The Evening Sun

I left San Francisco yesterday in the thickest fog I’ve seen in a long time. Winged my way to Salt Lake City and then Memphis to begin to teach my first Jazz Course in this city. Given its illustrious history with Beale Street and the Blues, I decided to accent the blues side of jazz and with just 5 short days to get the essence of the Orff/Jazz marriage across that, that seemed a good idea. 

 

I confess I came with a little trepidation, for several reasons:

1)   Only three of the thirty people signed up had worked with me before.

2)   All of them are graduates of the Memphis Course which has a markedly different focus than my San Francisco Course. 

3)   Though I don’t know how Memphis voted, some 64% of Tennessee voters chose last November to install the regime I hate from the depths of my soul. 

4)   I wondered if I can tell the stories that gave birth to the blues and freely name the role of white supremacy and systemic racism.

 

Once I began, all such worries vanished in an instant. Not only was the group receptive, but they were beyond-the-norm in their overall spirit and musical energy and nodding their heads in both affirmation and interest as I told some of the history essential to understanding the blues. And in over 35 years of teaching the course, I had more black participants than ever before, making up 30% of the class. 

 

I love this work so much. I am 150% the person I was born to be when teaching courses like this, mixing my passion for calling out the obstructions to social justice with my equal passion for creating a container of pure joy and fun and powerful, life-affirming music dance. I simply never want to stop. And with the invitations still pouring in and my health holding up, I see no reason why I have to.

 

Today, in analyzing the poetic side of the blues, I sang the W.C. Handy lyrics, “I hate to see, the evening sun go down…” I left out the punch line and asked the group why someone might be worried about that sun going down. And one young woman knocked it out of the ballpark when she answered with a thought I have never thought before or heard expressed:

 

“Because the person is in the evening of their life and not ready for the sun of their spirit to set.”

 

So much more profound than the actual punchline of  “Ever since my baby, done left the town.”

 

And given what I’ve just said about not ever wanting this teaching to stop, I felt the full resonance of that remarkable insight. Bam!

 

But set it must someday. Meanwhile, here I still am basking in its light and warmth and doing all I can to shine it out to others. 

 

Can‘t wait for tomorrow! 

PS Wrote this last night and woke up this morning remembering an e.e.cummings poem I hadn’t thought of in some 50 years. Change “5 or 6” to “75 or 76” and it speaks to the above. 

 

who are you, little i

(five or six years old)
peering from some high

window; at the gold

of november sunset

(and feeling: that if day
has to become night

this is a beautiful way)