Joe Trace - in his fifties, door-to-door salesman of beauty products,
erstwhile devoted husband - shoots to death his lover of three months,
impetuous, eighteen-year-old Dorcas. At the funeral, his determined, hard-
working wife, Violet - who is given to stumbling into dark mental cracks -
tries with a knife to disfigure the corpse. Jazz is the story of a triangle
of passion, jealousy, murder and redemption, of sex and spirituality, of
slavery and liberation, country and city, of being male and female, African
American, and above all being human.