Music frequently requires more than one performer to be created. Perhaps two or more musicians are required, each playing a “part” – without the presence of all the musicians, the song would be incomplete. Perhaps one musician will accompany a singer, each performing distinct but interdependent roles. Human relationships of love and friendship easily can be seen in a similar light. It takes two, as they say. Also similar to this musical analogy is the act of creating and reading literature. For each performer, there must be an audience, if the work is to be realized.
Of course jazz could be used in this analogy. Jazz music has the same requirements for partnership and role-playing. However, jazz frequently builds upon the notion of improvisation. One or more of the performers must create the music as it is being played, and the other performers must react to those creations in real-time. Jazz then becomes a powerful analogy for relationships that exist in a rapidly changing environment. If circumstances change rapidly, the partners must improvise their roles. If one of the partners changes or is changed by something, the other partner must improvise in real-time – or the relationship will be broken. The musicians may stop playing if they have lost the tune or if they cannot agree on where to take the improvised piece.
[...] She responds to Violet's complaint by predicting the story she will tell based on the common architecture of the blues song: Now I recon you going to tell me some old hateful story about how a young girl messed over you and how he's not to blame because he was just walking down the street minding his own business, when this little twat jumped on his back and dragged him off to her bed. Save your breath. You'll need it on your deathbed (14). [...]
[...] The politics of Jazz speak to the issues of the representation of black women's lives and make the novel worthy of its name while establishing a “visceral relationship between writer and reader” (2094). In her interview with Tate, Morrison expresses her concern that “relationships between women were always written about as though they were subordinate to some other roles they're playing” (Black Women Writers at Work118), continuing that the legitimacy of the relationships between black women and the function of such relationships in a socio-political context was overlooked, yet highly important to the black community. [...]
[...] When Joe views the picture, he connects to Dorcas based on his primal search for a mother figure and also his search for his own sense of passion which has died in his thirty-year marriage with Violet. (This is one continuous paragraph, comp. Spacing malfunction) Morrison illustrates the subjectivity of interpretation and how psychologically, it functions to give one a sense of better understanding themselves when Joe says of his parents, “They disappeared without a trace. The way I heard it I understood her to mean the ‘trace' they disappeared without was (124). [...]
[...] I find these moments in the text to be analogous to jazz improvisation as defined by Clarence Lateef, a renowned jazz musician and jazz philosopher, who states that the theory of emotional memory . specifically links improvisational music to personal experience and training, wherein ‘mind and body are unified through memory and muscle. In memory lie the seeds of improvisation: in technique, the means by which to cultivate the memory.' (Porter 249). The narrator recalls his/her memory” and “experience” of Violet and Joe, which is inseparably “emotional” and “personal,” and through verbally telling the story in his/her interpretation of Joe's and Violet's own voices, he/she can thereby “cultivate the memory,” which can then only be expressed through improvisation. [...]
[...] The ensemble nature of jazz music supports this collaborative effort between the narrator and the reader: a melodic riff is offered by the narrative voice, and as we answer the call-and-response that is both outwardly and subtly encoded in the text, we chose to create dissonance or consonance, and to fill in the “black spaces” with whatever material we compose, creating a unique creative masterpiece each time the book is read. Jazz, an art of improvisation and performance, is a form of music in which the same song is never played twice in quite the same way. [...]
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