Jazz in the Writing of Ishmael Reed

It seems impossible for a work of written literature to imitate a style of music. It seems especially impossible for that imitated style of music to be jazz. Ishmael Reed was able to do the impossible: he used the style of jazz music to write his works of literature. This paper will discuss how Ishmael Reed used the styles and principals involved in jazz, with emphasis in the novel Mumbo Jumbo, to break from the previous Euro-centric precepts of what was considered quality in literature. Ishmael Reed speaks of great jazz artists and how his writing parallels their styles. I will explore how the interpretive style of his writing, the idea of Jes Grew, the parting from Euro-centric standards of novel aesthetics and the social function this served for African Americans, the use of Voodoo, the ways in which his writing style was threatening to some, and the way in which his writing represented a completely new art form to display how Ishmael Reed's writing mirrors the style, function, and aesthetics of jazz.

"Reed in Mumbo Jumbo. . . works out of a critical matrix akin to jazz" (Hoffman 1994). Ishmael Reed's literature attempts to behave as a jazz composition would as opposed to a standard novel form. When compared to writers such as William Burroughs, Kurt Vonnegut, and John Barth, he replies that he would rather be compared to artists like Charles Mingus and Charlie Parker. "I try to do the same kind of thing from unit of sentence to paragraph to chapter where I get the same kind of shifts that you have going on in, for example, Charlie Parker. Charlie Parker didn't write 'Night and Day.' But what did Charlie Parker do with it? He improvised on it so that it became something more than what it was. So that's what I did with the western form. I think that's what I try to do with the detective form" (Hoffman 1994).