Jazz: Identifying an Influence

The notion may be disputed that jazz music and poetic literature was not only inspired by, but fueled by the critical denouncements issued by censorious reviewers. The argument may be juxtaposed that artists were spurred by bad talkers hurling insults in the direction of an African American movement, and the defense that erected from the demeaning judgments of white audiences influenced jazz by identifying a cause that currently oppressed musicians, therefore creating within the genre a motive that thrived passion and strengthened through resistance.

Citing from the American Review, “Jazz critics were motivated by political and radical concerns during the Harlem Renaissance and publicized their dislike of jazz music in order to express their dislike of African Americans…what remains consistent in the reports on the explanation of jazz is not the ultimate dislike of the music, but the political and social dislike of the black population” (135).

The format of this essay depicts the hypothesis that the strength and interminable energy that jazz seemed to adopt during the prime years of development from 1917 to 1930 may be largely attributed to the oppressive objectivity that condemned the genre. The advancing progression of the music was inspired by musicians revolting against prosecution of expression. If jazz was not litigated and adjudicated as it was, then its historical impact and revolutionary definition would not be nearly as strong nor as effective as it stands today.

Poetic literature from the era of African American suppression support these notions. Langston Hughes’s poem I, Too reads, ” They send me to the kitchen when company comes, but I laugh, and eat well, and grow strong. Tomorrow, I’ll be at the table when company comes. Nobody’ll dare say to me, ‘Eat in the kitchen’, then. Besides, they’ll see how beautiful I am and be ashamed. I, too, am America” (275). This poem is a wonderful illustration of jazz in the subjective view of the votary listener or musician. The stanzas, when viewed in original structure, can be juxtaposed with the melody of jazz’s mantra. Its beat changes and integrated structure is inaudible if not difficult to identify. This poem shows readers the frustration and sorrowful helplessness of suppressed African Americans and illustrates a clear portrait of the revolt that felt necessary in order to attain an equilateral. By Hughes’s poetic metaphor of eating in the kitchen, promising that “tomorrow” he will dine at the table when guests come, he is actually amplifying a message and an idealistic movement of revolt in order to gain congruency with the status and rights of the whites. This idealistic movement depicted in Hughes’s writings is the very movement epitomized in the jazz and demonstrated through a gene that encourages artists to be, “making your own sound, finding a way to be different from everybody else, never playing the same thing two nights running” (But Beautiful 10).