition of a jazz poem or jazz prose text is and what qualities or features it should enclose has evoked some heated discussions among writers and critics ever since the inception of these terms. Such matter of indecision appears to be most aptly exemplified by two major questions that have repeatedly been raised:

(1) Does jazz literature have to be about jazz?
(2) Or should it suggest the music through rhythmic or structural properties?

While some critics feel that a jazz text has to somehow imitate the rhythmic pulse of music, others claim that ‘jazziness’ is a rather random and diffusing term in a literary context.[18]

Although most views differ in one way or another, all of them share a general acceptance of an actually existing connection between the two arts.[19] This is evident in their acceptance of a possible new genre that forms a distinctive category of literary composition that exemplifies a “synesthesia of musical and literary innovations”[20], which will be discussed in the following.

Widely disseminated criticisms of jazz literature as a genre of its own standing have been rare. There are only few early critical writings,[21] and only from the 1980s onwards has the genre found more widespread recognition by critics.[22]

As early as 1958 Hugh L. Smith outlined jazz’s indebtedness to American literature for what he recognized at that time as “its growing national recognition as an art form”[23]. He notes three trends in novelists’ references to jazz, all of which are to be placed on a thematic level: “a quantitative increase in jazz subject matter, a qualitative advancement in the accuracy of portrayal of the jazz world, and a consistently romantic treatment of jazz subject matter”[24]. Along similar lines, Sascha Feinstein has allocated the influence of jazz on poetry to different categories.[25] He notes, for instance, that jazz-related poems deal with jazz musicians as such or imply direct references to a musician, while others concentrate on the atmosphere of jazz itself.[26] All of these writings show how poets respond to the music they hear by means of highly individual verse that reflects their poetic sensibilities and individual associations with jazz.[27] If only a poem’s title refers to jazz, a jazz composition, or to a jazz club[28], however, Feinstein finds it a “matter of personal decision”[29] and raises doubts as to whether this indication is sufficient to label a poem jazz-related.[30] Another, more difficult and complex issue arises in cases in which a musician or jazz tune is not named directly. The same problem occurs when references to jazz are in general rather implicit, in which cases form alone becomes the single available criterion. However, as Feinstein notes, there are many poets whose work has been so obviously influenced by the jazz aesthetics that “one can make some plausible assessments of form as well.”[31]

As a third example are considered critics Michael Jarrett and Gayl Jones who are concerned with the influence of jazz on any literary text. In similar ways, both divide jazz literature into two distinct groups, with Jones noting that in terms of literature, jazz can either affect subject matter or cause stylistic implications. The latter, she remarks, may be the attempt of a writer to reproduce musical rhythms similar to features intrinsic to jazz such as the “flexibility and fluidity in prose rhythms (words, lines, paragraphs, the whole text), [or] nonchronological syncopated order, pacing, or tempo.”[32] She further notes that a “sense of jazz – the jam session“[33] may be be suggested by means of an interaction of one or more voices improvising on main themes or motifs of a text via key words or phrases. With respect to their harmony, rhythms, and surface structure, she further states that, in comparison to a blues text, a jazz text has a “more complex and sophisticated character”[34] and may often seem rather associational than unequivocal. Jarrett’s equals Jones’ argumentation in that he considers jazz writing to be understood in two different ways: first, as writing about jazz (marked by “culturally assigned, politically privileged signifiers governing the representation of this music”[35]), and second, as writing with jazz (a writer attempting to copy the music at a formal level.[36]

As this brief discussion reveals, there are numerous ways of exploring a jazz-related text regardless of its genre, origin, or theme. Consequently, the supposedly opposite schools of thought (jazz-form versus jazz-subject) should not be discussed as opposites but rather as part of a larger discussion that combines both approaches. Hence, jazz may have a thematic as well as a structural impact on both poetry and prose. This assumption builds the framework upon which the following analyses are based.

4 James Baldwin: “Sonny’s Blues”

4.1 Overview

James Baldwin (1924-1987) was born August 2, 1924 in Harlem as the first of nine children. When he was three years old, his mother married his would-be stepfather whom Baldwin would never quite come to terms with.[37] Not surprisingly, the author’s first (semi-autobiographical) novel, Go Tell It On the Mountain (1953) is more or less a reflection about the relationship to his stepfather. Baldwin’s second novel, Giovanni’s Room (1956), features a rather outspoken portrayal of homosexuality and covers the author’s early expatriate years in Paris in the late 1940s. He lived in Europe, mainly in France, for the rest of his life, but occasionally visited the United States to participate in the Civil Rights Movement, to work as a teacher and lecturer, and to write about the continuing issues of race and identity in the country of his birth. Themes of dispossession and alienation and questions of identity (racial and sexual) would continue to be recurrent themes in Baldwin’s writings. Also, the motif of a father-son-relationship (or derivatives of it) repeatedly occurs in his fiction.

“Sonny’s Blues” was first published in Partisan Review in 1957. Eight years later, after having published numerous other short stories, essays, plays, and novels, Baldwin included the story of a young jazz musician in his 1965 collection of short stories Going to Meet the Man. Reviews of the collection ranged from stern criticism to approval, as it has always been with Baldwin’s works. Augusta Strong, for instance, finds that in all of Baldwin’s short stories “the craftsmanship is superb”[38]. Joseph Featherstone especially mentions “Sonny’s Blues” in his praise that he finds “close to a success”[39]. Although many of the author’s short stories in this collection deal with similar themes and issues (e.g., music as a means for communication and of finding a place within a community), “Sonny’s Blues” has for good reason received more critical attention than any of Baldwin’s other short stories ever since.

4.2 “Sonny’s Blues”

4.2.1 Synopsis

“Sonny’s Blues” is the story of two estranged brothers who gradually arrive at a closer relationship. The narrator, whose name is not revealed, is the older one. At the time the story is set (most probably the late 1940s or early 1950s), he has achieved a respectable position as teacher, husband and father. Quite oppositely, his younger brother Sonny, a jazz musician, is struggling with heroin addiction. In his life, he has not pursued a steady way of living like his brother. In the course of the story, the narrator tells about different incidents in his life that all deal with his relationship to Sonny. In the beginning of the story, he lacks an emphatic view of his younger brother although he repeatedly tries to approach him in a helpful manner, as it appears to him. Sonny, who has never assimilated to society the way his older brother has, struggles in his attempt to find a way to deal with his personal suffering that his status as an outsider (being a drug addict and jazz musician) confers upon him. He finally channels his feelings into music and, thereby, creates for himself a new identity, which his brother, however, does not comprehend. In a way, the two brothers serve as symbols for the two sides of the African American experience: the narrator has retreated to a way of living that is characterized by employment and family duties, and thus leads a way of life according to rather ‘white’ standards. Sonny, on the other hand, symbolizes the other side insofar that he still searches for his own, individual way of living that may be a combination of both his racial heritage and his personal desires. This, in turn, can be seen as symbolizing the fracture that exists within African American culture on a larger scale.

The story is told in retrospection in a first person point of view. Through a range of flashbacks and time leaps, the story unfolds by portraying the two brothers’ lives. The text follows the thoughts and memories of the narrator as he remembers key events of his life, whereby the reader witnesses his gradual development towards a better understanding of Sonny. As it pursues, the story depicts the importance of the black heritage and the significance of music in that heritage. Music plays the central role in Baldwin’s short story and finally becomes the catalyst for the two brother’s understanding of each other. Even more importantly, it enables the narrator to remember and accept his own roots. In addition to the musical metaphor, a range of other images are applied to the text, which include images of light and darkness, of silence, of movement (trembling and shaking), and biblical imagery. The story’s themes are brotherhood, maturing processes, and art (i.e., music) as a redeeming and healing power. The structure of the story is cyclical and moves from the delineation of situation over complication and climax towards denouement.

In the following, Baldwin’s short story will be outlined in more detail in order to describe and analyse how the narrator gradually accomplishes a better understanding of his younger brother. As will be shown, music serves as the central metaphor for the narrator’s gradually growing awareness and underlines each key moment in the text. At first, the musical motif is used as an element signifying his lack of understanding and his feelings of uneasiness or fright when experiencing things he would rather ignore.[40] Hence, music serves as a means to illustrate the two brothers’ differences in the beginning of the text. Later on, however, it functions vice versa as it finally becomes the catalyst for the two brothers’ reconciliation.

4.2.2 The Story and its Characters

The narrator is presented as a well-educated, cultured black who occupies a regular employment as an algebra teacher. He is living a respectable life and feels that by doing so, he has successfully escaped the miserable environment inhabited by most of his race. Nevertheless, his efforts of improving himself have brought him on a distance to his people and, more importantly, to his younger brother Sonny. The latter has suffered from drug addiction and is struggling to find an own standing in life. He has become a jazz musician and leads a life style that may well be deemed the exact opposite to that of his older brother.

The story begins with depicting the moment in which the narrator reads about Sonny’s imprisonment in the newspaper. Slowly, he realizes that he has ignored what was really happening, that he has kept Sonny “outside for a long time”[41]. In front of the high school where he works, he meets an acquaintance of Sonny with whom he discusses his brother’s problems. He feels confronted with implicit accusations of not having taken care of his younger brother and reacts by trying to blame the boy for getting Sonny in trouble. He then goes to a bar, still being accompanied by his brother’s friend. The music that is playing in the bar evokes an uneasy if not frightening feeling in the narrator:

The juke box was blasting away with something black and bouncy and I half watched the barmaid as she danced her way from the juke box to her place behind the bar. (…) I watched the barmaid, and I listened to the music which seemed to be causing the pavement to shake. (51)

This description underlines the assumption that the narrator deeply fears hearing the truth about his brother. The incident marks a rather early point in the narrator’s development and indicates how his laboriously constructed yet fake world shows deep fractures. He realizes that

[a]ll this was carrying me some place I didn’t want to go. I certainly didn’t want to know how it [ i.e., the drugs] felt. It filled everything, the people, the houses, the music, the dark, quicksilver barmaid, with menace; and this menace was their reality. (Ibid.)

When he hears of Sonny’s trouble, it seems as if all of the sudden, he awakes from some strange dream to find his world a completely different one: “I’d known this avenue all my life, but it seemed to me again, as it had seemed on the day I’d first heard about Sonny’s trouble, filled with a hidden menace” (55). Accordingly, all of what the narrator has put up for himself and his family remains a mere fake, looking “like a parody of the good, clean, faceless life” (56).

After this incident, the story jumps to a later moment in time. The narrator has sent Sonny a letter to prison telling him of his little daughter’s death and has just received an answer. In his letter, Sonny expresses how much he has missed his brother and how he is nevertheless fully aware of his situation and of having hurt his brother’s feelings. He reveals his struggles to him and expresses that now that his brother has written him, he is hopeful at last:

You don’t know how much I needed to hear from you. I wanted to write you many a time but I dug how much I must have hurt you and so I didn’t write. But now I feel like a man who’s been trying to climb out of some deep, real deep and funky hole and just saw the sun up there, outside. I got to get outside. (53)

After Sonny is released from jail, the two brothers meet more often and he narrator begins to reflect upon his brother, realizing how little has ever known him:

When I saw him many things I thought I had forgotten came flooding back to me. This was because I had begun, finally, to wonder about Sonny, about the life [he] lived inside. (…) [When] he smiled, when we shook hands, the baby brother I’d never known looked out from the depths of his private life, like an animal waiting to be coaxed into the light. (54)

The narrator then offers Sonny to stay at his family’s house. He describes how uneasy he feels in the accompaniment of Sonny because he fears to hear about things he would rather ignore:

Everything I did seemed awkward to me, and everything I said sounded freighted with hidden meaning. I was trying to remember everything I’d heard about dope addiction and I couldn’t help watching Sonny for signs. (…) I was trying to find out something about my brother. I was dying to hear him tell me he was safe. (56)

At this point of the story, the narrator’s thoughts drift back in time to when his parents were still alive. Once, he recalls, they were discussing whether there was any safe place around on earth for children, which his father objected (cf. 57). As the story moves further backwards in time to the time of his own childhood, the narrator remembers how he and some other children used to sit among their older relatives and listened to their stories. He recalls the fright he felt at those moments when their talk ceased and they all became aware of the darkness creeping into the room from the outside:

You can see the darkness growing against the windowpanes and you hear he street noises every now and again (…), but it’s really quiet in the room. For a moment, nobody’s talking, but every face looks darkening, like the sky outside. (…) Everyone is looking at something the child can’t see. For a minute they’ve forgotten the children. (…) The silence, the darkness coming, and the darkness in the faces frightens the child obscurely. He hopes that the hand which strokes his forehead will never stop – will never die. He hopes that there will never come a time when the old folks won’t be sitting around the living room, talking about where they’ve come from, and what they’ve seen, and what’s happened to them and their kinfolk. But something deep and watchful in the child knows that this is bound to end, is already ending. In a moment someone will get up and turn on the light. Then the old folks will remember the children and they won’t talk any more that day. And when the light fills the room, the child is filled with darkness. He knows that everytime this happens he’s moved just a little closer to that darkness outside. The darkness outside is what the old folks have been talking about. It’s what they’ve come from. It’s what they endure. The child knows that they won’t talk any more because if he knows too much about what’s happened to them, he’ll know too much too soon, about what’s going to happen to him. (57-58)

This scene marks a key moment in the story as it concerns one of its major themes: the pain of the maturing process. It portays the earliest moment in the narrator’s life in which he started to realize that besides the good times an inevitable part of life is the dark side of pain and suffering.[42] A further move in time brings the story another step forward: in a few days, the narrator will marry his girlfriend Isabel. His mother (who dies shortly afterwards) asks him to take care of Sonny in the future whom she feels in danger of getting “sucked under” although “having good sense” (58). She then tells him about the death of his uncle whose existence the narrator has not even known until this point, and how he got killed by a car driven by a group of white men. Again, music is applied to the text to highlight the importance of this passage, this time in form of a church song his mother is humming (cf. 58). His brother’s death changed the narrator’s father forever, his mother tells him:

Your Daddy was like a crazy man that night and for many a night thereafter. He says he never in his life seen anything as dark as that road after the lights of that car had gone away. (…) Your Daddy never did really get right again. Till the day he died he weren’t sure but that every white man he saw was the man that killed his brother. (60)[43]

She then makes the narrator promise to take care of Sonny and to be there for him, no matter what will happen. After his mother’s death, he takes Sonny to his family’s home where they have a serious conversation about Sonny’s plans for his future for the first time. Sonny tells his brother that he wants to become a jazz piano player, which the narrator does neither take serious nor accept as a viable possibility for Sonny’s life. Instead, he believes that this choice is “merely an excuse for the life he [leads]” (67):

I simply couldn’t see why on earth he’d want to spend his time hanging around nightclubs, clowning around bandstands, while people pushed each other around a dance floor. It seemed – beneath him, somehow. I had never thought about it before, had never been forced to, but I suppose I had always put jazz musicians in a class what Daddy called “good-time people.” (62)

Although he senses how important the fulfilment of his brother’s plans are to the boy, the narrator does not pay too much attention to Sonny’s plans and instead handles his dream like that of an immature child:

I was beginning to realize that I’d never seen him so upset before. With another part of my mind I was thinking that this would probably turn out to be one of those things kids fo through and that I shouldn’t make it seem important by pushing it too hard. Still, I didn’t think it would do any harm to ask: “Doesn’t all this take a lot of time? Can you make a living at it?” (62-63)

These essential differences between the two brothers are further intensified through Baldwin’s implicit equating of the brothers with two actual jazz musicians. Sonny’s idol is Charlie “The Bird” Parker[44] who at the time the story is a new character in the jazz scene, known only to people interested in jazz music. This is not the case with the narrator who has not even heard of Parker. The only jazz musician he knows is Louis Armstrong, who Sonny refers to as “old-time, down-home” (62).[45] Following this image, there seems to be little common ground for an eventual understanding between the brothers at this point of the story. “[W]hat I don’t seem to be able to make you understand is that it’s the only thing I want to do”, Sonny tells his brother, and when the latter objects, he argues, “I think people ought to do what they want to do, what else are they alive for?” (63) Despite their different opinions concerning the boy’s future, they agree upon Sonny trying to finish school so that perhaps later he may realize his dreams. The young boy starts practising the family piano every day and begins to spend every spare minute of the day with music. Yet, as the narrator’s description of these times shows, there is not a single sign of understanding of Sonny and his music:

Isabel finally confessed that it wasn’t like living with a person at all, it was like living with sound. And the sound didn’t make no sense to her, didn’t make sense to any of them – naturally. (….) It was as though Sonny were some sort of god, or monster. He moved in an atmosphere which wasn’t theirs at all. (…) [I]t was as though he were wrapped up in some cloud, some fire, some vision all his own; and there wasn’t any way to reach him. (65)

Nevertheless, the narrator recognizes that something important is happening to Sonny: he realizes that his brother is “at the piano playing for his life” (66). By the time the family realizes that Sonny does not attend school anymore, they have a serious argument with Sonny who then leaves their house not to return again, and the silence that now fills the house instead of his music was “louder than the sound of all the music ever played since time began” (ibid.).[46]

When the two brothers meet in New York after a long time of absence, they quarrel again about Sonny’s life style (c. 67). Obviously, the narrator is still not able or willing to understand his brother.

I didn’t like the way he carried himself, loose and dreamlike all the time, and I didn’t like his friends, and his music seemed to be merely an excuse for the life he led. It sounded just that weird and disordered. (…) [He] treated them [ i.e, his friends] as though they were his family and I weren’t. So I got mad and then he got mad, and then I told him that he might just as well be dead as live the way he was living. Then he stood up and he told me not to worry about him any more in life, that he was dead as far as I was concerned. (67)

After the abovementioned fight, their ways part again for a long time. The story now moves back to where it began, to the time of Sonny’s imprisonment. So far the narrator has clearly failed in his promise to take care of his brother. Most probably, he has known too little anguish himself so far to appreciate and understand Sonny’s. This interpretation is supported, for instance, by the fact that only after his baby daughter dies of polio about six months later, the narrator is finally able to send Sonny his letter. The description of this incident is similar to the one in which Sonny has just left the family: the same horrifying silence fills the house after little Grace fell on the floor. Her scream of hurt is missing but should have been there, and the silence following the sound of her fall indicates that this time, something deathly serious has happened:

At this time, Grace was quiet. Yet, Isabel says that when she heard that thump and then that silence, something happened in her to make her afraid. And she ran to the living room and there was little Grace on the floor, all twisted up, and the reason why she hadn’t screamed was that she couldn’t get her breath. And when she did scream, it was the worst sound, Isabel says, that she’d ever heard in all her life (…). (68)

As he thinks back and remembers his girl’s death, the narrator realizes that his own suffering has brought him closer to Sonny’s: “My trouble made his real” (68). His personal tragedy initiates the narrator’s slowly increasing appreciation of a life style other than his own. This consequently marks the beginning of his ‘opening-up’ and reaching for Sonny. Here, the story moves forward again to unfold continually from this point on. Through a window of his house the narrator watches life on Seventh Avenue and sees a group of church singers. As he listens to their singing, he witnesses a sudden change on their faces:

As the singing filled the air the watching, listening faces underwent a change, the eyes focussing on something within; the music seemed to soothe a poison out of them; and time seemed, nearly, to fall away from the sullen, belligerent, battered faces, as though they were fleeing back to their first condition, while dreaming of their last. (69)

[...]


[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.

[12] Like that of all music, the fabric of jazz includes four basic elements: melody, harmony, rhythm and tone. For a more detailed analysis of jazz music see Leonard Feather, “The Anatomy of Jazz ”, The Encyclopedia of Jazz (London etc.: Quartet Books, 1978).

[13] Improvisation has its roots in the call-and-response patterns of West African and African American cultural expression. At the beginning of the 19th century, early folk blues music and part of the Dixieland style involved musicians improvising around lyrics or melody. During the swing era (late 1920s to 1930s), big bands played carefully arranged sheet music, but their music would often ‘call’ for one member of the band to stand up and play a short improvised solo. In bebop, however, the focus shifted to an appreciation of improvisation over form, and musicians gave comparably little attention to composed melody. Often, improvisation has been compared to telling a story or to a conversation. In both cases one might answer, reject an idea or introduce some new element.

[14] A further similar device is the ‘quote’, a whole phrase directly borrowed from another composition or well-known solo.

[15] Musical devices that help to form and develop an idea are similar to literary ones: repetition, variation, alliteration, and rhyme. Over time, musicians usually develop their personal ’vocabulary’, i.e., a set of favourite phrases that they can repeat easily in every performance and that often make them instantly recognizable.

[16] Wilfried Raussert, “Jazz, Time and Narrativity”, Amerikastudien 45, 4 (2000): 521.

[17] Ibid., 519-20.

[18] Cf. Feinstein, 2. Some critics argue that allusions to jazz musicians might in fact be the only safe approach to explore whether a text has indeed been influenced by jazz. Others propose that in a strict sense, jazz literature should be based on autobiographical writings by jazz musicians. Cf. Berry, 42.

[19] Cf. Berry, 42; Baumgartner, 3; and Feinstein’s overall argumentation.

[20] Feinstein, 3.

[21] Notable in this respect is, for instance, Hugh L. Smith, “Jazz in the American Novel”, English Journal XLVII, 8 (1958).

[22] Among these are Smith, Sascha Feinstein, Gayl Jones, Michael Jarrett, Barry Wallenstein, Baumgartner, and Raussert.

[23] Smith, qtd. in Richard N. Albert, An Annotated Bibliography of Jazz Fiction and Jazz Fiction Criticism (Westport, London: Greenwood Press, 1996) xiv.

[24] Smith, 466.

[25] Cf. Sascha Feinstein, Jazz Poetry: From the 1920s to the Present (Westport London: Greenwood Press, 1997) 2 ff. In his analysis, the critic is concerned with the influence of jazz on poetry alone. The present thesis refers to his critique because it considers his observations as important in the overall critical conception of jazz literature and views them as applicable to other genres as well.

[26] A general portrayal of the music provide Marvin Bell’s “The Fifties”, Hayden Carruth’s “Paragraphs”, or Ted Joans’ “Jazz Must Be a Woman”. Anonymous musicians are portrayed in John Logan’s “Chicago Scene”, Mina Loy’s “The Widow Jazz”, or Carl Sandburg’s “Jazz Fantasia”. Duke Ellington is the inspiration of Aleda Shirley’s “Ellington Indigos” and Quincy Troupe’s “The Day Duke Raised; May 24th, 1974”. Others are referred to in Yusef Komunyakaa’s “Elegy for Thelonious”, Frank O’Hara’s “The Day Lady Died”, Michael Stillman’s “In Memoriam John Coltrane”. The atmosphere of jazz describe Wanda Coleman’s “At the Jazz Club He Comes on a Ghost” and C. D. Wright’s “Jazz Impressions in the Garden”. Cf. Feinstein, 7-8.

[27] Feinstein reports about one poet that “when reading the poem for a recent recoding, Troupe shouted out the stanzas like a man with a megaphone”. Ibid., 7

[28] Such are, among others, Paul Blackburn’s “Listening to Sonny Rollins at the Five-Spot”, or Ira Sadoff’s “At the Half-Note Café”.

[29] Feinstein, 8.

[30] Cf. ibid. Using a poem’s title as the definite or sole reason for labelling it jazz-related can be misleading. As an example, many poems have “Blues” in their title but display no single connection with the music or even with the emotions commonly associated with the blues.

[31] Feinstein names, amongst others, the following: Etheridge Knight, Amiri Baraka, Sterling Brown, Hayden Carruth, Wanda Coleman, Jayne Cortez, Langston Hughes, Ted Joans, Bob Kaufman, Sonia Sanchez, and more. Ibid., 8.

[32] Gayl Jones, “The Freeing of Traditional Forms: Jazz and Amiri Baraka’s ‘The Screamers’”, Liberating Voices: Oral Tradition in African American Literature, ibid. (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1991): 200.

[33] Ibid.

[34] Ibid.

[35] Michael Jarrett, “Four Choruses on the Tropes of Jazz Writing”, American Literary History 6, 2 (1994): 338.

[36] Cf. ibid.

[37] Baldwin would never meet his biological father.

[38] M. Thomas Inge; Maurice Duke; Jackson R. Bryer, Richard Wright, Ralph Ellison, James Baldwin, and Amiri Baraka (London: Macmillan,1978) 101.

[39] Ibid.

[40] In the text, the imagery of light has the same function like music: at each key moment in the narrator’s realization (or maturing) process, Baldwin uses light to indicate feelings of uneasiness or even fright. Paradoxically, it is used in the same manner as its opposite, darkness. Any process of growing awareness or recognition in the text is received as a painful experience. Like music, it is only in the end of the story that light connotates a new beginning. For a closer analysis of light imagery in Baldwin’s short story see Michael Clark, “James Baldwin’s ‘Sonny’s Blues’: Childhood, Light and Art”, CLA Journal 29, 2 (1985).

[41] James Baldwin, “Sonny’s Blues”, Moment’s Notice: Jazz in Poetry and Prose, eds. Art Lange & Nathaniel Mackey (Minneapolis: Coffee House Press, 1993): 48. Further parenthetical references are taken from this edition.

[42] This scene is one of the best examples for Baldwin’s use of the imagery of light and darkness. Light is here equated with the children’s maturation process. They intuitively sense that the warmth and security of their home will not preserve them from the “darkness”, thus hardship, of the world. Light here symbolizes, to quote from Donald Murray, “the harsh glare of reality, the bitter conditions of ghetto existence which harden and brutalize the young”. Donald C. Murray, “James Baldwin’s ‘Sonny’s Blues’: Complicated and Simple”, Studies in Short Fiction, 14 (1977): 354.

[43] Here, imagery of light again does not constitute a relieving moment but instead deepens the darkness preceding and following the car accident. This scene provides a thematic backdrop to the narrator’s own situation as it is a maturing experience in his father’s life in the sense that after the incident he was never able to live his former life. Clark notes, too, that the scene “marks the critical moment when youth gives way to adulthood and responsibility [and the] accident marks the transmutation of the father’s life from youth to adulthood.” Ibid., 201.

[44] There is a further, yet implicit, allusion to Parker in the text, which also creates an association to Sonny. It can be discovered in the scene in which the narrator listens to a boy whistling a tune in while he is thinking of Sonny: “It was at once very complicated and very simple, it seemed to be pouring out of him as though he were a bird, and it sounded very cool and moving through all that harsh, bright air, only just holding its own through all those other sounds” (49). This description instantly evokes memories of Parker blowing his complicated improvisations. At the same time, it foreshadows Sonny as the one who will stand in for what he is and where he comes from. Cf. Richard N. Albert, The Jazz/Blues Motif in James Baldwin’s ‘Sonny’s Blues’”, College Literature 11 (1984): 180.

[45] Armstrong (1901-1971) was certainly a highly regarded and popular jazz trumpet player. Yet, among bop musicians, he represented a more traditional form of jazz as opposed to the more radical style bebop musicians preferred.

[46] Throughout the story, Baldwin creates a strong contrast between silence and sound. Silence often indicates some form of horrifying experience. Here, for instance, it symbolizes the narrator’s inability to communicate with Sonny. Only in the end of the story, they find a way to break their silence, though in a wordless way – it is through music that the spell of their silence is broken. For more discussion on the topic of silence versus sound see Edward Lobb, “James Baldwin’s Blues and the Function of Art”, International Fiction Review 6, 2 (1979).

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Title
Varieties of literary interpretations of jazz in American writings of the 1950s and 1960s
College
University of Dusseldorf "Heinrich Heine"
Grade
1,0
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Year
2006
Pages
94
Catalog Number
V91151
ISBN (eBook)
9783638039901
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9783640193271
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869 KB
Language
English
Keywords
Varieties, American
Quote paper
Christine Recker (Author), 2006, Varieties of literary interpretations of jazz in American writings of the 1950s and 1960s, Munich, GRIN Verlag, https://www.grin.com/document/91151

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