Curating the Jazz Aesthetics in Melvin B. Tolson's Harlem Gallery

This article explores Melvin Tolson's jazz aesthetics and argues that Tolson's poetics emphasize rhythmic and linguistic syncopation to celebrate African and African American contributions to American history and culture in his poem Harlem Gallery. For Tolson, the story of Black America is the story of America, and he unapologetically appropriates the epic form to establish the foundational impact of jazz, blues, and other Black cultural elements on American literary discourse. His work integrates modernist techniques, cultural allusions, and linguistic signifiers to transcend critical attitudes that compartmentalize work by poets of color, and in this article readings of Tolson's poems, essays, and unpublished archival notes complicate understandings of Tolson's relationship to critics. Several passages from Harlem Gallery are discussed to demonstrate Tolson's development of a jazz aesthetic that effectively incorporates elements like the break, polyvocality, encoded language, and performative duality. Tolson's poetry ultimately works to flatten arbitrary aesthetic hierarchies, and he presents a jazz-infused democratic approach to culture and art that celebrates inclusion and difference.