The Gateways Festival Orchestra: The Color of Concert Music

The event described below is part of a series of initiatives of the Anti-Racism Taskforce of the Northern Illinois Conference of the United Methodist Church.  See below for details. The color of concert music is white. Its gender: male.  So goes the popular perception.  To start a conversation on t.....continued>
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Beauty in the Time of Pandemic

Below is a 3:30-minute video of a small but momentous occasion.  My son Aaron—a wonderful musician and talented teacher and conductor—leading the Gage Middle School orchestra, Riverside, California.  He’s been teaching there for 20 years and thousands of students. When he first got to Ri.....continued>
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Pentecost Means No “Supremacies”

We celebrate the Church’s “birth” on Pentecost Sunday, the day the promised Holy Spirit arrived.  This year we celebrated on May 20th, a Sunday where at my church—one of the most diverse in America—its large Filipino group took charge of the service.  The VIDEO below sh.....continued>
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Ornette Coleman: Lessons in Freedom (excerpt)

This is the first of 16 short excerpts from my radio series Voices and Freedoms: A History of Jazz.  Based on my book of the same name, the series (and book) were produced at the University of Virginia in the nation’s Bicentennial Year.  The show, syndicated by the Intercollegiate Broadcasting.....continued>
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Ronald L. Fair: “We Can’t Breathe”

May 2020 Update:  Another “I-Can’t-Breathe” incident. I could not watch the video of the police killing of George Floyd in Minneapolis on May 26, 2020.  But I heard it while my wife described to me what she was seeing: a police man with his knee on the neck of an already-subdued bl.....continued>
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Songs by DAN GUZMAN: “CBS”

“CBS” (COOL BLACK SICKNESS) a song DAN GUZMAN co-wrote and performs with Brad Hoskins.  Fat Cats, Moses in the desert with the Great I Am, bleeding seas, and things tumbling from the sky.  Apocalyptic dread.  Cool grooves.  It not only sounds good—it&#.....continued>
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VIDEO: Sen. Dick Durbin visits Emmanuel House

Update:  IN APRIL 2018, EMMANUEL HOUSE MERGED WITH LONG-TIME PARTNER ORGANIZATION THE JOSEPH CORPORATION TO BECOME The Neighbor Project.  THIS INCREASED THE NUMBER OF FAMILIES SERVED FROM AROUND 25 AT THE TIME OF SENATOR DURBIN’S VISIT TO NOW, IN 2020, A NUMBER APPROACHING 3000.  WATCH A VIDEO.....continued>
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Ornette Coleman: Lessons in Freedom (excerpt)

Posted on March 17, 2015 by Richard Guzman

Voices and Freedoms: A History of JazzThis is the first of 16 short excerpts from my radio series Voices and Freedoms: A History of Jazz.  Based on my book of the same name, the series (and book) were produced at the University of Virginia in the nation’s Bicentennial Year.  The show, syndicated by the Intercollegiate Broadcasting System, ran for five years across the U.S. in the late 70’s/early 80’s, with Vassar being the first college to pick it up. It is even more relevant today than when it originally played.

♦  Go here to learn more about and BUY the book Voices and Freedoms.  We plan to re-release it as a pdf download and an e-book on this site.

♦  Go to the Radio Shows page and scroll down to the list of episodes from the 16-part Voices and Freedoms radio series.  Anyone can listen to the excerpts, but full shows will be made available only to those who buy the book in either form.

 

Coleman-Shadows2Below is an excerpt from Show #14.

The show is on ORNETTE COLEMAN, one of jazz’s great innovators.  The excerpt focuses, however, on Coleman’s great art and its ability to reach us emotionally.  Without that, innovation sometimes turns out to be no more than novelty.  From the late-50’s until today—Coleman won the Pulitzer Prize for music in 2007—Coleman has continued to challenge music orthodoxy and, most important, to create more and more beauty.  “It is Coleman’s particular genius,” said one music critic, “to create situations where beauty can happen.”  Ornette Coleman died June 11, 2015, less than three months after this posting.

The title Voices and Freedoms refers to the two themes central to my tracing of jazz history and the history that surrounded the music’s creation.  “Freedoms” follows the evolution of jazz form, from the relatively tight constraints of its beginnings into greater and greater freedom of form.  In this, Ornette Coleman may be jazz’s greatest influence on form.

As “Freedoms” follows the constant changes in forms, so “Voices” follows something that remains constant throughout these changes.  Voice.  The human voice, signifying the constant presence of the striving, surviving, overcoming human.  Jazz has always been obsessed with this voice, and Ornette Coleman’s voice remains one of jazz’s most distinctive and humanizing.

♦  Go to a list of Radio Shows.  Go to the Voices and Freedoms page.

♦  Go to the DIVERSITY TRAINING AND TEACHING main page.

Posted in Featured Posts, Jazz History, Music & Meaning, Music & Media Podcasts | Tagged , , , , | Leave a comment

All Things Ray

Posted on March 10, 2015 by Richard Guzman

Ray CharlesThis post serves as an index to all the items about Ray Charles on this site, especially the VIDEO SERIES “Me and Brother Ray” (see below).  I have been a professor of English for several decades now, so it may seem strange to say that an American jazz-blues-pop-and-rock-and-roll-singer has been the one who has influenced my career the most.  He has.  As a kid, just as I hit double-digit age, I discovered jazz and blues through Charles, which led me into issues of race, something that had already begun troubling me. My first book, Voices and Freedoms, was a history of jazz published during the nation’s Bicentennial and made into a 16-part radio series that played across the U.S. for five years.  Its specific take on the music included a lot about race, something I’m still proud of.

I started violin lessons at six, and though I eventually became good enough to become the concert meister of the Monterey Civic Youth Orchestra, music never made deep down sense to me until I heard Ray Charles’ “Georgia on My Mind.”  I had a jazz trio in my teens (and you can hear it here!). "The Love of Thy Children" by Richard R. GuzmanI’ve been a member of ASCAP (the American Society of Composers Authors and Publishers) since at least 1981, mainly on the strength of some compositions (one, “The Love of Thy Children,” pictured at left) which combined traditional white choral styles with gospel, blues, and jazz—my own small attempt to try combinations similar to Ray Charles’.  His combinations, of course, changed musical history.

Academically, my specialty became black, multicultural, and world literature, and to this day one of my bread-and-butter courses is the graduate course Race, Ethnicity, and the American Experience (see a list of courses and access some course materials Here).  One of my most recent books is Black Writing from Chicago.  I begin my introduction by referring to Hoyt W. Fuller, who compares the daring of Chicago writing to Ray Charles’ music: more blunt and aggressive, more raw and free-wheeling.

Ray Charles led, of course, a painful, tumultuous, often scandalous personal life, but he produced world-changing music, a music laced through and through with a profound combination of pain and joy.  I can trace almost all of my professional life back not just to my interest in his music, but the inspiration that music provided.  Only the writer James Baldwin comes close to Ray Charles’ influence on me, so there is (or will be) a lot on this site about Brother Ray.

♦ Links to the items below will go live when they become available.

♦  Go to the TEACHING DIVERSITY main page

Posted in Black Writers, Chicago Writing, Diversity & Multiculturalism, Music & Meaning | Tagged , , , | Leave a comment

All Things Baldwin

Posted on March 6, 2015 by Richard Guzman
James Baldwin sketch

Copy of a famous sketch of Baldwin given to me by one of my classes.

This post serves as an index for everything James Baldwin on this site.  Along with Ray Charles, James Baldwin has forever, it seems, guided me along my professional life as an English professor, and both have done at least as much for me as a whole person, emotionally and intellectually.  James Baldwin has been a mainstay in my courses for over 40 years, courses such as Black Literature, Multicultural Literature, Race- Ethnicity and the American Experience, and in my writing courses as well. His exploration of the construction and consequences of race are, I believe, the most profound, personal, and searing ever articulated. And he is still vitally with us not only in his writings but in recent films like I am Not Your Negro (Oscar nominated for Best Documentary) and If Beale Street Could Talk (3 Oscar nominations, with Regina King winning for Best Supporting Actress).  There’s also a streaming channel devoted entirely to him.

James Baldwin t-shirt from Barnes & Noble

A Baldwin t-shirt given to me by one of my classes.

His writings, though, anchor his legacy, and decades after their publication they still constitute the bedrock of the way so many of us think and talk seriously about race.  And when grappling with the stubborn, malignant persistence of racism, I—as well as a host of others—find myself thinking and saying over and over: “What would Baldwin say about this?” Or “If only we could understand our humanity the way Baldwin did, and move in directions to expand it the way he challenged us to.”  His deepest challenges, however, remain unmet.  I hope the thoughts I post to this site will help us understand him more deeply and move in the directions he pointed us to.

For a while it seemed I couldn’t write anything without citing Baldwin.  In “Miscegenation and Me,” I quote his heralding of a new world: “This world is white no longer, and it will never be white again.”  And he’s always in my thinking, so that even when I’m introducing Chicago literature in my book Black Writing from Chicago, for example, I refer to him, even though he’s a son of Harlem.  So does Carolyn Rodgers in her wonderful Foreword to my book.  So do my students, months, years later.

Rachel Louise Snyder, Inscription to What We've Lost Is Nothing“When you talked about Baldwin’s idea of racism and ‘the void,’ our heads exploded,” said teacher Brennan Lazzaretto recently.  And then there’s Rachel Louise Synder.  Now professor at American University and an NPR contributor, she has authored two wonderful books so far, Fugitive Denim: A Moving Story of People and Pants in the Borderless World of Global Trade, and the novel What We’ve Lost is Nothing, this last book so heavy with Baldwin references she just had to inscribe my copy the way she did.  More on her important works later.

She remembers a day in class long, long ago when I spentBaldwin-dangerous2 most of it, she says, turning over and over the meanings of a single Baldwin sentence.  It’s pictured at right.  I hope my thoughts will help us understand how Baldwin’s complex insights can change us into a people and a society that produce far fewer people with nothing to lose.

_______________________

♦ The following essays are (or will be) on this site.  Links go live when they become available.

♦ Go to a list of Black Writers on this site, and to the Teaching Diversity main page.

Posted in Black Writers, Diversity & Multiculturalism, Writing | Tagged , , , , , | Leave a comment