Jazz Country: Ralph Ellison in America, and: Spiritual, Blues, and Jazz People in African American Fiction: Living in Paradox (review)

Jazz Country and Spiritual, Blues, and Jazz People in African American Fiction are the most recent literary studies adhering to that famous judgment captured by James Baldwin: "It is only in his music. . . that the Negro in America has been able to tell his story."

Porter's Jazz Country examines Ralph Ellison's views on literature and American life from the angle of jazz music. Jazz Country also sharpens interpretations of Ellison's major fiction through the metaphor of jazz. Unlike Robert O'Meally's recent collection of Ellison's essays on jazz music (Living with Music), Porter's examination is a lyrical rebuttal to Jerry Watts's Heroism and the Black Intellectual (1994), a vociferous, extended criticism of Ellison as a public figure. In this new work, Porter shows Ellison's abiding relevance to American life by identifying the influence of jazz music and musicians upon Ellison's literary sensibility: if jazz is America's indigenous classical art form, then Ellison, as a jazz writer, holds the post of classical American writer, so the logic goes.

Jazz Country is divided into seven chapters, beginning with an examination of Ellison's narrative odes to musicians like Charlie Christian, Jimmie Rushing, and Mahalia Jackson, as well as some of Ellison's brief comments about saxophonist Lester Young. Next, Porter explores Ellison's prophetic essays that helped to transform jazz musicians such as Duke Ellington, Louis Armstrong, and Charlie Parker into American icons.

The real heart of Porter's book is the third chapter, which shows the artistic relationship among three virtuoso modernist soloists of African American culture: Ellison; Albert Murray, Ellison's comparatively unknown but prolific Tuskegee classmate; and the renowned collage painter Romare Bearden. The book concludes with a brief reading of Invisible Man that compares the final riot scene to a jazz-influenced solo, followed by readings of Ellison's post–Invisible Man fiction, "Cadillac Flambé" (1973) and Juneteenth (1999). Porter is among the first to write lucidly of Ellison's second novel, emphasizing the centrality of Rev. Hickman's "Valley of the Dry Bones" sermon, a particularly apt example of the amalgam of blues and spirituals. The book concludes by confronting Irving Howe, Jerry Watts, and Norman Podhoretz, critics of Ellison's sometimes panglossian view of the United States. Porter approaches Ellison principally as a purveyor of art, and thus he finds solace in Ellison's transformation of the Homeric analogy in both Invisible Man and Juneteenth: "This image of dismembered black bodies watering and fertilizing American soil and then being reborn out of it recurs in Ellison's work. The black body as ‘seed' is presented in Invisible Man's castration nightmare and in Rev. Hickman's sermon, ‘Dry Bones Valley'" (146).

Jazz Country is tightly written and sharply focused. The book's contribution lies in its fine rhetorical analysis of some of Ellison's key concepts: unity, ambiguity, possibility, transcendence, and discipline. Ellison learned his craft reading and talking with the literary theorist Kenneth Burke, and the dramatistic (in Burke's language) potential of such key concepts for Ellison's universe is quite important and under-recognized. One of the few miscues in Porter's book is its overreliance on lengthy quotes, sometimes leading Porter to grant Ellison too much authority. Charlie Parker, for example, is "Uncle Tom reincarnated," in Ellison's view. While Ellison could be heraldic, he was also quite capable of playing favorites, and these prejudices should be explored.

A. Yemisi Jimoh's book argues that African American writers have operated in a cultural sphere dominated by the expressive tendencies of sound, musicians, and musical expression. She casts the most vigorous of African American musical leanings into...