What do you think?
Rate this book
Jazz June: A Self-Portrait in Essays
Jazz A Self-Portrait in Essays traces a life, not by recounting its major events but by going deep into its representative the moments of wonder, hope, fear, uncertainty, humor, love, and epiphany that make up human experience. Along the way, as a son of a single mother, as a young man in the big city, as a husband and father, as an aging empty-nester, and as an artist, the author discovers, with each new role, more of who he is. A lover of the arts, he offers creative reflections on literature, music, and film; a Black American whose life is informed but not defined by race, he embraces Black culture while remaining defiantly himself.
168 pages, Paperback
Published October 1, 2025
6 people want to read
Ratings & Reviews
Friends & Following
Create a free account to discover what your friends think of this book!
Community Reviews
Displaying 1 - 4 of 4 reviews
November 9, 2025
I couldn't put this down. Started reading one night before bed and ended up staying up til 1 AM when I forced myself to turn the light out. Thompson's writing is just so beautiful, so effortless, it just pulls you along into his world. He's such a good storyteller, you start to feel like you are there in the room with him, on the train to the Bronx, in the apartment with all the mice, sitting at the dinner table with his mother, looking out the window of the little house where he grew up in a Black neighborhood in DC, reading this book or watching that movie or hearing this song. A sweet and thoughtful collection of essays that add up to a different kind of memoir -- away from the by now sort of tropey narratives about the abusive or depressed mother, deprivations and chaotic homelife ... more of a meditation on coming of age as a Black man in America and the gradual transition into adulthood, career-dom, marriage/family, midlife and the all-too-relatable reckoning most of us end up doing with our ambitions amid the vicissitudes of life and the world around us. Loved it and I bet you will too.
October 27, 2025
Jazz June Review
For reasons that I cannot explain, I once found myself in the old Brooklyn Heights branch of the public library, leafing through the 1970s Manhattan Telephone Directory.
There they all were, the grocery stores – the A&P, Grand Union – restaurants -- Cafe Heidelberg, Kleine Konditori -- and clothing shops – Gee-The-Kids-Need-Clothes, Melnikoff’s -- of my childhood.
Reading Clifford Thompson’s latest essay collection – Jazz June – brought me back to that summer afternoon at the library where I stepped back in time, revisiting a previous life, in a neighborhood I no longer lived in, with a family now splintered by age and mortality.
“It was easy to feel,” Thompson writes, “in those moments of contentment, that life would remain as it was: that my brothers and sisters would stay under my parents roof, that my parents themselves would both remain alive and in that house, going to work and reading the paper and drinking instant coffee, that I would be in the capable hands of my whole family until…well, until a time I couldn’t imagine.”
As I found one childhood gem after another in the telephone directory, I pictured my parents, like Thompson’s, in our Yorkville apartment, my father in his armchair reading The New York Times, while his instant coffee kept him company on the side table, and my mother, knitting while sitting on the living room sofa.
One of Thompson’s many talents – he illustrated the cover of the collection – is his ability to reflect on the small moments, the ones most people miss, in breathtaking language. In The Moon, The World, The Dream Thompson meditates on his Washington, DC childhood:
“In my memory this sleepiness was at its sweetest in the spring and summer, when the front doors of houses up and down my street were routinely left open to let the breeze it, when, as darkness came, people rocked on metal gliders on their small porches, when sounds were mostly of cicadas whirring and crickets chirping and the occasional car passing with a lazy roar up the street, when the only other movement was of moths floating near the yellow glow of the streetlamps.”
Such lyricism, especially in reflecting on childhood, is not easily found these days and Thompson here evokes a certain type of writer – Horton Foote and Harper Lee come to mind – whose storytelling abilities are slow, measured, and perfectly paced. That these writers are Southern and Washington was once considered part of the South, is not lost here.
Yet Thompson is hilarious. Here he is reflecting on his ability as a word nerd and complete inability to navigate directions:
“I am capable…of spotting a dangling modifier…but if you need a lift to the airport, call Lyft, not me: I have what I am convinced will be diagnosed in the future as a disability…which is not a bad sense of direction but a sense of misdirection…My cousin…once compared me to a ‘homing pigeon on LSD.’ ”
The collection follows Thompson from childhood through late middle age, while tracing his evolution as a writer. In adolescence his discovery of comics and their use of words is beautifully traced in Ming Yang Fu, Or Seeking Words at Age Thirteen:
“There were the human failings of the characters, and there was also the power…of Stan Lee’s writing. And there was the other irony. The words that so often failed me in my daily life – failed me with girls, with friends, with my own mother…these words made up so much of what I embraced in comics.” Indeed, this is where Thompson’s taps into the writer’s universality: words are “a way of being in the world.”
In addition to comic strips what places this collection particularly in the mid-to-late 20th century is Thompson’s television references to “the programs I had actively viewed or had on in the background while I did my homework or played with my toys”. No moment is more absurd – or familiar, as I might have bought this book -- than the image of Thompson on a late night New Orlean’s-bound bus, reading The Complete Directory to Prime Time TV Shows, 1946-Present.
Time in Thompson’s collection is a theme that returns over and over. There is the passage of time, in terms of growing up and crossing the river into adulthood, but there is also the use of time and Thompson’s dogged determination to become a writer, while marrying, having children, and holding down day jobs that are less than dreamy.
When I first met Thompson – I had written an article that he edited – he discussed his first novel and how he wrote it for one hour a day before work. I was struck by his level of self-discipline – it reminded me of my father, a classical pianist who, into his late 80s, practiced for one hour every morning – and the fact that a working New Yorker who was married and raising a family managed to write a novel in the most distracting and expensive city in the world.
There is one question Thompson poses – “What is a personal essayist if not self-obsessed?” – that I challenge. While there are many non-fiction writers who are only concerned with themselves on the page, I don’t think Thompson is one of them.
His work, rather, is about reflection and in this beautiful collection he has dared to make sense of the world and his place in it with courage and, above all, conviction.
For reasons that I cannot explain, I once found myself in the old Brooklyn Heights branch of the public library, leafing through the 1970s Manhattan Telephone Directory.
There they all were, the grocery stores – the A&P, Grand Union – restaurants -- Cafe Heidelberg, Kleine Konditori -- and clothing shops – Gee-The-Kids-Need-Clothes, Melnikoff’s -- of my childhood.
Reading Clifford Thompson’s latest essay collection – Jazz June – brought me back to that summer afternoon at the library where I stepped back in time, revisiting a previous life, in a neighborhood I no longer lived in, with a family now splintered by age and mortality.
“It was easy to feel,” Thompson writes, “in those moments of contentment, that life would remain as it was: that my brothers and sisters would stay under my parents roof, that my parents themselves would both remain alive and in that house, going to work and reading the paper and drinking instant coffee, that I would be in the capable hands of my whole family until…well, until a time I couldn’t imagine.”
As I found one childhood gem after another in the telephone directory, I pictured my parents, like Thompson’s, in our Yorkville apartment, my father in his armchair reading The New York Times, while his instant coffee kept him company on the side table, and my mother, knitting while sitting on the living room sofa.
One of Thompson’s many talents – he illustrated the cover of the collection – is his ability to reflect on the small moments, the ones most people miss, in breathtaking language. In The Moon, The World, The Dream Thompson meditates on his Washington, DC childhood:
“In my memory this sleepiness was at its sweetest in the spring and summer, when the front doors of houses up and down my street were routinely left open to let the breeze it, when, as darkness came, people rocked on metal gliders on their small porches, when sounds were mostly of cicadas whirring and crickets chirping and the occasional car passing with a lazy roar up the street, when the only other movement was of moths floating near the yellow glow of the streetlamps.”
Such lyricism, especially in reflecting on childhood, is not easily found these days and Thompson here evokes a certain type of writer – Horton Foote and Harper Lee come to mind – whose storytelling abilities are slow, measured, and perfectly paced. That these writers are Southern and Washington was once considered part of the South, is not lost here.
Yet Thompson is hilarious. Here he is reflecting on his ability as a word nerd and complete inability to navigate directions:
“I am capable…of spotting a dangling modifier…but if you need a lift to the airport, call Lyft, not me: I have what I am convinced will be diagnosed in the future as a disability…which is not a bad sense of direction but a sense of misdirection…My cousin…once compared me to a ‘homing pigeon on LSD.’ ”
The collection follows Thompson from childhood through late middle age, while tracing his evolution as a writer. In adolescence his discovery of comics and their use of words is beautifully traced in Ming Yang Fu, Or Seeking Words at Age Thirteen:
“There were the human failings of the characters, and there was also the power…of Stan Lee’s writing. And there was the other irony. The words that so often failed me in my daily life – failed me with girls, with friends, with my own mother…these words made up so much of what I embraced in comics.” Indeed, this is where Thompson’s taps into the writer’s universality: words are “a way of being in the world.”
In addition to comic strips what places this collection particularly in the mid-to-late 20th century is Thompson’s television references to “the programs I had actively viewed or had on in the background while I did my homework or played with my toys”. No moment is more absurd – or familiar, as I might have bought this book -- than the image of Thompson on a late night New Orlean’s-bound bus, reading The Complete Directory to Prime Time TV Shows, 1946-Present.
Time in Thompson’s collection is a theme that returns over and over. There is the passage of time, in terms of growing up and crossing the river into adulthood, but there is also the use of time and Thompson’s dogged determination to become a writer, while marrying, having children, and holding down day jobs that are less than dreamy.
When I first met Thompson – I had written an article that he edited – he discussed his first novel and how he wrote it for one hour a day before work. I was struck by his level of self-discipline – it reminded me of my father, a classical pianist who, into his late 80s, practiced for one hour every morning – and the fact that a working New Yorker who was married and raising a family managed to write a novel in the most distracting and expensive city in the world.
There is one question Thompson poses – “What is a personal essayist if not self-obsessed?” – that I challenge. While there are many non-fiction writers who are only concerned with themselves on the page, I don’t think Thompson is one of them.
His work, rather, is about reflection and in this beautiful collection he has dared to make sense of the world and his place in it with courage and, above all, conviction.
December 19, 2025
There are some beautiful moments in these essays. I liked the description of the top of a house glimpsed from a window while reading, and the search for a long-forgotten (or remembered?) stream that ran through the city streets of the author's childhood. Because I'm a similar age, I enjoyed how the essays continually redefined moments from the author's past through a present lens, and how the author is aware that the lens continues to change as well.
November 16, 2025
What can I say? This is simply the best book -- out of dozens--that I have read this year. Cliff Thompson is a writer's writer; every sentence is crafted so beautifully. I just finished and I'm floored, blown away, in absolute awe--insert any such phrase you can think of!
Displaying 1 - 4 of 4 reviews