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 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.
Below 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.
Race and Business Branding
The “Race Together” campaign caused immediate, often vituperative, backlash. I have often said that Americans would rather talk about anything but race—talk constructively, I mean—so the backlash was surprising in no way whatever.
I will be expanding this post in the coming weeks, but wanted to get the news out as soon as I heard, which was on this evening’s Nightly Business Report. Go HERE to see the broadcast for today, March 18, 2015. The report segment, which approaches it from the perspective of business and business branding, starts at 19:01 into this video of the entire show. The branding expert interviewed thinks that, despite all the furor, it will make good business and brand sense in the future. And why not a business leading the way in discussing something so important that needs discussing? he asks. Most every other body has failed, especially as it has tried to start a broad, national discussion. That President Obama has failed to lead us into such a discussion is perhaps my biggest disappointment in his presidency.
One of the main reasons people don’t want to talk at all is that most still hold to the belief that the U.S. is colorblind, and that talking about race will only make the situation worse. When I led in the writing of a diversity plan for Naperville schools in District 203 (see that plan Here), people battered me with these beliefs constantly.
Meanwhile, as the chart below shows, Starbucks stores are densest in white communities. That may be ironic, but it may also make Starbucks the most appropriate company to take up this important cause. The people who battered me with their faith in colorblindness weren’t generally people of color, though a growing segment of these also increasing lean towards the belief that if we don’t talk about race it will just fix itself and go quietly away.
♦ Go to the TEACHING DIVERSITY main page.