Jazz Griots: Music as History in the 1960s African American Poem
by Jean-Philippe Marcoux

To the endless questions, theoretical statements, and hypotheses about how Black poets transcribe jazz into the poetic format, this book, while providing a different approach to reading jazz poetry, attempts to answer the question, why do Black poets revert to jazz for poetic material. This book’s answer is because jazz is Black History ritualized and performed, and jazz performance is storytelling.