In 1941 Thelonious Monk and Kenny Clarke copyrighted "Epistrophy,"
one of the best-known compositions of the bebop era. The song's
title refers to a literary device-the repetition of a word or
phrase at the end of successive clauses-that is echoed in the
construction of the melody. Written two decades later, Amiri
Baraka's poem "Epistrophe" alludes slyly to Monk's tune. Whether it
is composers finding formal inspiration in verse or a poet invoking
the sound of music, hearing across media is the source of
innovation in black art. Epistrophies explores this fertile
interface through case studies in jazz literature-both writings
informed by music and the surprisingly large body of writing by
jazz musicians themselves. From James Weldon Johnson's vernacular
transcriptions to Sun Ra's liner note poems, from Henry
Threadgill's arresting song titles to Nathaniel Mackey's "Song of
the Andoumboulou," there is an unending back-and-forth between
music that hovers at the edge of language and writing that strives
for the propulsive energy and melodic contours of music. At times
this results in art that gravitates into multiple media. In Duke
Ellington's "social significance" suites, or in the striking
parallels between Louis Armstrong's inventiveness as a singer and
trumpeter on the one hand and his idiosyncratic creativity as a
letter writer and collagist on the other, one encounters an
aesthetic that takes up both literature and music as components of
a unique-and uniquely African American-sphere of art-making and
performance.
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