Walking Out the Door

At Louis Armstrong Airport, with a live band on a stage and people line dancing— only in New Orleans! As hinted at many times, it has been a wild ride past 10 days, but at the end of the day, I set out to do exactly what I hoped to do with the 17 eager students who took time to become better teachers, more confident and skilled musicians with enough understanding about jazz to make some sincere music with their kids and more knowledgeable citizens with renewed energy to speak on behalf of social justice. 

 

The course began with an invitation to the Ancestors to bless us with their presence, continued with those here in the present moment making clear progress in their skills and understanding of this remarkable American art form bequeathed to us by its black creators and ended with me taking a nod to the Descendants, the children who will receive the fruits of their teachers’ labors. To bring them into the room, I read some quotes from the last chapter of my Now’s the Time book, something I often convince myself I don’t have time for in this Jazz Course. But it was so inspiring to remember the words of the kids who I quoted— kids like my daughter who were 13 when they wrote them and are now 46. I was struck by them all, but this one really touched me, as she captured my entire vision of Jazz Education taught through an Orff Schulwerk practice:

 

“One of the highlights of the year was the feeling I got as I performed in the concert. Not only did I know how the play the songs, I knew the people, the history, the form, the stories behind them and the practice I went through to learn them. I was proud not only of my playing, but also how I learned to play it and what I knew about the music.”       —ELLA CHRISTOPH 

 

There you have it. Not just the notes alone, but what’s behind them. Not just playing patterns with the hand but understanding the deeper structure behind them. Not music as a disembodied collection of sounds, but as the living, breathing voice of a people who suffered, exulted, triumphed. Not just listening to music or knowing about it, but actively playing it in your own hands, in your own style, in your own voice. And not just the pleasure of individual accomplishment hard-won through practice, but the joy of sharing it with others in a concert. 

 

I began the course framing it as a blessed marriage between Orff Schulwerk and the Black American Music known as Jazz and we were there not to just witness the ceremony, but to help raise the children birthed from the marriage. And I believe that’s exactly what we did in the nine intense days of this life-changing course. As testified one-by-one in the closing circle, people left with dynamic material—games/ songs/ dances/ tunes— that they’re eager to share with their children. They named pedagogical ideas that will be game-changers in their work, making both the children and themselves more happy. They walked out the door with renewed confidence in their musicianship, as they took risks to play new instruments and succeeded so wildly in their first steps. They felt the grief that is lighter when more people agree to carry it and emerged with renewed determination to tell the needed stories and stop accepting, ignoring or sugar-coating the toxic narratives. 

 

And so after a stirring Johnny Brown game where we laid our comfort down, held up by the love and energy of the circle, showed our motion, felt it come back to us (“we can do the motion”), we had a final hug and ended, as I often do, with: 

 

“Uh huh. Oh yeah. All right. That’s all.”

 

For now.