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Reviewed by:
  • Jazz and Twelve O'Clock Tales
  • Landon Moore (bio)
Coleman, Wanda. Jazz and Twelve O'Clock Tales. Boston: David R. Godine, 2008.

Wanda Coleman's "Jazz at Twelve" begins in a Malibu club as a woman anxiously awaits a jazz performance. She admires the musician's signature sound and his growing popularity on the radio station. "In these days of pop-disco-rock it's tough for jazznicks to draw," she remarks. "They don't teach music appreciation in grade school anymore. A whole generation has grown up without proper ears" (12). If what she says is true, readers may learn a great deal from Jazz and Twelve O'Clock Tales, Coleman's latest collection of short stories. As one might expect from a poet's prose, Coleman's writing is lyrical, inspired by the blues and jazz rhythm that has contributed to her reputation as the "L.A. Blueswoman." Suitably named for a line in Billy Strayhorn's song "Lush Life," this is Coleman's first collection of new short stories in almost fifteen years. She explores poverty, racism, sexism, and, ultimately, the power of human resilience in thirteen intricate portraits of "sad and sullen gray faces with distant gay traces" (Strayhorn).

The collection opens with "Joy Ride" as Coleman tunes the car radio to a local jazz station and we are introduced to two young married couples. On their way home from a picnic, the impending responsibilities of daily life at home and at work dim the couples' moods as they travel "through palm-laced residential zones and along wide-laned boulevards, southeast, toward that poorer, darker section of the City of Angels to which they are intangibly restricted" (1). As the sedan bounces down the potholed road, conversation ebbs, and inversely, the music emanating from the radio surges to "become bluesy and discordant, occasionally shrill and punctuated by staccato runs. The harpist, the pianist and the string section defer to brass and woodwinds. The percussionists begin their ascension" (2). The rising drums, like the escalating soundtrack of a suspense film, create a palpable tension that vibrates with expectation. When the song changes to a "jassy jazz" so too does the mood in the car, for in the road is a moving gunny sack, and while the slide trombone sounds, "the newlyweds syncopate as they speculate" about what the bag could hold (3). The music builds to a crescendo when the sound of the impact is almost smothered by the trumpet's shriek. Only when the couples exit the steaming vehicle does the music stop as "a deacon of the old school leans into the car's interior and cuts the sound" (3). By this time, [End Page 894] a crowd has gathered around the accident to see "a tiny chocolate arm perfectly formed" fall loosely from the folds of the sack, and "the faces of the watchers are all shades of a shared darkness" (3). Coleman's poetic economy of language infiltrates her prose so that this "shared darkness" becomes multivalent, significant not only for its suggestion of race but also as a descriptor of the crowd's collective mood after witnessing this scene unfold in their neighborhood, that "darker section of the City of Angels" from which, because of their skin color and grim financial status, there is no escape.

Coleman's writing dances to the rhythm that is repetition in the aforementioned "Jazz at Twelve," narrated by Babe, who first defines herself as Kevin's wife, and then, much later in the story, as a moonlight songwriter "living for the day when women's music will receive as much attention as men's" (18). The story begins and ends in one location, a Malibu jazz club, but Coleman's recurring sections of ironic prose travel beyond the traditional limitations of setting and chronological storytelling. While Babe is acutely aware of her immediate physical surroundings, she doesn't know that she's pregnant, or that her husband is addicted to heroin, or that in a couple of months her coin collection and a sealed envelope filled with cash will disappear, and after a while, so will her husband. Here, the negative space outside the...

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