"A New Kind of Music": Jazz Improvisation and the Diasporic Dissonance of Paule Marshall's "The Fisher King"

• Published in: Melus 2015-03, Vol.40 (1), p.99-123
• Main Author: Lowney, John
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Subjects: African American literature; African Americans; American literature; Braxton, Anthony; Diaspora; Ellington, Duke (Edward Kennedy Ellington) (1899-1974); Jazz; Marshall, Paule (1929-2019); Migration; Morrison, Toni (1931-2019); Music; Musical performances; Musicians & conductors; Narrative structure; Narratives; Noncitizens; Novels; Sun Ra; Upward mobility; Weston, Randy
• ISSN: 0163-755X; 1946-3170
• DOI: 10.1093/melus/mlu056

This essay argues that Paule Marshall's The Fisher King extends our expectations of jazz fiction through its exploration of the intercultural significance of jazz. Like Marshall's previous novels, The Fisher King represents a black Atlantic geography of migration. It covers a greater expanse of history than much of her fiction, however, and it also traces several different geographies of migration, from the US South and the Caribbean to New York in the early twentieth century, and from New York to Paris in the post- World War II years. Narrating the ascent and decline of a black jazz musician who leaves New York to find temporary fulfillment in Paris, The Fisher King dramatizes the link between African diasporic improvisatory music and improvisatory social practices, between the group improvisation associated with jazz and new social formations. Jazz improvisation informs both the narration of The Fisher King and the creative social relationships enacted in the novel—sexual, familial, and intercultural. At the same time, the novel's persistent gendered, class, and cultural conflicts delimit the utopian appeal of jazz, underscoring how these improvisatory relationships are subject to patriarchal, capitalist, and nationalist structures. By interweaving narratives of African American and Caribbean migration with mythic narratives of African American expatriation and jazz history, Marshall, like the jazz pianist featured in The Fisher King, creates “a new kind of music: splintered, atonal, profane, and possessing a wonderful dissonance,” a music of utopian desire that is, at the same time, “earthbound” in its expression of the “hard, pure lyricism of the blues” (The Fisher King 137).