Word: morrison
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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Jazz, the latest book by Pulitzer-Prize winning author Toni Morrison, is definitively the story of the City, of the twenties and of jazz, the music that gave voice to the African-American experience...
With a few exceptions such as Ralph Ellison, writers white and Black have used jazz as formula for cheap "atmosphere." Morrison rises above his temptation. There is no explicit jazz anywhere in this novel, no over-romantic images of saxophones and speak-easies. Instead, jazz is transmuted into narrative voice--a voice that at times surges poetically, at times sounds like a newsreel, at times is all-knowing...
...moment, this "moment in our century we assumed we understood." "If Booker T. was sitting down to eat a chicken sandwich in the President's house in a city called capital, near where True Belle had had such a good time, then things must be all right, all right." Morrison unravels the underside of the jazz age, complicating what we recall as a wildly uninhibited feel-good era. "Things" were not "all right"; history was not "over...
Keeping the example of Beloved in mind I acnowledge the danger in my choice. In dealing with women in the novel, Toni Morrison chronicles the destructive possibilities of love and its ability to kill...
...True," the female vocalist, Barb Morrison, joins Dito. Instead of constant noise, more ethereal moments alternate with heaviness--offering the listener a much needed respite. One wonders, however, whether the band repeats the line "Is it something that I can change" 10 or so times at the song's end because 1) it says so much about existential angst that it merits repetition of 2) because they sought to fill time. (I chose...