Epistrophies: Jazz and the Literary Imagination

Brent Hayes Edwards

Published by Harvard University Press 2017

Epistrophies

Jazz and the Literary Imagination

Brent Hayes Edwards

https://doi.org/10.4159/9780674979048

Overview
Contents

About this book

Hearing across media is the source of innovation in a uniquely African American sphere of art-making and performance, Brent Hayes Edwards writes. He explores this fertile interface through case studies in jazz literature—both writings informed by music and the surprisingly large body of writing by jazz musicians themselves.

Reviews

Brent Hayes Edwards is the finest literary scholar of his generation—an intellectual and artist of transformative force. His work reshapes the study and the making of world literature and art.
-- Fred Moten, University of California, Riverside

Epistrophies is a brilliant and essential contribution to the new and vital field of critical jazz studies. In addition to thorough explorations of poetry, liner notes, song titles, autobiography, and the many ways in which words can become musical (and vice versa), Edwards covers key figures from the entire history of jazz. He has provided nuanced readings of poetic writing as well as the multiple levels on which jazz and literature participate in the same aesthetic projects.
-- Krin Gabbard, author of Better Git It in Your Soul: An Interpretive Biography of Charles Mingus

This is an excellent book on an enduring theme of African-American culture, the intimate relationship of music—particularly jazz—and literary practice. Brent Edwards sees this as a two-way relation with many different manifestations rather than as a one-way subordination of black literature to jazz, as is often suggested. No author to my mind has approached this issue as thoroughly and in as nuanced a way as Edwards in what is the culmination of a decade-long project.
-- Bernard Gendron, University of Wisconsin–Milwaukee

Dazzling…[Edwards] compares the way poets use melody in language to the ways musicians use literary devices in jazz…[A] compellingly original perspective.
-- Publishers Weekly

This is a brilliant and utterly arresting book that takes a surprisingly uncommon subject and looks at it in a profoundly original way.
-- Jeff Simon Buffalo News

[Edwards] exhibits what I can only call intellectual glamour. He joins syntax and sentiment with élan, demonstrating a charismatic brilliance that persuades in parallel with, as well as through, his argumentation and evidence…Hilarious and trenchant at once, Edwards would be a beguiling writer in any field…He’s that rare academic whose work demands attention outside of experts in the field, without sacrificing tone or complexity. Almost conspicuously, William Empson comes to mind…As an alternative aesthetic history, Epistrophies is immensely satisfying…What makes Epistrophies such a singular work is the vividness and rigor of Edwards’s storytelling. As with Coleman’s Skies of America, there exists a temptation to discuss Epistrophies for what it could have been. Nevertheless, there is brilliance.
-- David B. Hobbs The Nation

Furnish[es] the reader with material that constantly surprises and subverts expectations.
-- Jordan Penney PopMatters

[Edwards] says something surprising and new that no one else has, or can, about two revered musicians [Mary Lou Williams and Cecil Taylor]—a genuine rarity in jazz scholarship…[The] critical and creative impulse to test the boundaries of the ‘sayable’ in both words and music—a ‘ferment at the horizon of articulacy’—is among the book’s guiding threads. In a brilliant chapter on the ‘poetics of transcription,’ Edwards studies the blues poem, a genre that has never found a happy home in either music or literature…Ambitiously, Edwards aims not just to hear, but to read, write, and think across a range of radically different sources. Epistrophies is a book whose individual parts persuade so easily and cohere so elegantly…The gift of Epistrophies is [an] act of renewal, an expansion not just of jazz literature as a category, but of jazz as a method.
-- Colin Vanderburg Los Angeles Review of Books

Topics

Frontmatter Publicly Available Download PDF	i
Contents Publicly Available Download PDF	vii
Introduction: “I Thought I Heard”: The Origins of Jazz and the Ends of Jazz Writing Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	1
1. Louis Armstrong and the Syntax of Scat Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	27
2. Toward a Poetics of Transcription: James Weldon Johnson’s Prefaces Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	57
3. The Literary Ellington Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	86
4. The Race for Space: Sun Ra’s Poetry Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	120
5. Zoning Mary Lou Williams Zoning Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	154
6. Let’s Call This: Henry Threadgill and the Micropoetics of the Song Title Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	181
7. Notes on Poetics Regarding Mackey’s Song Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	197
8. Come Out Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	221
Afterword: Hearing across Media Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	253
Notes Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	269
Acknowledgments Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	311
Index Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	317

Language: English
Publisher: Harvard University Press
Audience: General/trade;
Pages
- Main content: 336
Illustrations
- Other: 22 halftones
Keywords: Thelonious Monk; Kenny Clarke; Epistrophy; Amiri Baraka; jazz literature; James Weldon Johnson; Sun Ra; Henry Threadgill; Nathaniel Mackey; Duke Ellington; Louis Armstrong

eBook

Published: June 5, 2017
ISBN: 9780674979048