I was introduced to Zora Neale Hurston at twenty-eight. I was in a graduate class at CSUN on 20th century American novelists. Their Eyes Were Watching God was the novel. Here’s how Hurston begins:
Ships at a distance have every man's wish on board. For some they come in with the tide. For others they sail forever on the horizon, never out of sight, never landing until the Watcher turns his eyes away in resignation, his dreams mocked to death by Time. That is the life of men.
Now, women forget all those things they don't want to remember, and remember everything they don't want to forget. The dream is the truth. Then they act and do things accordingly.
Hurston didn’t write about the things she was supposed to write about – things like politics and economics and the social struggles of an oppressed race. She wrote about how it felt to be a woman, how it felt to used by a man, to be rejected by your community, and how it felt to fall in love.
She also wrote about jazz. In this excerpt from her essay “How It Feels to be Colored Me” she and her white friend have just entered a jazz club:
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.
- Archibald J. Motley, Saturday Night
Hurston showed me a side of jazz I never knew existed. Jazz always seemed to me exclusive, esoteric, something to be studied. When speaking of jazz, names must be dropped in low, knowing tones. To me, it seemed there were “jazz people” and “opera people” and the kind of people who use the term “amuse-bouche” in casual conversation. I didn’t seem destined to be one of them.
But, listening to AK Toney talk about Billie Higgins, explaining the origin of Be-Bop, hearing Dave Bass blow riffs on his sax, DJ Softcore, playing Ella Fitzgerald and Louis Armstrong’s version of “Summertime”, Al Jackson mixing beats and Josh Holloway accompanying him on horn, Lotus Petal singing along. That’s the world of Jazz Tonic. It’s poetry and dancing and MCs free-styling. It’s great blobs of emotion flying. And, against all odds... I feel a part of it.
- Archibald J. Motley, Night Life
Hurston ends her essay comparing herself to:
…. a brown bag of miscellany propped against a wall. Against a wall in company with other bags, white, red and yellow. Pour out the contents, and there is discovered a jumble of small, things priceless and worthless. A first-water diamond, an empty spool, bits of broken glass, lengths of string, a key to a door long since crumbled away, a rusty knife-blade, old shoes saved for a road that never was and never will be, a nail bent under the weight of things too heavy for any nail, a dried flower or two still a little fragrant. In your hand is the brown bag. On the ground before you is the jumble it held--so much like the jumble in the bags, could they be emptied, that all might be dumped in a single heap and the bags refilled without altering the content of any greatly. A bit of colored glass more or less would not matter. Perhaps that is how the Great Stuffer of Bags filled them in the first place--who knows?
Maybe that’s a little bit how it goes with jazz. Maybe jazz is the sound of all those things – “priceless and worthless” being celebrated. Who knows? I’m new to all this.
by Allison Conant, self-admitted Jazz Neophyte