Department of English
Putting Jazz on the Page: “The Weary Blues” and “Jazztet Muted” by Langston Hughes
Ralph Hertzberg McKnight Bachelor’s degree Project Literature Fall, 2018 Supervisor: Magnus Ullén
Abstract
The goal of this essay is to look at the poems “The Weary Blues” and “JAZZTET
MUTED” (hereafter to be referred to as “JAZZTET”) by Langston Hughes and examine their relationships to both the blues and jazz structurally, lyrically, and thematically. I examine the relationship of blues and jazz to the African-American community of Harlem, New York in the 1920’s and the 1950’s when the poems were respectively published. Integral to any understanding of what Hughes sought to accomplish by associating his poetry so closely with these music styles are the contexts, socially and politically, in which they are produced, particularly with respect to the
African-American experience.
I will examine Hughes’ understanding of not only the sound of the two styles of music but of what the music represents in the context of African-American history and how he combines these to effectively communicate blues and jazz to the page.
Keywords: Langston Hughes; “The Weary Blues”; “JAZZTET MUTED”; the blues; jazz; Harlem; be-bop; the “Jazz-Age”; African-American history; “jazz poetry”
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The poetry of Langston Hughes is inextricably linked to the new music he heard pouring out of the apartment windows and nightclub doorways of 1920s, and later,
1940s Harlem. Hughes was quick to identify the significance of this truly original art form and used it as a means to express the emotions and lived realities of the mostly
African-American residents he saw on Harlem streets. For Hughes, jazz was the Negro experience made manifest, in all of its complexity, dexterity, and brashness. Jazz was music for the people, and it was not unnoticed by Hughes that, as Ted Gioia writes,
“even most striking, this progressive attitude of early jazz players came from members of America’s most disempowered underclass” (200). 1 In Hughes’ 1926 essay “The
Negro Artist and the Racial Mountain”, he says explicitly that, to him, jazz “is one of the inherent expressions of black 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.”
It is clear from this quote that, even in his prose, Hughes used the sounds of musical instruments (in this case a drum) as a metaphor for the Negro experience. More thoroughly, Hughes writes in prefatory note to his collection of poems MONTAGE OF
A DREAM DEFERED that his poem on contemporary Harlem,
like bebop, is marked by conflicting changes, sudden nuances, sharp and
impudent interjections, broken rhythms, and passages sometimes in the manner
of the jam session, sometimes the popular song, punctuated by the riffs, runs,
breaks, and disctortions of the music of a community in transition. (387) 2
1 “Negro” was a commonly used description of African-Americans by African-Americans at the time. In Hughes’ poem “Negro” he explains what he means by the word: “I am Negro:/Black as the night is black,/Black like the depths of my Africa” (The Collected Poems of Langston Hughes 24). 2 The title of the collection is entirely capitalized, a tool Hughes would use in all the poems in his 1967 collection ASK YOUR MAMA 12 MOODS FOR JAZZ.
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Arguably, Hughes structured his poetry to mirror what he heard in the clubs of Harlem.
In effect, he was attempting to write jazz. This brings us to the question of how Hughes attempted to do this. It is important to note that Hughes’ idea of what jazz is encompassed more than just the music of Charlie Parker and Dizzy Gillespie. “To me,”
Hughes writes in his essay “Jazz as Communication”, “jazz is a montage of a dream deferred. A great big dream—yet to come—and always yet—to become ultimately and finally true” (368). For Hughes, everything that came out of the blues is jazz. The emotional longing and sorrow that exemplify the blues are also foundational to jazz.
And when that blues evolves into Rock and Roll, it too is jazz. “Jazz is a great big sea,”
Hughes writes, “and Louis must be getting old if he thinks J.J. and Kai—and even
Elvis—didn’t come out of the same sea he came out of too. Some water has chlorine in it and some doesn’t” (369).
Black intellectuals like James Baldwin took issue with Hughes’ poetry in terms of the informal language he used. Much of the criticism ignores what Hughes sought to do overall with his work, which was to address the African-American experience through the language and styles of African-American music. In “Jazz as
Communication”, Hughes cites a quote (probably a misquote, he says) from Louis
Armstrong: “Lady, if you have to ask what it is, you’ll never know” (369). And, while
Hughes is not so sure of that, I think that quote is spot on and that, as I will point out later, impenetrability is baked into bebop.
To understand what he understood jazz to be I will explore a bit of the history of jazz and what it represented to the African-American community, as well as the political connotations inherent in the music. I will also explore some of the fundamental structures of blues and jazz. Once I have provided a bit of context for Hughes’ work, I will do a close reading of one poem from each of those two eras to examine how
Hertzberg McKnight 3 successfully Hughes communicates jazz on the page. The question that I seek to address is to what extent, and to what effect, Hughes’ poetry draws on musical forms such as blues and jazz.
Early Jazz
Many historians trace the origins of jazz to a place in New Orleans known as
Congo Square. When Louisiana was under French colonial rule, the French king Louis
XIV issued an edict called “Code Noir” (The Black Code) laying down a set of rules for dealing with slaves in 1724. Article 2 of the Code Noir mandated that all slaves be baptized into the Roman Catholic Church. 3 A byproduct of that was that slaves were not allowed to work on Sundays. Because the code also prohibited slaves of different masters from gathering, the baptized slaves gathered in out-of-the-way places such as a spot known as “la place Congo”. These gatherings involved singing, dancing, and various forms of instrumentation. A noted architect Benjamin Latrobe witnessed these events as late as 1819 and made sketches of the performers. As Gioia explains, Latrobe
“not only left a vivid written account of the event but made several sketches of the instruments used” (4). He goes on to note, “These drawings confirm that the musicians of Congo Square, circa 1819, were percussion and string instruments virtually identical to those characteristics of indigenous African music” (4). One such characteristic of the percussion elements, as Gioia notes, was that “different beats are frequently superimposed, creating powerful polyrhythms” (11). He continues, “…an African ensemble would construct layer upon layer or rhythmic patterns, forging a counterpoint
3 There were 60 articles in all, including the banishment of all Jews from French colonies and mandating that masters may chain and beat slaves but not torture or mutilate them. However, as history shows, American slave owners didn’t feel bound by Code Noir.
Hertzberg McKnight 4 of time signatures, a polyphony of percussion” (11). These elements are clearly found in what would become jazz: from the quirky articulations of ragtime to free-flowing rhythm collages of be-bop. It should come as little surprise, then, that one of the earliest jazz musicians, Buddy Bolden (often credited as the originator of jazz), performed with his band at Globe Hall in New Orleans between 1900 and 1907, within eyesight of
Congo Square.
The origin of the blues is a bit harder to pin down yet shares its ancestry with jazz in that it can trace its roots to Africa and likely evolved from the work songs of the slaves in the ante-bellum South. In a documentary recorded for Mississippi Public
Television in 1978, B.B. King (because the roots of delta blues are so hard to trace, we may as well take the word of one of its masters) traces the roots of the blues to the cotton fields of the Mississippi Delta. In the video he says, “A leader would call out and the workers would follow, and the work would go on and on.” He continues, “The roots of the blues are in the field holler too. The solitary song of one man alone in the fields from sunup to sundown.”4 Unlike the freewheeling, improvisational grooves of be-bop, the blues is a fairly structured art form. In a blues stanza “an initial line is stated, then repeated, and followed with a rhyming line” (Gioia 13). This is then sequenced into twelve bars with each line taking up four bars each. This twelve-bar format is punctuated by the use of what is called the “blue” note which would be both the major and minor third in the vocal line, along with the flattened seventh. However, with the earliest blues musicians that structure was more fluid with stanzas anywhere between twelve and fifteen bars. This fluidity is now a hallmark of contemporary jazz that was first stretched to its limits in the era of be-bop.
4 “Good Morning Blues—narrated by B.B. King (1978).” Youtube, uploaded by BluesFilmer, 7 February 2018. www.youtube.com/watch?v=IT43PEPhMQc
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From Hughes’ first published book of poems, “The Weary Blues” is a wonderful example of Hughes’ meticulous poetic structuring. I’ll cite it in full here so that we can get a better understanding of how Hughes incorporates elements of the blues into the poem.
The Weary Blues
Droning a drowsy syncopated tune,
Rocking back and forth to a mellow croon,
I heard a Negro play.
Down on Lenox Avenue the other night
By the pale dull pallor of an old gas light
He did a lazy sway. . . .
He did a lazy sway. . . .
To the tune o’ those Weary Blues.
With his ebony hands on each ivory key
He made that poor piano moan with melody.
O Blues!
Swaying to and fro on his rickety stool
He played that sad raggy tune like a musical fool.
Sweet Blues!
Coming from a black man’s soul.
O Blues!
In a deep song voice with a melancholy tone
I heard that Negro sing, that old piano moan—
“Ain’t got nobody in all this world,
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Ain’t got nobody but ma self.
I’s gwine to quit ma frownin’
And put ma troubles on the shelf.”
Thump, thump, thump, went his foot on the floor.
He played a few chords then he sang some more—
“I got the Weary Blues
And I can’t be satisfied.
Got the Weary Blues
And can’t be satisfied—
I ain’t happy no mo’
And I wish that I had died.”
And far into the night he crooned that tune.
The stars went out and so did the moon.
The singer stopped playing and went to bed
While the Weary Blues echoed through his head.
He slept like a rock or a man that’s dead.
Published in 1925, “The Weary Blues” occurs in a bar on Lenox Avenue in
Harlem just a few short years before the Great Depression. This was also a time of a flourishing arts scene in Harlem populated by such luminaries as writer Zora Neale
Hurston, painter Aaron Douglas, and Louis Armstrong which came to be known as the Harlem Renaissance. That bit of context is key in that it makes the location of the pianist in the poem relevant to how Hughes used his poetry to draw attention to the people that would be the focus of much of his work: the working-class African-
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American. “The Weary Blues” begins: “Droning a drowsy syncopated tune/Rocking back and forth to a mellow croon/I heard a Negro play/Down on Lenox Avenue the other night.” Lenox Avenue sits apart from the swankier establishments of the era such as the Savoy, the Cotton Club5, and the Apollo which attracted the likes of Cab
Calloway and Duke Ellington. Hughes uses the setting to mark his pianist as not the kind of negro who could perform at those sorts of venues. The pianist plays “by the pale dull pallor of an old gas light” and even makes “that poor piano moan with with melody” (italics mine) and, later me makes “that old piano moan”. The stool that he sits on is “rickety” and he is “swaying to and fro” on it as if he might fall. Even the tune is “raggy”6. These phrases, accompanied by references to nighttime, that “the stars went out and so did the moon” and that “he slept like a rock or a man that’s dead,” do much to express the weariness denoted in the title. However, Anita
Patterson proposes that “In another poem the romantic images of the stars and moon going out would be richly evocative and metaphorical, signifying unfulfilled desire or desolation over a dream deferred. But here their figurative weight is offset by a context that leads us to believe that Hughes merely wants to indicate the passage of time” (664).7 She also notes that, “The blues song has been framed by the mediating perspective of the lyric speaker, who describes the ‘moan’ of the ‘poor piano’. In contrast to the speaker, who tries to put the meaning of the music into words, he conveys his feelings not so much with words but with the ‘lazy sway’ of his body”
(662). That “lazy sway” is quite evocative of a metronome, keeping time for the poem as a whole. This is reinforced by the “Thump, thump, thump” of his foot on the floor
5 While the Cotton Club certainly had African-American performers, it was a whites-only establishment. Hughes called it “a Jim Crow club for gangsters and monied whites” (The Big Sea, Loc 3087). 6 This may carry dual meaning as “raggy” was slang for ragtime music at the time. (OED, adj.3) 7 Hughes wrote that “The Weary Blues”, “was a poem about a working man who sang the blues all night and slept like a rock. That was all” (The Big Sea, Loc 3005).
Hertzberg McKnight 8 and the “dead” stop at the end. With these lines, Hughes lets the reader know that not only is the poem referring to a blues song, but that there is a tempo through which they are to be read, forcing the mental relationship between words and music. Of this relationship, Calvin Brown writes, “It is immediately obvious that music and literature are alike in one fundamental characteristic in which they differ from painting, sculpture, and architecture: they extend and develop in time rather than in space” (87). The tempo of the poem is not explicit (although the word “drowsy” would imply a slow beat) but Hughes does give the reader a musical framework in which we can place the poem, as well as the song itself that the pianist sings.8
Further reinforcing the connection to music in the poem is Hughes use of vernacular, as it would have been used in a blues song. The first lines of the song in the poem are, “Ain’t got nobody in all this world/Ain’t got nobody but ma self/I’s gwine to quit ma frownin’/And put ma troubles on the shelf.” One of Hughes’ most famous critics condemned his use of such language. Noted author James Baldwin scoffed, “Hughes knows the bitter truth behind these hieroglyphics, what they are designed to protect, what they designed to convey. But he has not forced them into the realm of art where their meaning would become dear and overwhelming” (qtd. in
Patterson 651). Baldwin would have us think that Hughes is using these colloquialisms as gimmicks to avoid directly confronting the real. Of Hughes’ unsuccessful poems Baldwin said, “they take refuge, finally, in a fake simplicity in order to avoid the very difficult simplicity of experience” (ibid.). In these criticisms,
Baldwin (intentionally or not) misses the larger implications of the words: their specific connection to the blues. Helen Vendler writes in “The Unweary Blues” that
8 Hughes writes that the poem included “the first blues verse I’d every heard way back in Lawrence, Kansas when I was a kid” (The Big Sea, Loc 3005).
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“In choosing to write ‘simple’ poems he excused himself from mastering complex traditional forms and proclaimed himself a follower of those oral traditions that had produced black folksongs and the blues” (39). With that in mind, one might argue that
“The Weary Blues” is more song than poem. That analysis can get a bit tricky. After all, “The Weary Blues”, is indeed a poem set inside a book of poems with the same title. As Brent Hayes Edwards writes in Epistrophies: “Oddly, the authority of the blues poem seems rooted in its double status or categorical undecidability: it is somehow both transcription and score, hovering on both sides of the inaccessible present of performance.” (80) This problem seems rooted in the question of whether music can be translated to the page. I believe Hughes handles this by offering the musical cues for how to understand the poem. As Edwards notes: “In the blues poem we encounter not a form without support, but a form that has been transferred from one support (the medium of sound) to another (the medium of written text). And part of the special effect of the blues poem is that the effect of this transfer is legible—it leaves a trace….” (82). The onomatopoetic “thump” reverberates in our minds and is inescapable. The “mellow croon” leaves a footprint that, although we cannot know the key, still resonates as music.
Structurally, “The Weary Blues” not only includes an actual twelve-bar blues song in the second stanza but mimics that twelve- bar structure in the first. The first stanza is comprised of twelve smaller phrases that reflect a traditional blues structure.
Similarly, if we count the first ten lines of the first stanza, we can see Hughes working more granularly with the blues format by indenting phrases where a blue note would be in a typical major scale such as this:
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The third line, “I heard a Negro play,” is indented to mark it as a “blue note”. The lines, “He did a lazy sway….,” are lines six and seven, corresponding to that spot in the scale. Because the sharp and flat notes in that position are the same sound, they can be regarded as a single note. Hughes reflects this by repeating the line. And we see that the eleventh line (because I count lines six and seven as a single note, this would be the tenth note in the scale), “O Blues,” fits nicely as the final “blue note” in the scale. The repetitions of “O, Blues!” (the exclamation point lets us know that this is a shout) and “He did a lazy sway….” harken back to the field hollers that B.B. King spoke about while playing with the standard blues structure in the manner that early blues singer Blind Lemon Jefferson might.
“The Weary Blues” combines the structure of the blues with the terminology of the African-American common man and layers that on top of an inherent time signature marked by the swaying pianist and his thumping feet to create what is arguably a blues song, with the music implied in the language. Hughes’ poetry would go on to evolve much as Harlem would evolve. As Harlem moved out of the Jazz Age and into the be-bop era, a new poetry would be required that fit the new music of the times.
Over time, musicians like Buddy Bolden began to superimpose improvisation onto the traditional blues structure creating what we now call jazz. The music went through various permutations through the decades between the 1920s and the 1960s, from ragtime to swing to bebop to free jazz and Hughes’ later poetry would evolve along with it. My focus will be on “JAZZTET MUTED”, which is cited in full below:
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JAZZTET MUTED
IN THE NEGROES OF THE QUARTER Bop PRESSURE OF THE BLOOD IS SLIGHTLY HIGHER blues IN THE QUARTER OF THE NEGROES into WHERE BLACK SHADOWS MOVE LIKE SHADOWS very CUT FROM SHADOWS CUT FROM SHADE modern IN THE QUARTER OF THE NEGROES jazz SUDDENLY CATCHING FIRE burning FROM THE WING TIP OF A MATCH TIP the ON THE BREATH OF ORNETTE COLEMAN. air eerie IN THE NEON TOMBS THE MUSIC like FROM JUKEBOX JOINTS IS LAID a neon AND FREE-DELIVERY TV SETS swamp- ON GRAVESTONE DATES ARE PLAYED. fire EXTRA-LARGE THE KINGS AND QUEENS cooled AT EITHER SIDE ARRAYED by HAVE DOORS THAT OPEN OUTWARD dry TO THE QUARTER OF THE NEGROES ice WHERE THE PRESSURE OF THE BLOOD until IS SLIGHTLY HIGHER— suddenly DUE TO THE SMOLDERING SHADOWS there is THAT SOMETIMES TURN TO FIRE. a single HELP ME, YARDBIRD! piercing
HELP ME! flute
call….
“JAZZTET” is part of a larger collection of poems collected in his 1961 work
ASK YOUR MAMA 12 MOODS FOR JAZZ (hereafter referred to as AYM) and
Hughes wanted it to be considered as one long poem with music as its foundation.
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Hughes establishes this from the very beginning by literally giving us a tune to be imagined throughout the poem. In the preface to AYM he directs the reader to a traditional blues piece called “Hesitation Blues”, complete with musical scoring and direction:
The traditional folk melody of the “Hesitation Blues”
is the leitmotif for this poem. In and around it,
along with the other recognizable melodies employed,
there is room for spontaneous jazz improvisation,
particularly between verses,
where the voice pauses (475).9
It is clear that Hughes intended AYM to be understood lyrically. He even refers here to the spaces between “verses”. Where those spaces are is open to interpretation, much as Thelonious Monk might interpret “April in Paris”. Though punctuation is scarce, those places would make poetic sense as a place where the “voice pauses”. However,
Hughes offers a wealth of opportunity to find breaks and thus improvise. For example, AYM is comprised of 12 parts (“moods” as Hughes calls them), the spaces between each might be considered breaks. 10 There are possible breaks between the titles and the text, between the stanzas, between the stanzas and the italicized marginalia that accompany each poem, between the poems and the liner notes that
Hughes provides at the end of AYM, and, conceivably, anywhere a reader might pause
9 As a “traditional” song, the music of “Hesitation Blues” has no official derivation. However, the lyrics have remained relatively constant over the years, having been recorded by everyone from Jellyroll Morton to Janis Joplin. The lyrics that may have concerned Hughes most are those of the chorus: “How long do I have to wait/Can I get you now/ Or must I hesitate.” This works thematically with “JAZZTET MUTED” through its allusion to the plight of the African-American in 1960’s Harlem. 10 The number 12 is not random. It is not only a reference to the 12-bar structure of blues but also a nod to game played by African-Americans called “The Dozens”, in which one person tries to out-insult someone else by making derogatory marks about their “Mama”. As in: “Your mama so fat that when she walks backwards, she makes the sound ‘beep, beep, beep.’”
Hertzberg McKnight 13 in a reading. Hughes gives the reader space to improvise when interpreting the text, further cementing AYM’s relationship to jazz. “JAZZTET” provides ample room for such improvisation in ways that “The Weary Blues” does not.
The swaying syncopation of “The Weary Blues” is replaced by a chaotic collage more reflective of the era. The jazz of the Twenties had become commodified and absorbed into the popular culture as it was co-opted by white musicians to make it palatable to a white audience. If anything, be-bop was a reaction to the commodification of jazz. Lott writes that artists like Dizzy Gillespie and Charlie
Parker made music “which at once reclaimed jazz from its brief cooptation by white
‘swing’ bandleaders like the aptly named Paul Whiteman and made any future dilution that much harder” (599). The music was consciously dense and impenetrable for those not in the know. John Lowney quotes Ralph Ellison as writing, “The
‘changes’ or chord progressions and melodic inversions worked out by the creators of bop sprang partially from their desire to create a jazz which could not be so easily imitated and exploited by white musicians to whom the market was more open simply because of their whiteness” (368). This aesthetic of resistance manifested itself in the language of jazz as well as the music. The lingo was explicitly impenetrable to white audiences so that it not only sounded like nonsense to the outsider but carried meaning that could only be understood by the initiated. Hughes explains this through the character Jessie B. Semple (better known as Simple) that he created in a series of columns for the Chicago Defender. 11 In the column entitled Bop, Simple breaks it down thusly:
11 The Chicago Defender was a weekly newspaper founded in 1905 by Robert S. Abbott in Chicago. Between 1942-1962, Hughes wrote dozens of columns for the weekly, many of which featured Simple holding forth in a neighborhood bar on subjects such as race, racism, music, and love. Other non- Simple essays discussed the Soviet Union and communism, the ramifications of the second world war for the black community, and much about his adopted home of Harlem. The Chicago Defender is still in print today.
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Be-Bop music was certainly colored folks’ music—which is why white folks
found it so hard to imitate. But there are some few white boys that latched
onto it right well. And no wonder, because they sat and listened to Dizzy,
Thelonius, Tad Dameron, Charlie Parker, also Mary Lou, all night long every
time they got a chance, and bought their records by the dozens to copy their
riffs. The ones that sing tried to make up new Be-Bop words, but them white
folks don’t know what they are singing about, even yet.” (The Collected
Works of Langston Hughes Vol. 7, 227)
What Simple is expressing here is a desire for black ownership of something that cannot be taken away, something intrinsically black. By fusing the poetry of AYM so tightly to bebop, Hughes expresses the desire that bebop implies. Günter Lenz writes that by using bebop as the structural principle of his book, Hughes “not only demonstrate(s) the improvisational, dynamic, expressive quality of black culture” but
“also represents black music itself as a political act of cultural liberation from white domination and of affirmation of a viable black urban ghetto culture and public sphere” (274). “JAZZTET” is thus not only a literary expression of bebop but a political statement. And, at the time it was published, political statements from black voices were often considered militant.
Lott says, “bebop was intimately if indirectly related to the militancy of the moment. Militancy and music were undergirded by the same social facts: the music attempted to resolve at the level of style what the militancy combatted in the streets”
(599). As Lowney notes, “Harlem…had become a national symbol of black urban unrest after 1943” (357). The spark for this unrest was the Harlem riots in that year that erupted after a white police officer shot and wounded an African-American soldier. Rumors circulated that the soldier had been killed and black Harlem residents
Hertzberg McKnight 15 took out their frustrations on white owned properties by smashing storefronts and burning cars. Underlying these frustrations was the racial discrimination black people faced nationwide, and particularly the treatment of black veterans who had hoped to gain respect by enlisting in the army and fighting abroad. The shooting of a black veteran added insult to injury, reinforcing the notion that social equality was no closer for black people in the post-war north as it had been in the Jim Crow south.12 Hughes sought to capture that frustration by transcribing bebop to the page. “JAZZTET”, like all the poems in AYM, taps into the militant spirit of bebop by incorporating the urgency of the music and its openness to improvisation.
That militancy is shown clearly in the format of the text itself. On the left side there are three stanzas in which every word is capitalized, while to the right is one italicized stanza that is clearly music direction. What is to be inferred from the style of the text? Is it reflective of the socio-political implications of bebop? The capitalization is clearly making a statement. It suggests volume and noise. And that volume carries the sound of the transgressive nature of the music and is intended to refer to the lived experience of black people. Patterson offers additional insight:
“Instead of using words that deceive us into seeing only their ‘transparency’ and make us believe that we are taking an unmediated look through a windowpane to a world outside the poem, Hughes offers historical knowledge by directing our attention to his careful arrangement of words on the page. His style often dramatizes how language shapes the poem’s social perspectives” (655).
The italicized music directions draw the eye away from the capitalized text.
The reader is forced to decide which side of the poem to focus on. Yet, since we are
12 During the war, the African-American newspaper Pittsburg Courier began what would come to be known as the “Double V” campaign which agitated for victory in the civil rights struggle at home as well as victory over the Axis powers abroad.
Hertzberg McKnight 16 to consider the poem as a single object, we must attempt to take it all in at once, much as we might a live bebop performance. As well as suggesting a musical accompaniment, the italics serve as an improvisational field through which the entire poem can be interpreted. This is intentionally ambiguous and suggests a performative aspect to the piece, much like a solo layered over a polyrhythmic combination of drum and bass. Because the italicized text is so fundamental to the poem, it bears deeper scrutiny.
As mentioned above, one might wonder how exactly to read “JAZZTET”. The italicized text to the right of the block text gives the reader options that don’t exist with “The Weary Blues”. Shall we read the poem horizontally or vertically? Like the leitmotif of “Hesitation Blues” suggested in the prologue, the marginalia in
“JAZZTET” offers additional musical accompaniment to the poem, further adding to the polyrhythmic nature of the poem as we consider “very modern jazz burning the air” layered on top of the more structured structure of the blues. That is a bit of the information we get if we read the poem vertically. However, if we read the poem horizontally, we run into the “disctortions” Hughes wrote about in the prologue to
AYM. Thus, the first two lines read as “IN THE NEGROES OF THE QUARTER bop
/ PRESSURE OF THE BLOOD IS SLIGHTLY HIGHER blues”. In addition to creating a different sort of “break” to be filled in with improvisation, the italics here do something more structurally interesting. As Meta DuEwa Jones writes, Hughes
“reframes the boundary between margin and mainstream” by “dissolving the binary between oral and written forms” (1164). She goes on to say that unconventional reading practices in AYM require a kind of reading in which “musical echoes…hover around the poem’s borders” (1164). This way of reading makes the marginalia more than simply a score to be heard alongside the capitalized text. It becomes part of the
Hertzberg McKnight 17 text as well as being outside of it. A.J. Carruthers writes, “Reading the marginalia as poetry, and by reading them across vertical and horizontal axes, one notices just how much they are scores for style and mood, rather than simply instructions for instrumentation” (12). As with the implied metronomic time present in “The Weary
Blues”, Hughes makes the music present in the reader’s mind with these italicized marginalia. As they can be read both horizontally and vertically, they seem to be everywhere at once, creating a greater sense of musical atmosphere. As Carruthers says in referring to jazz poetry, “The appearance of printed notation…in a poem can be understood to straddle both referent and structural use, where musical materials are sometimes foreign objects to the poem…or embedded within…the internal patterning of the poem” (2). This brings the marginalia into the very structure of “JAZZTET”, making the implied music integral to a reading of the poem. As a result, we could have a reading from the second stanza: “IN THE NEON TOMBS THE MUSIC / like /
FROM JUKEBOX JOINTS IS LAID / a neon / AND FREE DELIVERY TV SETS / swamp- / ON GRAVESTONE DATES ARE PLAYED. / fire”. Disregarding the political implications of the text for the moment, we can see how such a reading both offers a metronomic feeling (as suggested by the italicized breaks) and mimics the seemingly dissonant nature of bebop. And, given that the musical notations would be open to interpretation by a background performer, when the italicized words are linked to the capitalized body of text, we have an improvisational music avenue tied to the implications of the body of the poem layered over a basic 12-bar blues. The effect can feel chaotic (as it is intended to), but, most importantly, it successfully transcribes to the page the myriad feelings of liberation and frustration that bebop was meant to convey without an actual note being played. The music is the message. Yet to find a message that is not implied, the text speaks for itself.
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With the “neon swamp-fire cooled by dry ice” in mind, a closer look at the capitalized body of the text is in order to get a fuller grasp of what Hughes was trying to convey in “JAZZTET”. Where the setting in “The Weary Blues” is a lone bar on
Lenox Avenue, “JAZZTET” is located in the “QUARTER OF THE NEGROES”, a neighborhood (as I have noted) that was recovering from the riots of 1943. As in “The
Weary Blues”, death is invoked “IN THE NEON TOMBS” and on the
“GRAVESTONES”. Yet here, the images of death are not meant to finalize a blues song, as it does in “The Weary Blues”. They occur conspicuously in the middle of the poem after “SUDDENLY CATCHING FIRE / FROM THE WING TIP OF A
MATCH TIP / ON THE BREATH OF ORNETTE COLEMAN”.13 These images convey a phoenix-like sense of rebirth. Indeed, the “NEGROES OF THE
QUARTER” are not even people but “SHADOWS CUT FROM SHADOWS CUT
FROM SHADE”, which would imbue Coleman’s breath with almost godlike powers of resurrection. As I mentioned above, bebop was a tool to express the frustrations on the street. Yet it was also a means of emotional release. Hughes says in both stanzas that the “PRESSURE OF THE BLOOD IS SLIGHTLY HIGHER” as if it is searching, like the music, for release. Hughes offers an avenue for that release with
“DOORS THAT OPEN OUTWARD / TO THE QUARTER OF THE NEGROES”.
The doors serve to both offer a place of respite from the pressures of the streets as well as a means for the music to reach the people.
As the music is freed from the “NEON TOMB”, it joins with
“SMOLDERING SHADOWS” such that the music becomes the people and the
13 Coleman’s earlier recordings sound very much like bebop, with albums like The Shape of Jazz to Come in 1959. He would push the boundaries of jazz further with Free Jazz in 1961. Here, he often dispenses entirely with the relationship that jazz had with blues in terms of time, key-signature, and structure. As AYM was published in 1961, Hughes would have had the spirit of Free Jazz in mind. Here is a taste: www.youtube.com/watch?v=8bRTFr0ytA8
Hertzberg McKnight 19 people become the music, both crying out for release. This is exemplified in the poem’s final couplet: “HELP ME, YARDBIRD! / HELP ME!”14 The italics are significant here because it signals a change in voice. The plain text portion of the poem is seen from a witness’s perspective, observing the situation “IN THE
QUARTER OF THE NEGROES”, whereas this final couplet is from a first-person perspective. As the music and the “SMOLDERING SHADOWS” become one it becomes corporeal, the plaintiveness and frustration and freedom made manifest in the voice of an actual person. A person that needs to be heard. This italicized couplet also links the main body of the text to the musical direction alongside it, including an extra break between the lines for the improvisation Hughes speaks of in the prologue to AYM. It may also be the signal of a kind of key change, should one decide to read the poem vertically. Let us look at how both parts of the poem work in concert.
I have asserted that Hughes is attempting to put music on the page. This is, of course, problematic in that words are not music. Hughes uses form to make this association. R. Baxter Miller notes of Hughes:
In making the verbal script (the framed language at the center of the page)
face the marginalia, or the directions for the musical background, he sets
verbal and iconographic language (poem) against even more temporal
language (music). This intriguing arrangement allows for the music and words
to read the same or to contradict each other in the collective formation of
irony. The strategy also achieves a reversal of mood. (6)
14 This is a reference to Charlie Parker, also known as “Bird” or “Yardbird”. There are many different stories about how he got that nickname. According to the website Songfacts, two of the most prominent theories are 1) He loved to eat chicken and down in Missouri where he was raised they called chickens “yardbirds” and 2) He liked to practice in a local park where he wouldn’t be bothered by police and his sax sounded like birdsong.
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Even so, this doesn’t actually create music. But as we know from the prologue and the marginalia, the poems of AYM are to be set to music. This means that “JAZZTET” is not meant merely to be read but heard, regardless of whether there is actual music playing behind it. Carruthers says, “This is not a blank conceit: if the poem in search of musical form is not oriented toward performative functions, and not expected to be set to music, music becomes not only part of both the aural and visual properties of the text, but gets right to the heart of the spatial and temporal dimensions of the poem” (4). However, because Hughes is seeking to emulate jazz in the poems of
AYM, we must look at “JAZZTET” as something to be performed because performance is the soul of jazz. Given that improvisation is the guiding principle of jazz, every performance of a work is unique. Andrew Kania offers a definition of improvisation that spells out why: “an improvisation is a performance event guided by decisions about that event made by the performer shortly before the event takes place” (365). With “JAZZTET” the reader is forced to make these quick decisions on how to approach the text. As I mentioned above, one can choose to read it horizontally or vertically. One can also insert the musical cues between the lines of the block text, or wherever the breaks occur, and one is free to choose where to see those breaks. The words in the marginalia are similarly open to interpretation. They can be taken as actual text or as a tool to imagine a musical score to go with the poem.
Words like “modern”, “burning”, and “eerie” are gauzy enough to allow a reader (or musician) to give whatever definition she wants to the words, or, indeed, ignore them entirely since they seem like mere direction. There is no single way to read this poem, and this is what most closely links it to jazz, separate from other music forms like blues. This is, of course, true of all poetry, but in the case of “JAZZTET”, and the
Hertzberg McKnight 21 other poems in AYM, the marginalia provide the reader with additional space to move through that is not available with poems without such cues.
It is the multitude of interpretations layered on top of each other that constitute the work. As Kania writes, it is “the event itself, rather than the sound structure it instantiates” that is the work of art (397). In both poems, the music is extracted from the performative action of reading the poem. And because any reading of it requires an act of improvisation, “JAZZTET” is both poem and work of jazz.15
As noted above, “JAZZTET” is part of the larger work of AYM and the blues motifs of repetition manifest themselves throughout the piece, in both the block text and the marginalia. The “flute call” in “JAZZTET” is a recurring theme in AYM, also expressive of the need for escape echoed in the block text of “JAZZTET”. The line
“IN THE QUARTER OF THE NEGROES” is also repeated in all of the “moods”, reinforcing the notion that AYM is a piece for black people and about black people, like the jazz music it sought to emulate. Adding additional context to the work are
“Liner Notes” that Hughes included at the end of the poem for each respective
“mood”. The “Liner Notes” for “JAZZTET” read:
Because grandma lost her apron with all the answers in her pocket (perhaps
consumed by fire) certain grand- and great-grandsons play music burning like
dry ice against the ear. Forcing cries of succor from its own unheard
completion—not resolved by Charlie Parker—can we look to monk or Monk?
Or let it rest with Eric Dolphy? (531)16
15 Some rock bands like the Grateful Dead would make improvisation fundamental to their live performances. Their influences were more what we would now call “Americana” than jazz, but they did attract the attention of a couple of well-known jazz musicians that would occasionally join them onstage. Branford Marsalis would regularly appear with the band and once, in 1993, Ornette Coleman did as well. I was fortunate enough to attend that show. 16 The third track on Dolphy’s album Out to Lunch! is named “Gazzelloni” after a classical flautist and is full of the “flute calls” suggested throughout AYM.
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Liner notes were included with most albums at the time to give greater context to the music being listened to such as the musicians involved, how they got together, where the album was recorded, and so forth. With the liner notes for “JAZZTET”, Hughes expands the themes of a struggle for freedom, something that was lost by a great- grand-mother. For black men of Hughes’ era, that woman would have been a slave.
The “cries of succor” here are somehow different than those of the final couplet in
“JAZZTET”. Hughes seems to acknowledge that the pain felt by black Americans cannot be assuaged by jazz alone. He writes that it is “not resolved by Charlie
Parker”, suggesting that true freedom for black Americans is still a dream. Maybe black folks can find comfort in the church or in the music of other jazz musicians, but, as he suggests in these liner notes, the struggle in ongoing. That too is a part of the black experience, and just as impenetrable by a white audience as the language of bebop.
That Hughes’ poem should be set to music was clear to critics of AYM at the time it was published as well. As Jones notes, “Perhaps the most strident critique came from Dudley Fitts, who deemed AYM as ‘stunt poetry, a nightclub turn’ in the
New York Times Book Review (636)” (1151). Another critic wrote in 1961, in Kirkus
Reviews, that AYM “should be felicitous when recited at night clubs and will undoubtedly gather partisans, but lovers of real poetry won't be among them.”17
Because much of Hughes’ work mimics jazz so tightly, it carries with it much of the impenetrability that was a part of its allure to the African-American community. It was black poetry for black people and (mostly white) critics found themselves at a loss to fully understand it.
17 kirkusreviews.com/book-reviews/langston-hughes-8/ask-your-mama/
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In my analysis of “The Weary Blues” I point out the musicality inherent in the poem. But phrases like “musicality” and “rhythm” cannot accurately describe words written on a page. We use these terms because, when reading a poem, we are affected in ways different from, say, reading an advertisement in a subway. In his paper “The
Music of Poetry”, John Hollander offers a possible explanation for this. He says:
In general, the stock use of musical expressions with which we attempt to
describe the so-called “music” of poetry testifies our unstated commitment to
two beliefs. The first of these is that the sound-patternings in poetry, and even
the suggestions of formal patterns which cannot be heard, affect us as music
does. The second entails our assent to the proposition that these workings of
verse must remain, as most of us feel that music must remain, rather like a
kind of magic. (240-241)
The magic of poetry is that, whether we want this to happen or not, we cannot help but hear the words echo in our heads as we read them. An interesting line of further inquiry might investigate exactly how that happens, but that feels like more in the realm of the neurosciences than literary analysis. Similarly, words on the page carry with them the weight of context that cannot be ignored. Some may feel that we must take the words in poetry at face-value, but I would argue that this would be impossible when reading “The Weary Blues” and “JAZZTET”, where the words are specifically placed within the context of music and that music itself carries its own context. Hughes was conscious of this and specifically used his words to plant the music in our heads as we read. Because Hughes is writing exclusively about the black experience in AYM, the poems share the unique feature of bebop as a form of music by and for black people. For “The Weary Blues”, the blues cadence and structure permeate the text, while with “JAZZTET MUTED” the reader is left to her own
Hertzberg McKnight 24 devices to read the marginalia as she sees fit, improvising from line to line, between lines, and around them. Hughes would consider both poems “jazz”. As he wrote in
“Jazz as Communication”, jazz “washes up all kinds of fish and shells and spume and waves with a steady beat, or off beat” (369). Because of this, both poems become jazz and, as Hollander suggested, that is a kind of magic.
Works Cited
Brown, Calvin S. “The Poetic Use of Musical Forms.” The Musical Quarterly, vol. 30, no. 1, 1944, pp. 87–101. Carruthers, A. J. Notational Experiments in North American Long Poems, 1961- 2011 : Stave Sightings. Palgrave Macmillan. 2017 Edwards, Brent Hayes. Epistrophies: Jazz and the Literary Imagination. Harvard University Press. 2017 Gioia, Ted. The History of Jazz. Oxford University Press. 1997 Hollander, J. “The Music of Poetry”. The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, Vol. 15, No. 2 (Dec., 1956), pp. 232-244 Hughes, Langston. “Jazz as Communication”. The Collected Works of Langston Hughes: Essays on Art, Race, Politics, and World Affairs. University of Missouri Press. 2001 Hughes, Langston. The Big Sea: An Autobiography. Farrar, Straus and Giroux. 1993. Digital. Jones, Meta DuEwa. “Listening to What the Ear Demands: Langston Hughes and His Critics.” Callaloo, vol. 25, no. 4, 2002, pp. 1145–1175.
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Kania, A. (2011). “All play and no work: An ontology of jazz,” The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, 69, 391-403. Lenz, Günter H. “‘The Riffs, Runs, Breaks, and Distortions of the Music of a Community in Transition’: Redefining African American Modernism and the Jazz Aesthetic in Langston Hughes' Montage of a Dream Deferred and Ask Your Mama.” The Massachusetts Review, vol. 44, no. 1/2, 2003, pp. 269–282. Lott, Eric. “Double V, Double-Time: Bebop's Politics of Style.” Callaloo, no. 36, 1988, pp. 597–605. Lowney, John. “Langston Hughes and the “Nonsense” of Bebop.” American Literature, vol. 72 no. 2, 2000, pp. 357-385. Miller, R. Baxter. “Framing and Framed Languages in Hughes's Ask Your Mama: 12 Moods for Jazz.” MELUS, vol. 17, no. 4, 1991, pp. 3–13. Patterson, Anita Haya. “Jazz, Realism, and the Modernist Lyric: The Poetry of Langston Hughes.” MLQ: Modern Language Quarterly, Volume 61, Number 4, December 2000, pp. 651-682. Rampersad, Arnold and David Roessel, editors. The Collected Poems of Langston Hughes. Vintage Classics. 1995 Vendler, Helen. “The Unweary Blues,” New Republic, vol. 212, no. 10, 1995, pp. 37- 42
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