Joe Trace – in his fifties, door-to-door salesman, erstwhile devoted husband – shoots dead his eighteen-year-old lover.

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. Passionate and profound, Jazz brings us back and forth in time, in a narrative assembled from the hopes, fears and realities of black urban life.