TRANSCRIPTS:
I’m Mark Rapp, and this is Rapp on Jazz.
Toni Morrison, one of America’s greatest novelists, often turned to jazz as both subject and structure. Her novel "Jazz" doesn’t just talk about music—it sounds like it. The story unfolds like an improvisation: voices overlap, themes repeat and shift, and the rhythm carries you forward. Morrison once said she wanted to write prose the way a jazz musician plays—full of call and response, riffs, and freedom.
For Morrison, jazz symbolizes resilience, creativity, and the African American experience. In her writing, the music becomes a metaphor for survival and reinvention—how communities make beauty out of hardship.
Just as jazz musicians transform sorrow into swing, Morrison’s characters transform struggle into story. Her work reminds us that jazz is a way of seeing, remembering, and imagining a freer world.
This has been Rapp on Jazz, a co-production of ColaJazz and South Carolina Public Radio, made possible by the ETV Endowment of South Carolina.