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Jazz
1st edition cover
Author	Toni Morrison
Country	United States
Language	English
Genre(s)	Historical novel
Publisher	Alfred A. Knopf
Publication date	1992
Media type	Print (Hardback & Paperback)

Jazz is a 1992 historical novel by Pulitzer and Nobel Prize-winning American author Toni Morrison. The majority of the narrative takes place in Harlem during the 1920s, however, as the pasts of the various characters are explored, the narrative extends back to the mid-1800s American South.

The novel forms the second part of Morrison's Dantesque trilogy on African American history, beginning with Beloved and ending with Paradise.

Narrative style and themes

The novel deliberately mirrors the music of its title, with various characters "improvising" solo compositions that fit together late a whole work. The tone of the novel also shifts with these compositions, from bluesy laments to up beat, sensual ragtime. The novel also utilizes the call and response style of Jazz music, allowing the characters to explore the same events from different perspectives.

The various "improvisations" in the novel are held together by an ostensibly omniscient, anonymous narrator. Unusual for this style of narration, the narrative voice is in the first person and not the third person.

One of the main themes of the novel is purgatory and the cathartic ability of Jazz music.

Characters

• Joe Trace, a door-to-door cosmetics salesman and the murderer of his young lover.
• Violet Trace, an unlicensed beautician. Violet is married to Joe. She is nicknamed "Violent" because she assaulted the corpse of Joe’s lover with a knife at the funeral.
• Dorcas, Joe's young lover, who is shot down at a party. Dorcas is inspired by a picture from The Harlem Book of the Dead (a collection of funeral photographs by James Van Der Zee).
• Alice Manfred, Dorcas’ Aunt and guardian. A conservative Christian ashamed by her niece’s behavior. Alice enters into an unusual friendship with Violet.
• Felice, a friend of Dorcas’ who helps the Traces to understand each other.
• Golden Gray, a mixed race man from the 1800s. Golden appears in both Joe's and Violet’s histories.

Information Toni Morrison's novel Jazz is not, strictly speaking, about jazz at all. Its very first paragraph sounds the basic theme: A woman named Violet went to a funeral to mutilate the face of a dead eighteen-year-old girl who had been shot by Violet's husband in a desperate act of misguided love. This, then, is the melody on which the disembodied first-person narrative voice improvises a story, or several stories, constantly adding, revising, inventing, shifting back and forth among various characters, going back in time as far as antebellum Virginia. The various stories and voices the narrator evokes are, as Morrison explains, designed to reflect "a jazz performance in which the musicians are on stage. And they know what they are doing, they rehearse, but the performance is open to change, and the other musicians have to respond quickly to that change. Somebody takes off from a basic pattern, then the others have to accommodate themselves. That's the excitement, the razor's edge of a live performance of jazz" ("Toni Morrison" 41). How important jazz is for her writing she had underscored in 1983, when she described her style as "hanging on to whatever that ineffable quality is that is curiously black. The only analogy that I have for it is music. John Coltrane does not sound like Louis Armstrong, and no one ever confuses one for the other, and no one questions if they are black. That is what I am trying to get at ..." ("An Interview" 153). (4)

References