46 pages • 1 hour read
Mary Rand Hess, Kwame AlexanderSwing
Fiction | Novel/Book in Verse | YA | Published in 2018A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Background
Historical Context: Jazz and Its Origins
Jazz is a distinctly American creation. Developed in the early 1920s, it combined aspects of several musical traditions, including ragtime and the blues. It is also rooted in musical styles from Cuba, the Caribbean, and West Africa. Its birthplace is attributed as the American South, primarily New Orleans, Louisiana, which was home to a culturally and racially diverse population. It was the blending and borrowing of these key musical traditions over many years that led to what is now recognized as jazz.
A jazz ensemble can be formed of a wide variety of instruments but generally consists of piano, bass, drums, and brass such as saxophone, trumpet, or trombone. As a musical style, jazz is “very rhythmic[,] has a forward momentum called ‘swing,’ and uses ‘bent’ or ‘blue’ notes” (“What Is Jazz?” National Museum of American History). The music is usually highly syncopated, and it can shift or change abruptly. This is due in part to the most unique and distinctive aspect of jazz: its reliance on improvisation. Musicians perform solos that they invent as they play rather than relying on pre-scored music. Other musicians in the ensemble play in response to the improvisation in an adaptation of call-and-response style. Jazz therefore requires a great deal of skill, talent, and creativity.
Due in part to its roots in the culture of enslaved people in America, jazz is regarded as an art form that is uniquely African American. Historically, it has been associated with the celebration of Black culture and achievements and considered a symbol of Black freedom and resistance. Notable jazz musicians, many of whom are referenced in Swing, include Miles Davis, Charlie Parker, Dizzy Gillespie, John Coltrane, Duke Ellington, and Louis Armstrong.
Literary Context: The Verse Novel
Verse novels, or novels in verse, use poetry to convey a story that otherwise conforms to the conventions of the modern novel. Individual poems take the place of traditional chapter divisions, following one another in a linear fashion to build the story’s plot. To this end, this genre is both highly narrative and lyrical—a hybrid between poetry and traditional prose. The invention of the novel in verse dates to such 19th-century works as Alexander Pushkin’s Eugene Onegin (1831) and Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s Aurora Leigh (1856). However, it gained increasing popularity in the 21st century as a sub-genre of the young adult (middle grade) genre. The novel in verse’s appeal for younger readers is attributable to many factors. It is an approachable introduction to poetry (usually free verse) compared to traditional metered verse. In particular, the low print density of the verse novel’s pages are often less daunting for reluctant readers than the dense blocks of text usually found in a prose novel (Coustillac, Regis. “Novels in Verse: Poems That Tell Important Stories.” OverDrive, 2019). Likewise, key aspects of poetry, such as vivid imagery and powerful emotion, lend themselves to effective storytelling and character development, engaging young readers in a meaningful way. Finally, contemporary verse novels emphasize diversity and celebrate marginalized voices and experiences, providing a wide range of readers with the means to see themselves reflected in the larger literary canon. In Swing, the use of verse serves an additional function, mirroring the rhythms of jazz and serving as another example of the hybrid artforms the work celebrates (e.g., Noah’s multimedia creations).
Related Titles
By these authors
