Coming Through Slaughter Structure

Today in class we discussed the structure of Jazz music, and how the structure of Jazz music inspired the structure of "Coming Through Slaughter" by Michael Ondaatje. As this novel is about the great Buddy Bolden a famous Jazz player from the south and his style of improvisation, you can see this style imitated in the text.
As our group discussed, we knew that typical jazz has 1 measure of 8 with a 4/4 shuffle beat, with the added improvisation or solo, but this is repeated. Looking through the text we noticed that most new ideas or plot lines start with an Astrix (*) which can be interpreted as a new beat to the measure of 8, and usually after each * there are four paragraphs or lines that follow. As stated before the text follows Buddy Bolden's style, so when there are some pages with only one line this can be interpreted as Buddy's unusual solo style that interrupts the basic Jazz structure. Also the text is split into 3 chapters, which can be used to show the usual 3 verses sung in Jazz.