Music and Jazz as a Language of Intimacy in Open Water

What Music and Jazz Represent in the Novel

Music and jazz function as a recurring symbolic language throughout Open Water — a way for characters to communicate what words cannot. The novel is structured around specific songs, albums, and musical moments that mark emotional turning points. Jazz specifically appears as a form of improvisation and mutual responsiveness, while music more broadly serves as a container for intimacy, grief, joy, and communal belonging.

The narrator describes a Deptford bar where musicians gather and channel their voices through instruments to ask each other how they are feeling. This is the novel's clearest statement of what music does: it becomes a question, a confession, and an answer all at once. The bar is a space where Black people gather to be themselves, where the music draws people inside, and where a friend describes the experience as the ancestors visiting and taking over.

Where Music Recurs

Music appears at nearly every key moment in the narrative:

The Deptford jazz bar (Chapter 7): The narrator attends a Wednesday jazz night, describing the room as having an energy that is freeing, a space of Black people simply being themselves. The music creates a space of safety and visibility.
Phone conversations (Chapter 8): The woman describes dancing as her coping mechanism — she dances to breathe, and describes moving into the spaces between drum hits, where the silence lies.
The kitchen breakdown (Chapter 7): The narrator cries alone in his kitchen while Jonwayne's song plays, then moves to Solange's track, describing the shift as moving from trauma toward pure expression.
The Shake Shack scene (Chapter 4): The woman offers the narrator an earbud, and they listen to Kendrick Lamar's jazz-infused work together, performing their truths for each other.
The summer garden (Chapter 14): A Tribe Called Quest's The Low End Theory plays, and the narrator reflects on the album being about being seen, being heard, and about freedom.
The relationship itself (Chapter 17): The narrator describes the couple as a pair of jazz musicians forever improvising, and concludes that they are not the musicians but the music.

Beyond these central moments, the outline shows music woven into the narrator's broader memory: Dizzee Rascal's Boy in Da Corner heard on a coach to Bournemouth, Skepta's show where the narrator loses himself in a mosh pit, and Frank Ocean's Blonde dropping while he swims in the sea in Spain. These memories connect music to formative experiences of Black identity and self-discovery.

How the Symbol's Meaning Shifts

The meaning of music and jazz changes across the novel, moving through several registers:

Communal expression and freedom. In the Deptford bar, music is collective. The narrator describes the gathering as a form of protest — gathered together, living easy — and asks what freedom sounds like. Music here is a shared language that allows Black people to be seen and heard without explanation.

Intimate connection. When the woman offers the narrator an earbud at Shake Shack, music becomes a private exchange. They listen together, performing their truths for each other, and the act of sharing music becomes a form of courtship. Later, the narrator describes their love as manifesting in music: her heartbeat as a kick drum, his smile as a grand piano, and the two of them as soloists in harmonious conversation.

Personal healing and grief. In the kitchen scene, music accompanies the narrator's breakdown and recovery. The break — a percussion break where the music falls loose from its rhythm — becomes a metaphor for his own collapse and confession. When he moves to Solange's track, he describes himself as born fresh, born new, born free, bypassing the trauma and the shadow of himself.

The relationship as music. By Chapter 17, the narrator explicitly reframes the relationship itself as music. They are not musicians playing together but the music itself — the love manifests in the sound, the rhythm, the improvisation. This is the most abstract and elevated use of the symbol.

Character Connections

The narrator uses music as a way to process emotion and connect with others. He listens to specific albums at pivotal moments — Jonwayne when he breaks down, Solange when he begins to heal, A Tribe Called Quest in the summer garden, Kelsey Lu when he thinks of the woman. Music is his private language of feeling.

The woman describes dance as her primary mode of self-expression and survival. She dances to breathe, and describes making a little world for herself through movement. Her description of dancing into the spaces between drum hits — that huge silence the drums ask you to fill — is one of the novel's most precise statements about what music offers: a structure for presence and selfhood.

Samuel introduces the narrator to the woman at the birthday party, and the narrator's friendship with him is part of the social world where music and dance circulate.

Theme Connections

Music and jazz connect directly to several of the novel's central themes:

The honest gaze and being seen vs. looked at: In the Deptford bar, the narrator says you are seen here and you can live here. Music creates a space where Black people are seen rather than surveilled.
Open water as metaphor: The narrator describes the music as plunging into an ocean, with trauma washed away by the waves. Music and water both function as immersive, cleansing forces.
Music and dance as connection and liberation: This is the most direct theme connection — music is the vehicle for both intimacy and freedom.
Grief, loss, and healing: The kitchen scene shows music accompanying the narrator's grief and his slow return to himself.
Black identity, freedom, and surveillance: The narrator reflects on A Tribe Called Quest's The Low End Theory as being about being seen, being heard, and about freedom, even if brief.

Study Questions

1. How does the Deptford jazz bar function as a space of both communal expression and personal healing?

The bar is where the narrator goes when he feels unformed and disconnected from himself. The musicians ask each other how they are feeling through their instruments, and the narrator describes the experience as being washed clean, with trauma washed away by the waves. The bar is communal — a bunch of Black people just being themselves — but it also enables individual transformation. The narrator makes a choice to be there, to want to shift, to want to move, and finds power in reaching towards himself in this way. The space allows him to be seen and to feel safe, which is the precondition for his own healing.

2. What does the woman's description of dancing into the space the drums leave reveal about her relationship to music?

The woman describes dancing as her primary coping mechanism and her way of inhabiting her own body. She dances to breathe, and describes feeling all of herself through movement — parts of herself she does not always feel allowed to access. The image of dancing into the silence between drum hits suggests that music provides a structure within which she can claim space for herself. She makes a little world through dance, a world where she is fully present and fully herself. This connects to the novel's broader concern with Black people being forever seen and unseen, forever heard and silenced — dance is a way of being heard on her own terms.

3. How does the narrator's description of the relationship as jazz music in Chapter 17 extend the novel's use of music as a symbol?

In Chapter 17, the narrator describes the couple as a pair of jazz musicians forever improvising, then immediately corrects himself: perhaps they are not musicians, but their love manifests in the music. He maps their physical and emotional connection onto musical instruments — her heartbeat as a kick drum, his smile as a grand piano, her grace as the rhythmic strum of a double bass. The final line — you are not the musicians but the music — elevates the relationship itself to the status of music. This extends the symbol from something external (listening to songs, attending jazz nights) to something internal and constitutive: the love itself is a form of music, an improvisation between two people who respond to each other with the harmony of soloists in conversation.

4. What role do specific songs and albums play in the narrator's emotional journey?

Specific songs mark emotional turning points. Jonwayne's track plays during the narrator's kitchen breakdown — the moment he confesses his joy, his pain, his truth — and the music stops as he collapses, creating a break that mirrors his own falling apart. Solange's track then accompanies his recovery, as he moves across his living room affording himself the freedom to be, describing himself as born fresh, born new, born free. A Tribe Called Quest's The Low End Theory plays in the summer garden, prompting reflections on visibility and freedom. Kelsey Lu's Church accompanies his thoughts of the woman, an album of orchestral loops reaching towards a quiet ecstasy. Each song is tied to a specific emotional state, and the narrator's musical choices chart his movement through grief, healing, desire, and connection.