In 1926: living at the edge of time - Monoskop

122 ARRAYS
uncanny strength for which they have no appropriate words, but which
confuses their value-hierarchies and enthrones black culture and black
bodies as objects of desire:
The negroes are here. All of Europe dances to the sound of their banjos.
We can't help ourselves. Some say it's the rhythms of Sodom and
Gomorrah ... Why shouldn't it be those from Paradise? Here origin
and decline are fused ... and here we see the fusion of the "best" and
the "worst" art. These negroes come from the darkest parts of New
York. There they were despised and outlawed. These beautiful women
may have been saved from a squalid ghetto, where they bathed their
splendid limbs in dishwater. They're definitely not from the jungle-let's
not kid ourselves. Nevertheless, they are a new, untouched race. Their
dancing comes out of their blood, their life . . . The main thing is the
negro blood. Drops of it are falling on Europe-a land, long dry, that
has almost ceased to breathe. Is this the cloud that looks so black on
the horizon? A shimmering stream of fertility? ... Do the negroes need
us, or do we not rather need them? (Gall, 257-258)
What provokes this reflection is the impossibility of attributing jazzwith
all its connotations of authenticity-to the African continent,
which, on the mental map of many European intellectuals, is a realm of
authenticity and longing. [see Center vs. Periphery] Since jazz emerges
from America's urban slums, it belongs to the very milieu in contrast to
which white culture struggles to maintain its claim to superiority.
Those writers who accept the challenge of jazz are inspired to attempt
redefinitions of culture as a whole. The culture of the present is seen as
centered in a passionate "love" for authenticity and reality: "Music is
today's most authentic art-a music for the unnamed, written for the
masses. It's not important whether good jazz has lasting value, or
whether it will be immediately replaced; either way, its time has come.
Blaring and buzzing, playful and lightly sentimental, jazz has no beginning
or end, with its merciless, rhythmic stamp" (von Wedderkop, 253).
As part and condensation of contemporary reality, jazz relies on matter,
on the primary physical qualities of sound, rather than on expression or
form. It thus becomes the hope of a culture that is obsessed with having
lost its stable ground. [see Uncertainty vs. Reality] "Ours is the age of
matter and not of form, an age of quantity, an age for which nothing is
so ridiculous and superfluous as the mere (sublime) form-art for art's