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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The Beauty of the Lord

Posted on May 1, 2023 by Richard Guzman

Ed Fontaine, daughter Christina, and me.

In late April this year, Jubilate—a choral group co-sponsored by University Baptist Church and the University of Virginia, Charlottesville—celebrated its 50th Anniversary.  Started in 1973 by Carl Beard, then music minister at UniBap, it first drew 12 auditioned University students, then 28 the next year, until reaching 44 in its third year, a number it has maintained for most of its 50 years.  During the 50th Anniversary 149 people made up the alumni choir!

In 1974 I showed up at the University to begin a PhD program, started attending University Baptist and began writing for and singing in their marvelous Sanctuary Choir.  I wrote for Jubilate, too.

I left the University in 1977, PhD in hand, taking a position at North Central College in Naperville, IL. But I was devastated to have to leave the area. I hoped for a position, any position, at Uva. Before leaving I took my first born, Rick, just weeks old, up on Sky Line Drive, overlooking the Shenandoah Valley and the eastern ridges of the Blue Ridge Mountains. He could just barely hold his head up, but I kept saying to him, Remember—You come from here—You come from here.  We traveled back to Charlottesville every chance we got, even spending an entire summer there around 1980, I think, when I accepted an NEH Fellowship there.

The times get fuzzy, but around 1979, when we were there for another visit, Carl Beard called me in to meet a new member of Jubilate, Ed Fontaine.  “Why don’t you two jam a little,” he said.  I sat at a piano in the church’s basement.  “It was right about there,” said Ed when we met again this year at the 50th Anniversary. “You were playing something that reminded me of some Stevie Wonder song, so I fell right in singing some Wonder-like words and melody.”  Ed was 19.  He had (and still has) a magnificent tenor voice, full of range and texture.  He can sing with grit and also float effortlessly, light and high. Afterwards, Carl said, “You think you could write a piece featuring Ed?”  I said, Why not try.

The following Sunday I was in church and one of the hymns was “For the Beauty of the Earth.”  It struck a chord in me.  The “Beauty of the Earth” soon became “The Beauty of the Lord” in my mind, and before long “The Beauty of the Lord” was born.  That’s what the Audio/Video below is: Ed Fountain, backed by Jubilate, singing a song I wrote for him. “What a gift you gave me,” he says every time we meet, and now his daughter Christina, also a Jubilate alum, says something similar.  The first time we met, she just gave me the biggest hug after her Dad said, “This is the man who wrote ‘The Beauty of the Lord.’”

It’s not a simple piece. “It’s a good thing your music is so good,” said Gary Walton, part of the Jubilate group that first did the piece, “because it’s hard.”  It also uses a verse from Julia Ward Howe’s “Battle Hymn of the Republic.” “That took guts,” said church friend Howard Newland.  There’s talk of Ed and his daughter doing the piece together for the 55th Anniversary concert.

Sometimes I wonder why I stay in the church, though the first answer is always obvious: it’s the people. They become friends. We deepen our friendship as we work together.  I have directed our church’s homeless shelter program for around 20 years now, and the others who volunteer with me have become close friends.  Yet as I work as a consultant on anti-racism issues for the Northern Illinois Conference of the United Methodist Church, I learn more and more about the church’s complicity in condoning and building racist structures and policies.  It’s taken the Pope till this year to renounce the Doctrine of Discovery, for example, the result of Papal Bulls in the late 1400’s that gave license for the Christian west to kill, enslave, and take land from indigenous peoples all over the world.

Still, I think of the friends I have and how the church provides means to work together to serve the poor and to lift up the message of anti-racism.   Most of all, however, I think it finally comes down to the beauty of Jesus, the Beauty of this Lord.  We fail this Lord mightily, we distort his meaning so much, but his beauty continues to call us and embrace us.

♦ Go to the GuzMusic section of this site for more music by me and the family.

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The Green Book vs. The Green Book

Posted on April 19, 2023 by Richard Guzman

In late March 2023 a group from churches in the Northern Illinois Conference of the United Methodist Church visited the Illinois Holocaust Museum to see an exhibit called The Negro Motorist Green Book and afterwards to have a discussion on Blacks in film, and, in particular, whether The Green Book movie—which won 2019’s Best Picture Oscar—did justice to the exhibit they had just seen.  Not really.  In fact, there was almost no relationship at all.

The 15-minute VIDEO below is a slightly expanded version of a talk I gave after the exhibit.  It set a framework for the audience and several panelists who shared their perspectives. I briefly discussed The Green Book movie in “Our ‘Green Book’ Fantasy, Plus Other Oscar Winners That Don’t Hold Up.” There I grouped it with Driving Miss Daisy and Crash, two other Oscar-winning films where race featured prominently.  At the Museum I got to put it in a larger context of films which present distorted images of Blacks, Black life and American history.

I begin by talking about the film which founded modern American cinema: Birth of a Nation.  In a country where racism is often spoken about as its “original sin,” it’s profoundly significant that this film is often considered the most racist ever made.  But in a different way so is Gone with the Wind, which I speak about next, and also many of the films starring one of America’s sweetest sweethearts, Shirley Temple. I speak especially of one of her frequent co-stars, Steppin Fetchit, whose exaggerated portrayal of a Black servant was probably an underhanded way—a “signifying” way—of parodying what Americans thought blackness was in the first place.

The exhibit the Holocaust Museum of Illinois hosted was a traveling Smithsonian exhibit on The Negro Motorist Green Book.  The book was the brainchild of New York mailman Victor Hugo Green.  It was an indispensable guide helping Black Americans navigate the often unfriendly, even violent and deadly, roads of our country.  It told Blacks where they could stop for gas, for food, for rest, which were often few and far between. But it’s been pointed out that in the movie The Green Book no black hands ever even touch The Negro Motorist Green Book.  It’s a mere prop, resulting in yet another film where Black life is seen through white eyes, here the eyes of chauffeur Tony Lip, who has signed on to drive black musician Dr. Don Shirley around on his concert tours.  It’s Viggo Mortensen’s film, and Mahershala Ali, who plays Don Shirley, wins the Oscar for best supporting actor.

The Green Book isn’t as thoroughly a “white savior” film as The Blind Side, or The Help, or Dances with Wolves.  There’s more of an exchange between the Tony Lip and Don Shirley characters. But it is on the white savior film spectrum, and Tony Lip (Viggo Mortensen’s character) does plenty of saving, including saving Don Shirley from being so separate from his own people. It’s almost as if Tony is blacker than Don Shirley is!  And in the end Tony even saves Don Shirley from spending Thanksgiving alone. Talk about a film feeding us comfort food.

I’m not very interested in saying a movie should have done this or that.  It is what it is.  I’m more interested in the effects it has on its audiences.  White savior films are among the most popular films of their day.  They feed us the comforting thought that whiteness is still central.  More than that, they comfort us by reducing racism to the level of the merely personal.  If only we could become friends like Tony and Don.  That solves it.  But it doesn’t.  It doesn’t touch the large historical, systemic aspects that keep racism alive and well in virtually ever aspect of our lives, including just trying to take your family on a simple, safe road trip.

♦ Go to the Diversity Training and Teaching page, and to the Lead Post on the anti-racism workshop “Becoming the Beloved Community,” for which I have been the main presenter. This article is also cross listed there.

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Five Years and a National Award

Posted on April 4, 2023 by Richard Guzman

In late March 2023 Rick Guzman, executive director of The Neighbor Project, received the Emerging Leader Award from the National NeighborWorks Association in a ceremony in Washington D.C.  The 6:30 video below shows the announcing of this award, Rick’s acceptance, and Brian Schrader’s nomination video.  Schrader is The Neighbor Project’s board chair.

It’s been five years since The Neighbor Project was formed on April 1, 2018 through the merger of Joseph Corporation and Emmanuel House (read the founding story here). In that timespan, it’s gone from 7 employees to 20, partnered with the City of Aurora to co-launch Illinois’ first Financial Empowerment Center, and is equipping record numbers of neighbors to achieve financial well-being, build wealth, and become the primary drivers of growth in their neighborhoods.

On top of that NeighborWorks America* has issued two successive “Exemplary” ratings to The Neighbor Project—making the organization one of the few to ever move from the lowest national rating (its pre-merger rating was “Vulnerable”) to the highest possible rating in just over three years.

In his acceptance speech Guzman thanked his board of directors at The Neighbor Project, his family, and his “amazing, talented, diverse” staff. “No one person moves an organization from ‘vulnerable’ to ‘exemplary,’” he said.  In the nomination video that followed his speech, board chair Bryan Schrader noted that Rick would be the first to give credit to his staff, but it’s his great leadership and guidance that also deserves praise.  Schrader noted Rick’s leadership in creating the Financial Empowerment Center and his commitment to diversity, equity, and inclusion.  In the beginning the board was super-majority white male. Now it’s nearly 50/50, the staff is 80% minority, 60% bilingual, and 50% female.  The Neighbor Project now also has a chief equity officer at the COO level to which all programs report.

Rick ended his acceptance speech by returning to the ideas he first articulated at the 2021 Neighbor Project gala.  There he urged us to “Flip the Hero Script,” positioning the people The Neighbor Project helps as the real heroes and the real drivers of community regeneration.

* The Neighbor Project (TNP) is a chartered member of NeighborWorks America, which is a Congressionally chartered Intermediary that provides critical training, funding AND organizational audits/assessments for TNP and nearly 250 similar organizations in all 50 states, plus D.C. and Puerto Rico.  Go Here for news and history of The Neighbor Project and its relationship to Emmanuel House and Bryan House. The latter is where it all began: a living memorial to Bryan Emmanuel Guzman started by Rick and Desiree Guzman.

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