“A New Kind of Music”: Jazz Improvisation and the Diasporic Dissonance of Paule Marshall’s The Fisher King

Paule Marshall’s novel The Fisher King (2000) revisits a familiar site for readers of her fiction: the Brooklyn neighborhood of Bedford-Stuyvesant, familiarly known as Bed-Stuy. The primary events of The Fisher King take place in this historic African diasporic neighborhood during the spring of 1984; however, the retrospective plot that underlies these events encompasses an expansive black Atlantic geography of migration from the US South and the Caribbean to New York in the early twentieth century and from New York to Paris in the postwar years. What connects the characters who make these journeys is also what divides them: the life story of a jazz musician, the Caribbean American pianist Sonny-Rett Payne, whose rise and fall evokes legendary narratives of mid-century African American jazz musicians. Beginning in Bed-Stuy, continuing in Kansas City during World War II, and returning to establish his reputation in Brooklyn and then the Manhattan clubs where bebop came into being, Sonny-Rett eventually migrates to Paris, where his career continues to ascend, only to come crashing down during the 1960s. In its narrative structure as well as its plot, The Fisher King is at once an homage to and inventive revision of earlier African American narratives that feature jazz musicians as protagonists. Narrated through the dialogic interplay of the novel’s multiple voices and memories, Sonny-Rett’s life story evokes the tension between the individual and collective expression associated with jazz performance. His trajectory as a musician recalls previous African American jazz narratives, especially those inspired by Charlie Parker, from James Baldwin’s “Sonny’s Blues” (1957) to John Williams’s Night Song (1961) and William Melvin Kelley’s A Drop of Patience (1965). Like these narratives and other renowned African American jazz novels, from James Weldon Johnson’s The Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man (1912) through Toni Morrison’s Jazz (1992), The Fisher King dramatizes the historical impact of jazz through its narrative adaptation of specific jazz performance practices, most notably improvisation. The Fisher King features dramatic scenes of jazz improvisation, and, like the process in which Sonny-Rett transforms popular songs through his improvisatory interpretations, the novel’s narrative structure adapts and transforms Western myths of the Fisher King.¹

What distinguishes The Fisher King from previous African American jazz novels is its dual emphasis on the intercultural significance of jazz and the social implications of improvisation. Marshall’s novel dramatizes the link between improvisatory music and improvisatory social practice, between the group improvisation associated with jazz and new social formations. Jazz improvisation informs both the narrative structure of The Fisher King and the most unlikely improvisatory social relationships in the novel—sexual, familial, professional, and intercultural. As theorists of African American jazz improvisation have noted, improvisation is frequently associated with freedom and spontaneity, but the process of improvising also involves an active engagement with traditional musical and cultural practices. The musician and musicologist George Lewis, for example, differentiates “Afrological” from “Eurological” understandings of improvisation, underscoring how Afrological improvisers assume that freedom can be achieved only through “discipline, defined as technical knowledge of music theory and of one’s instrument as well as through attention to the background, history, and culture of one’s music” (“Improvised” 153). As he writes, bebop initially set the standard for African American improvised music in challenging “traditional notions of intra- and extramusicality” (135), drawing attention to the social significance of musical innovation.

Contemporary musician-theorists such as Leo Wadada Smith and Anthony Braxton have expanded this understanding of African American improvised music in their emphasis on “code-switching across traditions and genres,” of “musical exchanges across borders of language and musical culture” (Lewis, “Afterword” 165). Such improvisatory movement among musical traditions and cultures is also implicit in Graham Lock’s temporal figuration of improvisation in Blutopia: Visions of the Future and Revisions of the Past in the Work of Sun Ra, Duke Ellington, and Anthony Braxton (1999). He writes that African American improvisatory music is characterized by two impulses: “a utopian impulse, evident in the creation...