Robert G. O¿Meally is the Zora Neale Hurston Professor of English and Comparative Literature at Columbia University, where he is also founder and director of the Center for Jazz Studies. He is the author of Lady Day: The Many Faces of Billie Holiday (1989); editor of The Jazz Cadence of American Culture (Columbia, 1998); and coeditor of Uptown Conversations: The New Jazz Studies (Columbia, 2004), among many other books.

From the collages of Romare Bearden and paintings of Jean-Michel Basquiat to the fiction of Ralph Ellison and Toni Morrison to the music of Louis Armstrong and Duke Ellington, Robert G. O'Meally explores how the worlds of African American jazz, art, and literature have informed one another.

Acknowledgments
Introduction
1. This Music Demanded Action: Ellison, Armstrong, and the Imperatives of Jazz
2. We Are All a Collage: Armstrong's Operatic Blues, Bearden's Black Odyssey, and Morrison's Jazz
3. The "Open Corner" of Black Community and Creativity: From Romare Bearden to Duke Ellington and Toni Morrison
4. Hare and Bear: The Racial Politics of Satchmo's Smile
5. The White Trombone and the Unruly Black Cosmopolitan Trumpet, or How Paris Blues Came to Be Unfinished
Coda
Notes
Index