Jazz Country: Ralph Ellison in America - Tapa dura

"I suspect that the one body of music which expresses the United States - which expresses this continent - is jazz and blues." - Ralph Ellison; "Jazz Country is an appropriate and even inspired entry into the world of Ellison's writing. It explores the interplay between Ellison's passionate Love or 'appropriation' of jazz and blues and his ideas about many other important issues, including his own ideal standards in the writing of American fiction and his analysis of the broad implications of American culture itself." - Arnold Rampersad, Stanford University; "Ralph Ellison based his ideal of the Renaissance man, American style, on the jazz musicians he had known. In Jazz Country, Horace Porter excavates Ellison's writings on jazz for a view of the artist we have never before seen in such sharp focus." - Diane Middlebrook, author of Suits Me: The Double Life of Billy Tipton

This title reassesses Ralph Ellison and explores his writings and views on American culture through the lens of jazz music. Horace Porter's study addresses Ellison's jazz background, including his essays and comments about jazz musicians such as Louis Armstrong, Duke Ellington, and Charlie Parker. Porter further examines the influences of Ellington and Armstrong as sources of the writer's personal and artistic inspiration and highlights the significance of Ellison's camaraderie with two African American friends and fellow jazz fans - the writer Albert Murray and the painter Romare Bearden. Most notably, ""Jazz Country"" demonstrates how Ellison appropriated jazz techniques in his two novels, ""Invisible Man"" and ""Juneteenth"". Using jazz as the key metaphor, Porter refocuses old interpretations of Ellison by placing jazz in the foreground and by emphasizing, especially as revealed in his essays, the power of Ellison's thought and cultural perception. The self-proclaimed ""custodian of American culture"", Ellison offers a vision of ""jazz-shaped"" America - a world of improvization, individualism and infinite possibility.