jazz

[Gillies, Lindsay]

chris stolz writes:
If there is a writer who has captured the structural intricacies and 
freeforms of jazz (truly schizophrenic music) it would be Pynchon.
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agreed 110%.  there is a deep relationship between Pynchon's prose style and 
bebop and its children, the same sort of runaway train effect---you have to 
get on for the ride.  Straight melodic playing (even with piano-bar improv) 
in deployed very much in relationship to a well-known structure (song). 
 This is not Pynchon, although the tremendous volume of musichall song and 
dance is related---personally, the vaudville lyrics are so apposite (and 
unimprovised) that they completely evoke in my internal ear the melody they 
go with.  Bebop, on the other hand, has a compulsive, fanatic, even 
hallucinatory drive to turn the melody inside out, invert it, improvise it 
at many times normal speed---force you to follow the thread of the 
performance, not the implied structure it is ultimately playing off. 
 Inherently a tour de force...