Vocabulary from Langston Hughes's "Jazz as Communication"

Somebody is going to rise up and tell me that nothing that comes out of Tin Pan Alley is jazz.

To me jazz is a montage of a dream deferred.

And that’s what Rock and Roll is—teenage Heartbreak Hotel—the old songs reduced to the lowest common denominator.

I never worked on a levee.

It borrows their gut-bucket heartache.

Jazz seeps into words—spelled out words.

Maybe in the next seminar—for Saturday—Nat Hentoff and Billy Strayhorn and Tony Scott and the others on that panel will tell us about it—when they take up “The Future of Jazz.”

It goes back further and borrows the steady beat of the drums of Congo Square—that going-on beat­—and the Marching Bands’ loud and blatant yes!!

It goes back to the jubilees and stepped-up Spiri­tuals—Sister Tharpe—and borrows their I’m-gonna-be-happy-anyhow-in-spite-of-this-world kind of hope.

Rock and Roll puts them all together and makes a music so basic it’s like the meat cleaver the butcher uses—before the cook uses the knife—before you use the sterling silver at the table on the meat that by then has been rolled up into a commercial filet mignon.