I've put together new steps in the breakaway by slipping and almost falling. I was always looking for anyone dancing in the street or just walking and doing anything that suggests step. If I could see it, I could do it. --Shorty Snowden, Savoy dancer present essay has developed from an affirmation of two widely acknowledged tropes in Ellison's thought and an extension of both in the pervasive presence of in the author's fiction, non-fiction, and life. (1) first trope could probably be captured by the title of one of Ellison's essays, The Novel as of American Democracy, if one were to add to Function the modifier Moral-Educational. second is that of the (particularly bebop-era) jazz jam session as figurative condensation of this democracy. This latter idea is strengthened significantly by Ellison's education for and career as trumpeter. first and longest section of this essay, then, is an attempt to wed the two tropes--the novel as ameliorating methodology and jazz improvisation as regulative ideal--through phenomenological exploration of the ubiquity of and its near-coextension with music in the author-trumpeter's life and masterpiece novel. These analyses open the possibility that, given music's intimate connection to for Ellison and the prominence of language and imagery in the novel, jazz could function as well as, if not better than, jazz music as Ellison's regulative ideal for the U.S. novel as ethical instrument of agonistic co-operation (Ellison, Collected 99, 188). Secondly, in the wake of this exploration, I will gesture briefly toward reading of the novel as whole. In essence, I will consider Invisible Man as kind of public jazz wherein each chapter constitutes different (each with its own corresponding dance) and features its own different primary characters or dance soloists. performances of the soloists, in turn, can be understood as attempts at kind of multileveled syncopation. Based on Lucius Outlaw, Jr.'s contention that the movements of individual characters in the novel can be read as symbolizing the movements of various communities (or typical figures in community), one could justifiably claim that Invisible Man is centrally concerned with the movements of syncopated communities. By implication, the protagonist's central attribute will appear, not as invisibility, but as arrhythmia. Ralph Ellison loved to dance, even as far back as toddlerhood: Either his father or mother was responsible for 'the first ever taught me as two-year old' ('Dark Brown, Chocolate to the Bone'), as well as for his command of wildly popular, risque to go with it, the Eagle (Rampersad 6). This dance, according to prominent historian Marshall Stearns--to whose students Ellison once gave formal address--is typical example of U.S. American jazz (or vernacular) (xiv): Eagle Rock was named after the Eagle Rock Baptist Church in Kansas City, according to Wilburn Sweatman: They were famous for dancing it during religious services in the years following the Civil War. may well have been much older, but ... it has the high arm gestures associated with evangelical dances and religious trance. (Stearns 26-27) By the time he was in grade school, Ellison apparently possessed talent in addition to his enthusiasm, because during a second-grade class presentation, Zelia N. Page Breaux, superintendent of music for the city's black schools, noticed Ralph's intensity as he sang and danced to nursery song (Rampersad 26). On the basis of this performance, Breaux made him major part of her curriculum, and later, invited him to first join and ultimately lead his high school band (2.6). Along with music, Breaux's curriculum also included significant component, as indicated by Ellison's remark that European fold dances were taught throughout the Negro school system (Ellison, Collected 198). …