Jazz your Writing

Movement, creativity, and finding your voice

Photo by Yoel J Gonzalez on Unsplash

Before we get started on the last post in our jazz series, I was on a train for five hours this weekend and had a chance to check out some great stuff on the internet that you might enjoy. I also know that a bunch of you got this ensuing post by mistake last month! So consider these articles your extras:

• Judy Blume’s books are finally getting put on screen…as a huge Blume fan, I’m excited. The afore-linked article discusses the intriguing history of why they haven’t been made into film in the past. Also check this out from last month in The Atlantic, who dub her: “the poet laureate of puberty”

• Fantastic interview with Masha Gessen in The New Yorker: “What We Talk About When We Talk About Trans Rights”…addressing pronouns, Dave Chapelle, trans youth, and more in really nuanced ways (including a discussion of when they got cancelled by ‘trans Twitter’)

• If you haven’t seen enough — Alastair Campbell on Gary Lineker and the BBC is both entertaining and brilliant; check out all Campbell’s stuff via Tweets. And I enjoyed this personal reflection on Match of the Day from Substack writer Grahame Anderson. He’s got a great newsletter called quite effectively: Things I Love (American quite). It’s been really amazing watching BBC report scathingly (at times) on the BBC and wondering if all the subtexts are simply created by the layers that exist or if they have been manufactured. One can only hope that it is all moving toward better laws for refugees and free speech. I’ve always loved Lineker’s football commentary as well as the fact that he houses refugees in his personal home. I wonder where this saga will be at as you read this…

In addition to all the jazz stuff below, I’d love to hear what you think about the above topics.

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Jazz Your Writing

Japanese novelist Haruki Murakami - no stranger to this publication - once ran a jazz club in Tokyo. He loves jazz music and it often enters his novels as allusions. After Dark especially makes use of jazz (especially Duke Ellington) through the Tokyo nightlife and the protagonist who is a trombonist.

Murakami makes reference to many forms of music, which he discusses at length with Seiji Ozawa in Absolutely on Music. He talks about attending the Montreux Jazz Festival (p. 243+) and the jazz in his “manic record collection” (pp. 62-4).

Emily Temple compiled writing advice from Murakami for Lit Hub, including this bit of wisdom about jazz and writing:

“One of my all-time favorite jazz pianists is Thelonious Monk. Once, when someone asked him how he managed to get a certain special sound out of the piano, Monk pointed to the keyboard and said: “It can’t be any new note. When you look at the keyboard, all the notes are there already. But if you mean a note enough, it will sound different. You got to pick the notes you really mean!”

I often recall these words when I am writing, and I think to myself, “It’s true. There aren’t any new words. Our job is to give new meanings and special overtones to absolutely ordinary words.” I find the thought reassuring. It means that vast, unknown stretches still lie before us, fertile territories just waiting for us to cultivate them.”

Murakami writes, then, like a jazz musician plays; that is, he knows his words so well — including the words of many authors before him as evident in his use of allusion and play with genre — that he can actively improvise as he creates whilst holding many echoes of meaning through his literature (personal, historical, linguistic, etc.).

This is what a jazz musician does, too. As jazz musician and composer Ken Ross discussed with me in the conversations I shared two weeks ago, knowing the history of jazz, the stories of jazz greats, his instruments, and many varieties of playing notes together to create a language allows him to play freely and meaningfully.

Today, I’d like to talk about this concept of ‘jazz writing’ from a couple of angles then take you through a few writing strategies and prompts related to:

• Improvising / free writing

• Allusions to jazz

• Creativity in constraint

• Identity (& freedom)

From theory to fiction

I recently spoke about the act of creation with students at Pratt Institute — and with some of you who attended the lecture, thanks! I’ve also shared a recording with you, but at this moment, I wanted to include a small section from my talk before the discussion.

I was talking from a frame as a fiction writer who uses critical theory, cultural studies, historical literature, and studies of the arts (AKA the stuff I explore in this newsletter weekly or comparative literature) to create paradoxically more freely. We then applied this to other artistic forms of creation. The students have a vast, impressive range of focus areas and projects!

This is something I said that afternoon:

I talked with my former student from 2004 who is now a professional musician about jazz for a newsletter article I’m publishing next week.  His creativity as a jazz musician first came from studying the history of jazz musicians and learning about its origins from a theoretical standpoint. He already played music, but to move into this genre where every performance is a moment of active creativity, he says he was able to do it in part through crazy amounts of practice, knowing his music inside out …and through knowledge. He says he only learned to play jazz by listening to the stories of its founders and understanding the way their music was formed from these histories. I found this fascinating. I had asked him about jazz and (American and/or Black American) identity and this is what he came up with. He’s not only aware of the roots of the music he plays; it seems to dance within the notes that come out, in parts homage, pastiche, and a shared community.

And this is something else that critical theory and active knowledge of artistic histories allows us to do: form an infinite and immortal discourse (well, immortal at least as long as humans are around). More than discourse – that’s not exactly the right word – it’s a way of engaging with such deep ideas about the human experience, often rooted in simply stated elements like death or love or fear or joy, in a way that is never limiting and always opening to discovery. Through theory, we can start to make sense of this free conversation of artistry and consider how our creations enter the dialogue.

Again, the reason conversation, dialogue, and discourse don’t feel quite right is that although my artistic medium is words – specifically the written word, literature – the language I’m talking about here may be the many languages of the arts, simply stated as visual, musical but also structural, genre-specific, physical movements (of people or things), and more. Of course, we also theorize and historicize it through literature or spoken language, because perhaps it’s a more universal and standardized way to form understandings.

Jacques Derrida talks about life as a kind of dance. And then he also equates writing with living.

So the question of What are you going to say? is sort of the same as Who are you? But to answer each of those questions, you need to be comfortable with yourself and also feel comfortable with the medium of expression (in this case, writing/language…but you might apply these ideas to another medium, like painting, composing music, or food/cooking).

I don’t mean that everything you say defines you but that it is an extension of your identity. Although, I would argue that identity is unfixed and actively created, so these expressions may change greatly over time. In essence, you are expressing your voice to the world.

Jazz yoga

Maybe moving from that thought to a yoga workshop seems strange, but bear with me for a moment. As I mentioned above, we can apply this concept of improvisation to many creative endeavors. Movement is one of these.

I took a yoga workshop with Raphan Kebe entitled Space and Flow (this is something he has developed into a whole school of yoga, or a tangent from the practice).

raphankebe

A post shared by Raphan Kebe (@raphankebe)

Kebe comes from a background of yoga, dance, and (playing) jazz music as well as living in a multicultural world that he enjoys navigating. He is Parisian, but lived in London for 25 years and now is based in Barcelona but travels frequently for workshops, engaging with people from all over the world on a daily basis.

He describes his studies in the three disciplines as very strict: rigorous and extensive training in each. Like Picasso, his seemingly free-form and unrestricted yoga comes from a very strict and deep understanding of yoga’s history, spiritual practices, and asanas, or bodily movements and postures.

He told us: ‘You need to know the scales first,’ referring in metaphor to the basics of yoga. ‘Then, you can improvise.’ What we created would be something new and an expression of ourselves but at the same time a part of yoga.

We can apply this concept to literature or other creative practices. One of the sessions was about Creativity in Constraint. He gave us a set of limitations of the body that we then had to solve through movement. He described this as physical kōan, or Zen riddles to figure out with our bodies.

I utilized this concept to think about writing within genres and text types. Most basically, I considered the controversial 5 Paragraph Essay, a staple of American education. I wrote an article about this idea for The Writing Cooperative last year, which you can apply to other forms of writing. Essentially, I discuss the way we can utilize these textual constraints, conventions, and histories to in fact be more creative.

Here’s a beautiful, short original composition from Kebe:

Jazz writing: prompts & methods

Many writers have drawn inspiration to stylistically write as if playing jazz. I mentioned the existentialists and Beat writers a couple weeks ago as well as Michael Harper and other Black American poets in this post (Jazz in the Arts).

Probably the best example one can read is in Ralph Ellison’s novel Invisible Man, written from a man whose life and identity were intertwined with jazz from a young age. These articles by Scott Irwin and Steve Pinkerton explore the topic in detail. Something the also discuss is the way the rhythm of the language is rooted in jazz (p. 112):

The dialogue between preacher and congregation bounces with the rhythmic cadences of call-and-response intrinsic to the African-American vernacular.

“Now black is . . . ” the preacher shouted.
“Bloody . . . ”
“I said black is . . . ”
“Preach it, brother . . . ”
“ . . . an’ black ain’t . . . ”

Ellison discusses this use of the musical vernacular in his preface (as well as the more specific influences of jazz on his writing). He likens his use of storytelling to that of an African-American oral tradition that he used to experience especially at the “barber-shop” (p. xxxiii of the Modern Library edition):

I knew that I could draw upon the rich culture of the folk tale as well as that of the novel, and that being uncertain of my skill I would have to improvise upon my materials in the manner of a jazz musician putting a musical theme through a wild star-burst of metamorphosis.

In the end, his ‘invisible’ protagonist’s “disembodied voice” suggests that he might “speak for you” — in other words, the reader, whoever that may be. While at once writing in and of the African American tradition, he also writes for us all.

Anyway, if you haven’t read the novel, I highly recommend it. And now, here are a few suggestions about your own jazz writing.

Improvising / free writing

Find a rhythm of writing. In fiction, your rhythm might change between characters. But for now, try a free write in your own rhythm. Through cadence and syncopation, we can create meaning. Many of you will have studied, for example, blank verse in the work’s of Shakespeare and the way variations in rhythm contained meaning.

1. So, what you can do is choose a topic —the thing you can see out your window, a fight you had with someone close to you, the way you feel about winter—and do an improvised free write. Rather than just exploding words onto the page (which isn’t wrong by any means), try to capture your own rhythm.

2. Visualize the ideas first. Find your mood and your tone. Then speak within your head or out loud, or perhaps even hum (or play on an instrument) how you’re feeling or what you’re thinking about or what you see/hear/smell/taste/touch.

3. Then, get the words down with their rhythms. Use punctuation, spacing, and the sounds of the words themselves to create that rhythm. Don’t worry about where the writing is going; try to capture the moment of that rhythm.

Allusions to jazz

This one may sound obvious: mention a jazz musician or piece of music in your writing, and therefore enhance the writing through its meaning. Yes! Many writers use jazz allusion in this way.

You may already know jazz music quite deeply or even play it yourself. I encourage you to find more knowledge about a particular piece of jazz music or performance that you like. Dig into the story behind it or the person playing it. These stories are where the allusions can subtly move us.

Here’s one you can do (of course, feel free to choose your own):

1. Listen to Ella Fitzgerald sing “Mack the Knife” in Berlin (1960)

2. Read about Fitzgerald’s life, perhaps on this National Women’s History site or through Ellafitzgerald.com.

3. Go a bit deeper by watching this video from NPR on the performance; to go even deeper here’s a long biopic narrated by Tony Bennett or this shorter video by Grunge that focuses on the difficulties she overcame

4. Listen to the music again, this time without video

5. Write a scene from a story that mentions this performance

6. Alternatively, mention the performance (or Fitzgerald) as a metaphor in an article/essay

It may feel artificial to work in this direction. Instead, you might consider that when you have the chance to add a musical allusion into your writing, that you take another listen. Even if it’s something you know quite well, you might find nuances in listening again or through researching more about the origins of the song itself.

Creativity in constraint

You can use limitations to help you be more creative in your writing. These might be genre or text type, word count or language use…generally you do have some limitations on your writing already if it’s not a free write like the above. Alternatively, your free writing might be morphed into something more constrained and paradoxically more creative through the steps you need to take to make it fit and, therefore, say more or make more sense for your reader. This is largely how I write fiction as well as essays.

There’s also the example of the haiku we looked at last month or other poetic forms that are constrained by meter or rhyme or stanza length or all three, as in the case of a sonnet. When I used to assign sonnet writing to high school students, at first I saw a grave fear in their eyes. Then, as they began to play around, they liked the use of structure. Many said it was ‘easier’ than writing a poem in free verse.

Besides writing a sonnet (!!), here’s something you can try:

1. Select a painting to write about — maybe one by Gerhard Richter or Christine Ay Tjoe

2. Limit yourself to 200 words or one side of a paper

3. Include:

   1. At least one word in another language than the main one you are writing in

   2. A description of a sound coming from the painting

   3. An imagined description of touching the painting

   4. Something funny

Identity (& freedom)

If jazz is about identity and freedom, it can be about yours, too. This is perhaps the most simple exercise, but the one that might help you to go the deepest.

1. Choose a piece of jazz music (maybe from our Spotify list, something from your record collection, or from one of the most famous jazz performances)

2. Listen completely. No distractions. Maybe close your eyes. Maybe listen a second time.

3. Write. Do a free write of whatever comes to mind after listening. Don’t worry about its direction. Consider that pieces of the writing might be used for a project or that the writing might simply reflect part of yourself.

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These exercises are ultimately about playing with your voice and using jazz as an inspiration to do so. Of course, you can adapt them in many ways. Did this help you to try something new? What other ideas do you have related to jazz writing?

Another big project I’m currently working on is about helping people find their voices through writing and yoga (in combination). More on that to come.

Thank you for reading and possibly participating! Time is short for all of us and often our responsibilities and fatigue keep us from taking time for reflection and creation. Please consider giving yourself the gift of stopping everything and writing or reading or looking at/playing art even just for a few minutes each day.