Strategies and Structures

Strategies and Structures

1. Hentoff starts off his essay with the example of a Nazi who likes jazz although he is forbidden because he wants to show that Jazz is that powerful, more powerful than the wishes of Hitler. He writes, “And in Russia, under Communists, jazz was declared an enemy of the people, bu there too [as in Germany] it could not be entirely suppressed” (3). Also, it shows that Jazz appealed to all sorts of people, which heightens the fact that it held a lot of power on people. Henthoff writes, “Every night, in many clubs in many countries throughout the world, this ceaselessly intriguing interplay between improvising musicians creates new patterns of melody, harmony and rhythm” (10).

2. Hentoff uses a lot of examples about the spirit an d personality of jazz to explain why jazz is beyond time. He says, “The essential attraction of jazz throughout time is its “sound of surprise” …the listener is often startled by ... a turn of rhythm that is so deeply emotional that he or she may shout aloud in pleasure” (7). Emotions and surprise are sensations that are forever present in humans and since Hentoff shows that these sensations are found in jazz it becomes timeless because its meanings will be forever understood. Hentoff also says jazz is timeless because,“Youngsters are drawn to the depth of feeling that can't be find in popular music and older listeners relive their own musical adventures while learning more about the further dimensions of this music” (10). Basically, Hentoff believes everyone can relate to jazz music and since it is so flexible as far as effecting different generations, it is also timeless. Henthoff adds that jazz's emotion, harmonies and rhythms “know no generational divide” (10). In the same...

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...I touched her feet, and her face contorted with the memory of her childhood pain. “You are lucky,” she said. We both understood that she was thinking far more of the bindings that long ago that made her cry,” she is using the feet as a metaphor to show that Wu's time is so much different and better than the times she lived in. When Wu writes, “I sit at my desk, study, thinking of her tiny-doll like feet, of the miles of differences that separates us,” she is using a metaphor and an example. It is a metaphor because over the duration of Wu's piece her grandmother's feet have become a symbol and metaphor for the hardships her grandmother lived through and the space between herself and her grandmother. It is an literal example because Wu could just have been thinking of her feet, but most likely her mind is thinking about the other information that is represents.