Early Jazz Literature (And Why You Didn't Know)

Over the last 15 years, something recognizable as jazz literature has become an institutional academic fact. The 1990s saw publication of a considerable number of anthologies of jazz poetry and prose, texts ready-made for undergraduate surveys and graduate seminars in poetry, American and/or African-American culture or literature, modernism, the Harlem Renaissance, the 1950s, popular music, or even courses built entirely around jazz literature.¹ These anthologies include Richard Albert's From Blues to Bop: A Collection of Jazz Fiction (1990), Marcela Breton's Hot and Cool: Jazz Short Stories (1990), Sascha Feinstein and Yusef Komunyakaa's The Jazz Poetry Anthology (1991) and The Second Set (1996), and Art Lange and Nathaniel Mackey's Moment's Notice: Jazz in Poetry and Prose (1993). Feinstein, who has published both a trenchant study of Jazz Poetry (1997) and a useful Bibliographic Guide to Jazz Poetry (1998), also edits Brilliant Corners, a biannual journal of jazz and literature that began publication in 1996.² The same years saw the parallel emergence of "jazz studies" approaches within the academy, a welcome development that sought explicitly to link the genre's politics and aesthetics—material that had been largely the province of either trained musicologists or literary critics on amateur night—to broader trends in cultural studies and critical theory, a development perhaps most clearly marked by the appearance of two 1995 essay anthologies edited by Krin Gabbard: Representing Jazz and Jazz among the Discourses.

The long 1990s were in general a good decade for the institutional legitimation of jazz, beginning with the resolution passed in 1987 by the 100^th US Congress as House Resolution 57 (now also the name of a Washington, D.C., jazz club) that legislated recognition of jazz as "a rare and valuable American national treasure" (United States), and then continuing with the "Classical Jazz" repertory concerts that began the same year at New York's Lincoln Center under the direction of Wynton Marsalis; the extensive attention paid to the centennials of jazz figures such as George Gershwin, Duke Ellington, Louis Armstrong, and Bix Beiderbecke; the 1998 PEN/Faulkner Award given to a jazz novel, Rafi Zabor's The Bear Comes Home (1997); and the 18 September 1998 White House Millennium Evening hosted by Bill and Hillary Clinton to celebrate "Jazz: An Expression of Democracy" (White House). Any lingering doubts one might have had that jazz was as officially American as baseball or the civil war were most certainly laid to rest with the January 2001 PBS broadcast of Ken Burns's monumental (and monumentally marketed) 10-night, 19-hour documentary, Jazz.

Yet despite this recent institutional consensus, and despite the general agreement that jazz as such is a "historic" form (United States), with "musical and cultural overtones" that extend back to "the turn of the century" (Feinstein and Komunyakaa back jacket), the jazz literature anthologies I've named all have opted for an approach mostly unconcerned with the equally long history of jazz literature (whether defined as writing about jazz or writing that aspires to the formal or ideological condition of jazz). Indeed, aside from the occasional nod in the direction of a Langston Hughes or a Eudora Welty, they are devoted to prose and poetry written almost entirely since 1945 and seem content to gloss quietly over the jazz writing of another day.³

This critical amnesia can be explained in part, no doubt, as a simple function of the ephemerality of the texts in question. Albert's introduction to his From Blues to Bop: A Collection of Jazz Fiction underscores this point. Following a brief survey of jazz-inspired fiction from the late 1930s and early 1940s, Albert writes: "The jazz novels I have mentioned certainly do not make up a complete list. Others are out there somewhere, but they are difficult to locate. Most of those I have briefly commented on have had single printings and have not been reissued. . . . When it...