Can a sentence swing and a paragraph bop? Is it possible for prose to be as stripped down and cool as a Miles Davis trumpet solo, or a poem to be as incantatory as John Coltrane’s saxophone? Despite all of the musical genres which the United States contributed to contemporary culture, most of them born from the specifically African American experience it should be added, jazz remains in many ways the lodestar of our melodic and rhythmic firmament, the “Classical Music” of America (as complicated as that assertion might be). As to demonstrate the international inheritance which the music represents, the Japanese novelist Haruki Murakami—who is himself an avid fan, the possessor of a massive record collection and the owner of a Tokyo jazz club—describes the relationship between the genre and literature in a 2007 essay, writing that “Practically everything I know about writing, then, I learned from music..
. and mainly from jazz.” Murakami explains how from jazz he learned about the sounds of words—rhythm; he mastered their arrangement—melody; and he was tutored in composition—free improvisation.
Quipping that Charlie Parker and Thelonious Monk have given him the fundamentals of writing more than Fitzgerald did, Murakami compared the contemporary novelists’ task to that of the jazz musician, saying that as with notes, there “aren’t any new words. Our job is to give new meanings and special overtones to absolutely ordinary words.” What follows is a syll.
