In Zora Neale Hurston's essay "How It Feels to be Colored Me," what happens when she goes to The New World Cabaret?

She goes to The New World Cabaret, a popular nightclub in Harlem during the 1920s, with a white male friend to listen to a jazz band. There, she says, "[her] color comes." That is, she feels this music on an instinctive level:

I dance wildly inside myself; I yell within, I whoop; I shake my assegai above my head, I hurl it true to the mark yeeeeeooww! I am in the jungle and living in the jungle way...But the piece ends...I creep back slowly to the veneer we call civilization with the last tone and find the white friend sitting motionless in his seat smoking calmly.

Notice that she writes that all of this is happening "inside" of her. She does not express herself physically, but remains seated while listening and responding privately. The music evokes a sensibility that is non-Western -- hence, the reference to the "assegai." 

Arguably, Hurston romanticizes Africa and African-inspired themes, particularly by referencing "the jungle" and "living in the jungle way." She is not fetishizing Africa, but contrasting African forms of expression with those in Europe and America. In Africa, one can feel music and channel that feeling into an individualized physical response. In Europe, music is more cerebral and dance movements are subjected to rules about form; that way, everyone is in sync and knows what to do (e.g., waltzes).

"The white friend" has a cerebral, or analytic, response to the music:

"Good music they have here," he remarks, drumming the table with his fingertips. 

Music. The great blobs of purple and red emotion have not touched him. He has only heard what I felt...

He has "only heard" it, meaning he has responded passively to the music. His judgment of it being "good" is an analytic response, not an emotional one. 

In this scene, Hurston illustrates what she perceives to be a difference between black and white people. She does not judge the man negatively for this, but merely sees that they are different and distant from each other on this matter, whereas, when they arrived at the club, they "[entered] chatting about any little nothing that we have in common."