White History
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The jazz program at the Hartt School was managed by saxophone legend Jackie Mclean. There was a heavy political aspect to the program. For example, Howard Zinn’s “People’s History of the United States” was the textbook for our Jazz History course. It is an often shocking attempt to capture the perspective of slaves, indentured servants, women and other marginalized people whose stories are regularly ignored in what Jackie called “white history” classes. It is not a book about music.
Jackie’s worldview centered on Africa, not Europe, Egypt, not Greece, Imhotep, not Aristotle. In a bold statement of his view, the official name of the department was African-American Musical Studies.
“White people been tryin’ to move Egypt out of Africa since the beginning,” he would say.
I recall feeling confused and wanting to ask whether the Egyptians were black. I had always assumed that they more like arabs. Was that because I was brainwashed?
I didn’t ask though.
By that time I was no stranger to the idea that white people were the source of all the evil in the universe. I had already read a bunch of articles by Zinn during my prior year at Interlochen. The teacher there was a white Republican but his whole thing was about viewing history from multiple perspectives, which for him meant including a far-left perspective. This was in addition to the time I had already spent researching the spiritual poverty of white civilization in the New Age section.
I didn’t know if it was because of the guns or the money or the drugs or the disease or the weird obsession with writing everything down, or the insane urge to project boxy Cartesian gridlines all over everything. I couldn’t see what the real problem was but I could forgive the ones who continued to believe that all of the bad stuff came from white people. Still, they were wrong.
I could now recognize that there was more to capitalism than meets the eye. The hedge fund crisis had worked itself out and now everyone was getting rich again. The stock market was going up and up and up. One time, the trumpet player in my quintet arrived a few minutes late for practice with the excuse that he had just made $5,000 daytrading tech stocks.
Whatever was wrong with our civilization before, whatever had caused slavery and imperialism and war and racism; it appeared to have been fixed. None of that stuff was going to happen again in my lifetime, and I was going to make the most of my life by being the best musician I could be.
For Jackie though, race and politics were fundamental to his way of thinking about music. Jazz wasn’t just one way of operating a musical instrument. It was a language rooted in a culture and a history. You couldn’t separate the music from the historical struggle from which it came.
This was a full turn from my Jazz History class at Interlochen which was an exhaustive study of the recordings, almost but not completely free of politics. My initial reaction to Jackie was that he was a product of history rather than a teacher of it.
I had always viewed music from a more abstract, logical perspective. I wanted there to be axioms and rules; fundamentals that somehow went beyond culture. In fact, the desire to escape from this culture without actually sacrificing its benefits was my original motivation to be a musician. I was in the jazz program specifically because I believed that improvised music required a greater musical ability than read music, and that jazz was the highest form of improvised music. It really had nothing to do with wanting to engage deeply with black history or culture.
Jackie’s system did have fundamentals, they just weren’t written down in some big book of rules. It was similar to the way that all the rules of the English language are not formally documented. They had to be learned through repetition and immersion, just like natural language.
Imhotep was pretty impressive. According to Wikipedia, “He is considered by some to be the earliest known architect, engineer, and physician in history” and “He was the author of a medical treatise remarkable for being devoid of magical thinking.” Jackie described him as a visionary map-maker who created maps of the human body as well as the stars and the cities of ancient Egypt. Something about that description really captured my attention.
It was as if Socrates and Plato had moved beyond incessant wordy debate and actually cured real disease and built real things. That’s what Imhotep was like. He was worth learning about. And Jackie was right. I had never heard his name in any of my white history classes.
Still, I thought he could be right about the past and wrong about the future. The cold war and the ’60s was over. Capitalism was the future and the future was looking bright. My biggest fear was missing out.
It would ultimately take another white person to convince me, once again, that our white culture was truly evil. His name was Noam Chomsky.
A Marxist activist invited by Jackie gave me one of his books.
