Jazz and Literature

Maria Antónia Lima is Associate Professor at the University of Évora, in Portugal, where she completed her PhD on the fiction of Charles Brockden Brown, Edgar Allan Poe, Nathaniel Hawthorne, and Herman Melville. She is a researcher at the University of Lisbon Centre for English Studies (ULICES) and teaches American Literature at the University of Évora. She was President of the Portuguese Association for Anglo-American Studies (APEAA) and a Board Member of the European Society for the Studies of English (ESSE). Her publications include international essays in specialized journals and critical volumes, as well as books on Gothic and the relationships between literature and the arts. Mia Funk is an artist, podcast host, writer, and creative educator. Founder of The Creative Process international educational initiative, podcast, and travelling exhibition, her varied work sees her leading workshops and mentoring students around creativity, critical thinking, environmental ethics, and humanities disciplines. Her work appears in public and private collections, including the U.S. Library of Congress, Office of Public Works, and Centre Culturel Irlandais de Paris. She’s received the Prix de Peinture from the Salon d’Automne and exhibited in the Grand Palais. Funk served on the National Advisory Council of the American Writers Museum and serves on the advisory board of the European Conference for the Humanities.

INTRODUCTION

Maria Antónia Lima and Mia Funk

PART I - JAZZ AND LITERATURE: ELECTIVE AFFINITIES

1 Jane Austen and John Coltrane

Allen Michie

2 Does Early Jazz Express Freedom or Possibility?

Amedeo D’Adamo

3 Modern Jazz Quintet: Hughes, Joans, Kaufman, Cortez, Komunyakaa

A. Robert Lee

4 Race and Cut-Up Improvisational Aesthetics: William Burroughs and Jazz

Benjamin J. Heal

5 Jazz and Futurism in Italy 1910–1935

Francesco Martinelli

6 David Bowie’s Blackstar: Jazz, War, and Seventeenth-Century Literary Connections in “’Tis a Pity She Was a Whore” and “Sue”

James Rovira

7 Jazz as Modernity’s Challenge in Interwar Spain

Juan Herrero-Senés

8 Sounds in the Dark: Jazz in Noir Narratives

Maria Antónia Lima

9 Jazz in Brazilian and Portuguese Poetry

Mário Avelar

10 Truth Has to Be Given in Riddles: Literary Influences in the Portuguese Jazz Scene

Nuno Catarino

11 Jazz, Body, and Soul: Yusef Lateef’s Autophysiopsychic Practice

Sam Reese

12 Varieties of Religious Experience through Jazz in Cortázar’s “The Pursuer”

William Levine

PART II - EXPERIENCES OF CREATIVE INTERFACES

13 Hvor En Var Baen: Places of Childhood

Haftor Medbøe

14 Four Musicians and Six Characters: Narrative Categories in Contemporary Free Jazz

José Dias

15 The Creative Process: Storytelling as an Improvisational Process

Mia Funk

16 Morte d’Miles: Time with a Virtuoso

Peter Weller

17 Inside the Mind and Heart of the Free Improviser – an Improvisation

Robert Dick

18 Notes on Improvising While Composing: Dutch Writer J. Bernlef on Writing with Jazz

Scott Rollins

PART III - THE CREATIVE PROCESS

19 INTERVIEWS

Music, Space, Sensation, and the Creative Process

Ada Limón

Jazz, Poetry, Improvisation, and the Art of Memory

Anthony Joseph

Portugal, Cultural Memory, and the Language of Jazz

Bernardo Moreira

Jazz and the Time of the Novel

Bruce Evan Barnhart

An Improvised Life

Dickie Landry

African American Music and Storytelling: A Curator’s Perspective

Dwandalyn R. Reece

Improvisation and Freedom, Passion and Purpose

Edmar Castañeda

Jazz, Film, Graphic Novels, and The Discovery of Sound

Filipe Melo

Writing Between the Notes

Geoff Dyer

On Music and the Intersection of Life and Craft

Jericho Brown

A Journey Through Music, Performance, and the Science of Time

Natalie Hodges

A Long Time Ago in a Cutting Room Far, Far Away

Paul Hirsch

Zen, Blues, Simplicity, and The Art of Songwriting

Rick Carnes

Songwriting and Self-Exploration

Sharon Kovacs

20 POEMS

For Ray

Ana Castillo

That Cat Named Bird

Antonia Alexandra Klimenko

My Romance

Gerald Fleming

Rahsaan Roland Kirk at the Village Vanguard

Jeffrey Greene

Chet Baker

J. Bernlef

Forever Monkin’ it

Malik Ameer Crumpler

Forward Avenue Blues (for Katherine Dunham)

Michael Simms

Other Leavings, Other Lives

Yvette Centeno

21 ARTWORKS