12:01am - Jazz! - By AH

“Midnight. Harlem. Once it was true, that in 1932, Harlem’s heartbeat was a drumbeat.” Thus began After Midnight, the first of two shows for this year’s institute. After Midnight is a high-energy revue celebrating the music and dancing of Harlem’s famous Cotton Club from the 1920s and ‘30s, an era known as the Harlem Renaissance. With a live 17-piece jazz band and performers such as Dulé Hill, Patti LaBelle, and Adriane Lenox, this show aimed to replicate the screaming trumpet, the libidinous dancing, and the vocal gymnastics of club performers.

The word jazz in its progress towards respectability has meant first sex, then dancing, then music. It is associated with a state of nervous stimulation, not unlike that of big cities behind the lines of a war. To many English the War still because all the forces that menace them are still active – Wherefore eat, drink and be merry, for tomorrow we die. - F. Scott Fitzgerald, ‘Echoes of the Jazz Age’

After Midnight will have served as an introduction to jazz on this visit for many of the scholars. Attentive listeners will have heard many important forms for Black culture, including syncopation, call and response, scat, humour, and improvisation.

“You hear this music simply because music is heard and seldom seen, except by musicians.” – Ralph Ellison, Invisible Man

We will come across jazz again in our tour of Harlem, the Louis Armstrong House Museum, and a lecture on American music. We will also see the influence of jazz and blues on wider American art forms: As Jack Kerouac notes in On the Road, "Holy flowers floating in the air, were all these tired faces in the dawn of Jazz America." Ironically, despite the centrality of African American music and performers in drawing spectators to the Cotton Club in the twenties and thirties, the establishment was white-only for patrons, demonstrating the gross inequality of segregation in the United Stated post-Plessy v. Ferguson. There is, therefore, a tinge of sadness in several of the songs. And more than a hint of protest in others, as in the Billie Holiday-performed ‘Strange Fruit’ with its striking lyrics:

                        Southern trees bear a strange fruit,

Blood on the leaves and blood at the root,

Black body swinging in the Southern breeze,

Strange fruit hanging from the poplar trees.

“What happens to a dream deferred?” Thus ended After Midnight, coincidentally across the street from the production for A Raisin in the Sun, which also contains the famous line from Langston Hughes’s poem, ‘Harlem.’ Though this was less an elegy than a celebration. As the applause from the second standing ovation died down and the participants returned to the present – and the bright lights of Times Square on an oppressively hot night in the city – we hope the music and the spirit of the performance will stay with us well into the future.