SOURCE: “Josef Skvorecky and the Tradition of Jazz Literature” in World Literature Today, Vol. 54, No. 4, Autumn, 1980, pp. 586-590.

In the following excerpt, Szwed examines several works of jazz literature, focusing on Josef Skvorecky's The Bass Saxophone: Two Novellas.

The idea of the universality of the black experience in the West is so common that it seems too banal to mention. It comprises a subtext in the writings of Twain, Melville, Faulkner, maybe half of American literature. A smaller group of writers—DuBois, those of the Harlem Renaissance, Norman Mailer—have told us that part of this experience is its ability to be communicated indirectly, through images of the body, through art, music, dance. The theoretical appeal of blacks also represented for late nineteenth- and twentieth-century artists an escape from industrialization and the rise of the middle class: one thinks of slumming literati such as Rimbaud in his A...