"A New Kind of Music": Jazz Improvisation and the Diasporic Dissonance of Paule Marshall's The Fisher King

Abstract

Paule Marshall’s novel The Fisher King (2000) revisits a familiar site for readers of her fiction: the Brooklyn neighborhood of Bedford-Stuyvesant, familiarly known as Bed-Stuy. The primary events of The Fisher King take place in this historic African diasporic neighborhood during the spring of 1984; however, the retrospective plot that underlies these events encompasses an expansive black Atlantic geography 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 postwar years. What connects the characters who make these journeys is also what divides them: the life story of a jazz musician, the Caribbean American pianist Sonny-Rett Payne, whose rise and fall evokes legendary narratives of mid-century African American jazz musicians. Beginning in Bed-Stuy, continuing in Kansas City during World War II, and returning to establish his reputation in Brooklyn and then the Manhattan clubs where bebop came into being, SonnyRett eventually migrates to Paris, where his career continues to ascend, only to come crashing down during the 1960s. In its narrative structure as well as its plot, The Fisher King is at once an homage to and inventive revision of earlier African American narratives that feature jazz musicians as protagonists. Narrated through the dialogic interplay of the novel’s multiple voices and memories, Sonny-Rett’s life story evokes the tension between the individual and collective expression associated with jazz performance. His trajectory as a musician recalls previous African American jazz narratives, especially those inspired by Charlie Parker, from James Baldwin’s “Sonny’s Blues” (1957) to John Williams’s Night Song (1961) and William Melvin Kelley’s A Drop of Patience (1965). Like these narratives and other renowned African American jazz novels, from James Weldon Johnson’s The Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man (1912) through Toni Morrison’s Jazz (1992), The Fisher King dramatizes the historical impact of jazz through its narrative adaptation of specific jazz performance practices, most notably improvisation. The Fisher King features dramatic scenes of jazz improvisation, and, like the process in which Sonny-Rett transforms popular