In Honor of Duke Ellington: Here Are 15 Great Books About Jazz

Can a sentence swing and a paragraph bop? Is it possible for prose to be as stripped down and cool as a Miles Davis trumpet solo, or a poem to be as incantatory as John Coltrane’s saxophone? Despite all of the musical genres which the United States contributed to contemporary culture, most of them born from the specifically African American experience it should be added, jazz remains in many ways the lodestar of our melodic and rhythmic firmament, the “Classical Music” of America (as complicated as that assertion might be).

As to demonstrate the international inheritance which the music represents, the Japanese novelist Haruki Murakami—who is himself an avid fan, the possessor of a massive record collection and the owner of a Tokyo jazz club—describes the relationship between the genre and literature in a 2007 New York Times Book Review essay, writing that “Practically everything I know about writing, then, I learned from music… and mainly from jazz.”

Murakami explains how from jazz he learned about the sounds of words—rhythm; he mastered their arrangement—melody; and he was tutored in composition—free improvisation. Quipping that Charlie Parker and Thelonious Monk have given him the fundamentals of writing more than Fitzgerald did, Murakami compared the contemporary novelists’ task to that of the jazz musician, saying that as with notes, there “aren’t any new words. Our job is to give new meanings and special overtones to absolutely ordinary words.”

What follows is a syllabus, on the occasion of the 50th anniversary of Duke Ellington’s death, of some literary works with jazz at their center which have given “special overtones” to words.

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Langston Hughes, The Weary Blues

Arriving Uptown from the Midwest, poet Langston Hughes arrived in Harlem at the height of its Renaissance, and was privy to the ways in which jazz altered American cultural life. At venues such as the Cotton Club, Hughes was converted to the transformative power of Louis Armstrong and Ellington, and arguably became among the first poets to borrow the feel of jazz in its syncopation and blue notes to the sound of verse.

“Jazz is a great big sea,” Hughes wrote. “It washes up all kinds of fish and shells and spume and waves with a steady old beat, or off-beat,” an approach to composition amply displayed in his first collection.

Dorothy Baker, Young Man with a Horn

The Great Gatsby may be remembered as a Jazz Age novel, but the music is more background than substantive in Fitzgerald’s novel. By contrast, the unjustly forgotten Dorothy Barker, infamous at the time for her lesbian pulp stories, crafted the first genuine jazz novel in Young Man with a Horn.

A fictionalization of the Kansas City cornetist Bix Beiderbecke, Barker’s novel follows its main character Rick Martin through gin jukes and speakeasies, his candle-like destructive life dedicated to the creation of music, a “marked man; a lifelong sucker for syncopation.”

Ralph Ellison, Invisible Man

Arguably the greatest American novel of the twentieth-century’s second half, Ralph Ellison’s classic novel of Black disenfranchisement and alienation is still capable of shocking and elucidating the national racial divide all these decades later through the author’s acute existential imagination. What can’t be obscured in that is the central role that jazz plays in the formation of the anonymous narrator’s consciousness, how as Ellison charts the musical transitions from swing to bop, of how music “can profoundly alter how we view the world and our place in it.”

Jack Kerouac, Mexico City Blues

Jack Kerouac, with his cross-country odyssey and his empty wine bottles, his apple pies and leather-bound notebooks, can be easy to parody. The marathon writer of On the Road, he of the flannel shirts and the overworked Remington, may be the author who launched a thousand GAPs in William S. Burroughs memorable snark, but his poetry at its best conveys the staccato exuberance of the great bebop wunderkinds like Dizzy Gillespie and Charlie Parker whom he idealized.

Most innovative for Kerouac, in his prose and poetry, was a method of improvisational composition drawn from jazz called “bop prosody.” Truman Capote dryly referred to it as typing rather than writing, but at its most sophisticated it was neither—it was doodling. Best listened to, rather than read, Kerouac’s jazz poetry accompanied by the improvisational sax of Al Cohn and Zoot Sims, still sounds incandescently hip, if only you can jettison your jaundiced irony.

James Baldwin, Another Country

The United States’ greatest essayist, James Baldwin’s novels are animated by the same interests and concerns—in race relations, gender politics, queerness, faith and politics, and always a deep and abiding humanistic empathy. Rufus Sewell, the depressive and suicidal main character of Another Country, is a jazz drummer who inhabits the clubs of Greenwich Village and Harlem before he is psychically felled by a tumultuous relationship with a white Southern woman.

The drummer haunts his own story after he jumps to his death from the George Washington Bridge, his friends and family forced to make sense of his suicide but also his music created beyond the “misty doors of the jazz joint.”

Amiri Baraka, Black Music

Born Leroi Jones, the playwright, poet, and essayist Amiri Baraka was the radical godfather of the Black Arts movement, an unrelenting and uncompromising voice for revolutionary political and aesthetic commitments. As a critic, he wouldn’t apologize for the Black origins of his beloved blues and jazz, understanding the music which is America’s greatest cultural contribution as coming from the distinctive suffering and triumph of his own people.

“Art is a weapon in the struggle of ideas, the class struggle,” Baraka said in an interview to 3:AM. Magazine in 2009, something in evidence in collections like Black Music and Blues People: Negro Music in White America, published four years before.

Michael Ondaatje, Coming Through Slaughter

Most famous for his World War II novel The English Patient, the Sri Lankan-Canadian writer Michael Ondaatje’s first work Coming Through Slaughter (the last word in the title a town in Louisiana) returns to jazz’s mythic origins in his fictionalized account of cornetist Buddy Bolden, inventor of New Orleans ragtime, an important element in the evolution of the future genre.

Referred to by many other early pioneers as the veritable “Father of Jazz,” Bolden suffered from schizophrenia and long decline, ending in an anonymous ignoble death. As a reminder of jazz’s relative age, no recordings of Bolden exist, the man now as much myth as anything,

Geoff Dyer, But Beautiful: A Book about Jazz

Arguably the greatest nonfiction writer of his generation, the English essayist Geoff Dyer is known for producing fascinating, idiosyncratic, and often uncategorizable books (as in his Out of Sheer Rage, a book about writing a book about D.H. Lawrence). But Beautiful: A Book About Jazz is no different, as Dyer freely combines fiction and nonfiction in a work meant to express something of the music which he grew to love, but admittedly understood little of the theory behind.

Combining essay and story, Dyer gives life to greats like Charlie Mingus and Thelonious Sphere Monk, alchemists of rhythm who “played to the dead, calling them back, showing them the way back to the living.”

 Sascha Feinstein (editor), The Jazz Poetry Anthology

As far back as Hughes, poets have drawn a caffeinated energy from the swing of jazz, incorporating not just the imagery and personages of the music into their verse, but the energy and the exuberance, the vitality and the volatility as well. Edited by two masters of the form, jazz poetry includes Black Arts masters such as Baraka and Komunyakaa, Beat writers like Lawrence Ferlinghetti and Kenneth Koch, and a host of luminaries including Nathaniel Mackay, Mina Loy, Marvin Bell, Hayden Carruth, and Sonia Sanchez.

A music both “shiny and pure” as well as “sugar and spice” Sanchez writes, this theurgy of “guitar thickened blues…a faraway horn/questioning the wind.”

Toni Morrison, Jazz 

America’s bard, our greatest of Nobel Laureates, the Homer of the Black experience, Toni Morrison turns to the most important contribution of the nation in her eponymous novel. Less concerned with the music itself than it is in mimicking its feel in rhythm, melody, and structure, Jazz largely centers itself in a Purgatorial Harlem of the 1920s, where the genre itself found its footing and became the very sound of American modernism.

Reflecting on her own process, Morrison told The Paris Review in 1993 that “I thought of myself as like the jazz musician—someone who practices and practices and practices in order to be able to invent and to make his art look effortless and graceful.”

Bob Kaufmann, Cranial Guitar

Perhaps the most celebrated of jazz poets, Bob Kaufmann was born in New Orleans, just like the genre that he made his life’s work. Any number of collections of Kaufmann’s verse evidences his commitment to a type of poetry that in its subjects and sounds feels like jazz.

Always cognoscente of the ways in which history’s displacements and destruction, its injustices and atrocities, are what made the existence of this chimerical art even possible in the first place, Kaufmann writes that “they sat down in our blood soaked garments,/and listened to jazz/lost, steeped in all our death dreams.”

Ted Gioia, The History of Jazz

A doorstopper of an account, but written with a novelist’s eye towards narrative’s elucidating power, everything is in Ted Gioia’s The History of Jazz—Satchmo and Bix, the Duke and the Count, Bird and Trane. Revised several times since its release, Gioia is a critic who writes in the rarest of idioms for that vocation: in the tenor of unembarrassed enthusiasm.

Despite all of his own clear erudition, Gioia notes that “Listening, not jargon, is the path into the heart of the music.”

Jayne Cortez, Jazz Fan Looks Back

The Black Arts poet Jayne Cortez was a fierce, visceral, magnetic writer (she also happened to be the ex-wife of saxophonist Ornette Coleman) who brought a lyrical intensity to her evocation of the genre which she loved. Committed to a transoceanic expression of blackness, in America, Africa, and everywhere, Cortez positioned jazz as an emancipatory form, a sound for liberation.

For Cortez, literature could approach music, as she “crisscrossed with Monk/Wailed with Bud/Counted every star with Stitt/Sang ‘Don’t Blame Me’ with Sarah/Wore a flower like Billie/Screamed in the range of Dinah/& scatted ‘How High the Moon’ with Ella Fitzgerald.”

Stanley Crouch, Considering Genius: Writing on Jazz

Temperamentally and ideologically the opposite of Baraka, the conservative cultural commentator Stanley Crouch was the other great explicator of jazz in the twentieth century. Along with Nat Hentoff, the three were—in their divergent ways—responsible for assembling the canon and counter-canon of jazz history.

Crouch, for all that he can be criticized for in terms of his sometimes anodyne interpretations of the genre, still evidences an infectious exuberance for a music that he argues well is everyone’s birth-right who is willing to put into the work to claim it.

Esi Edugyan, Half-Blood Blues

Drawing from the historical “Rhineland Bastards,” mixed race children the result of Black Allied troops stationed in Germany following the Great War, the Ghanese-Canadian novelist Esi Edugyan’s Half-Blood Blues invents the story of Hieronymus “Hiero” Falk, a brilliant musician who performs swing in Weimar Germany, all of his music being lost when the Nazis come to power. With shades of the great Romani guitarist Django Reinhardt or of the so-called “Swing Kids” who protested fascism through jazz, Edugyan’s novel expresses an inviolate truth about this music.

That truth is that in its cacophony and beauty, its elegance and its joyfulness, jazz is the music of democracy, of liberation, of freedom.