Jazz is a survival strategy for people harassed by cacophony.

Quite early, Eliot made a great impact by the careful use of jazz and film form. The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock gets much of its power from an interpenetration of film form and jazz idiom.

If jazz is considered as a break with mechanism in the direction of the discontinuous, the participant, the spontaneous and improvisational , it can also be seen as a return to a sort of oral poetry in which performance is both creation and composition.

…jazz belongs in that family of mosaic structures that reappeared in the Western world with the wire services. It belongs with symbolism in poetry, and with many allied forms in painting and in music.

The Negro created a music based on language (“jaser" -- New Orleans for "to yatter") that was totally involving of all the senses. We still talk ineptly about "Negro integration,'' ignoring the fact that the Negro integrated all the countries of the world in the l 920's. That integration still holds.

Since black is not a color but an interval, may this not be the ultimate secret of Negro mastery of rhythm?...touch creates interval and evokes closure or rhythm.

And the whole of the English language took on a tremendous new oral life from radio. I'm sure that this was carried straight on into jazz and rock music.
TV News as a New Mythic Form, 1970, in Understanding Me, 2003, p 160
Conversation is improvisation, so that the new interest in musical improvisation reveals new aspects of the meaning of verbal conversation.

[Referencing the dance halls that became known as discos] Sound, in this kind of world, is not used as something to be listened to, it is kind of full rubber, which you press against and it presses back against you, makes you feel kind of wanted. Sound, in the new world of dance song, it's not for listening, it's for making.

The ideal of “hi fi” really indicates a new concept of composition rather than performance. If the jazz musician composes in the act of performing, the mike and studio situation bring into existence both new composition and new performance.

Jazz musicians express their distaste for recorded jazz by saying, "It is as stale as yesterday's newspaper."

Jazz would seem to be an effective bridge between highbrow and lowbrow music, much as Chaplin made a similar bridge for pictorial art.

The power of English in jazz and rock to accommodate itself to Negro dance and music may have significance here. So far as I know, it is impossible to sing rock in any other language but English. It has been tried.

Speech is the “hidden” ground for the music as figure in any culture whatever. There are specific and complex reasons why the oral tradition of American Southern speech constitute the only possible ground for jazz and rock. Some of these reasons include the fact that English is almost the only language in the world that has actual feet and not mere syllables. Equally basic is the relation of English to the metropolitan patterns of industrial sound. New technological sounds and patterns are processed through the speech in order to become “music.” To people who do not understand this complex of speech technology factors, it must seem very mysterious that Chinese and Norwegian alike are compelled to sing Rock in English rather than their own tongues.

If jazz is considered as a break with mechanism in the direction of the discontinuous, the participant, the spontaneous and improvisational , it can also be seen as a return to a sort of oral poetry in which performance is both creation and composition.

Jazz and syncopation riding the new radio waves revealed the nature of civilization as a world of continuity by recreating the syncopated tribal world of a closed society.

Negro jazz united the cultures of the world for the first time since the Tower of Babel.