Literary free jazz? Mumbo Jumbo and Paradise: language and meaning

(10.) Indeed, free jazz itself is not entirely separate from postmodern aesthetics. Significantly, Coleman selected Jackson Pollock's "White Light" as the artwork for the cover of his album. Coleman's own resistance to melody in the strict sense of the term closely parallels the resistance to figurativism in abstract expressionism. For more on jazz and the visual arts, see O'Meally.

(11.) In Interrupting Auschwitz, his study of the implications of the Holocaust for aesthetic production, Cohen describes another example where any traditional language of history or narrative aesthetic becomes inadequate and must be transformed to comprehend and transcend a traumatic historical moment. While the vast differences between the forces culminating in the Holocaust and those leading to slavery and its aftermath of racism resist any easy conflation of the two histories, the scale of the horror of each enables a natural comparison. Cohen's reading, which dwells on Adorno's work, reveals an aesthetic response to trauma that in many ways parallels Morrison's project in Paradise.

(12.) Coleman's The Shape of Jazz to Come and The Change of the Century, Taylor, and Sun Ra are only some of the more explicitly titled visions of a new future.

(13.) I am not suggesting that Coleman, Coltrane, or other free jazz musicians made political decisions in their musical experimentations. Nor did they all always or necessarily function out of a sense of trauma and loss. However, reflecting on the effect of their music, on its reception by critics and audiences, its relationship to earlier musical forms and to the social and political contexts in which it was formed, I cannot ignore these implications. Consider, for example, Coltrane's response to the recurring critique that he played angry music: "I don't really know what a listener feels when he hears music. The musician may feel one way and the listener may get something else from the music.... The beauty of jazz is that you're free to do just what you feel." Coltrane recognizes the potential disparity between the performer's and the audience's experience of music but acknowledges the importance of both (Porter 195).

(14.) Cohen makes this link even clearer in his related analysis of Edmond Jabes and the concept of the Book. Quoting from Jabes, Cohen writes that "if 'making a book, or rather, helping it to come into being means above all blurring its utopian tracks, wiping out the trace' ... it is because its 'utopia'--its consummation as Book--is what presents itself only in the form of an erasure" (122).

Keren Omry, since being awarded her PhD in English Literature at the University of London, continues to explore the ongoing dialogue between contemporary African American literature, jazz aesthetics, and paradigms of ethnic identity. She also researches, teaches, and has published on the intersections between racialized and gendered discourses in science fictional narratives

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