“If a method of Printing which combines the Painter and the Poet is a phenomenon worthy of public attention, provided that it exceeds in elegance all former methods, the Author is sure of his reward,” especially when the resulting productions are “of equal magnitude and consequence” with those “of any age or country” (E 692). So maintained thirty-five-year-old William Blake in an etched prospectus addressed “To the Public” and dated 10 October 1793, two weeks before the execution of Marie Antoinette would dominate the London news. “Works now published and on Sale at Mr. Blake's, No. 13, Hercules Buildings, Lambeth” comprised two “Historical Engraving[s]” - Job and Edward and Elinor - two “small book[s] of engraving” - The Gates of Paradise and The History of England (now lost or never actually published) - and, extending this range of concern with matters national, spiritual, and educational in diverse media: America, a Prophecy; Visions of the Daughters of Albion; The Book of Thel; The Marriage of Heaven and Hell; Songs of Innocence and Songs of Experience. In his only recorded use of the phrase now synonymous with his greatest achievement, Blake described these latter six books as “in Illuminated Printing.” The prices ranged from three to twelve shillings (almost a laborer's weekly wage). Not advertised were the author's two conventionally type-set volumes, Poetical Sketches of ten years before and The French Revolution of 1791; missing also from the prospectus were Blake's five-year-old first experiments in illuminated printing, All Religions are One and There is No Natural Religion and, understandably, two manuscripts: a burlesque set in an island in the moon and a verse narrative about a mythic patriarch, Tiriel. None of the works he then advertised, which include those best known today, were to find a large market, but Blake later commented that sales were “sufficient to have gained me great reputation as an Artist which was the chief thing Intended” (letter of 9 June 1818, E 771).

Blake has been called Britain's greatest revolutionary artist. He is also routinely described as a visionary or mystic, a man more concerned with spiritual than political matters. Many critics subscribe to the intermediate position that Blake's early enthusiasm for the French Revolution transformed itself into a Romantic concern with the creative power of the imagination or a version of John Milton's “paradise within thee, happier far.” This chapter suggests, on the contrary, that Blake was always a deeply political writer, even if he was one who viewed the distinction between spiritual and political matters as the product of a fallen human consciousness, but whether he is understood as a political radical, a mystical genius, or a disillusioned fellow traveler, the judgment is complicated by a paucity of biographical information. Unlike the annotations he made on various books he owned, which regularly refer to political matters, the few Blake letters that survive rarely mention politics.

Like some other radicals in the 1790s, Blake saw the American revolution as igniting a process of liberation that would sweep around the globe, exploding repressive superstitions and causing despotic governments to crumble. Some envisaged this process as a fulfillment of the enlightenment that would establish universally acceptable principles of justice based on reason rather than on corrupt tradition. But Blake's antinomianism led him to see the enlightenment as an extension of the errors it aimed to dispel. He imagined global revolution not as universalizing the rule of reason, but as liberating desire and spreading “thought-creating fires” (SL 6:6, E 68).

The vision was certainly rebellious, but Blake himself cut an odd figure as a revolutionary. The links between his prophetic art and contemporary radicalism have been widely explored, but identifying a contemporary fit audience has proved difficult. When he composed America (1793), the first of his “continental prophecies,” he may have thought of it as an intervention in the political debate stimulated by the French revolution. But the advertised price of 10s. 6d. (E 693) put it well out of reach of a popular audience. It was his most ambitious illuminated book to date, with plates more than four times bigger than the Innocence plates.

Blake and history painting

Recent commentary on Blake has tended to find the core of his achievement in the prophetic books of the 1790s and in the later prophecies, Milton and Jerusalem. These books speak now to a world that relishes their complexity, unresolved nature, and play between image and text. Yet they represent only a part of his achievement, and were the focus of his attention, as far as we know, only between 1788 and 1796, and again between 1804 and c. 1820.He was more continuously preoccupied with his work as a painter in tempera and watercolor of biblical and literary subjects, usually in series. Blake's “illustrations” are not a secondary activity but are quite as personal and imaginative as his prophetic work. It is true that there were artists like Blake's friend Thomas Stothard who made a living from designing illustrations to novels and other works, and Blake often engraved from the drawings. But such illustrations were clearly subordinate to the text. Blake's designs, on the other hand, constitute an active engagement with each text by an artist who never doubted that he was the peer of any author. Furthermore, his designs are informed by assumptions and traditions that belong to discourses of art rather than literature. They look back to the Italian Renaissance and to ancient Greece, and in later years to Gothic and even Hindu traditions. The fact that the starting point for almost all of Blake's temperas, watercolors, and some separate prints was a text written by another author no more diminishes them than Michelangelo's use of the Bible diminishes the Sistine Chapel. Blake argued that each of his tempera or watercolor designs had the potential to be hugely enlarged, and that his method of “portable Fresco” (E 527) would enable him to produce public paintings on a monumental scale.

Is Jerusalem unreadable? Several of its ringing declarations - “I must Create a System, or be enslav'd by another Mans / I will not Reason & Compare: my business is to Create” (pl. 10:20, E 153) - have become cultural mottoes in our time. But is Jerusalem more than a curiosity shop with some treasures amidst the clutter? Viewing the work from afar permits orderly schemes of supposed comprehension; but the closer we come to the poem's walls of words, the less clear our vision, the less certain our resolve to persevere through all 100 plates. To plunge into Jerusalem is to confront a profoundly unsettling experience.

The text of Jerusalem appears to be a narrative, replete with reasonably standard English syntax, a third-person narrative voice, named characters, and events. Yet these ingredients resist linkage into a chronology of represented actions constituting a story, much less a sequence of causes and consequences forming a plot. The characters seem like human personalities for brief passages, but they expand or contract into polymorphous personifications of psychic or cosmic categories resisting both stability and definition. These entities give speeches, but they constitute a series of monologues rather than conversations. Space is granted more than three dimensions, with Britain, Palestine, and fictive places mixed and matched like skewed map overlays. Time is also multiple, with moments and eternities each containing the other. The poem immediately assumes a command of Blake’s private mythology, as though he had carried the epic tradition of beginning in medias res to a bizarre conclusion: not the middle of a famous action, but the middle (muddle?) of Blake’s mind. Yet, for all its freedom from the consensus realities that make texts readable, Jerusalem is highly repetitious in its imagery and actions.

Reading William Blake's illuminated books is, to say the least, an uncanny experience. Some people find it unappealing. Not seeing any immediately obvious meaning, not even recognizing in Blake's text any of the conventions and cues which normally guide readings along, they find themselves repelled by the text's seemingly obscure words and bizarre images, and ultimately find reading Blake a tiring and unrewarding activity, involving a great deal of effort and very little definite accomplishment. Other readers admire Blake's work for the very same reason: confronting the seemingly impenetrable wall of words and images, they arm themselves with formidable scholarly guides, dictionaries and code books, writings of long-forgotten mystics and visionaries, and they seek out the text's buried treasures, relishing the extraction of what they take to be the mysterious knowledge contained within, access to which is seemingly barred to all but those who have passed certain (presumably secret) rituals of initiation.

The goal of this chapter is to provide an overview of the principal musical resources used in jazz improvisation as well as an approach to listening to jazz from the ‘bottom up’ – a way of hearing that will stress the interactive interplay between the soloist and the accompaniment. The melodic vocabulary of the improvising jazz soloist, which is what generally first catches the new listener's attention, must always be seen as emerging in a complex dialogue between the soloist and the rhythm section, and between the preexisting musical knowledge of the band members and what they collectively discover in the process of improvisation.

Among the many musical characteristics associated with jazz are improvisation, syncopation, swing, blues feeling, call-and-response organisation and harmonic complexity. Improvisation and swing are often considered to be the most important elements of jazz, although defining them has proved elusive. Improvisation has been described as the spontaneous creation of music in performance, but the sense of improvisation as elaborating upon something previously known is sometimes lost in this definition. Swing has generally been defined as forward propulsion through time resulting from the interplay between a fixed underlying pulse and the unevenly articulated subdivisions of that pulse which must ultimately be shaped into convincing phrases. The improviser does this in call-and-response with a rhythm section (generally piano or guitar, bass and drums) – an ensemble within an ensemble whose function is both to keep time and interact with the soloist.

Although novelists, film-makers and photographers are likely to rely upon familiar myths when they create images of jazz, they can also bring new life to a music that can be opaque, even to the initiated. As David Yaffe has argued, a novelist such as Ralph Ellison can surpass both musicologists and critics when, for example, he links Louis Armstrong's music with his metaphor of invisibility: ‘Sometimes you're ahead and sometimes behind. Instead of the swift and imperceptible flowing of time, you are aware of its nodes, those points where time stands still or from which it leaps ahead. And you slip into the breaks and look around’ (Ellison 1952, 8). In Ellison's metaphors, Yaffe hears a definition of swing more convincing than one based on empirical data or formal analysis. At their best, fiction, cinema and photography produce illuminating, often startling representations of jazz through different sets of metaphors appropriate to the history and aesthetics of each medium. In hopes of identifying these metaphors and how they function, I devote special attention to ‘tutor texts’ that facilitate a long view of jazz within specific art forms. Although these texts may not be the most canonical, they may be the most representative. I begin with a book that sums up how images of jazz were presented during the twentieth century.

Among the many historical accounts of jazz, it is above all the discographies that convey most graphically and emphatically just how extensively performed and how diverse jazz has been since it arrived on the public scene in 1916–17. But it is beyond the brief of a discography to do much more than list, and so the nearest thing we have to a record of the sheer scale of jazz diversity and inventiveness is silent on many other questions. Thus, while many discographies take for granted that the diversity they chronicle represents a collective body of music – even if they appear to have built into them particular views of what is and is not ‘jazz’ – they do not see it as their task to identify what, if anything, might connect the music together (and how and why), even less to consider the question of how the achievements they enumerate belong in, reflect and respond to a wider world. And there is no particular reason why they should. But if we seek to go beyond diversity and extent and look for what made jazz distinctive, we need to ask questions such as: how did jazz acquire its identity in the twentieth century, how was that identity constructed, and what role was played in the formation of identity by the ways in which the music was connected to processes and histories both close to and beyond its immediate environment?

Jazz is a construct. Nothing can be called jazz simply because of its ‘nature’. Musical genres such as the military march, opera and reggae are relatively homogeneous and easy to identify. By contrast, the term jazz is routinely applied to musics that have as little in common as an improvisation by Marilyn Crispell and a 1923 recording by King Oliver and his Creole Jazz Band. Developed well outside the more carefully regulated institutions of American culture, early jazz, proto-jazz or Ur-jazz was performed by people from an extremely wide variety of backgrounds. Many styles of playing were mixed together and others were split off and acquired different names. If today we call something jazz, it has much more to do with the utterances of critics, journalists, record companies and club owners than with the music itself.

Those who have been most devoted to defining the music and to discriminating between true jazz and false jazz often rely upon tautologies and ad hominem arguments. The esteemed poet and jazz writer Philip Larkin, for example, once wrote:

A family dinner

The sound of trumpets ushers in the dinner guests. Dressed as a cook, an old soldier brings in the food. He greets the Emperor Saturninus and his wife with courtesy and encourages them to begin. The former Roman general's costume elicits a question, but since the guests already suspect that Titus Andronicus is not in his right mind, they do not press the point.

Over dinner, Titus turns the conversation to an episode in Roman history, when Virginius killed his daughter because she had been raped. Was this right, he wonders? Decidedly, the emperor assures him: she should not outlive the deed that shamed her. The old man takes this for authority, rounds on his own daughter and kills her then and there.

Self-evidently, this is not how families are expected to behave, and Saturninus says as much. However patriarchal Shakespeare’s culture, or ancient Rome, come to that, this is ‘unnatural and unkind’ (5.3.4). But Lavinia too was raped, Titus explains, and begs his guests not to interrupt their meal, as if the summary execution of his daughter were no more than incidental.

This chapter offers a sketch in broad strokes of some of the main trends in critical reaction to and theories about Shakespeare's tragedies since the late seventeenth century. By this time the culture of Shakespeare's age had come to seem crude and barbarous to educated Londoners, distanced as it was by the restoration of Charles II in 1660, the influence of French drama, the introduction of actresses playing female parts, and the restrictive licensing of only two indoor theatres that targeted moneyed patrons. The first critical writings on Shakespeare's works began to appear before the end of the century, though as an industry Shakespearean criticism developed during the eighteenth century, fostered by the spate of editions of the plays that followed that of Nicholas Rowe, published in 1709. For almost a century after Thomas Rymer’s A Short View of Tragedy was published in 1693, editors and critics felt obliged to consider Shakespeare in relation to what were called the ‘Rules of Art’, rules derived from the French and from Horace, though often ascribed to Aristotle, especially the three unities of time, place, and action. Shakespeare was regarded as a prodigy, whose ‘wild and extravagant’ works possessed genius but lacked refinement, the ‘Turn and Polishing of what the French call a Bel Esprit’.

‘Improvisation’, wrote Gunther Schuller in his groundbreaking study, Early Jazz, ‘is the heart and soul of jazz’ (1968, 58). Yet, as Bruce Johnson points out elsewhere (see Chapter 6), improvisation is only one of the distinctive elements of the music, and indeed Schuller immediately qualifies his assertion by pointing out that improvisation is also an essential ingredient of other folk and popular musical traditions. Even more to the point, improvisation is not a major ingredient in many celebrated jazz recordings. Louis Armstrong's classic ‘Cornet Chop Suey’ of 1926 was copyrighted almost as recorded (and in the trumpeter's own hand) more than two years earlier (Gushee in Nettl and Russell 1998, 298–9). Duke Ellington's ‘Concerto for Cootie’ of 1940 was described as a ‘masterpiece’ by another pioneering analyst, André Hodeir, yet one of the characteristics of the piece is ‘the elimination of improvisation’ (Hodeir 1956, 77). As the recorded evidence shows, other renowned soloists can be heard to repeat familiar solos in all essential respects, and over considerable periods of time (Berliner 1994, 240). As Armstrong himself put it: ‘always, once you get a certain solo that fit in the tune, and that's it, you keep it. Only vary it two or three notes every time you play it’ (quoted by Gushee in Nettl and Russell 1998, 313). Across the stylistic spectrum, too, performances have been praised mainly because they achieve the elusive quality of ‘swing’ (see Keil 1995), or when melodies are simply embellished but where the player's instrumental tone – as on Clifford Brown with Strings (1955) – is judged to be particularly expressive. Only the pedantic, however, would disqualify these and many other pieces from acceptance as jazz on the grounds that they lack a substantially improvised component.

The idea for this chapter came from Mervyn Cooke's suggestion that we jointly organise a seminar – on jazz in 1959 – at the University of Nottingham. As soon as I began I found the choice of year felicitous both as a decisive cultural moment in establishing an autonomous art-form and as a year for musical landmarks recorded in every style of jazz (from mainstream to avant-garde). Nineteen fifty-nine was the year when jazz, as it is now, began. Jazz before this time is now largely regarded as historic, as music usually identified by regional (e.g., Harlem school, Chicago style) and temporal (early jazz, Swing Era) associations. From 1959 onwards, it more strongly resembles universal current practice, indicating – and without condescension to pre-1959 jazz – that this is the beginning of contemporary jazz. This is easily demonstrated by the still pervasive familiarity of certain of the recordings made in that year. Kind of Blue (Miles Davis), Time Out (Dave Brubeck), Giant Steps (John Coltrane) and Ornette Coleman's The Shape of Jazz to Come are albums that can scarcely be unknown or un-owned by jazz aficionados – and the 1960s had not even officially begun. Perhaps they began when John F. Kennedy was elected to the US Presidency and Robert Frost read his poetry at the Inauguration ceremony. In his speech, the young president raised the image of a relay in which ‘the torch has been passed to a new generation of Americans’. This was turnover time in American culture and politics, as it was in jazz.