Jazz and Freedom

Every January for many decades, I taught the song Free at Last to preschoolers aged three to five. You haven’t fully lived until you’ve seen a preschooler with eyes shut and body rocking singing this sing from the bottom of their soul with such passion and energy. I’ve always believed that kids—and adults— should know what they’re singing about, so besides sharing the stirring ending to speech by Martin Luther King, I tried to talk to the kids about what the word “free” means. And then realized, “Hmm. What does it mean?!”

Can you explain that to a three-year old? A ten-year old? Yourself? Because any way I look at it, I find freedom one of the most overused and least understood words in the English language. I’ve found some good definitions of what it’s not— like Fran Leibowitz’s “Your freedom to extend your arm goes as far as my face.” But as to what it actually is? Well, good luck with that. 

Here’s what I think I know:

• Freedom is not a passive noun, but an active verb that requires the full measure of our disciplined effort and committed intelligence to achieve even a sliver of its promise. 

• Freedom exists on many levels at once— political freedom, religious freedom, artistic freedom, spiritual freedom, freedom of speech, freedom to define ourselves and yet more. 

• Some freedoms are granted from without— laws, conventions, agreements— and some can only be achieved from within— the spiritual and artistic ones, for example. 

• Every person deserves to be endowed with these “inalienable rights.”

“I wish I knew how it would feel to be free,” sings Nina Simone in the Billy Taylor song of the same title and I believe we all have that deep yearning. To be free is to have unshackled ourselves from our own limitations, ignorance, crippling doubts and the sense of unworthiness that comes both from parents, teachers and peers without and our own nagging shadows within. To move eloquently as we master a dance style or athletic challenge frees the body from its stiffness and heavy gravitational pulls. To read rigorously and relentlessly, to write and reflect and shape one’s own critical thought frees us from our confusion and obliviousness as to how the world works, helps “thaw the frozen sea within” (Kafka). To truly love somebody breaks through the self-constructed castle overgrown with protective thorns to awaken the sleeping beauty within. 

When it comes to spiritual awakening, there are disciplines designed to help us cast off our chains— Zen meditation, treks in wild places and our own American jazz tradition, for example. Jazz, with its invitation to rigorous training, deep understanding and intention to break free from the confines of our narrow selves, is the practice of freedom, the voice of freedom proclaimed in an exuberant and masterfully crafted improvisation. Witness Louis Armstrong’s 1928 groundbreaking work in The West End Blues, his solo soaring over and beyond the confines of measured bars and beats. Witness Charlie Parker, who flew so high and free into the air that he was nicknamed “Bird.”

So here we are, over 400 years of the most unimaginable treatment of one group of human beings over another, still trying to turn around the legacy we Americans have inherited and still overlooking the other side of the story. In the face of the horror, the most extraordinary lotus blossom blooming time and again from the swamp, reminding us of a spiritual and artistic freedom far beyond what most of us have even dreamed of, never mind touched, never mind begun to live in. None of it excuses, dismisses or sidesteps the devastation of the unrelenting narrative of White Supremacy, but all of it gives a larger context, offers an authentic counter-narrative which could be called Black Supremacy, yet no black person has ever once suggested it. In fact, they have time and again generously opened the door to the music and dance that give body, voice, weight and authenticity to the experience of freedom to anyone who comes with a genuine interest. Do we thank them for that?

That dynamic between the outer oppression and the inner freedom is the conversation we all would do well to both witness and participate in. Daddy Rice noticing that old black man Jim Crow dancing outside the theater and with a mixture of that good old American way of figuring out how to make a buck from it and genuine admiration, the minstrel show was born. While the newspapers vilified ragtime and the free-wheelin’ New Orleans ensembles, a sizable group of white folks felt a spiritual void in their stiff bodies and polite voices and began to Charleston their way to a taste of a kind of freedom they had never known. A decade later, they were heading uptown to Harlem as guests of the black community at the Savoy Ballroom. Another ten years and they were nodding their heads through the wee hours of the morning in subterranean clubs hitching a ride on the stellar voyages of Bird and Diz, Monk and Miles. 

And the drama didn’t only play out on the bandstand. Compare the white women screaming at black children going to school with the courage of Rosa Parks sitting quietly, but firmly, on the bus. Measure Governor Faubus or Wallace or the Southern white preachers’ spiritual vaccum side-by-side with Martin Luther King’s lofty mountain climb. Compare the powerful truths of James Baldwin next to the well-articulated Yale-educated lies of William Buckley. 

The thing we all would do well to understand is how the least free people in this world are the ones with unearned privileges, lots of money, the law at their back, but are imprisoned by their prejudice, their narrowness, their hatred, their determination to keep their status bequeathed to them undeservedly by the legacy of White Supremacy. While the people who still suffer from other people’s power to define them, to deny them their rights, to refuse to see their humanity, often live in the center of their inner freedoms. Freedoms earned in spite of the limitations of the crippling laws, hatreds, conspiracy theories and isms designed to hurt, bind, oppress, discount, discredit, pigeonhole, put down our fellow human beings.

Let us be clear. The presence of one freedom does not excuse the absence of the other. We would do well to work from both ends at once, changing both the outer and the inner. What good is Thelonious Monk expressing his freedom on the piano if the policeman pull him over in the car for the crime of driving in a car with a white woman and start beating on his hands? What good is George Floyd doing his liberating yoga breaths if the policeman’s knee on his neck denies him the right to breathe? What good is Ralph Yarl learning to be a helpful brother when he gets shot by knocking on the wrong door by accident?

So, my friends, after singing Free at Last with the preschoolers, sing I Wish I Knew How It Would Feel to Be Free with the older ones. Feel their passion as the song goes to the heart of our deepest yearnings— to say what we need to say, to give what we’re longing to give, to live what we’re longing to live. To share the love in our heart and then soar up in the sky with Charlie Parker, unfettered, unchained, free.

I wish I knew how it would feel to be free.

I wish I could break all the chains holding me.

I wish I could say all the things that I should say

Say 'em loud, say 'em clear, for the whole world to hear.

 

I wish I could share all the love in my heart.

Remove all the bars that still keep us apart.

I wish you could know what it means to be me.

Then you'd see and agree that everyone should be free.

 

I wish I could give all I'm longin' to give.

I wish I could live like I'm longin' to live.

I wish I could do all the things I can do.

And though I'm way overdue, I'd be startin’ anew.

 

I wish I could be like a bird in the sky.

How sweet it would be if I found I could fly.

I'd soar to the sun and look down at the sea.

Then I'd sing 'cause I know how it feels to be free.