Ask Me Now: Conversations in Jazz and Literature (review)

In 1996, Sascha Feinstein founded Brilliant Corners: A Journal of Jazz and Literature, “a journal of jazz-related literature,” with the issues anchored by “lengthy discussions with people passionate and knowledgeable about both literature and jazz” (xi). Ask Me Now features twenty of those interviews.

Is it really oral history or is it a collection of interviews? That academic question is not worth arguing about at length here, but it can be said that in this collection Feinstein has captured the views of the passionate, fascinating, and talented individuals who populate this relatively small field. By doing this, for the first time in book form, he has preserved a relationship between two art forms at a particular point in time. Each interview is prefaced by a very brief introduction about the person and then several excerpts of that person’s work, usually including the works that are discussed in the interview. The samplings from the works are essential because the range of expression and the varieties of blending jazz and literature would only come through to a small extent without knowing the works being discussed. The set-up makes the interviews much more immediate and relevant for the reader.

To return to concerns of oral history, Feinstein has allowed the interviewees to edit their interviews, believing what’s most important is “to record an artist’s exact intention” (xii). The author has expertise in the subject and often inserts his own opinions, making the interviews often read more like conversations than oral history. But if we say that oral history is, in the words of that great public scholar, Wikipedia, “the recording, preservation and interpretation of historical information, based on the personal experiences and opinions of the speaker,” then this is definitely oral history.

Writer and record producer Hank O’Neal calls much of jazz a form of oral history. “A great deal of what has passed as history was really shoddy jazz journalism at best” (312). By first conducting these interviews and then collecting them in this book, Feinstein has performed a significant service to those of us interested in how art forms overlap and affect people.

Sascha Feinstein is Professor of English at Lycoming College, where he codirects the Creative Writing Program. He is the author of Jazz Poetry: From the 1920s to the Present (1997) and A Bibliographic Guide to Jazz Poetry (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1997) and coeditor of two volumes of The Jazz Poetry Anthology (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1991 and 1996). He has won the Hayden Carruth Award for his poetry collection, Misterioso (Port Townsend, WA: Copper Canyon Press, 2000), and most recently published Black Pearls: Improvisations on a Lost Year (Spokane: Eastern Washington University Press, 2008)

Jazz poetry is far more than poetry about jazz. It usually aims to capture qualities of jazz as well. As poet Sonia Sanchez states, “When you are truly a jazz poet, you don’t have to mention Coltrane, people will hear it” (363).

Perhaps the best way to show the richness of the book’s content is to cite examples. Feinstein often explores the similarities between jazz and literature. Playwright and poet Amiri Baraka, formerly LeRoi Jones, calls poetry “a form of musical presentation” (16). As part of his fascinating discussion of how trombonist Vic Dickenson was an influence on his work, Hayden Carruth discusses how he has tried to emulate in his poetry the mixture of freedom and discipline that exists in jazz (33). Carruth’s comments can then be reflected upon when reading other worthwhile comparisons of the constraints in jazz and poetry from pianist Fred Hersch (165–66), poet David Jauss (181–82), and pianist Bill Evans, quoted by Dan Morgenstern (271).

The book abounds in comments that make you stop and think. Bassist Bill Crow compares the effects of time on music (immediacy) and writing (with the opportunity to rewrite and rethink) (74). Poet Cornelius Eady compares the work of Thelonious Monk with the...