SOURCE: “Solos and Chorus: Michael Ondaatje's Jazz Politics/Poetics,” Mosaic, Vol. 32, No. 3, September, 1999, pp. 131-148.

In the following essay, Malcolm identifies jazz references and influences in the fiction of Michael Ondaatje.

Given that jazz is a relatively recent musical form, it is not surprising that studies of its connection to literature are few in comparison to the discussions of the relations between literature and classical music, where indeed the proliferation of such discussion has developed to the point of occasioning some specialists to define and insist upon criteria for “valid” comparisons. Thus in the section on “Literature and Music” in the 1990 Modern Language Association manual entitled Teaching Literature and Other Arts, Robert Spaethling has emphasized the need to distinguish between literary works/studies in which music functions as a metaphor/allusion and those in which music functions as a structural device. More recently, in Performing Rites, Simon Frith...