Racism's Ravages Revenged
July 18 2010

The ravages racism has wrought. The tragedies. The brutal waste. Civilisation in general. Music in particular.

Many suffered and died at the hands of intolerance.

Some, however, faced with the racists’ closed ‘no’, found portals of ‘yes’ in maligned outposts of music. They, with others, turned the outposts into desired destinations. Heroes, they left the racists to burn in their own fire pit of hatred, and merge ingloriously into a rising flame, setting alight the victims' remembrance.

The heroes I have in mind emerged at the intersection of classical music and jazz. The Pianobabbler knows this intersection, being classically trained, although he plays only jazz now.

Classical music and jazz. The fixed and the free. The devised and the improvised. White and Black.

Jazz today commands respect and enjoys renown. Deservedly. Until a generation ago, classical held it in sniffy disdain. Racism formed one pure stratum of the disdain. No Blacks allowed.

Marion Anderson and Paul Robeson stood in the victims’ front row of this intolerance, They endured, and established themselves as outstanding classical performers. Later generations brought forth Leontyne Price, André Watts, Jessye Norman, many others.

Not embarking on a history of bigotry towards African-American, I can safely generalize that these artists withstood and overcame slings and stresses other gifted musicians never had to contemplate.

But what of those who did not withstand and overcome? Those sensitive souls unable to survive hatred's bitter bite?

We shall never know many of them. Lost.

Some did survive, though, and thrived.

A happy twist of irony emerged from the unhappy truth: rejected, they made themselves the master builders of the jazz edifice that rose up over the years. They turned being turned away into showing the way for what music turned into.

Fats Waller. Art Tatum. Nina Simone. Herbie Nichols. All classically training. They could have made classical careers, had the doors not been closed.

The doors were closed.

Can you imagine? Art Tatum playing the Liszt B-minor Sonata? Nina Simone performing Schumann’s Frauenliebe und leben? What were we denied? What an altered world we would have known, if they had done so.

Yet what holes would punctuate the historical canvass if we did not have Waller’s Handful of Keys, or Nichols’ compositions. The dirt of intolerance stimulated pearls of music.

Today, jazz and classical live in greater harmony. Artists of colour no longer face the same intolerant obstacles. Some, like Wynton Marsalis and the transcendant Bobby McFerrin straddle both worlds. Problems remain, but many have faded away.

Racism served as the unwitting agent of Hegelian negation that cleared the way for some of the supreme invention in jazz. This does not excuse racism. On the contrary. It demonstrates that closed and small never triumph in the end.

Classical music's loss. Jazz's gain. But what benefits jazz, benefits music, which ultimately benefits classical. Part of the greatness of the artists of whom I've been speaking lies in their having contributed to the very institution that had slapped them aside.

We can only sympathize with, admire, thank, and celebrate these artists.

And we do.

The Pianobabbler has babbled.

The Pianobabbler is a RonDavisMusic production. The Pianobabbler's blog posts appear weekly at pianobabber.com. Please remember to leave your comments and thoughts below. Subscribe to the RSS feed. And subscribe to RonDavisNews by clicking on the link, above right. And follow us on Twitter.

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