“I am interested in restoring the articularity of sound,” she once stated in an unpublished lecture, and she often made the case for music as an insurgent expression of black interiority. She was, in my mind, a rebel sister theorist of music. Beyond her indelible mastery with words, Toni Morrison was a remarkable thinker who encouraged a whole generation of critics and scholars to lean in to her deep, daring, and instructive focus on music as one of the most potent forms we have to dissect America’s racial complexities, and to affirm the prodigious expanse of black humanity. As our paths continued to cross on occasion, Morrison became my foremost model for writing about music as black radical action. Though I’d been one of the lucky ones to hear her lecture for a semester (and read from her new novel Beloved) when I was an undergrad at Berkeley, visiting her Princeton class all those years ago first showed me that she wasn’t just an exquisite writer, singular in nature, but a profound philosopher of sound.

I think about that encounter quite a bit. When it was all over, Morrison gently cupped my face in her hands for just a moment, looked straight in my eyes, cracked a sly smile, and said, “Well, aren’t you a smart one.” I remember coming down with an acute case of awkward black girl-itis. Our discussion flowed from a consideration of the corrosive, casual hate entangled in the white supremacist songbook of Stephen Foster and others, to the liberation folk of black abolitionist Henry “Box” Brown. It was an intimate workshop, and I shared the floor with a lauded classical vocal group who sang wrenching selections from the antebellum archive. That day in her class, I tried to keep my palms dry when she, the regal one draped in a flowing gray caftan, leaned in to shake my hand.

Toni jazz