Jazz Fiction: A History and Comprehensive Reader's Guide (review)

Generally speaking, jazz literature is preoccupied with the connection between music and the written word. Sometimes the connection is so loose that the use of jazz seems commercial in nature—the main concern seems to be appealing to readers; books, short stories, and poetry that use jazz in this superficial way attempt to engage readers through posed or forced coolness and danger. Sometimes such texts go so far as to suggest teamwork among musicians (jazz kinship), or perhaps a sultry sense of adventure, or perhaps they even hint at madness. Though many authors momentarily include jazz either in the background or foreground of their works, a small number aspires to making jazz the backbone of their oeuvre, through paying attention to musical structure or sounds of specific words and phrases.

In Jazz Fiction: A History and Comprehensive Reader's Guide, David Rife focuses on jazz fiction as a whole, including short stories. He defines jazz fiction as "those stories and novels in which the music figures in the narrative"; however, he clarifies that his study also includes works like Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man, which "are obviously imbued with the spirit of the music, even though their discernible jazz content might seem negligible or even nonexistent" (2). In his foreword, guest editor David Cayer stresses that some of the fiction included is "devoid of jazz but which uses 'jazz,' 'swing,' or related terms as a form of bait-and-switch advertising" (ix). He also makes it clear that Rife's intention is not an all-inclusive book about jazz fiction. Rather his intent is to create an annotated reference and bibliographic tool that "should go far to help aficionados of jazz literature identify the real thing—the authentic jazz fiction—and select the works that come closest to meeting their needs" (19).

The book is divided into four sections: "From Music to Story"; "Jazz Fiction by Select Categories"; "Jazz Fiction Short Lists"; and "Annotated Bibliography of Jazz Fiction." The largest selections are the first the reader encounters, in the form of nine chapters, including "Bibliographic Overview." These cover various kinds of jazz fiction (for example, "'Jazz' Fiction sans Music," "Works Based on the Lives of Actual Musicians," "Fantasy and Science Fiction," "Mystery and Crime," and "Immigrant and International"). The last section is a detailed annotated bibliography of the subject, spanning almost 180 pages. Brief lists of further reading appear just before the annotated bibliography in parts 2 and 3. These classifications are broken down further than the chapter titles: among others, there are "Teen and Young Adult," "Blues," "Internet," "Novelizations," and "Pulp and Smut" (64–75). The brief lists in part 3 are intended to give readers somewhere to start. Rife explains that many of the stories in his list can be found in editors Richard N. Albert's From Blues to Bop and Marcela Breton's Hot and Cool: Jazz Short Stories (both published in 1990 and included in the annotated bibliography).

The first chapter, "Bibliographic Overview," provides the most thorough history of jazz fiction in the book (subsequent chapters in "From Music to Story" are chronologically ordered discussions). This chapter explains jazz fiction's beginning in 1912, with the publication of James Weldon Johnson's The Autobiography of an Ex–Colored Man, which foreshadows themes in subsequent jazz literature: the rapport between musician and patron; race relations; identity; and the power of music to transcend the well-being and interests of a group of people (3). Authors during this early period include benchmark authors like F. Scott Fitzgerald and Langston Hughes, as well as the lesser-known Dorothy Baker, who wrote Young Man with a Horn (1938), loosely based on biographical details about Bix Beiderbecke (the basis of the 1950 Hollywood film of the same title).

Rife points out that new tropes emerged in the literature between the 1940s and 1960s: the on-the-road existence...