Exploring the temporal dimension of African American music in its development from early forms of blues and jazz to the free and fast-paced sequences of jazz musicians such as John Coltrane and Ornette Coleman, this volume addresses music as a key metaphor for the analysis of time in African American culture. Two narrative strategies emerge from tracing the impact of musical time on narrativity in an intercultural sphere - novels by Langston Hughes, Ralph Ellison, Toni Morrison, Ismael Reed, and Ntozake Shange representing the textual basis for critical analysis. First, the excursions into the field of music illustrate blues' and jazz's pivotal role in shaping and redefining a particular African American sense of time from the Harlem Renaissance to the contemporary period. Second, the exploration of the writers' historical imagination unfolds a story about alternating concepts of history and culture, as they emerge from the impact of musical time on the novelistic discourse. This volume will be of interest to scholars of literature, music, and cultural studies.