Trading Meanings: the Breath of Music in Toni Morrison's Jazz
r Connotations I Vo!. 7.3 (1997/98) . Trading Meanings: The Breath of Music in Toni Morrison's Jazz NICHOLAS F. PICI 'We played music in the house all the time," recalls Toni Morrison in a 1992 interview with Dana Micucci (275). Indeed, Morrison was inundated with music and song during her childhood years in Lorain, Ohio. Morrison's mother, Ramah Willis, was just one of many musicians on her mother's side: she was a jazz and opera singer and played piano for a silent movie theater, while Morrison's grandfather was a violin player (Micucci 275, FusseI283). Morrison remembers how her mother sang everything from Ella Fitzgerald and the blues to sentimental Victorian songs and arias from Carmen (Fussel 284). That music should play such an important role in much of Morrison's writing, then, will probably come as no surprise for her readers. Virtually all of her novels touch upon music in some way or another. And whether that music is slave work songs, spirituals, gospel, or the blues, and whether the vehicle she uses to convey this musical experience is content, language, form, or a blending of all three, the musical motifs are unmistakable in Morrison's writing and inextricable from it. In the case of her second-most recent novel, though, music becomes an even more dominant, overriding force and assumes a role that is, ultimately, more important thematically and aesthetically to the novel's own peculiar artistic integrity than any of the roles music plays in her earlier novels. Morrison's Jazz, in effect, breathes the rhythms, sounds, and cadences of jazz music, radiating and enunciating, reflecting and recreating the music's central ideas, emotions, and aural idiosyncrasies perhaps as well as written prose can.
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