Jazz Fiction in Global Context

Abstract

The history of jazz has been one of relentless formal and stylistic innovation, marked by generational battles between old and new, disruptors and traditionalists. These battles have typically played out against the backdrop of the music’s African–American origins and return obsessively to questions of authenticity and value shaped by the history of racialist thinking in the West. Indeed, it sometimes seems that there is no way to think about jazz without falling into the dichotomizing ruts of racialist thinking, a pattern that Pim Higginson has aptly called the racial score. This chapter focuses on a number of literary and cinematic works written at key inflection points in the music’s evolution, emphasizing their efforts to overcome the gravitational pull of the racial score and to foreground jazz’s role in shaping the broader history of global modernity. In order to do so, I distinguish between treatments of the music that define it in terms of its traditional vernacular elements (swing, blues, dirty notes, etc.) and those that explore it in terms of its formal procedures, with the basic principle of improvisation understood to be foundational. Significantly, works in the latter group tend not only to be about jazz but also to incorporate formal/stylistic techniques inspired by the music. I examine works from three continents—by Amiri Baraka and Nathanial Mackey, Emmanuel Dongala and Koffi Kwahulé, Louis Malle and Jacques Réda—arguing that their emphasis on improvisation as a technology of modernity makes it possible to honor the music’s specifically African–American dimensions while also foregrounding its universalizing potential as a creative force for the future.