Note: this article discusses works and movements from the early-twentieth century, and therefore references the term ‘Negro’. While during the early-twentieth century this term was often embraced by Black writers, it is no longer widely used and is now considered outdated. This term should therefore be treated with sensitivity, as some people may find it offensive.

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Based in Harlem, New York, the Harlem Renaissance was a period of intellectual and cultural development during the 1920s and 1930s. It was initially named the “New Negro” movement after Alain Locke’s 1925 The New Negro, an anthology of ‘over thirty-five writers, artists, and intellectuals’ put together to depict ‘a spiritual Coming of Age’ for Black writers. African-American literature, art, music, dance and more became a centre of cultural celebration in New York and beyond. 

While it created new opportunities for Black artists, the Harlem Renaissance still took place against a backdrop of racism in America. Harlem became a destination for African-American workers fleeing the oppressive conditions of the American South in what was known as the Great Migration, as “Jim Crow” laws in the Southern states enforced racial segregation and encouraged racist attitudes. The Harlem Renaissance fought against racial oppression in America both politically, by campaigning for legal change, and culturally, by carving out a space in which Black artists could express themselves freely

In the early-twentieth century, jazz was embraced by people around the world as an exciting new development in the arts. In his 1934 book Art as Experience, the philosopher John Dewey argued that people should move away from art that is ‘relegated to the museum and gallery’ and towards cultural products that are more accessible in daily life. He wrote that the ‘arts which today have most vitality for the average person are things he does not take to be arts: for instance, the movie, jazzed music, the comic strip, and, too frequently, newspaper accounts of lovenests, murders, and exploits of bandits.’ ‘Jazzed music’, or jazz, therefore represented a new avenue for popular art.

Most importantly, however, jazz became a symbol of artistic freedom for Black Americans during the Harlem Renaissance. J. A. Rogers wrote an essay for The New Negro called ‘Jazz at Home’ which presents jazz as ‘a marvel of paradox: too fundamentally human, at least as modern humanity goes, to be typically racial, too international to be characteristically national, too much abroad in the world to have a special home. And yet jazz in spite of it all is one part American and three parts American Negro, and was originally the nobody’s child of the levee and the city slum.’

Roger suggests that jazz music is both associated with African-American people, and also deeply connected to modern (at the time 1920s) human experience that it transcends the typical boundaries of race. Jazz may have been born in America, but it also transcends national boundaries – jazz famously found a thriving scene in Paris, as well as being celebrated elsewhere around the world. Nevertheless, Roger maintains that jazz is ‘one part American and three parts American Negro.’ While it can be universally appreciated, it remains rooted in Black American tradition. Roger writes, it ‘is just the epidemic contagiousness of jazz that makes it, like the measles, sweep the block. But somebody had to have it first: that was the Negro.’

The importance of jazz to the Harlem Renaissance is apparent in the literature of the movement. ‘How it Feels to be Colored Me’, a 1928 essay by Zora Neale Hurston (an anthropologist, writer and filmmaker), highlights the importance of jazz to early-twentieth-century Black cultural identity. There were a lot of intellectual and scientific debates around race in the early-twentieth-century, but they were often dominated by White men. Hurston’s essay cuts through the imposing, academic terms of such debates by focusing on the question of emotion and personal experience – how it feels to be a Black woman in America, and how jazz can be a way of understanding that feeling.

Hurston argues that she ‘does not always feel colored’, but rather the feeling of race is imposed upon her by the pressure of White society: ‘I feel most colored when I am thrown against a sharp white background.’ The feeling of being different from others is created by the experience of contrast: ‘Among the thousand white persons,
I am a dark rock surged upon, and overswept,
but through it all, I remain myself.’

Hurston suggests that, when plunged into the sea of White society, she becomes a ‘dark rock’, hyper-conscious of her race. However, she also highlights a sense of selfhood that persists beyond these racial categories: ‘When covered by the waters, I am; and the ebb but reveals me again.’ There is a ‘me’ whether or not Hurston is ‘thrown against a sharp white background.’ Hurston therefore acknowledges the importance of her specific racial experience, while also refusing to be defined purely by her racial identity.

Discussions about race in America are often dominated by the sense of being a “minority” – in this case, a Black person in a country dominated by White people. While there were many Black people living in America in the early-twentieth century, they were often denied access to spaces of political or cultural power, such as government, schools and certain social groups.

Understanding this “minority” status is important for acknowledging the oppression faced by Black people in America. But such labels can also have the impact of alienating groups of people, making them feel like an “other” – like they do not quite belong to a particular country or community. Hurston’s essay both acknowledges and reverses these traditional terms of racial discourse. She uses jazz to highlight the strong artistic communities formed by Black Americans, ones in which they can feel powerful, and this time it is White people who may take on the status of “other”, feel like they do not belong. In certain spaces Hurston may be ‘overswept’ by ‘the thousand white persons’, but ‘[s]ometimes it is the other way around. A white person is set down in our midst, but the contrast is just as sharp for me’:

For instance, when I sit in the drafty basement that is The New World Cabaret with a white person, my color comes. We enter chatting about any little nothing that we have in common and are seated by the jazz waiters. In the abrupt way that jazz orchestras have, this one plunges into a number. It loses no time in circumlocutions, but gets right down to business. It constricts the thorax and splits the heart with its tempo and narcotic harmonies. This orchestra grows rambunctious, rears on its hind legs and attacks the tonal veil with primitive fury, rending it, clawing it until it breaks through to the jungle beyond. I follow those heathen – follow them exultingly. I dance wildly inside myself; I yell within, I whoop; I shake my assegai above my head, I hurl it true to the mark yeeeeooww! I am in the jungle and living in the jungle way. My face is painted red and yellow and my body is painted blue. My pulse is throbbing like a war drum. I want to slaughter something – give pain, give death to what, I do not know. But the piece ends. The men of the orchestra wipe their lips and rest their fingers. I creep back slowly to the veneer we call civilization with the last tone and find the white friend sitting motionless in his seat, smoking calmly.

“Good music they have here,” he remarks, drumming the table with his fingertips.

Music. The great blobs of purple and red emotion have not touched him. He has only heard what I felt. He is far away and I see him but dimly across the ocean and the continent that have fallen between us. He is so pale with his whiteness then and I am so colored.

Hurston’s racial identity may be defined by contrast, but this passage demonstrates that this contrast is not only the result of oppression – being ‘overswept’ by ‘the thousand white persons’ – but also the joyful feeling of being part of a Black artistic community that White people are not able to dominate: ‘Music. The great blobs of purple and red emotion have not touched him. He has only heard what I felt.’ Hurston lays claim to jazz as a rebellion against racial oppression, an unrestrained expression of emotion that is only heightened by its sense of revolt against White society, an experience specific to Black people in mid-twentieth-century America. Similarly, Rogers calls jazz ‘the revolt of emotions against repression’:

The true spirit of jazz is a joyous revolt from convention, custom, authority, boredom, even sorrow – from everything that would confine the soul of man and hinder its riding free on the air. The Negroes who invented it called their songs the “Blues,” and they weren’t capable of satire or deception. Jazz was their explosive attempt to cast off the blues and be happy, carefree happy, even in the midst of sordidness and sorrow.

Influenced by the Blues, which is defined by its telling of “blue”, or sad stories, jazz music takes such ‘sorrow’, including American racism, and rebels against it through its creation of joyous sound. In his famous essay, ‘The Negro Artist and the Racial Mountain’, poet Langston Hughes declares that ‘jazz to me is one of the inherent expressions of Negro life in America: the eternal tom-tom beating in the Negro soul – the tom-tom of revolt against weariness in a white world, a world of subway trains and work, work, work; the tom-tom of joy and laughter, and pain swallowed in a smile.’

As you may have noticed, the imagery in Hurston’s description of jazz looks beyond 1920s Harlem or the “Jim Crow” South. She instead describes her experience as ‘in the jungle and living in the jungle way.’ Such ‘jungle’, or “primitivitist” (relating to the early stages of humanity), imagery was common to accounts of African-American art in the early-twentieth century. 

As Nick Gaskill explains, what was known as ‘modern primitivism’ in the early-twentieth century contained a complex paradox between liberation and oppression. On the one hand, primitivist imagery provided a means of rebellion against White American values, a space for ‘practises opposed to the strictures of whiteness.’ Black Americans were well aware of the oppression caused by “civilisation”, as American laws and institutions perpetuated racist views. By looking back to a time before such oppressive structures existed and imagining an experience shaped instead by human feeling, primitivist imagery such as Hurston’s undermines these ‘strictures of whiteness’. However, as Gaskill writes, the idea of “primitivism” also risks encouraging ‘the racialized division of civilized and savage.’ Associating Black Americans with early humans feeds into the racist stereotype present in the early-twentieth century that they are somehow less developed or refined than White Americans, a damaging falsehood that was often used as an argument against equality.

Nella Larsen explores this paradox throughout her novel Quicksand, which tells the story of Helga, a young, mixed race woman who leaves her teaching role at a Southern Black segregated school and travels to New York and beyond in a search for happiness and purpose. Published in 1928, the same year as Hurston’s ‘How it Feels to be Colored Me’, Larsen’s novel contains a similar description of a jazz show:

They danced, ambling lazily to a crooning melody, or violently twisting their bodies, like whirling leaves, to a sudden streaming rhythm, or shaking themselves ecstatically to a thumping of unseen tomtoms. For the while, Helga was oblivious of the reek of flesh, smoke, and alcohol, oblivious of the oblivion of other gyrating pairs , oblivious of the color, the noise, and the grand distorted childishness of it all. She was drugged, lifted, sustained, by the extraordinary music, blown out, ripped out, beaten out, by the joyous, wild, murky orchestra. The essence of life seemed bodily motion. And when suddenly the music died, she dragged herself back to the present with a conscious effort; and a shameful certainty that not only had she been in the jungle, but that she had enjoyed it, began to taunt her. She hardened her determination to get away. She wasn’t, she told herself, a jungle creature.

While a lot of Larsen’s imagery is similar to that used in Hurston’s description of jazz, her celebration of the music is cut short when she remembers its association with primitivism – in Hurston’s terms, ‘living in the jungle way.’ Helga has a ‘shameful’ feeling about enjoying such music: ‘She wasn’t, she told herself, a jungle creature.’ This passage highlights the tension between the deep emotional experience of Harlem Renaissance art and the association it sometimes has with negative social stereotypes. Helga is carried away by the brilliant music, but her anxiety about its racial connotations brings her thudding back to earth.

Unlike Hurston’s present-tense account of jazz experience as ‘living in the jungle way’, Helga’s conception of the jazz show as ‘jungle’ music only appears in retrospect, ‘when suddenly the music died.’ During the music, Helga was ‘oblivious of the color, the noise’ and their relation to primitivist discourse—‘the grand distorted childishness of it all.’ Her ‘shameful’ reaction follows the reintroduction of a social consciousness, as she ‘dragged herself back to the present with a conscious effort.’ Cheryl Wall describes how the ‘jungle’ image was ‘foisted on blacks as Harlem barrooms were refurbished to resemble African jungles’. In this passage, Larsen highlights that the harmful primitivist stereotypes associated with jazz, stereotypes that may prevent Americans from embracing such artforms, are separate from the experience of the music itself. Larsen’s description of Helga being ‘drugged, lifted, sustained, by the extraordinary music’, as the ‘essence of life seemed bodily motion’, emphasises how jazz creates a very fundamental, physical experience that is grounded, not in an imagined distant past like that of primitivism, but rather the vital feeling of the present.

Hurston’s personal use of primitivist imagery in her description of jazz is nevertheless an important celebration of its joyful music of feeling in contrast with the more restrictive standards of White American art. While they have different approaches to the “primitivitist” label often associated with Harlem Renaissance art, both Larsen and Hurston demonstrate the power of jazz as an artform central to early-twentieth-century American culture, one that can create and capture intense feeling in a way very different from older American musical forms. Jazz’s focus on improvisation, experimentation and rhythm provided a unique means of expression during the Harlem Renaissance.  

In his essay, Hughes highlights how racial prejudice could make Black Americans feel ashamed of their culture: ‘the Philadelphia clubwoman is ashamed to say that her race created [jazz] and she does not like me to write about it. The old subconscious “white is best” runs through her mind.’ His argument that Black American artists should instead foster pride in their cultural identity can be understood as the ethos of the Harlem Renaissance movement, working to create joy: ‘it is the duty of the younger Negro artist, if he accepts any duties at all from outsiders, to change through the force of his art that old whispering, “I want to be white,” hidden in the aspirations of his people, to “Why should I want to be white? I am a Negro – and beautiful!”’

If you would like to read more of Zora Neale Hurston’s ‘How it Feels to be Colored Me’, you can access the full version here.

You can read about Langston Hughes, and access the full version of his ‘The Negro Artist and the Racial Mountain’, here. Hughes was known for his jazz poetry, which took on the style and rhythms of jazz music. Click here to explore some of his poems.

If you’d like to learn more about what the music scene was like during the Harlem Renaissance, listen to this podcast made by the New York Metropolitan Museum of Art. Listen to this podcast if you’d like to learn more about Harlem Renaissance literature.

If you want to listen to some jazz for yourself, you could start off with this rendition of ‘Harlem Nocturne’ by famous jazz artist Duke Ellington, or click here to listen to Duke Ellington and Ella Fitzgerald, another important jazz artist, performing ‘It Don’t Mean A Thing (If It Ain’t Got That Swing)’.