Why We Study Jazz

A few years back, I made a textbook of sorts for my 8^thgrade Jazz History class. Yesterday I read out loud the introduction to my New Orleans Jazz Course students and liked what I wrote. And so I share it here. 

 “Jaaaaaaaaaazz.”Say it slowly. Savor the sounds. Whisper it. Just four letters, three sounds, but enough to hold an entire universe of moods and styles and ways for the body to dance, the mind to dream, the heart to feel. 

In that small word is so much of the history of the United States—the good, the bad, the ugly, the American dream and the American nightmare.It’s the story ofour triumph and our shame, our joy and our pain, our happiness and our sorrow, our yesterday and tomorrow. It’s the lotus flower growing from the swamp, giving hope, healing and beauty to the world.

Nobody quite knows where the word “jazz” came from, but we know a lot about where the music came from. It was the meeting of West meets West—West Europe meets West Africa. Western Europe—particularly England, France, Portugal, Spain and Holland—developed the technology to travel by ship to lands far away—what are now countries like Ghana, Ivory Coast, Senegal, Gambia, Angola and others. It was a meeting that millions wish never had happened. So much suffering, so much brutality, so much injustice— and we still haven’t recovered. But out of all that ugliness, great beauty rose up. How did it happen?

A West African mother is forcefully abducted and made to “marry” a West European father and they have a child. The child has qualities of both the mother and father, but is wholly neither. A new person is born—an African-American. The song he or she sings was not recognizable in either England or Ghana, but had some characteristics of both. 

On the mother’s side, music in all the diverse West African cultures had—and still has— the qualities of a language. It is spoken by all and learned like a mother tongue, absorbed effortlessly by the babies on the back feeling the rhythms of the mother dancing and working, the vibrations of the songs. Music is almost always connected to dance, rising up the body from the toes to the hips to the arms to the whole body. The music and dance carry the important stories, manners and values of the culture, is constantly present in daily life and is one of the primary means of passing on key cultural information to the next generation. Wherever music is happening, all are invited to participate by singing, clapping and dancing. When the adults finish playing, the children rush to the instruments and imitate what they have just heard. Formal study and music lessons are rare and playing instruments a natural outgrowth of expressing what one sings and hears and feels. A chief is expected to drum and dance and a village is often organized by musical ensembles.

On the father’s side, music is often an optional expression to the side of more “important things” like reading, writing, doing math and mastering a profession. It is often learned through formal lessons not always available to all and often begins at the instrument before the songs have taken root in the voice and body. It is passed on by written symbols and learned first through the eye rather than the ear. It requires formal practice, often alone in a room. Dance is not required to learn music, though some music still may be used for dancing, again often taught in formal lessons. Power lies more in book knowledge than songs. People may or may not sing in church or school or on occasional holidays and people in the countryside may learn and carry on folk traditions that still include the ear and the body. But in the mainstream “high culture,” such folk music will have a lower status. 

In short, the way life is organized, the way key knowledge is passed down, the role of music and dance in community life, the way such music and dance is learned, the way both personal and political power is recognized was—and still is— markedly different in West Europe and West Africa. The child would inherit the intuition, spirit and soul of the mother and the outward forms, institutions, instruments and language of the father and something new was born from the conversation between the two—an African-American folk music that would lead to jazz and dozens of other musical styles. 

The slave trade from West Africa to the “New World”—what is now Brazil, Cuba, Haiti, Jamaica, Dominican Republic, the American South and more created a mix of many specific marriages. In Brazil, West Africa blended with the Portuguese, in Haiti, the French, in Cuba, the Spanish and in the American South, the English. Each would later create many distinct styles of new music. 

But jazz came from the American South, where the Protestant English forbade the playing of drums, forcibly converted the Africans to the Puritan form of Christian worship, broke up families so that slaves who worked side-by-side would not speak the same mother tongue or know the same songs and dances. What was remarkable was that these new African-Americans could only borrow from English songs and dances, sing in English, eventually play European instruments. But their African feeling for music never died and would transform everything they touched with the gold of their mother Africa sensibility. The way they sang hymns, the way they danced quadrilles, the way they played piano or trumpet was unlike anything people had ever done in Europe, infused with a percussive quality, soulful singing and dynamic energy remembered over centuries from their lost mother culture. And here we come to the roots of the music that flowered into work songs, field hollers, spirituals, blues, gospel, New Orleans funeral music, boogie-woogie, swing, be-bop, cool and other styles contained in that small word jazz.And then more yet as it led to rhythm ‘n’ blues, rock ‘n’ roll, Motown, funk, heavy metal, disco, pop, punk, rap, hip-hop and beyond. 

If we had the power to go back in time and change history, I imagine all good-hearted people would stop the forces that led to slavery. But how strange to think that by so doing we would have never had Scott Joplin, Louis Armstrong, Billie Holiday, Miles Davis, the Nicholas Brothers, James Brown, Ray Charles, Smokey Robinson, B.B. King, Michael Jackson and hundreds of other musicians and scores of musical styles that have given us so much happiness and inspiration. Since what happened happened, at least we should know who to thank, listen to their story, listen to their music, learn the social and political lessons from the injustices they suffered, learn the artistic lessons from their dedication to their craft, discover what the music has to say to us and what we might bring to it and move it all forward to a bright new future. That’swhy we study jazz.

Radical Originality

It looks promising that the title of these last four days is “The Storm That Never Came.”

And thankfully. Every few hours, the word was “Nowit is coming!” And it never did. 

Eight of us spent the day at our host’s lovely house prepared for the worst and it never did anything but drizzle. Twice our phones went off with emergency alerts and both times nothing happened. Believe me, I’m not complaining. 

Meanwhile, I spent some of yesterday morning working on my book, a section about blending in (one of music’s great gifts) and standing out (also). I quoted an 18^thcentury English poet I had never heard of, Edward Young. I saw the quote in the Nobel Museum in Stockholm and liked it. So I went to Mr. Google to find the source and there was a whole page about the topic of “Originality.”

Even as we, like most societies, are deeply conservative in terms of wanting everyone to conform to some norm, not ask too many questions or have too many original thoughts, we also value novelty, be it the next phone ap, avant garde art or the next “new” idea about education. Sometimes it goes too far, mindlessly asking “what’s new?” instead of “how can we do or think the old just one inch better?”

But isn’t it interesting that the word “original” comes from “origin,” which could mean the first of its kind, but also attention to the origin of the idea/practice/ invention. Just like the word “radical,” which we associate with wild-eyed leftists throwing out the old ways, actually comes from “pertaining to the roots, of or having roots.” For me, the most interesting original thought and radical practice is simply looking at origins and roots from a new perspective, honoring the past with attention to the present and a vision for the future. That well describes my own work in Orff Schulwerk and in fact, Carl Orff himself created a new compositional style based on his study of Medieval music and texts. 

Here are some thought-provoking quotes about “originality” and what a blessing to be out of survival mode where I have the luxury of thinking about things like this instead of “What’s my escape plan if the predicted storm really hits?” Enjoy.

• We are all born originals – why is it so many of us die copies?    –Edward Young

• When there is an original sound in the world, it makes a hundred echoes. –John Shedd

• Originality is unexplored territory. You get there by carrying a canoe – you can’t take a taxi. –Alan Alda

• The world in general doesn’t know what to make of originality; it is startled out of its comfortable habits of thought, and its first reaction is one of anger. –W. Somerset Maugham

• The man with a new idea is a crank until the idea succeeds.  – Mark Twain

• Originality is the fine art of remembering what you hear but forgetting where you heard it. – Laurence J. Peter

• Originality is a thing we constantly clamor for, and constantly quarrel with. –Thomas Carlyle

• Others can give you a name or a number, but they can never tell you who you really are. That is something you yourself can only discover from within. –Thomas Merton

• The original insight is most likely to come when elements stored in different compartments of the mind drift into the open, jostle one another, and now and then form new combinations.    –Eric Hoffer

• The will to originality is not the will to be peculiar and unlike anybody else; it means the desire to derive one’s consciousness from its primary source. –Nicolas Berdyeav

• Be daring, be different, be impractical, be anything that will assert integrity of purpose and imaginative vision against the play-it-safers, the creatures of the commonplace, the slaves of the ordinary. –Sir Cecil Beaton

The Great Hunkering Down

In the year 999, European Christians  were preparing for the Apocalypse. They were convinced the end of the world was near and they should get ready for the Rapture. It never happened. In hindsight, they called it “the great Non-Event.”

In the year 2000, American folks were preparing for Y2K, some massive failure of computer systems that would bring down the country. It never happened. 

Here in New Orleans, after dreaming of, preparing, working hard on my first Jazz Course in New Orleans, I was faced with the possibility of cancelling after the first of the scheduled 10 days. 45 people who joined me in the dream and had come here from as far away as Spain, South Africa, Singapore and San Francisco, the Netherlands, Hong Kong, Australia and Vancouver were faced with the prospect of having our hopes and dreams crushed by something as simple as bad weather. 

The course began with a dramatic flash flood with 8 inches of rain and my co-organizer, Saint Allen Dejan (my title) driving me and my fellow Pentatonics band teachers through streets turned into rivers. People who started to walk the few hundred yards from their dorms were told to seek shelter in a building close to the Performing Arts Center, but not yet there. Suddenly photos like the above where flashing on the group What’s Ap. Scary!

And yet 15 minutes after the scheduled starting time, all but 8 arrived and 30 minutes later, we all were there. Minus the one New Orleans native who had to deal with a flooded house and damaged car. So off we went into our two welcome songs, including one from Ghana that translated as “Thank you for the trouble you took to get here.” Never were those words so true!

By the end of the day, the rain had let up, but the predictions for worse weather to come were dire. Allen told me that the University had decided to close the campus for three days, leaving us with no space to hold class. There was talk about the dangerously and unseasonably high Mississippi River overflowing and possibly breaking a levee that could cost as disaster of Katrina or worse proportions. Things were looking grim. 

That night, my colleagues and I checked the weather obsessively and began exploring options like trying to get the whole course to rent cars and drive to Houston, where a fellow Orff teacher who survived Hurricane Harvey offered shelter. I started to fantasize about  galvanizing the Houston Orff Chapter to find us a church basement and some Orff instruments and continue the course there. Plan B was to rent a car and have us leave the area for three days and go on a spontaneous road trip to return on Sunday when the University might re-open and the weather improve. Plan C was to get out of Dodge while it was possible. The next morning, at the end of constant debate, we had all changed our plane ticket to fly out. An unmitigated disaster for the course financially, personally and educationally. 

But the day itself was calm with no rain, so we went ahead and went to meet the class in the common room of one of the dorms. But I had left some things in the University Band room, so we just casually tried to see if we could get in and lo and behold, the doors were open. So we moved the class back there.. I expected the same massive freak-out we had gone through, but didn’t feel it in the group. We did the opening activity as scheduled, Allen gave an update on the weather and the possible evacuation plans and such and by the end of that, people seemed comfortable staying. I invited my colleague Tom Pierre to lead a gospel song with the perfect title: “The Storm Is Passing Over.” The words could not have been more appropriate: 

“Take courage, my Soul. And let me journey on.

Though the night is dark, and I am far from home.”

Didn’t we raise the rafters with our voice, led by his soulful teaching!!! From there to my version of “Rain Rain Go Away”: and at the break, all but one of my band colleagues, whose family was nervous for him, changed out airline tickets back. Our other Saint, SF Orff Course registrar Rachel, went out to buy water and granola bars for the “great hunkering down” and we finished the day playing a hot Ghana xylophone piece and beginning our first blues improvisations. It never rained a drop the whole day and the sun was out.

That night, around 30 of us went to Frenchman St. and were initiated into the New Orleans club scene. A concert by the Jason Marsalis Trio at Snug Harbor and then just walking down the street poking our head into club-after-club, from a brass band to a Django-like group, to a rock/Soul group and beyond. All the music that came from the fertile seed of the African abduction and grew to such glory on these shores, (in spite of the hatred, brutality, ignorance of the dominant white culture, all of which continues to this day) Driving home at 11:30, there were a few tiny drops of rain. 

Awoke this morning expecting that now the sh*t would hit the fan and though overcast, no rain. Oops, as I wrote that sentence, a little deluge came down. Oh, and now stopped, two minutes later. Not that I’m taking this too lightly. The Weather Channel still says that Tropical storm Barry could drop as much as 25 inches of rain in some areas. But I’m hoping that New Orleans isn’t one of them (while feeling concern and compassion for folks living in the worst of it). I’d love to look back and call this “a great non-event” but the jury is still out.

Meanwhile, this will certainly be a memorable Jazz Course!

Reparations?

Let’s talk reparations. You’d have to bury your head pretty deep in the sand to not see that we owe something to the people we abducted, kidnapped, bought and sold, grew rich off their free labor, beat, raped, murdered without consequence, kept out of certain neighborhoods, out of certain schools and generally heaped centuries of unbearable suffering on their heads for no justifiable reason beyond our own greed, ignorance and hatred. At the same time, we cheer so loudly when the same people win our team’s basketball/ baseball/ football/ etc., games, provide music for us to dance to, to romance to, to enhance our minds and hearts, offer stunning and stirring examples of moral courage and leadership. We enjoy all of this without ever having truly grieved, owned up to, apologized for, all the damage caused. 

And so the idea of reparations. It’s something we teach the children in school. If you hurt someone on purpose, reflect on your behavior, apologize to the person and think of something you can do to make up for it. If you broke their toy, buy or make them a new one. If you hurt their body, give them a hug and buy them ice cream. If you hurt their heart, ask them what you can do to help them feel happy again. It’s Basic Human Decency 101. And yet, as a culture, we Americans have yet to do it for the Native Americans and African-Americans, for starters. The list goes on from there, but since our treatment of these two groups defined the first few centuries of our growing identity as a culture and a country, that’s a good starting point. 

Shall we just give everyone $20? Say sorry and buy them ice cream? What is an appropriate gesture of restorative justice?

Well, how about this. When someone from Ghana, a land that supplied much of our free labor and was depleted by the outgoing population, wants to come to the United States to share a bit of their culture and learn a bit of some ideas that grew here, we should open the door wide and greet them with open arms. Especially if they want to go to New Orleans to consider how to teach jazz via the Orff Approach, share some drumming and dancing with the people in the course, lead a group on Sunday in Congo Square, go to Whitney Plantation to find out what happened to their enslaved ancestors, experience the Brass Band tradition to take some back to their brass band students in Ghana. 

If you haven’t guessed, I’m talking about a particular person, a morally upstanding and evolved human being with a job at a school in Ghana, a wife and family, not even a hint of a criminal record and nothing but beautiful intentions. He’s not coming to exploit the U.S., to run guns or sell drugs, to get involved with dubious research. He just wants to share some music and learn how to teach music better. For two weeks. 

In any case, there should be no problem for him to enter. But add to the mix the history of stealing his ancestors and treating them as shabbily as we did, the first tiny baby step towards reparations could come from such a musical and cultural sharing. Really, we should PAY for his flight and accommodations and for his teaching. But he’s not asking for that. He’s willing to foot the bill. He’s simply asking to get off the plane and go to the course, just the way I got off the plane in Finland or Sweden or Nova Scotia with no questions asked. 

But instead, he goes to the American Embassy and FOR THE THIRD TIME IN THREE YEARS, THEY REFUSE TO GIVE HIM A VISA. WITHOUT EVEN TAKING ONE MOMENT TO LOOK AT HIS PAPERWORK.

I’m going to repeat those:

• For the third time, they refused his Visa for no reason whatsoever.

• Without even glancing at his paperwork.

• Without even glancing at his paperwork. 

• Without even glancing at his paperwork. Which, by the way, was in perfect order.

Can we even speak the word “reparations” when things like this are happening every day?

I am so ashamed of my country. Remember the book “The Scarlet Letter?” Every American who helps perpetuate things like this, accepts it, embraces it, should be branded with a red S for Shame and put in the stocks. 

I am so ashamed.

I am so ashamed.

I am so ashamed. 

And I hope you are too.

Anytime, Anyplace. (Low Pressure/ High Pleasure)

I’m so grateful my musical talent was small enough that I had no chance—or interest—in making it to the concert stage or touring the jazz clubs. It turned my lifelong love affair with music into a happy thing to be shared anywhere, anytime, instead of a demanding profession. Of course, the teaching of music is as demanding a profession as any, but the sharing of it with children and with other teachers interested in how to share their love with children has been low on the pressures and high on the pleasures. 

In the past year, I’ve sung and made music at my old elementary school, my old high school, two senior centers in San Francisco and one in Salzburg, at a party of 40 yr. old alums with their children, at my school farewell luncheon saying goodbye to teachers, at my granddaughter’s school in Portland and of course, in my daily classes with kids and in my workshops. 

Yesterday after yet another soul-stirring day traveling the musical world without passports and visas, we celebrated the course’s end with a lovely sea-side dinner in downtown Halifax. As they do now in San Francisco in the Arboretum, it is the season of “flower pianos” in public places. So as we passed by one on the Halifax pier, I stopped to play with my new friends singing and dancing and body percussing and wasn’t that fun! A man asked for Loch Lomond and sang along with me, a little girl was listening so I went into variations of Itsy Bitsy Spider, we sang Twinkle Little Star to a toddler. I started to play some Bach and people seemed to be walking away, so I switched to the Maple Leaf Rag and that brought them back. After about a half-hour straight, we walked back to the car and as we passed some people on the way, they applauded. I tipped my hat and no money came in, but it was just a joke anyway.

So there you have it. Anytime, anyplace with anyone, I’m ready to bring some color and life to the occasion with the language that speaks more truly than words. And isn’t that a blessing?

The Homeless Problem

The homeless problem in San Francisco and other places is real and growing. It is grueling to live on the street, devastating to have no warm, safe, secure and dependable place to lay your head and debilitating to feel an outcast in society. All of that is real and needs to be dealt with. 

But we have another kind of homelessness we don’t talk about. Where do we house our extravagant energies? Our deep grief and red-hot outrage? Where do we find room for the Shakespearean dramas of our lives? A house where we can sing the operas of betrayal and bad fortune full throttle without the neighbors calling the police? 

A student in the course yesterday asked what to do with the kid who jumps into the middle of the circle uninvited and starts showing off his dance moves? The other kid who runs to the congas and starts playing wildly? How to honor those energies without squashing them, but at the same time, have a harmonious class that includes all the other kids politely following the agenda? What a great question!!

My answer is simple: Find the proper time and container for those energies, temper them in the fire of art and cool them into a useful hard steel with artistic craft . Promise the dancing kid a game in the next class where he’ll get to go in the middle and show his dance and then all will copy. And help him understand that then he’ll have to leave to make space for someone else. As the person asking the question wisely remarked, there’s a good chance that when he finally gets in the middle to show his motion, he’ll just stand there and do nothing. But at least you have the beginning of a conversation with the child. Frame it with the goals of “Blend in-Stand out- Know when to do each and for how long” (this part of a chapter in my upcoming book). The kid at the djembe will surely get a chance to play, but before she lets herself go with a solo, first she has to learn a coherent pattern. And when she does solo, any random kind of banging is the beginning of the discussion about music and communication and the need to shape articulate sentences that everyone can understand. 

My perfect example of this is the tradition at my school I started called “Wrong Words Day,” a chance at the Winter Holiday time for kids to sing all the naughty words to carols. But first they have to earn it by one week where not a single child sings a single wrong word when we first sing the songs. If they do, Wrong Words Day will be cancelled. When it comes, the delight on some children’s faces is a wonder to behold. All we had to do was create a home for their naughty impulses, find the proper container for their excesses. Richard Gill, a brilliant Orff teacher who did much to move the field forward, wrote an autobiography titled “Give Me Excess of It.” And he did. But always contained within the rigorous disciplines and demands of art. 

Those energies simply released are like wild bulls in china shops. Those energies systematically repressed to damage to the psyche and are vulnerable to later explosions. The third alternative is to house them in the discipline of art. It might also be sports or martial arts or mediation,  things that require forceful energy married to discipline, like nuclear explosions contained in a reactor to generate useful energy rather than cause wanton destruction. 

Talking about this, I said something like: “War is the failure to shape our extravagance by the proper vehicles of art.” I liked that sentence. It is also a failure of imagination, art’s twin sister. So when we see people wantonly throwing their power around, we see people who have failed the promise of their human possibility, whose artistic self is homeless, thrown out on the street looking for doorways to sleep in and scraps of food in the garbage. Not a pretty sight. 

So there’s a problem of our time, one which schools can easily attend to. Give a home to our deep need for lavish expression, feed our hunger for beauty, provide shelter for our angst and sadness next to our joy and ecstasy. It’s as simple as that. 

Off Road Excursion

After small groups created a dance to a Slovenian song, we sat down to discuss the details of how we arrived at a satisfying creative experience. The guiding principles and steps that are the very themes of my new book I’m still working on between 40 miles of biking or six hours of teaching a day. But just like my biking trip, we found ourselves leaving the main road of flat, tarmacked riding along with the crowd and working our way through the dirt-pathed back woods where too few venture to travel. 

In short, a question came up, how I don’t remember, as to how such a child-like, mean-spirited, ignorant human being could have risen to the top position of power in my country. And why is he still there after such proven incompetence and determination to feed our worst selves and topple the pillars of democracy? Something we’re all trying to understand.

Being a teacher talking with teachers, I focused on the failure of our educational system to create citizens capable of critical thought, caring, compassion and knowledge of history. Even though Canada has a different history from the U.S., there is much in common (treatment of native peoples) and much that is simply universal—power, privilege, money taking priority over people, justice, environmental economics. The conversation bounced back and forth between what is and never should have been (our past history) and what yet might be (our future possibility). Many inspiring stories were shared, like the boy who was bullied for wearing a pink T-shirt to school and some classmates bought 20 pink T-shirts and wore them in solidarity the next day. 

The conversation went on for one hour. I repeat. One hour! In most places I teach in the United States, people would be shuffling uncomfortably or getting angry that we weren’t talking about Monday’s lesson plan, thinking that they had come to the workshop just to get some “cool stuff” and why did they have to think about the greater dimensions of what we’re training our children to know, to think, to feel, to imagine. For this willingness and interest, I praise Canada! They seemed to understand that our detour is actually the main road of our profession, much more important than the 4 steps of teaching a cool folk dance (though that’s definitely an important part of the conversation). Some of the points from our courageous conversation:

Important lessons from history

Watch out for people in power who are:

• Purposely manufacturing fear to protect power and privilege. 

            • Purposely promoting ignorance to keep people uninformed. 

            • Serving money over morality.

• Duping people who they’re marginalizing to convince them they’re part of the winning team (The history of creating “whiteness.”)

             

Healing possibilities:

         • Tell the stories from all sides. Incude what the history books 

               and mainstream news leaves out.

• Change the narrative that excuses and normalizes atrocities and brutality.

• Create opportunities for proximity, getting to know the “others” by working 

     and playing together.

             • Humanize abstractions and euphemisms. Give a face and name to people 

               killed under the heading of “collateral damage”

            • Teach children the importance of speaking out, advocacy, being an ally.

            • Learn to connect history’s lessons to current times.

            • Look for and praise the beauty in each child so that they don’t feel a need 

              to insult, harm or hurt others. 

I’m writing this on the 4^thof July, when our fear-inducing “leader” is bringing out the tanks to celebrate, defining our independence as military power instead of visionary thinking, I’m ashamed that I had to go to Canada to have conversations like these. Of course, more and more of my fellow Americans, Orff teachers and beyond, are stepping up and at the same time that I’m critiquing us, I want to affirm and encourage the growing number of people waking up and speaking up and taking action. Of which perhaps the most important is to think about how to bring the children into this all. 

And now back to Step 3 of our Slovenian dance.