Jazz Machine is written as a poem. The only one in the collection to my knowledge. He had originally written it in prose with a lot of lingo from Jazz musicians in it, but it didn’t sound right, so he rewrote it as a kind of beat poem. Has the same feel as Howl, although, and I take nothing away from Matheson here, not quite as good. It’s like saying a piece of music is good, but no Beethoven’s Ninth.
In it a white scientist develops a machine that can listen to Jazz music and change it into what the musician is really feeling. So it can explain the loss or pain that he’s feeling. The musician he shows it to, smashes the machine with an angry rant about how you have taken everything else from black people, enslaved them, lynched them, stolen from them, but don’t steal the one thing they have left their soul. Their ability to express the pain i music.
It’s a pretty good piece. The Jazz Machine was the sixteenth story of volume three and published in The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, February 1963.