Anything Goes_ A Biography of the Roaring Twenties - Lucy Moore [18]
Rogers recognized the uniquely urban, modern quality of jazz. “With its cowbells, auto horns, calliopes, rattles, dinner gongs, kitchen utensils, cymbals, screams, crashes, clankings and monotonous rhythm it bears all the marks of a nervestrung, strident, mechanized civilization. It is a thing of the jungles—modern man-made jungles.”
He emphasized jazz’s musical importance, quoting Serge Koussevitsky, the director of the Boston Symphony Orchestra, who described jazz as “not superficial, [but] fundamental.” Composers Darius Milhaud, Eric Satie and Georges Auric were jazz fans. The conductor Leopold Stokowski summed up its appeal: “Jazz has come to stay because it is an expression of the times, of the breathless, energetic, superactive times in which we are living, it is useless to fight against it . . . [Negro musicians] are pathfinders into new realms.”
While Rogers acknowledged that jazz clubs attracted lowlife —drinkers, gamblers and prostitutes—on balance he considered that “those who dance and sing are better off even in their vices than those who do not.” More importantly, jazz served a vital function as a social leveler. It made people more natural with each other, less artificial, and gave hope to those who believed that old restrictions upon society might one day fade away entirely. “This new spirit of joy and spontaneity may itself play the role of reformer.”
Johnson also took pride in the fact that the black contribution to American cultural and artistic life, in music, dance, the theater, in literature, had helped “shape and mold and make America…It is, perhaps, a startling thought that America would not be precisely the America that it is today except for the powerful, if silent, influence the Negro has exerted upon it—both positively and negatively.”
Black artists, he wrote, were “bringing something fresh and vital into American art, something from the store of their own racial genius: warmth, color, movement, rhythm, and abandon; depth and swiftness of emotion and the beauty of sensuousness.” Johnson acknowledged that some white Americans saw black Americans as a burden. On the contrary, he argued, black people had much to contribute to society as a whole. Johnson believed that the black man “is an active and important force in American life; that he is a creator as well as a creature; that he has given as well as received; that he is the potential giver of larger and richer contributions.”
The greatest poet of black America in the 1920s was Langston Hughes, although he would have hated to have been described as a “black” artist: he wanted recognition for his talent, not his skin color. Hughes rejected the idealized image of Africa as a salve for his dissatisfaction with his place in the world. “I did not feel the rhythms of the primitive surging through me,” he wrote. “I was only an American Negro—who had loved the surface of Africa and the rhythms of Africa—but I was not Africa. I was Chicago and Kansas City and Broadway and Harlem.”
Instead he found in the cadences of jazz and slang a vocabulary that reflected his American heritage, rather than harking back to a lost Africanness or trying to imitate the western canon. Hughes’s first volume of poetry, published in 1926, was called The Weary Blues and was inspired by the themes of the music he loved and the Harlem streets where he heard it played. As he wrote in “Lenox Avenue: Midnight”:
The rhythm of life
Is a jazz rhythm,
Honey.
Hughes identified less with Western poets than with black jazzmen, whom he saw as wandering troubadours like himself. He understood that it was their music, as much as his poetry, that would transform American society.
“Let the blare of Negro jazz bands and the bellowing voice of Bessie Smith singing Blues penetrate the