Moment’s Notice
Jazz in Poetry and Prose

Art Lange and Nathaniel Mackey, Editors

"Moment’s Notice is the best anthology of jazz literature." - Hungry Mind Review

"The jazz anthology to end all jazz anthologies." - ALA Booklist

Through jazz, the African American experience fused with the European musical tradition, and the amalgamation has inspired this incredible range of writers to recapture the inspiration of the blazing moment in stories and poems.

An essential Western concept of the performing arts is rigid control: theatre, dance, and music adhere strictly to the guidelines of a script of musical score. In contrast, jazz composers provide a framework - a melody and set of chord changes - that musicians use as a guide, fleshing out the outline with the improvisational blaze of individual inspiration.

The fire of that transitory moment has long captivated writers, whose work is more often accomplished by revising, refining, and polishing. A wide range of writers have been inspired to join the jam session with their own lyric voices and rhythms in Moment’s Notice: Jazz in Poetry and Prose. Among the sixty contributors are James Baldwin, Amiri Baraka, Edward Braithwaite, Hayden Carruth, Julio Cortazar, Robert Creeley, Jessica Hagedorn, Langston Hughes, Jack Kerouac, Amus Mor, Frank O’Hara, Ishmael Reed, Ntozake Shange, Cecil Taylor, Quincy Troupe, and Eudora Welty.

Art Lange, editor of down beat magazine from 1981-1987 and teacher at Columbia College, is a native Chicago poet. His music reviews, interviews, articles, and liner notes - jazz and classical - have been widely published over the last seventeen years.

Nathaniel Mackey, currently a professor of African American literature and music at the University of California, Santa Cruz, has published a book of poetry, Eroding Witness (University of Illinois), a book of fiction, Bedouin Handbook (Callaloo), and edits Hambone, a literary magazine.

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