Ryan Gosling, Langston Hughes and the Meaning of Jazz

Running in and out of jazz clubs, you see people from all over the world. You might say that in recent years, jazz has made quite a comeback. OK, it’s still quite far from Sabrina Carpenter- level pop culture status, but you have Ryan Gosling in La La Land and Jon Batiste in real life — to name a few. The virtuosic Batiste even recently won Album of the Year at the Grammys and played at the Super Bowl. 

Meanwhile, in the movie La La Land, the very white and Canadian Gosling is obsessed with saving jazz (even at the expense of Emma Stone). Clearly, there’s something about jazz that is broad and compelling beyond a particular culture or class.

Batiste reflects this expansive nature of jazz. In many ways, his music is rooted in jazz, which itself is rooted in the African American experience. Still, he often reaches for universal feeling, incorporating a wide range of sounds and textures, speaking both to culturally specific audiences and to the world at large.

Of course, jazz is itself quite broad and expansive. Like any language, it has different dialects and offshoots. But recently when reading an essay by the great visionary of the Harlem Renaissance, Langston Hughes, I began to think about the capacity of jazz — and music in general — to be both culturally specific and universal. 

Can a musical style be both a unique expression of one specific culture and also made to fit and serve all eight billion humans?

One could extend this question to many musical styles, from Klezmer music to the Hungarian compositions of Bella Bartok to our very own, much-beloved Sabrina Carpenter. Do these songs speak to everyone or just to the cultures they purport to represent and draw from? Do they sing in universal or specific tones? 

To answer these questions, let us look at two essays by Langston Hughes. Here is where we jump off and back in time to the 1920s, when Harlem was renaissance-ing, skirts were short and Hughes was young and in his 20s.

It was in 1926 when Hughes penned his essay titled “The Negro Artist and the Racial Mountain.” In this essay, he argues for pride in African American identity and a distinct literary and artistic project of and for African Americans. Right away, Hughes tells us the problem, and although lengthy, I believe it is important to include it here:

“One of the most promising of the young Negro poets said to me once, ‘I want to be a poet—not a Negro poet,’ meaning, I believe, ‘I want to write like a white poet’ meaning subconsciously, ‘I would like to be a white poet’; meaning behind that, ‘I would like to be white.’ And I was sorry the young man said that, for no great poet has ever been afraid of being himself. And I doubted then that, with his desire to run away spiritually from his race, this boy would ever be a great poet. But this is the mountain standing in the way of any true Negro art in America—this urge within the race toward whiteness, the desire to pour racial individuality into the mold of American standardization, and to be as little Negro and as much American as possible.”

Hughes asks: What hinders truly culturally representative African American art? For him, this is being ashamed of one’s race and one’s self. This is “the mountain standing in the way of any true Negro art in America.” 

African American art must be African American art. Black artists, Hughes writes, have a duty “to change through the force of his art that old whispering ‘I want to be white,’ hidden in his aspirations, to ‘Why should I want to be white? I am a Negro—and beautiful!’” 

For Hughes, jazz is an expression of this pride in African American life. Pride, he stresses, encompasses both the ‘beautiful’ and the ‘ugly’ of the African American of the time. “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.”

Jazz is an expression of a distinct character and energy, and it is unashamed.

Hughes stresses again that “The tom-tom cries and the tom-tom laughs.” Jazz is open to the whole world of the African American experience. And, “If colored people are pleased we are glad. If they are not, their displeasure doesn’t matter either.” It is not for a people, but of a people. (And being totally and shamelessly of them, it is for them.)

This expression of individual and cultural identity is, for Hughes, true artistic and personal freedom. Only through encompassing the whole truth of individual experience is the music truly authentic and the artist truly free.

As he concludes, “We build our temples for tomorrow, strong as we know how, and we stand on top of the mountain, free within ourselves.”

So this is jazz as a specific cultural expression. For a people, not for all people.

Perhaps if it were for all people, then it would be for no one. It would lose what cultural specificity it must have for a listener to identify with it. To see and feel themselves in the music.

Now, Hughes wrote “The Negro Artist and the Racial Mountain” at the ripe age of 25. In 1956, at a panel in the Newport Jazz Festival, an older Langston Hughes reflected upon jazz in more universal tones.

For one thing, Hughes now sees jazz as communicating universal feelings. Many feelings are widely shared among people in vastly different environments. Hughes explains this with an example from the blues: “I’m not a Southerner. I never worked on a levee. I hardly ever saw a cotton field except from the highway. But women behave the same on Park Avenue as they do on a levee: when you’ve got hold of one part of them the other part escapes you. That’s the Blues!” In this quote, Hughes does not prescribe a specific cultural background for the blues. The blues and jazz are for everyone. Everyone who feels.

He even goes so far as to call rock and roll a kind of jazz. Hughes stresses the similar feelings expressed in rock and roll and the Blues, writing that rock and roll “borrows their [Blues singers’] gut-bucket heartache.” Now, “Jazz is a great big sea.” 

Hughes goes further. “Jazz seeps into words,” he writes, and most of the best writers today are “influenced by jazz.” And he includes both Black and white authors. It’s hard to tell whether Hughes means that these writers have merely been influenced by jazz or express jazz, but either way, this is a more expansive portrait of jazz. While Hughes himself wrote with jazz-like rhythms and syncopations, he now seems to be seeing jazz in more abstract terms — like it is an aesthetic philosophy of sorts.

“To me jazz is a montage of a dream deferred. A great big dream — yet to come — and always yet — to become ultimately and finally true.” Here, he does not tie this “dream” to a specific people or culture. Jazz is a universal expression of yearning.

Hughes closes with jazz as a personal language. “Jazz is a heartbeat—­its heartbeat is yours.” Everyone has a heartbeat. Perhaps the drum of jazz beats in all of us.

Now we come back to our original questions: Does jazz, or genre music more broadly, speak more to the specific culture it’s rooted in, or does it have a universal reach?

Taking Hughes’ two essays together, we get a depiction of jazz that is both culturally specific but necessarily open and expansive. Possibly, Hughes’ view of jazz changed over time, initially taking a more restrictive stance and later on fully embracing jazz’s capacity to express and take in all of life.

Maybe jazz can be both: tailored to and rooted in a unique culture, and at the same time, speaking to all of us. 

We might say the same for Ms. Carpenter. Sabrina sings of Gen Z, sex and espressos but reflects timeless themes of love and passion. Perhaps Gosling and Batiste do this, too, connecting to the universal capacity of individual expression.

Maybe this is the power of all music. Of art.

Still, maybe there is something special about jazz. That it is unafraid of complexity and dissonance yet still so attached to the reality of experience. It is not simply complex in an abstract way but complex in its reality, in the way that it absorbs and expresses all of life — the ‘beautiful’ and the ‘ugly.’

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Photo Caption: Louis Armstrong, a master of Jazz, playing the trumpet 

Photo Credit: Wikimedia Commons / World-Telegram Staff Photographer