The Music of Toni Morrison’s “Jazz”
What her 1992 masterpiece teaches us about the soul.
In this interview on Beloved, Toni Morrison mentions her affinity for American jazz pianist Keith Jarrett. The implication of this quiet revelation about the music tastes of our nation’s most influential African-American novelist — that amongst the hot bevy of black musicians who built the historical and technical groundwork of jazz and blues, she likes Keith Jarrett the most — is not only a fun fact, but a reframing of how I read music and racial identity in Morrison’s 1992 novel, Jazz.
Like Morrison’s character Golden Gray, Jarrett’s identity is porous and subject to interpretation. Ornette Coleman, the creator of the term “free jazz”, once approached Jarrett after hearing him play and said “Man, you’ve got to be black. You just have to be black.” You just have to be. The insistence here is not really about the color of Jarrett’s skin, but about the color of his soul. He had a soul that wanted to create, as any of his live albums of solo improvisations will show. (He recorded a set in 1976 called Sun Bear Concerts, which I am sure would steal Morrison’s heart, where Jarrett visits five cities in Japan and improvises based on his impressions of each city) Jazz, both the music and the novel, embodies the power of making things up as we go along with a vague sense and memory of structure, technique, and history but with the innovative drive of our own unique persons. If this all sounds spiritual, that’s because it is.
As Prof. Giselle Anatol of the Toni Morrison Society said, playing and listening to jazz has a pure and purifying effect. It has the ability to forgive: “Young men on the rooftops changed their tune; spit and fiddled with the mouthpiece [… and when they] blew out their cheeks it was just like the light of that day, pure and steady and kind of kind. You would have thought everything had been forgiven the way they played”. Jazz, and soul music in general, “penetrate[d] Joe’s sobs” and allowed him and Violet to reconnect by the end of the novel. If African-Americans are the dead waiting for judgement, then New York City is their Purgatory and jazz the fire that will release their souls.
Jazz then, is a form of violence. As the the character Alice Manfred explains, it was the “dirty, get-on-down music” that incited the East St. Louis race riots . It was music that opens “Violent” Violet’s eyes to the anger and resentment that hid in her marriage. It was music that poisoned Joe’s heart with the nostalgia and what-ifs that cradled him to infidelity and murder. It was music that Dorcas followed to the dance floor and her young death and post-mortem mutilation. It is not music that needs to be played, for it permeates the subconscious of every person who yearns for something else, but it is music that’s one-sided, music that’s listened to but not repeated back. It’s the parrot that wants to say, “I love you” if it weren’t for the cage.
As Prof. Herman Beavers is right to point out, although orality and aurality are homonymically similar, they are worlds apart in meaning. (And interestingly, neither depends on writing) Orality is the ability to express oneself in spoken words, which like all music, is transient. That is, unless there’s a listener to receive and remember what you said. Aurality then forges connection and gives legitimacy to the bravery and audacity of someone else voicing their inner wishes. Censorship can quash the effects of orality, but not the effects of aurality.
Listening to good jazz is like catching up with a close friend — it’s wholesome and validating. At times jazz moves like an orchestra, together. At times jazz is singular, it brings out the personalities of individual players through solos. The key here, and something that Morrison experiments with in Jazz’s narrative structure, is the prominence of call-and-response. Sometimes jazz can sound chaotic. Instruments play over each other, bulldozing complexity with more complexity. However, when a solo comes on there’s a sense of consciousness, of interpretation and opinion. One character sings, As untrustworthy and biased as I am, I am curious about what’s going on here and I want the space to muse. The voice of one character becomes the archetypal call-to-action of another character, and so another solo begins, if you get to muse then I also get the right to muse, and so on. The result is not just music, but a story.
Jazz, like the mind, is part memory and part imagination. The photograph of Dorcas that Joe and Violet place on their mantle and take turns staring at is memory turned into physical possession. Gossip, scepticism, and distrust are imaginations distilled into powerful, paralyzing drugs. Music can be alienating, if not deadly.
For me, Morrison’s achievement in Jazz lies in the style. The novel’s characters get to really see each other and voice the broiling feelings of jealousy and dissatisfaction that fill their hearts. The story’s beginning turns its characters against each other with assumptions. Joe Trace killed a girl, what an awful man. “Violent” Violet sliced up her face, what an awful woman. Dorcas was with an older man, that girl is nothing. Despite these assumptions, each character gets their respective solos, and have their stories interact with others, including the author herself. The fire, the forgiveness that Morrison places at core of this novel is that black people are worthy of their vision of paradise.
This essay is dedicated to Zev.