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chapter 7 Cultural and Aesthetic Expressions I feel I owe a great debt to black people because it was through the music of Louis Armstrong and King Oliver that I got my best inspiration and direction. I didn’t learn anything from just ordinary black musicians. It was the geniuses of jazz music who really gave me my lessons . . . King Oliver, Louis Armstrong, Earl Hines and Bessie Smith. —Bud Freeman, tenor saxophonist The whirl of life in black Chicago appeared dramatically in many cultural and aesthetic expressions. In its ability to overwhelm most other aspects of life, along with the heightened sentiment during the decade toward materialism and consumption , this composite spirit of creativity, rebelliousness, and celebration submerged reform and civil rights advocacy and challenged religion. Once again, the NAACP memorandum that analyzed the temper of the times and cited the “many diversified interests” that attracted the attention of the mass of the people bears interrogation as to the confluence of time, place, and character. As a venue, Chicago historically was a proven incubator from which cultural creativity arose from various sources, institutionally, organizationally, and individually . The city also had established itself as magnet, locus, wellspring, and actualization of cultural expression, appearing as an especially nurturing hostess.1 With the advent of the Jazz Age and its musical force in the 1920s, black Chicago’s literary production unfortunately drifted into a penumbra. Contemporaneously, an upsurge of creativity manifested itself in the performing arts, and to a lesser extent, in the visual arts. When economic depression and reform dominated life during the succeeding decade, literary revitalization matched growing musical versatility and visual production, producing a “Black Chicago Renaissance.”2 Changes in the socioeconomic class structure found elite, middle-class, middling, and proletarian interests often coinciding around several aspects of the arts in an almost democratic fashion, but still often colliding as well as dividing. While Johnson and Frazier depicted black Chicago of the 1920s as devoid of an intelligentsia and a creative, supportive, cultural milieu, for reasons lost to posterity, the conclusive bases for their combined lack of awareness of what historical evidence has revealed about the previous decades—creativity, innovation, independence, and cross-class fertilization—are unknown. A priori assumptions, personal inclinations, and perhaps a preoccupation with the celebrity of Harlem during the 1920s provide possible answers.3 By 1927, a more complimentary Carroll Binder assessed the community and its standards thus: “Chicago‘s Negro community includes a number of men and women of high professional and intellectual distinction. It shelters writers and artists whose work is favorably known among both whites and Negroes, but from both a literary and artistic standpoint there is no group in Chicago comparable to the Harlem Negro literati.”4 The demographic onslaught that brought 51,000 newcomers carried along an expanded talent pool as well as eager consumers of popular, African-based culture. Beyond what polite society enjoyed in choral production, ragtime provided the arrival of a new type of music into the public’s heart and feet. Ferdinand “Jelly Roll” Morton, the self-proclaimed inventor of jazz, thrilled audiences throughout the city during this transitional period. When the end of the war ended employment opportunities, it fortunately did not end migration, as numerous musically talented individuals from New Orleans, the Mississippi Delta, St. Louis, and Kansas City headed to Chicago. Not to be overlooked within this wartime migration were the professionals and educated persons who supported the arts in their totality, producing even more aesthetically interested black consumers, customers, and enthusiasts. As to their tastes, they leaned more toward their own cultural productions , for example, the first phase of blues from the Mississippi Delta to join with vaudeville and song. For film, they looked to producer and director Oscar Micheaux, in the estimation of John Hope Franklin “the most important and prolific producer of black film during the 1920s.”5 Micheaux filmed on the streets of the South Side and chose his characters from passersby, from millionaire Robert S. Abbott to the average pedestrian. Important for the arts, African American businesses such as Binga’s, Overton’s, and Abbott’s lent essential support for the arts by building venues for the performance and enjoyment of the arts, maintaining a workforce with money to spend on entertainments, directing donations to artistic enterprises, and providing a class of persons who felt they elevated themselves through their rising sense of appreciation of the arts, primarily of the indigenous or popular varieties. Nonetheless, the artistic production from...

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