1st Edition
Jazz and Literature An Introduction
Jazz and Literature: An Introduction presents an original collection of essays from leading international scholars, examining an array of musical and literary interconnections including improvisation, multicultural influences, poetry, modernism, the Beat movement, jazz forms, noir, solo and collective expression, global perspectives on jazz and literature, etc. This volume sheds light on the critical and creative discussions of music and literature, showing the evolving relevance of jazz in the twenty-first century. The book also includes a special section dedicated to interviews with writers, musicians, and creatives such as U.S. Poet Laureate Ada Limón, Jericho Brown, Anthony Joseph, Geoff Dyer, Paul Hirsch, Dickie Landry, and Dwandalyn R. Reece. This volume is an ideal resource for students of music and literature and for academics interested in the creative dialogues between jazz and literature.
INTRODUCTION
Maria Antónia Lima and Mia Funk
PART I - JAZZ AND LITERATURE: ELECTIVE AFFINITIES
Jane Austen and John Coltrane
Allen Michie
Does Early Jazz Express Freedom or Possibility?
Amedeo D’Adamo
Modern Jazz Quintet: Hughes, Joans, Kaufman, Cortez, Komunyakaa
A. Robert Lee
Race and Cut-Up Improvisational Aesthetics: William Burroughs and Jazz
Benjamin Heal
Jazz and Futurism in Italy 1910-1935
Francesco Martinelli
David Bowie’s Blackstar: Jazz, War, and Seventeenth-Century Literary Connections in “‘Tis a Pity She Was a Whore” and “Sue”
James Rovira
Jazz as Modernity’s Challenge in Interwar Spain
Juan Herrero-Senés
Sounds in the Dark: Jazz in Noir Narratives
Maria Antónia Lima
Jazz in Brazilian and Portuguese Poetry
Mário Avelar
Truth has to be given in riddles: Literary Influences in the Portuguese Jazz Scene
Nuno Catarino
Jazz, Body, and Soul: Yusef Lateef’s Autophysiopsychic Practice
Sam V.H. Reese
Varieties of Religious Experience through Jazz in Cortázar’s “The Pursuer”
William Levine
PART II - EXPERIENCES OF CREATIVE INTERFACES
Hvor En Var Baen: Places of Childhood
Haftor Medbøe
Four Musicians and Six Characters: Narrative Categories in Contemporary Free Jazz
José Dias
The Creative Process: Storytelling as an Improvisational Process
Mia Funk
Morte d’Miles: Time with a Virtuoso
Peter Weller
Inside the Mind and Heart of the Free Improviser — an Improvisation
Robert Dick
Notes on Improvising While Composing: Dutch Writer J. Bernlef on Writing with Jazz
Scott Rollins
PART III - THE CREATIVE PROCESS
INTERVIEWS
Music, Space, Sensation, and the Creative Process
Ada Limón
Jazz, Poetry, Improvisation, and the Art of Memory
Anthony Joseph
Portugal, Cultural Memory, and the Language of Jazz
Bernardo Moreira
Jazz and the Time of the Novel
Bruce Evan Barnhart
An Improvised Life
Dickie Landry
African American Music and Storytelling: A Curator’s Perspective
Dwandalyn R. Reece
Improvisation and Freedom, Passion and Purpose
Edmar Castañeda
Jazz, Film, Graphic Novels, and The Discovery of Sound
Filipe Melo
Writing Between the Notes
Geoff Dyer
On Music and the Intersection of Life and Craft
Jericho Brown
A Journey Through Music, Performance, and the Science of Time
Natalie Hodges
A Long Time Ago in a Cutting Room Far, Far Away
Paul Hirsch
Zen, Blues, Simplicity, and The Art of Songwriting
Rick Carnes
Songwriting and Self-Exploration
Sharon Kovacs
POEMS
For Ray
Ana Castillo
That Cat Named Bird
Antonia Alexandra Klimenko
My Romance
Gerald Fleming
Rahsaan Roland Kirk at the Village Vanguard
Jeffrey Greene
Chet Baker
J. Bernlef
Forever Monkin’ it
Malik Ameer Crumpler
Forward Avenue Blues (for Katherine Dunham)
Michael Simms
Other Leavings, Other Lives
Yvette Centeno
Biography
Maria Antónia Lima is an Associate Professor at the University of Évora, in Portugal, where she completed her PhD on the fiction of Charles Brockden Brown, Edgar Allan Poe, Nathaniel Hawthorne and Herman Melville. She is a researcher at the University of Lisbon Centre for English Studies (ULICES), and teaches American Literature at the University of Évora. She was President of the Portuguese Association for Anglo-American Studies (APEAA) and a Board Member of the European Society for the Studies of English (ESSE). Her publications include international essays in specialized journals and critical volumes, as well as books on Gothic and the relationships between literature and the arts.
Mia Funk is an artist, podcast host, writer, and creative educator. Founder of The Creative Process international educational initiative, podcast, and traveling exhibition, her varied work sees her leading workshops and mentoring students around creativity, critical thinking, environmental ethics, and humanities disciplines. Her work appears in public and private collections, including the U.S. Library of Congress, Office of Public Works, and Centre Culturel Irlandais de Paris. She’s received the Prix de Peinture from the Salon d’Automne and exhibited in the Grand Palais. Funk served on the National Advisory Council of the American Writers Museum and serves on the advisory board of the European Conference for the Humanities.
