鈥淚 suspect that the one body of music which expresses the United States鈥搘hich expresses this continent鈥搃s jazz and blues.鈥濃揜alph Ellison
Horace Porter is the chair of African American World Studies and professor of English at the University of Iowa. He is the author of Stealing Fire: The Art and Protest of James Baldwin and one of the editors of Call and Response: The Riverside Anthology of the African American Literary Tradition.
The first book to reassess Ralph Ellison after his death and the posthumous publication of Juneteenth, his second novel, Jazz Country: Ralph Ellison in America explores Ellison's writings and views on American culture through the lens of jazz music.
Horace Porter's groundbreaking study addresses Ellison's jazz background, including his essays and comments about jazz musicians such as Louis Armstrong, Duke Ellington, and Charlie Parker. Porter further examines the influences of Ellington and Armstrong as sources of the writer's personal and artistic inspiration and highlights the significance of Ellison's camaraderie with two African American friends and fellow jazz fans鈥攖he writer Albert Murray and the painter Romare Bearden. Most notably, Jazz Country demonstrates how Ellison appropriated jazz techniques in his two novels, Invisible Man and Juneteenth.
Using jazz as the key metaphor, Porter refocuses old interpretations of Ellison by placing jazz in the foreground and by emphasizing, especially as revealed in his essays, the power of Ellison's thought and cultural perception. The self-proclaimed 鈥渃ustodian of American culture,鈥 Ellison offers a vision of 鈥渏azz-shaped鈥 America鈥攁 world of improvisation, individualism, and infinite possibility.
鈥淚n this new work, Porter shows Ellison鈥檚 abiding relevance to American life by identifying the influence of jazz music and musicians upon Ellison鈥檚 literary sensibility 鈥Jazz Country is tightly written and sharply focused. The book鈥檚 contribution lies in its fine rhetorical analysis of some of Ellison鈥檚 key concepts: unity, ambiguity, possibility, transcendence, and discipline.鈥濃American Literature
鈥Jazz Country is an appropriate and even inspired entry into the world of Ellison's writing. It explores the interplay between Ellison's passionate love or 鈥榓ppropriation鈥 of jazz and blues and his ideas about many other important issues, including his own ideal standards in the writing of American fiction and his analysis of the broad implications of American culture itself.鈥濃擜rnold Rampersad, Stanford University
鈥淩alph Ellison based his ideal of the Renaissance man, American style, on the jazz musicians he had known. In Jazz Country, Horace Porter excavates Ellison's writings on jazz for a view of the artist we have never before seen in such sharp focus.鈥濃揇iane Middlebrook, author of Suits Me: The Double Life of Billy Tipton
