Toni Morrison Jazz Summary

In the article “Kinds of Blues: Toni Morrison, Hans Janowitz, and the Jazz Aesthetic” by Jürgen E. Grandt, claims that non-African American writers can imitate Jazz from there reading, the invention of jazz- based on their reading techniques belongs to African Americans. At the beginning the article informs us that in the year 1951 there was a jazz critic named Leonard Feather, that believed white and black Jazz musician had different styles and that they can be distinguished by how they play Jazz. So, he came up with a test, which the results made him realized that his belief was wrong, because he wasn’t able to tell who was colored and who was white. It also talks about the comparison of two novel both of which contain the title “Jazz”.

The Jam session is an academy that musicians go to get trained without getting pressure from producers, agents and sponsors and cutting contest is when two or more soloists alternately improvise on the same tune with final goal of cutting or outplaying the opponent by countering, overthrowing, growing and topping the opponent’s musical ideas. The two opponents have to have the same instrument to compete against each other. If one of the opponent manages to cut the other one they might land a gig with a big name in the business or a recording contract. In which Morrison uses this concept at the beginning of her novel when she talks about Violet going to the funeral to see the girl and she cuts her face this is a sense a cutting contest because she is going against the girl that stole her husband away. After that the article gives us more examples on what the chase and the hunt ideas fit in the novel and Jazz music. At the end of the article Morrison explains that African American literature cannot help but be a mixture, just as jazz itself was and is a mixture, drawing on and converting sources form outside the black American experience. It also inform us that Morrison and Janowitz literary Jazz alerts us to the irony that jazz music is both a clearly black American art form and world