Carl Sandburg’s “Jazz Fantasia” throws you straight into a late-night jam session and practically shouts along with the band. The speaker urges the jazzmen to beat drums, sob on saxophones, clatter tin pans, and moan like an autumn wind. This is not polite music; it sounds like a fight tumbling down stairs, full of speed, clashing sounds, and raw feeling. Sandburg clearly loves the noise and thrill of it. But then the mood suddenly softens. The “rough stuff” stops, and the poem glides into a dreamy image of a Mississippi steamboat moving up a dark river, with green lanterns, stars, and a red moon. That shift creates a mood both wild and tender, capturing how jazz can be harsh and chaotic one moment, then lonesome and beautiful the next.
Jazz Fantasia — Summary
Drum on your drums, batter on your banjoes, sob on the long cool winding saxophones. Go to it, O jazzmen. Sling your knuckles on the bottoms of the happy tin pans, let your trombones ooze, and go hushahusha -hush with the slippery sand-paper. Moan like an autumn wind high in the lonesome treetops, moan soft like you wanted somebody terrible, cry like a racing car slipping away from a motorcycle cop, bang-bang! you jazzmen, bang altogether drums, traps, banjoes, horns, tin cans — make two people fight on the top of a stairway and scratch each other's eyes in a clinch tumbling down the stairs. Can the rough stuff . . . now a Mississippi steamboat pushes up the night river with a hoo-hoo-hoo-oo . . . and the green lanterns calling to the high soft stars ... a red moon rides on the humps of the low river hills . . . go to it, O jazzmen.