Jazz und seine Musiker im Roman. “Vernacular and Sophisticated” by Alexander Ebert (2009)

The book (originally a dissertation) at hand was designed to identify and explain various aspects of jazz in terms of their usage and function in literature. One main aspect is Albert Murray´s theory (or design) of the so-called “blues idiom,” a powerful and universal approach to life, language, interpretation and individual expression.

The study uses aspects of classical and recent approaches to culture, music and (African-American) orality to identify various strategies in seven novels which are discussed in detail, always aiming at their usage of jazz, be it as language, structure, or simply by electing a jazz character (musician or acting-like-a-musician) as the protagonist.
The author Ebert does very detailed studies of the following jazz novels (and one short story), i.e. he identifies and explains which musical features and techniques are used in a literary way to function similarly in literature: Langston Hughes: Not Without Laughter (1930), Dorothy Baker: Young Man with a Horn (1938), Ralph Ellison: Invisible Man (1952), James Baldwin: „Sonny’s Blues“ (1957), John Clellon Holmes: The Horn (1958), Albert Murray: Train Whistle Guitar (1974), Michael Ondaatje: Coming Through Slaughter (1976), Toni Morrison: Jazz (1992).

The study identifies many links to the image of the artist as outsider and relates strongly to the blues and the blues men as forefathers of the jazz musicians of the 1940s. This includes the function of the musicians as a rebel and  alienated man, says Ebert.
Fictional jazz artists as found in the respective eight texts use variations of coded musical forms of communication which are derived, learned and sometimes simply copied (in case of white musicians) from the African-American artist.

Using as his major tools the writings of Ralph Ellison and Albert Murray, the author develops a set of instruments that help identify the role and the practicality of the workings of jazz elements that either are present or absent in the texts.

This is the only publication in German on this topic that researches several jazz novels and is based on the idea of the blues idiom.

There is a short excert here.
(The book is in German).