This chapter examines the literary portrayal of music in Alain Locke’s The New Negro, Claude McKay’s poem “Negro Dancers,” Hurston’s “Characteristic of Negro Expression,” and Richard Bruce Nugent’s “Smoke, Lilies, and Jade.” It considers the role of spirituals in the work of Du Bois and Locke before detailing how writers of the 1920s represented the innovations of new jazz sounds. The chapter notes the significance of the spirituals for both W. E. B. Du Bois and Locke, suggesting that, while Du Bois viewed them almost as an archeological deposit, Locke saw these songs as an important artistic tool to help progress African Americans forward: Locke ‘uses’ the spirituals as an inspiring precedent for the new ‘task’ facing the descendants of slaves on the verge of democratic transformation. Close readings of McKay’s poem, Hurston’s essay, and Nugent’s short story illuminate the term “orinphrasis,” or the description of sound or music in narrative or poems.

To provide the proper background to understand jazz in the GDR (founded in 1949), the book opens with a brief historical account of jazz in Germany prior to the creation of the East German state.examines the arrival of jazz in Germany after World War I, offering a brief synopsis of the cultural politics of the Weimar (1919-1933) and the National Socialist (1933-1945) eras. These years witness the influx of jazz music and dance culture into the defeated German empire, its ambivalent reception by the bourgeoisie, and the emergence of deep questions about national cultural identity against newfound American trends and influences. Under the twelve years of National Socialism, these questions took on new dimensions: Nazi propaganda unequivocally ostracized jazz as an emblem of racial transgression, categorizing it alongside other degenerate works, yet also recruited the popularity of the music for propagandist purposes throughout the regime, even until its collapse.