J Afr Am St (2012) 16:363–371

DOI 10.1007/s12111-011-9206-x
BOOK REVIEW

The Composing Mode of Jazz Music in Morrison’s Jazz

Toni Morrison. Jazz. (New York: Vintage, 1992, Rpt. 2004)
Pp. xv-229. ISBN: 1-4000-7621-8

Sima Farshid

Published online: 4 December 2011

# Springer Science+Business Media, LLC 2011

Introduction

The most discernible innovation of Toni Morrison's Jazz is its linguistic and
structural resemblance to the jazz music. In an apparently difficult practice, Morrison
has tried to blur the distinctions between literature and music, the printed and the
heard, the visual and the aural by creating a kind of music in her written text and by
employing jazz techniques. To engender a musical language, she “plays” her
narrative with the inherent rhythm of her alliterated sentences via which she creates
an internal music in the text. Moreover she has structured her Jazz upon the
composing mode of the jazz that is based on the spontaneity and improvisation of
musicians who execute the double role of composer/performer and whose
personality contributes to their improvised composition the “takeoff point” of which
is a melody that serves as the initiating point on which the musicians maneuver.
As the melody of jazz is gradually unraveled by performers who “play against
each other”, each of Morrison's characters plays their own pieces to recount the
story. The interplay of varied sounds and narrative modes in different chapters
resembles the “plan” of the jazz music for call and response among instruments and
vocalists. Morrison mingles divergent narrative viewpoints in different parts of the
novel to resonate the diversity of voices and melodies that are produced by jazz
musicians in a single musical piece. Moreover, in the same way that the jazz music
engages the personality of its performers, the major narrator of Jazz is deeply
involved in the world of the novel, and accordingly, as a human being, makes
mistakes that are not concealed by the writer; instead she is presented as a fallible
figure whose alleged power is thereby undermined.
Having its roots in the blues, jazz music reflects the yearnings of black people and
echoes the rebellious spirit of the era called after it—the Jazz Age. As an entirely
African American music, the jazz undermines many rules of classical Western music

S. Farshid (*)
English Department, Karaj Branch, Islamic Azad University, Karaj, Iran
e-mail: sima.farshid@kiau.ac.ir