Contents

• Introduction: vamping til ready
• Movement I: Three ways of looking at a yardbird: Charlie Parker and the theorization of jazz improvisation in the work of Ralph Ellison, James Baldwin, and Le Roi Jones/Amiri Baraka
• Movement II: Black is, black ain’t: violence, black masculinity, and the novel as democratic symbol
• Movement III: Cutting session: Baldwin as intellectual prizefighter, Baldwin as improvising intellectual
• Movement IV: Improvising over the changes: improvisation as intellectual and aesthetic practice in the transitional poems of Le Roi Jones/Amiri Baraka
• Coda