Final Address to the Institute

[I thought I might open with a few improvisational remarks before moving on to the memorized portion of my speech. It shouldn’t add more than eight or nine minutes. Kidding! Kidding!]

I didn’t buy my first jazz recording until I was eighteen years old, which is rather late considering Louis Armstrong was playing the cornet before his thirteenth birthday and Mary Lou Williams gave her first piano performance at age six. Then again, Red Holloway is just hitting his peak at 80, so maybe there’s still time. I was a freshman in college when I first got a copy of Miles Davis’ Kind of Blue. I kept it, alphabetically ordered, between a copy of The Clash’s London Calling and the Dead Milkmen’s Beelzebubba (“One Saturday I took a walk to Zipperhead/ I met a girl there and she almost knocked me dead”). Miles was, needless to say, like nothing I had ever heard before. In any case, I remember playing it for the first time in my dorm room and hearing a piano then bass then finally a blast of horn. Then it went on. And on. For more than nine minutes. It had a beat, a rhythm I could almost feel, but otherwise it was completely foreign. I kept waiting for words that would never come. In short, it both blew my mind and confused the hell out of me. Well, in the past four weeks, with the benefit of engaging and insightful speakers and carefully chosen reading selections, I’ve replaced much of my confusion with practical knowledge, while still occasionally having my mind blown.


One of the most important outcomes of this seminar is that it not only helped me appreciate jazz in particular or music in general in a much richer way—though it has—but that it has genuinely changed the way I look at the complexities of American society. Yes, it is true that I didn’t know what a “blue note” was before or what an “A-A-B-A” song structure was, nor did I know the colorful history of Stalebread Lacoume and his Razzy Tazzy Spasm band or who played drums in Ellington’s rhythm section (for the record, that would be Sonny Greer). And while knowing these things has no doubt enriched my enjoyment of music—and no doubt improved my dinner conversations—they have not, in and of themselves, made me a better teacher. What has done that, and what I will take a way from St. Louis, is an understanding of how jazz music, this wonderful sound born out of New Orleans, incubated in Chicago, dispersed through Kansas City’s territorial bands, matured in New York City, and given to the rest of the world, offers a unique lens in which we can study the cultural transformations of the 20th century and the American character. Music, literature, visual art, dance, economics, politics, sociology, history, these are not separate disciplines in everyday life and should not be taught as such. This is a fact that seemed self-evident to me before, but there is a difference between an intellectual tenet and deeply felt truth. This is the stuff, like a Charlie Parker solo, that when finally understood, blows minds.


If time permits, I would like to address one specific area that appeals directly to my English classroom. Professor Herman Beavers from the University of Pennsylvania, challenged us in a few particular areas. First, he stressed a point made in Guthrie Ramsay’s Race Matters: Music cannot be separated from the conditions that created it. I often find myself asked to teach literature to my seniors in a method called New Criticism, which advocates close reading of texts independent of any background information; in a sense, we are to isolate the words on the page from external influences such as race, class, and gender. This seminar has seriously called into question much of this thinking. In addition, I could cite some of the techniques he suggested for a discussion of time, setting, characterization, space, and identity, but I think it would be more fitting to end with another of Dr. Beaver’s challenges: “Sustain this moment.” Let us not be tourists here, but, as he urged, occupants. And let us take that challenge with us back to home, [improvisational riff ] back to our students.


So, to steal Columbia University professor Dr. Bob O’Meally’s paraphrase of Mark Twain: I apologize. If I had more time, it would have been shorter.