Welcome to JAZZIZ Essentials, a video series exploring the musicians, albums, songs and events that gave rise to jazz.
In honor of National Poetry Month, in this video, Online Editor Matt Micucci talks about the jazz poetry of Langston Hughes. Hughes was a leading figure of the Harlem Renaissance and innovator of a then-new exciting literary form called jazz poetry. A jazz poem is described by Sascha Feinstein as “a jazz poem is any poem that has been informed by jazz music. The influence can be in the subject of the poem or in the rhythms, but one should not necessarily exclude the other.”
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