Indigenous Music
Hentoff, Nat
INDIGENOUS MUSIC Nat Hentoff Depriving Kids of Their Heritage Jazz: An American Idiom" was the topic of a four-day session held in Denver recently by the Colorado Endowment for the Humanities. I...
...How many American schoolchildren know that...
...And there are any number of jazz combos that would welcome the work as well as the chance to help create what any music most needs—future audiences...
...One way to begin to end the cultural deprivation of America's young is to adapt a technique that New York's Lincoln Center has developed for classical music...
...But the toughest odds, as in all high art, were those against a newcomer trying to break through, getting his name to mean something to the giants: Coleman Hawkins, Roy Eldridge, Charlie Parker...
...No musical terminology is involved...
...I began by recalling the memorial services in a New York church last fall for drummer Jonathan David Samuel Jones, "the man who played like the wind" and, in his years with Count Basie, helped put wheels on the jazz beat (as Whitney Bal-liett once said...
...He had been everywhere at all hours, and he had heard everybody at all hours...
...I too have an obsession...
...Jo was a pervasively influential shaper of the music...
...There isn't a social-studies class in any high school that wouldn't remember, for a long time, a visit from Dizzy Gillespie, Cecil Taylor, Max Roach, John Lewis, et al...
...There are myriad tales of all-night jousts and tourneys as young jazzmen challenged bruising patriarchs...
...Yet Ellington, Jones, Parker, and so many others are classic American heroes...
...But so far, neither school systems nor any of the art complexes around the country have shown any interest...
...I remembered Art Blakey saying, the day after Charlie Parker died, "I wonder how many black kids even know who Bird was...
...There is much to learn from them, and not only from their music...
...They are highly skilled performers and knowledgeable about composition...
...The accounts rival the legends of Camelot...
...For decades, just being black on the road could lead to the end of the road for a jazzman who looked too uppity to a sheriffs deputy...
...But they are not asked to come...
...He realized every democratic ideal in the quality of his music...
...I was asked to come and talk about anything that was on my mind...
...After classroom teachers have been through these sessions with a master teacher, a musical ensemble is sent to each of the schools...
...But none exists...
...As for colleges, some have jazz musicians-in-residence, but they are confined to the music departments...
...And the jazz survivors have a lot to teach about what they have seen as sharply observant, constant travelers—outsiders see more—throughout this country and the world...
...I watched one such session, dealing with Bartok's "Sonata for Two Pianos and Percussion...
...Marian McPartland, rehearsing a large number of Washington schoolkids for a tribute to Duke Ellington a few years ago, asked how many knew who Duke was...
...What is so remarkable, however, is that Negroes invented a form based on freedom, a great art form...
...And after the ensemble leaves, the teachers and the students check each other out as to what went down...
...Blakey knew how many...
...After an hour, the teachers, who had never heard the piece before, were so excited by how much they had learned about how it all worked that they were eager to get back to their schools and introduce their students to this magical new world...
...The teachers, now hip to the sounds and structures, tell the kids what's coming and what to listen for...
...Musicians, most of them young, are selected and designated master teachers...
...In the February issue of Ebony, Wyn-ton Marsalis, equally compelling on jazz and classical trumpet, has an article on "Why We Must Preserve Our Jazz Heritage...
...They teach these teachers how to hear music in ways they can then pass on to the kids in their classes...
...And Jo, moreover, was the preeminent oral historian of the music...
...Jazz is still not considered "serious" music, "art" music...
...Just a few had heard of the most original composer in the entire history of American music, a composer who was also a penetratingly evocative historian of the black experience in this land: "Black, Brown, and Beige," "Deep South Suite," "Sepia Panorama," "Harlem Air Shaft," "Portrait of Bert Williams," "Portrait of the Lion," "Harlem," and scores more...
...Maybe one in a thousand, even in hip New York...
...They aren't "serious" enough to participate in seminars on sociology and American history...
...The master teachers, one of whom is my daughter, are able, in lay language, to illuminate any work in such a way that listeners can practically see as well as hear its shapes and how they fit together...
...And if they don't, what will their children know...
...It is considered black entertainment music, and therefore is not for the classroom...
...Listening to musicians speak of him, as they also added their own histories to the deep river of jazz memories, I wondered how many people going past the church that night had ever heard the name of Jo Jones...
...It ought to be available in all schools...
...That's like asking the Ancient Mariner to come in off the street and carry the albatross with him onto the dais...
...The same recognition of deep human values that you hear in Beethoven," Marsalis wrote, "you hear in Louis Armstrong...
...From those ideals turned into sound and from our experience in this country with limitations wrongly imposed, Negroes have been more concerned with freedom and the quality it can provide than any other group in this country...
...The master teachers are sent out to work with teachers in public schools, in both the city and the suburbs...
...There is no reason, of course, why a jazz version of this master-teacher approach can't also expand the knowledge and pleasure of schoolteachers and students...
...Just a few...
...As Max Roach has said, "For every three beats a drummer plays, he owes Jo five...
...There is more than enough in Ellington's music and in corollary readings in books and essays on black history for an all-year high-school course...
...Like heroes everywhere, they have survived against great odds...
Vol. 50 • May 1986 • No. 5
