Rating: 
Summary: Jazz's rhythm was hard to get into, but tied up beautifully.
Review: I found Jazz difficult to get into as the rhythm of the story was confusing at first. I wasn't immediately "lured in" like in Sula, the other book of Toni Morrison's that I have read. The style began flowing smoothly once I hit the midway point, when the story seemed to build and to be going somewhere. The second half was page-turning. I found the characters more understandable, drawn to their grief, intrigued by their quirks. It is a story of longing - for love, for proper parenting and for hope. A good, easy read with a lesson in patience - once you get to the end, you're glad you suffered through the slow beginning and learned the meaning of long-term commitment, as Morrison teaches throughout the book.
Rating: 
Summary: Not near John Coltrane, _Jazz_ just don't jive
Review: I never would have suspected, from her work previous to this, that Morrison was capable of mediocrity. Overreaching? You bet, but she still always pulled things off with finesse. _Jazz_ just doesn't do it. Morrison's two strengths, it has always seemed to me, are her characters and her plotlines. _Jazz_, admittedly, has some interesting characters. Its problem is that they have no place to go. She seems to be trying to write in the form of a jazz song, but where Coltrane could extend a song for an hour and jump off in any direction, this was music, and Morrison's attempts at avant-garde are foolish, confusing, and just not that great. Avoid this one, and precede to anything earlier. If you want good jazz, go the music section...
Rating: 
Summary: Beautiful
Review: The title of this novel is Jazz and if you're looking for the structure of The Old Man and the Sea or A Christmas Carol, look elsewhere. That'd be like comparing the poetry of ee cummings to the 5 paragraph essay structure your eighth grade teacher made you learn.
The city comes alive in this novel of loves lost and found. And while like all Morrison novels, loves lost outnumber loves found, it is an achingly beautiful read. Highly recommended.
Rating:
Summary: Jazz
Review: In this 1920's novel based on two African American's living in Harlem, the reader finds themselves fighting for certain sides in the story. After falling smittenly in love with one another (at a cotton crop farm) Joe and Violet married. They lived here for thirteen years and then decided to move to Baltimore. On the way here, they find "the City" (Harlem). Once in Harlem, Joe becomes a cosmetic salesman from door to door. He comes upon the house of Alice Manfred's house. Here also lives her 18 year old niece, Dorcas. Joe falls for Dorcas and begins asking a friend to borrow her house during the day for himself and Dorcas to use. For three months Joe sneaks around with Dorcas, while Violet is at home listening to her parrot sqawk "I LOVE YOU" over and over again. Shortly after, Joe finds Dorcas with another man, Acton. Joe is angered and kills Dorcas. At the funeral, Violet shows up and slashes the already dead girl in the face. Throughout the story, there are flashbacks of Joe and Violet's childhood, meeting, and marriage. Then they also go back to discuss how Joe came to meet Dorcas. Through all of this, Morrison becomes the voice of an unknown person and going inside people's heads. Violet begins to visit Dorcas' aunt and builds a friendship on with her. In the end, Violet and Joe's relationship is enthralled in love. There is some about "the City", it makes you love.
Rating:
Summary: Jazzalutely Wonderful!
Review: Morrison is masterful. While it took me a few pages to warm up to the story, once I was hooled I couldn't put it down. I just loved how the sotry was told through the point of view of each of the characters. Morrison's insight into Harmlem life is just astounding. I could almost smell the neighborhoods she was describing. I highly recommend this book.
Rating:
Summary: Rereadable
Review: The book is a kind of poetry. Every word of it is right. You have to figure out how to be welcoming and defensive at the same time in the city according to one of the characters. Violet and Joe Trace live on Lenox Ave. in Harlem. Violet went to Dorcas Manfred's funeral with a knife. This occurred in 1926. Later she acquired a picture of the girl so that she and Joe could look at it in their living room. Violet is an unlicensed beautician who works in the apartment or in the apartments of her customers. After the funeral Violet usually worked in other places where people took pity on her and permitted her to do their hair. Violet had listened to her grandmother, True Belle, tell Baltimore stories. After the funeral Violet threw out her birds. This left her without her routines, rituals. Joe and Violet met in Vesper County, Virginia in 1906. Dorcas moved to the city from East St. Louis where her parents had been killed in the riots. She lived with her Aunt Alice who disliked the music and felt it was responsible for most social ills. By the time she was eleven her whole life was unbearable. Alice Manfred worked hard to make her niece private, but she was no match for a city seeping music. Joe met Dorcas at Alice Manfred's place. Alice tells Violet sometime after Dorcas's death that she does not understand women with knives. Violet's father and mother had been dispossessed, in a sense driven off of the land. Her mother committed suicide just before one of the four or so times when her father returned to the family with funds. The important thing learned by Violet was never to have children. She had met Joe when she was doing a bad job of picking cotton. Joe did not want children either. Later on, though, Violet longed for a child. Dorcas was young but wise. She was Joe's personal sweet. People might say he treated Violet like a piece of furniture. He was born and raised in Vesper County in 1873. He was called Trace because his own parents had disappeared without a trace. When he went to school he told the teacher his name was Joseph Trace. His foster brother, Victory Williams, turned around in surprise and said the Williams parents would be mad. He told Victory that when his parents came back he would need a different name so they could pick him out among the seven or so children; but they never came for him. Dorcas had long hair and bad skin. When Joe was a teenager he encountered the person he believed was his mother, a wild woman, someone who was almost feral. This scared him. It made him work hard. Dorcas said that Joe made her sick. She had a new friend, Acton. Acton felt that Dorcas liked to deceive Mrs. Manfred, her Aunt Alice. Dorcas ws buried with a stolen opal ring on her finger.
Rating:
Summary: Phenomenon
Review: Morrison has done it again. The story of a twisted love affair gone awry, Jazz takes you through the streets of an up and coming Harlem in the 1920s. It bares the souls and psyches of Violet, a 50-something black woman going through a midlife crisis, and her husband Joe, who falls in love with a teenage girl in an attempt understand his disjointed past. If you have read any of Toni Morrison's works, this book follows the exact same pattern of her others: no visible pattern at all, but somehow coming together throughout the various narratives in various times and places within history. Although many questions are left unanswered, you still feel as if you have been immersed in a dream, a fantastic journey into the past that you never want to end. Morrison's writing is both beautiful and complex. There literally are no words to describe it. There is no one else out there like Morrison. I suggest that first-time Toni Morrison readers start off with Sula, which is her shortest and least complex work, but still one of her greatest, and then pick up Jazz after you have read a few others including Beloved, Tar Baby, and Song of Solomon.
Rating:
Summary: Dark passion
Review: Inspired by a newspaper story where a woman stabbed a dead woman at the funeral, Morrison tackles obsession, vitriolic hatred manifested as marrings. The marring of a deep love by an affair, the marring of the mistress, the marring of Violet's reputation/identity by her actions throughout the community that once embraced her.
To defend, to attack a live mistress/sexual opponent is acceptable but when one's husband has killed hsi mistress to hold the love in amber, is madness. A madness that goes deeper than what we can imagine.
Or can we?
In Tar Baby, the topic was love and loving with White people as the background, a white canvas, if you will but here, it is Black on black canvas. Cry for freedom by traveling from the South as a loving couple, cry for release through a 50 year old man finding love with an 18 year old girl and then cry vengeance with a capital V for Violet. Hot like hot chocolate in hell, thsi book is jazz, hits its mark with the improvisation, the dance of the sentences that are no longer simply poetry but now notes, harmony, lyrics, melody dancing along the ceiling, on the wall as shadows, as figures entwined first 1 then 2 then 3 then 2 then a solitary one again. Bebop, bebop. 4 beat to 8 beat to 16 beat then to 8 then to 4. Improved as scat through Coltrane, a love supreme, a love supreme, a love supreme.
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