Epistrophies: Jazz and the Literary Imagination

From its inception, African American literature has taken shape in relation to music. Black writing is informed by the conviction that music is the privileged archival medium of black communal experience--that music provides a "tone parallel" (in Duke Ellington's phrase) to African American history. Throughout the tradition, this conviction has compelled African American writers to discover models of literary form in the medium of musical performance. Black music, in other words, has long been taken to suggest strategies for writerly experimentation, for pressing against and extending the boundaries of articulate expression. Epistrophies seeks to come to terms with this foundational interface by considering the full variety of "jazz literature"--Both writing informed by the music and the surprisingly large body of writing by jazz musicians themselves.--