Music and literature, rivals among the arts, have not coexisted without intruding on each other's terrain. Ever since what we think of as "literature" developed out of the sounds of spoken, sung, and chanted art, writing has aspired to the condition of music, in which form contributes significantly to content. Nowhere is this truer than in the African American tradition, whose music is often considered its greatest artistic achievement and one of the greatest contributions to North American art. But while many African American writers have used musicians and music as theme and metaphor in their writing, none had attempted to draw upon a musical genre as the structuring principle for an entire novel until Toni Morrison did so in her 1992 novel Jazz, a novel set in the Harlem section of New York City in 1926.

In Jazz, the connection to music is found not only in the novel's plot but, more strikingly, in the way in which the story is told. The narration slips easily from the third-person omniscience of the narrator's disembodied voice—which, though sensitive and sympathetic, claims no particular identity, gender, or immersion in specific social circumstances—to the first-person lyricism of key characters. But throughout these shifts, the narrator is both generous with the characters' voices and protective of his or her mastery over the narrative as a whole. On the one hand, the central characters are given the responsibility of relating their parts of the overarching story, but on the other hand, their sections are set off by quotation marks, reminders that the narrator is allowing them to speak. In this way, the narrative is analogous in structure to the playing of a jazz band which intertwines its ensemble sound with the individuality of embedded solo performances.

In jazz, composer and conductor Duke Ellington was the first to construct his compositions with his individual musicians and their unique "voices" in mind. Yet no matter how lengthy his musicians' improvisations, no matter how bold or inventive their solos might be, they always performed within the undeniable logic of the composer's frame—they always, in other words, performed as if with quotation marks around their improvisations and solos. It is this same effect that Toni Morrison has achieved in Jazz, a literary rendering of an art of composition that Duke Ellington perfected around the time in which Jazz is set.

In this novel, Morrison has found a way, paradoxically, to create the sense of an ensemble of characters improvising within the fixed scope of a carefully constructed collective narration. By simulating the style of a genius of music while exhibiting Morrison's own linguistic virtuosity, Jazz serves to redefine the very possibilities of narrative point of view.