SOURCE: “Communicating by Horns: Jazz and Redemption in the Poetry of the Beats and the Black Arts Movement,” in African American Review, Vol. 26, No. 2, Summer, 1992, pp. 291-298.

In the following essay, Thomas discusses the differing approaches to jazz music in the poetry of the Beats and African-American writers.

For Langston Hughes and Rudolph Fisher, jazz is the backdrop for the desperate urbane comedy of the Harlem Renaissance. For the poets of the 1950s “Beat Generation” and the militant Black Arts Movement of the 1960s and '70s, jazz is perceived as a more significant social critique of an oppressive social structure. Some of the works of Amiri Baraka (LeRoi Jones), Bob Kaufman, Larry Neal, and Henry Dumas explore a spiritual dimension of jazz that can be compared to an almost religious fervor, with all of the many implications of that term. For these writers, the jazz musician is...