The Composing Mode of Jazz Music in Morrison’s Jazz

Excerpt

The most discernible innovation of Toni Morrison's Jazz is its linguistic and structural resemblance to the jazz music. In an apparently difficult practice, Morrison has tried to blur the distinctions between literature and music, the printed and the heard, the visual and the aural by creating a kind of music in her written text and by employing jazz techniques. To engender a musical language, she “plays” her narrative with the inherent rhythm of her alliterated sentences via which she creates an internal music in the text. Moreover she has structured her Jazz upon the composing mode of the jazz that is based on the spontaneity and improvisation of musicians who execute the double role of composer/performer and whose personality contributes to their improvised composition the “takeoff point” of which is a melody that serves as the initiating point on which the musicians maneuver. …