American life, in this year 1925, consists essentially of surfaces. You may point out New England communities and say here is depth, and I will answer, true, but New England is dead so far as the America of now is concerned. You may show me an integrity in the West where a century ago pioneers came, and I will answer, that integrity resides with the elders and not with the mightier young ones. He who wishes to picture today’s America must do it kaleidoscopically; he must show you a vivid contrast of surfaces, raucous, sentimental, egoistical, vulgar, ineffably busy—surfaces whirling in a dance which sometimes is a dance to Aphrodite and more frequently a dance to Jehovah.
In seeking a symbol of the vital chaos of America’s soul, I find no more adequate one than jazz. Here you have the rhythm of frenzy staggering against a symphonic background—a background composed of lewdness, heart’s delight, soul-racked madness, monumental boldness, exquisite humility, but principally prayer.
I hear jazz, and I am given a vision of cathedrals and temples collapsing and, silhouetted against the setting sun, a solitary figure, a lost soul, dancing grotesquely on the ruins.... Thus do I see the jazz singer.
Jazz is prayer. It is too passionate to be anything else. It is prayer distorted, sick, unconscious of its destination. The singer of jazz is what Matthew Arnold said of the Jew, “lost between two worlds, one dead, the other powerless to be born.” In this, my first play, I have tried to crystallize the ironic truth that one of the Americas of 1925—that one which packs to overflowing our cabarets, musical revues and dance halls—is praying with a fervor as intense as that of the America which goes sedately to church and synagogue. The jazz American is different from the dancing dervish, from the Zulu medicine man, from the negro evangelist only in that he doesn’t know he is praying.
I have used a Jewish youth as my protagonist because the Jews are determining the nature and scope of jazz more than any other race—more than the negroes, from whom they have stolen jazz and given it a new color and meaning. Jazz is Irving Berlin, Al Jolson, George Gershwin, Sophie Tucker. These are Jews with their roots in the synagogue. And these are expressing in evangelical terms the nature of our chaos today.
You find the soul of a people in the songs they sing. You find the meaning of the songs in the souls of the minstrels who create and interpret them. In “The Jazz Singer” I have attempted an exploration of the soul of one of these minstrels.
Samson Raphaelson.
New York, October, 1925.