By Eisa Nefertari Ulen, published in The Defenders Online, June 2010

Part book-on-tape, part spoken word disc, and part jazz CD, The Harlem Renaissance Remembered is an innovative compilation of poetry, sound, and substance. Featuring Jonathan Gross, Ph.D., a Professor of English at DePaul University, and musician “Mack” Jay Jordan, who played with Ramsey Lewis and Nat King Cole during a decades-long career that took him around the world, this CD will appeal to jazz enthusiasts and educators, poets and poetry lovers, avid readers and admirers of all things Renaissance.

The 1920s heyday of the Harlem Renaissance produced one of the most important eras in American history. Social and political movements powered the Renaissance: Booker T Washington’s Uplift at Tuskegee, Marcus Garvey’s Back to Africa Movement at the UNIA, Ida B. Wells-Barnett’s Anti-Lynching Campaign and publication of The Red Record, Alain Locke’s Cultural Pluralism; publication of The New Negro; and Father of The Harlem Renaissance, and WEB DuBois’ contributions as one of the greatest intellectuals in history, with The Souls of Black Folk; the formation of the NAACP and its magazine, The Crisis; and the development of Pan-Africanism. A great explosion of creative expression from a wide range of artists, from painter Aaron Douglass to folklorist and author Zora Neale Hurston, Ida B Wells expressed the dynamic, progressive fervor of black folk during the Jazz Age.

Indeed, as Gross points out in his excellent introduction to the CD, the impact of the Renaissance was global, with the worldwide travels of Renaissance luminaries forming and shaping black life in America as well as nations of people of color and The Soviet Union.

Produced by Brilliance Audio, The Harlem Renaissance Remembered includes some of the best poetry of the era, including Countee Cullen’s “Heritage” and Langston Hughes’ “Dream Variations” and “Theme for English B,” as well as “Dream Deferred,” which inspired the title of the first play written by a black woman to be performed on Broadway, Lorraine Hansberry’s A Raisin in the Sun.

The Harlem Renaissance Remembered CD is truly an intertextual, multigenre project. Excerpts from Hughes’ signature essay, “The Negro Artist and the Racial Mountain,” follows Duke Ellington’s “It Don’t Mean a Thing,” inviting the listener to consider the powerful insouciance expressed in Hughes’ Renaissance Era manifesto:

“We younger Negro artists who create now intend to express our individual dark-skinned selves without fear or shame. If white people are pleased we are glad. If they are not, it doesn’t matter. We know we are beautiful. And ugly too. The tom-tom cries and the tom-tom laughs. If colored people are pleased we are glad. If they are not, their displeasure doesn’t matter either. We build our temples for tomorrow, strong as we know how, and we stand on top of the mountain, free within ourselves.”

The use of poems, excerpts from essays, music, and a terrific introduction to the Renaissance Era provide contextual meaning and should appeal to teachers looking to enrich their lessons and inspire young learners and college undergraduates alike to want to know more about 1920s Harlem. The disc also contains an excerpt from Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man, which will help educators at every level of learning launch conversations about race, class, and the experiences of 20th century African Americans.

Missing from this discourse will be the issue of gender, as this disc does not remember women; perhaps the absence of Nella Larsen, Zora Neale Hurston, Jesse Fauset, and Dorothy West, Ma Rainey, Bessie Smith, and Billie Holiday will spark an interesting conversation among students – one that focuses on the invisibility of significant black women writers and blues artists of the Renaissance.

The Harlem Renaissance Remembered does meaningfully evoke the struggle, pain, and insistence of black humanity, of black life. The CD concludes with Louis Armstrong’s “What a Wonderful World,” a decision that, as Gross explains in the Afterword, evokes the Blues Aesthetic of the era, the totality of human experience, from great sorrow to incredible joy. As Black Arts Era poet and activist Kalamu Ya Salaam said, this Blues Aesthetic expresses the “ethos of blues people that manifests itself in everything done, not just in the music.”

The jazz in The Harlem Renaissance Remembered provides the musical component of the political, social, and artistic movement of the people who lived on the black side of WEB DuBois’ color line: in the 1920s and 1930s. Just as soul and funk provided a soundtrack to The Black Arts Movement of the 1960s and 1970s and Hip Hop is the beat behind what Kevin Powell has called today’s Word Movement, blues and jazz are forever associated with The Harlem Renaissance. Blending poetry, essay, and fiction with jazz makes The Harlem Renaissance Remembered an important and enjoyable contribution to the memory of a people.

Eisa Nefertari Ulen is the author of Crystelle Mourning and lives with her husband and son in Brooklyn – just three blocks from the A train.