In this effort, Morrison uses bits and pieces of history to create a revised story of how things happened. She also explores various mediums to declare her prophetic messages: multiple genres of music, black language and the art of storytelling each allow her characters to recover the lost history of their people. In fact, while Beloved was published in 1987, the historical truth behind this novel continued to resonate with Morrison and eighteen years later she wrote a stirring libretto revisiting one of the sources of Beloved, creating for the Margaret Garner Opera, which premiered in 2005 in Detroit, Michigan. In 2008, for the Chicago premiere, the playbill includes “A Note from Toni Morrison,” that speaks to her identity as a prophetic writer, one called to explain the past in order to affect the future:
For more than five years I had been in thrall to the material, trying to do justice to the historical characters involved while exercising the license I needed to
interrogate the dilemma Margaret both presented and represented…Some ten years later, free from exhaustion following the publication of Beloved I realized that there were genres other than novels that could expand and deepen the story…Finally, to the real people who lived this tale, I trust we have done them, their heirs, and the spirits justice. (Program 12)
. Another example of Morrison’s use of music as a medium is uncovered in Jazz. Jazz is a novel that not only borrows the structural composition of this unique American music, but it also uses both the form and the content of jazz to bear witness to the richness and complexity of black life. Unlike her other novels, where the narrator is objective, in Jazz the narrator improvises with her instrument, writing, in the context of the story-telling of all the other characters. In fact, in writing the novel this way Morrison embodies her belief that the reader must “participate” in the story and, as an individual in a jazz group does, must also listen carefully to all the voices. This shift in the presentation of her narrative style is another deliberate and conscious effort to
resembles in some respect the solos/duets, the riffs, the narration and comments of piano and horns and voices, the acts of improvisation, and the coded language that characterize jazz.
Morrison is well aware that jazz music is a fusion of history and emotion, blues and humor, rhythm and discordance, that it is dance music as well as self-expression, that it brings joy and solace and carries secret messages for black culture, hearking back to Africa, back to slavery and sharecropping, back to Jim Crow and the escape from oppression, back to the heart o and soul of W.E.B Du Bois’s “black folk.” Her interest in telling such a story in such a way stems from her fascination with the music and with the culture in which it developed and is played. In the preface to Playing in the Dark, she writes about a passage in the Algerian writer.
The one precise, unique note tracing a sound whose path was almost painful, so absolutely necessary had its equilibrium and duration become; it tore at the nerves of those [other than Armstrong, apparently] who followed it’ [italics
mine]…What solicited my attention was whether the cultural association of jazz as important to Cardinal’s “possession” as were its intellectual foundations. I was interested, I had been for a long time, in the way people ignite critical moments of discovery or change or emphasis in literature not written by them.The Louis Armstrong catalyst was an addition to this file, and encouraged me to reflect on the consequences of jazz—its visceral, emotional, and intellectual impact on the listener. (vi-viii)
Marie Cardinal’s biography speaks of where she has an extreme reaction when she encounters the music of Louis Armstrong. The brilliance of Armstrong’s ability to play the trumphet, triggered the pain and insanity that resided inside of Marie Cardinal—“it tore at her nerves.” As Morrison continues to discuss Marie Cardinal’s experience with the music of Armstrong, she says that it encountered her “to reflect on the consequences of jazz—its visceral, emotional, and intellectual impact on the listener”(viii). Obviously, some of this impact is what she sought to create in Jazz, where is a metaphor for American culture and the black experience in Harlem, New York, as well for the voices of those who were a part of the Great Migration from the South. The reader is forced to experiences the Music, the City and the People in this text, in
order to gain another perspective on black culture as expressed through the music. Lar Eckstein further supports this notion of music as a form of bearing witness, in the article “A Love
Supreme: Jazzthetic Strategies in Toni Morrison’s Beloved.” Therein he writes: “For Morrison, African American writing fundamentally relies on the sounds and rhythms of black music—as a source of narrative content, but particularly also an as aesthetic “’mirror’”. She notes: he writes, “If my work is faithfully to reflect the aesthetic tradition of Afro-American culture, it must make conscious use of the characteristics of its art forms and translate them into print: antiphony, the group nature of art, its functionality, its improvisional nature, its relationship to audience performance, the critical voice which upholds tradition and communal values and which also provides occasion for an individual to transcend and/or defy group restrictions” (qtd in Ecks 272). Here, Morrison admits that her work mirrors the cultural practices of the Black Aesthetic, which allows for a movement from traditional or individual concerns to community concerns. And Black music, especially the sounds and rhythms, are a very important part of this mirroring that she translates into written expression, in the novel Jazz.