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For over twenty years, publishing quality jazz-themed fiction has been a mission of Jerry Jazz Musician. Hundreds of short stories have appeared on the pages of this website, most all of which can be accessed by clicking here.
A substantial number of novels and stories with jazz music as a component of the story have been published over the years, and the scholar David J. Rife has written short essay/reviews of them, which he has compiled in two valuable resources, Jazz Fiction: A History and Comprehensive Reader’s Guide (2008), and a recently published sequel, Jazz Fiction: Take Two. (Several of the stories published on Jerry Jazz Musician are reviewed).
Rife’s work is impressive and worth sharing with Jerry Jazz Musician readers. With his cooperation, essay/review excerpts from Take Two will be published on a regular basis.
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In this edition, Rife writes about jazz novels and short stories that feature stories about women, written by women.
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…..Jazz Fiction: Take Two is the sequel to Jazz Fiction: A History and Comprehensive Reader’s Guide (2008). The earlier work filled a pressing need in jazz studies by identifying and discussing 700 works of fiction with a jazz component.
…..This work picks up where that one left off, around the turn of the 21st century, and surveys over 500 works of jazz-inflected fiction that have appeared since. None of these works, to my knowledge, have been discussed in this context.
…..The essay-reviews at the center of the book are designed to give readers a sense of the plots of the works in question and to characterize their debt to jazz. The entries were written with both the general reader and the scholar in mind and are intended to entertain as well as inform. This alone should qualify Jazz Fiction: Take Two as an unusual and useful reference resource.
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-David J. Rife
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photo by William Gottlieb/Library of Congress
Billie Holiday, c. 1947
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Women by Women
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….. Whenever the question of literary heroines prods my consciousness, several of the usual suspects spring to mind: Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina, Flaubert’s Emma Bovary, and James’s Isabel Archer, among others. All larger-than-life females trapped in oppressive, male-dominant cultures. Predictably, they tire of their diurnal responsibilities, like looking after children and managing the household, while longing for an ever-receding freedom in search of self-actualization.
…..Jazz fiction offers some notable female characters, too. Like the above, they display a striking range of emotions and behaviors, and a passion for liberation and independence. The female jazz protagonists in the narratives listed below will never be as famous as their older “sisters,” but their differences from them are worth contemplating. It’s hard to imagine, for instance, that Anna Karenina had been sexually violated by her mother, that Emma Bovary had bonded with another woman who just happened to be dead, or that Isabel Archer had been robbed of her personality and sense of self. Comparisons between our jazz gals and their more illustrious forbears are endless—and endlessly interesting— but should always begin with the acknowledgment that they matriculated in radically different societies over a century apart and that only one of the groups had the potential liberation of jazz at their disposal and the inestimable advantage of having been created by women.
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..….The lives of two girls of mixed ethnicity and broken families intersect when Mahsa leaves Karachi to attend college in Montreal, where Katherine is struggling to make her way as a jazz musician. Both young women are pianistic prodigies whose sensibilities and skills distinguish them from their peers and bring them lovingly together. Their absorption in music allows them to triumph over the daunting challenges of war, civil strife, sexism, and their own problematic choices. The novel is saturated in the mechanics of music and in lives surrendered to jazz. Katherine recalls:
…..“The first day of my real life was when I heard Dance of the Infidels . . . Down fell the needle into the groove on the turning black record with its yellow label. I was bouncing with Bud, and bouncing out of the end of my childhood. Nothing else would matter again. No one ever said passion is a good thing but when it happens there is no escaping. I started transcribing Bud Powell. It was the hardest thing I ever did. I got Harold to let me use an old beat-up record player in his office. I set it up in the basement as close as I could to the piano. Stopped and started. Dropped the needle down over and over looking for the spot. Writing the note. Listening again. Running to the piano and playing it to see if I got it right. It took me the whole summer and it was a happy summer.”
…..Notable jazz musicians, including several Canadians, are mentioned along the way. Art Blakey, who had never hired a woman before, lets Katherine sit in with the Messengers, and Marion McPartland befriends her and arranges her first recording gig. Finally, the young women’s reflections on and dissections of specific jazz performances are richly provocative, as when Katherine listens twenty times in a row to Coltrane’s “My Favorite Things” and realizes she wasn’t “lonely with Coltrane and Tyner inside” her and that this kind of “music is what marriage could be, playing solos at the same time and ending up together.” This essential jazz novel contains ample rewards for the fan of jazz literature.
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……The story begins as the young Lena Horne, having just completed a grueling two-week road trip in the segregated South, arrives in Pittsburgh to visit her father at his hotel in the storied Hill district. She’s weary and emotionally drained from sleeping on a bus and scrounging for restaurants and hotels that serve Blacks. As she nears her dad’s hotel, she stops at a lemonade stand where she meets a Lebanese-American girl, Maria David, who like everyone else who sees Horne in the flesh is awestruck by her beauty and commanding presence. From here on, the novel comprises two parallel faux biographies, one of the actual Lena Horne, the other of the fictitious Maria David—an effective structural device. After settling in with her dad, Lena familiarizes herself with the vibrant jazz scene: by meeting and schmoozing with the musicians and scoping out the venues where she will soon perform. Music, she realizes, is the only thing that makes her feel truly alive and enables her to get in close touch with her innermost self. Unfortunately, her dad wants her to forego her dream of a musical career in favor of a husband and family. As she struggles with this dilemma, she becomes all the rage in the jazz locales of Pittsburgh, Manhattan, and Los Angeles, along the way engaging with such luminaries as Duke Ellington and Paul Robeson, arguably the two most impressive Black leaders in the world at the time. She also meets her idol, Billie Holiday, who dispenses some valuable words of guidance to the less experienced young singer. Her deepest, most loving relationship, however, is with Ellington’s chief songwriter and righthand man, Billy “Swee’ Pea” Strayhorn. They love each other deeply but, alas, he’s gay so marriage is out of the question. As Lena is building a reputation and looking toward Hollywood, she complicates her life by half-following her daddy’s wish for her to marry an ordinary guy and settle down. Is it necessary to mention that the marriage doesn’t last and that a second marriage—to a white man!—complicates her life even further? Meanwhile, as we follow Lena on the bumpy road to international celebrity, we observe Maria (who had also dreamed of fame) following her parents’ advice to marry and settle into a conventional life, which she does with considerable success. When Marie sees a murder take place, however, her life momentarily breaks out of its pattern and brings her back together with her idol, Lena Horne, who is now unquestionably her friend. In clubs, Broadway shows, and Hollywood movies, jazz permeates this researched narrative—and so does racial politics.
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..….An exceedingly long framed narrative that imaginatively recreates the biography of a long-forgotten jazz singer. The free-lance journalist who writes the story, Joan, gradually becomes obsessed with this project when she learns that her recently deceased neighbor, Vera Turner, had been a well-known big band singer—“canary”—during the years surrounding WW2, and so she sets out to piece together, and write about, what her neighbor’s life must have been like. Joan begins by tracking down the octogenarian band leader who had shepherded Vera to prominence during the golden age of swing. The result is an accumulation of many, many historical details about big band life, principally in Chicago, during these decades: streets are named, clubs, restaurants, and hotels are identified; the mechanics (and travails) of band life described, and the leading musicians and their leaders are referenced. At the heart of all this is the life of the precocious teenager from the sticks who developed into a star performer in the big city. Along the way we learn as much about her domestic life as we do of her professional one: her romances and marriages, what she wears, eats, drinks, and so on. Meanwhile, in the story’s frame, Joan is experiencing the kind of personal troubles that parallel those of her “heroine.” Devotees of the big band era will find some nuggets of interest in this book, which contains a substantial bibliography.
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…..For the young woman at the center of this story, Frances, booze had dominated much of her early life, and now, in 1993, she’s in Ithaca participating in an ashram and teaching English at Cornell, hoping to put her alcoholism and her privileged, “moneyed nonsense” life behind her and, just perhaps, experience the kind of enlightenment Buddhism has to offer. Frances and her gifted friends had agreed that “Buddhism was the jazz of religion,” and in fact the story goes into some detail about their lives in an ashram. Frances has also embraced creativity as consolation for her tragic past, and jazz especially provides a necessary “counterpoint in [her] inner life.” She interpreted Dexter Gordon’s music to mean “Don’t worry, don’t fret, just listen to the love”; his ballads were for her “a greater love, like Coltrane’s and Monk’s music too.” We learn late the nature of Frances’s tragic past: she had been sexually violated by her mother when she was still an infant and, even worse, had been rejected by her father when she finally worked up the courage to tell him what had happened. So now, years later, in trying to fathom her mother’s unspeakable transgression, Frances finds “true kinship in jazz and a way to transcend myself in sacred repetition. In jazz and Buddhism was the divine. Emptiness they both sang. All phenomena is emptiness.”
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…..The title refers to the countless thousands of females coerced into the teeming international sex trade. The novel implies that one tragic circumstance of this atrocity is that the women and girls, in the process of being subjected to sexual slavery, are robbed of their identities, the selves they might otherwise have achieved. So too do the two fundamentally different protagonists of this mystifying, fragmented (but nevertheless absorbing) post-modern novel experience identity issues. Beatrice, the locus of the story’s skimpy jazz content, was born with a “jazz voice” and a Marilyn Monroe face and figure. Her many suitors, attracted to her accidental persona, don’t last long and deepen her hollowness. She becomes a remote, affectless human cipher who can sing jazz with style. Unfortunately for us jazz lovers, neither her gift nor her stage presence is described at any length. (This novel is a fictional account of the international tragedy recounted in Victor Malarek’s The Natashas: Inside The New Global Sex Trade [2005])..
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Click here to read previous editions of excerpts from David J. Rife’s Jazz Fiction: Take Two
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Click here to read “Not From Around Here,” Jeff Dingler’s winning story in the 66th Jerry Jazz Musician Short Fiction Contest
Click here to read more short fiction published on Jerry Jazz Musician
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