The often-heard cliché that “writing about music is like dancing about architecture”—which has been variously attributed to Thelonious Monk, William S. Burroughs, Frank Zappa, Martin Mull, Laurie Anderson, and Elvis Costello, among others—seems to take for granted that it’s ludicrous to use one expressive medium to comment on or respond to another. But such cross-media encounters can actually be remarkably generative. As but one example, literary scholar Brent Hayes Edwards points to African American literature, which has taken shape in relation to music from its very inception. What Edwards shows in his latest book, Epistrophies: Jazz and the Literary Imagination, is that the pollination has gone both ways, “an unending back-and-forth between a music that hovers at the edge of language, on the one hand, and a writing that strives for the rhythmic propulsion, emotional charge, and melodic contours of music, on the other.”
In Epistrophies, Edwards comes to terms with this foundational interface by considering the full variety of “jazz literature”—both writing informed by the music and the surprisingly large body of writing by jazz musicians themselves. Here’s a bit from the book:
The term jazz literature tends to bring to mind writing influenced by music. But this other sort of jazz literature—that is, writing by musicians—includes an enormous range of work, including not only autobiography but also music criticism, history, interviews, philosophy, fiction, poetry, drama, technical and instruction manuals, liner notes, and magazine and newspaper articles. Aside from autobiographies this work has received little attention from scholars of either literary studies or jazz studies, but it seems to me that this corpus must not be dismissed as a curiosity. It should be understood, instead, as a persistent impulse. Whether in Sun Ra’s “cosmo-myth rituals” or in Ellington’s “social significance” suites, one encounters again and again an approach to aesthetics that resists any easy distinction between “writing” and “music,” instead viewing both as components in a broader sphere of art making and performance.
Edwards makes his way through studies of Louis Armstrong, Duke Ellington, and Mary Lou Williams, among others, to consider the uses and implications of jazz writing for artists we tend to think of primarily as composers and improvisers. Here’s Edwards again:
Although all the chapters shuttle between jazz and literature, it is not by coincidence that the first is devoted to Louis Armstrong, in an attempt to take account of the apparent parallels or shared predilections across his work as a singer, an instrumentalist, and a writer. To read and hear Armstrong this way—or Duke Ellington, or Sun Ra, or Mary Lou Williams, or Henry Threadgill—is to shift the fringe of contact between music and language by noting that black musicians so often insist on working in multiple media, not as autonomous areas of activity but in conjunction, insistently crossing circuits, rethinking and expanding the potential of each medium in the way it is like and unlike the other. It is also to insist that the provocation goes both ways: from music to literature, from literature to music.
The book’s title itself points to one of these flowing episodes of provocation. There’s a famous 1941 composition by Thelonious Monk and Kenny Clarke called “Epistrophy”—the title refers to a literary device in which a word or expression is deliberately repeated at the end of successive phrases, clauses, sentences, or verses—that Amiri Baraka alluded to decades later with his poem “Epistrophe,” which, not for nothing, never once employs its namesake’s namesake literary device. From a bebop standard, to a Black Arts poem, to Edwards’s dazzling new work of criticism—“Epistrophy” to “Epistrophe” to Epistrophies—consider that architecture well-danced.
