Wynton: Thank you very much. Thank you, Senator Harkin. Your support of the arts is a gift to our
country, and I’m honored that you and Mrs. Harkin have come here tonight. I’d also like to thank Bob Lynch and everyone
at Americans for the Arts. Your advocacy keeps us encouraged and reinforces
the adage that there is strength and power in numbers. The annual Nancy Hanks lecture is one of the
most significant events on the national cultural-policy calendar, so I am deeply honored and humbled
to have this opportunity to talk this year. This is entitled “The Ballad of American
Arts.” Before we sang, we spoke. Before we danced, we walked. Before we wrote, we told stories. Before we told stories, we lived. Those songs, dances, writings allow us to
speak to one another across generations. They gave us an understanding of our commonality
long before that DNA told us we are all part of one glorious procession. At any point on the timeline of human history,
there are tales to be told of love and loss, glory and shame, profundity and even profound
stupidity; tales that deserve retelling, embellishing, and, if need be, inventing from whole cloth. This is our story. This is our song. If well sung, it tells us who we are and where
we belong. Well, these people were all kinds of people
from everywhere. Some lived in cities, some on farms. Educated, ignorant, religious, sacrilegious,
enslaved and not, but even the unenslaved were oppressed, and they all wanted to be
free, and the frontier represented freedom. Well, they sang songs and told stories, and
what was in those stories was their exploits, their humor, and their aspirations. Some people sang and spoke with such depth
that just listening and watching took you to the frontier of your own soul, picked you
up, made you much more alive. [Band plays “Yankee Doodle”] But this liberty was not free. Patrick Henry said, “Give me liberty, or
give me death.” Many experienced death in the pursuit of liberty,
and suddenly, all types of people appeared together, geniuses, a thing never seen again:
Virginian Thomas Jefferson; high-minded New Yorker Alexander Hamilton; Bostonian-turned-Philadelphian
Ben Franklin, in the twilight of his brilliance the living embodiment of downhome sophistication. Men arguing with epic intensity of money and
trade and the rights of states and money and taxes and political power and money and slavery
and religion and money and just about everything you knew or had ever heard of. Oh, well, there was a lot of knowledge in
that group and a lot of memory and all that comes with knowledge and memory. I’m talking about pride, arrogance, stubbornness,
but don’t let those wigs fool you. These men possessed the timeless wisdom and
the willingness to act together. You see, somewhere along the way, they realized
that their freedom was linked to other people’s freedom, and with the art of the pen, they
crafted the most flexible and poetic political document in history, a sterling example of
group improvisation on a grand, human theme, that theme very basic: how in the world can
I be me without keeping you from being you? That constitution, the Bill of Rights…well,
it taught us how to negotiate our differences the same way a good dance band adjusts to
find the right tempo for each different room of dancers. To be effective, our Founding Fathers had
to create a living document that could find the right tempo across the ages, and when
the ink dried on the very last signature, it was the Constitution that told us how to
be, but it was left to the American arts to tell you who to be, and the who always determines
the how. That’s why this constitution could be amended. Oh, yes, this freedom had a fine political
frame, but it was in need of a cultural engine. This new American way needed homegrown arts
to make us into one people, teach us who we are. It’s still revolutionary: the freedom to
choose the life of your dreaming, to put yourself in the situation you wanted to be in or should
be in. Man, this liberty is some serious stuff because
once you turn freedom loose, there’s no telling where it might go. It showed up suddenly in Minton’s Playhouse
in 1940, ’41, up in Harlem. Geniuses all together, a thing never seen
again. Charlie “Yardbird” Parker, Kansas City,
the living embodiment of downhome sophistication and cool; John “Dizzy” Gillespie from
Cheraw, South Carolina, full of rhythmic fire and intellectual curiosity; I’m talking
about Thelonious Monk from Rocky Mount, North Carolina, mathematician of music and master
of thematic improvisation. Right there were all kinds of knowledge and
memory and all the self-absorption that comes with those attributes. These men were furiously discussing American
fundamentals through a musical style called bebop, and somewhere along the way, they answered
questions about individual freedoms and collective responsibilities in the language of swing. When all was said and done, they did nothing
less than create the new school of American virtuosity. It was for real. It rose from the bowels of our caste system
to demonstrate with sheer brilliance that who a person is always more definitive than
what a person is. Well, there’s Bird and Dizzy and Monk creating
a community of people in service of American objectives detailed by Jefferson, Madison,
and Adams more than 150 years earlier. The urgency and speed of their music declared
“Now is the time.” [Band plays “Now’s the Time”] The greatest artists play for history. Such is their passion, discipline, insight,
and belief. Ben Franklin so believed in the American experiment
that upon his death in 1790, he bequeathed £1,000 to be held in trust for Philadelphia
and Boston, and that trust was to be expended over 200 years. Now, a financial inheritance can be accurately
assessed in dollars, but I want you to tell me what is the value of an artistic heritage? Who calculates the value of “Amazing Grace”
or “Yankee Doodle” or “Go Down Moses”? Oh, those spirituals were the first body of
identifiable, purely American musical art. It was all kinds of people from all over made
one through tragedy. Tragedy aside, people still played drums in
Congo Square in New Orleans, and all kinds of people danced to this music because those
drums reminded people of who they were, and what they played told folks “Hey, this is
a new land.” These people knew to mind the drums because
those drums are memory, and they carry meaning. Bostonian Ralph Waldo Emerson told you about
the power of individuality. New Yorker Thelonious Monk had told you “A
genius is he who is most himself.” John Henry was being himself when he said,
“A man is a natural man, and before I let that steam drill beat me down, I’ll fall
dead with my hammer in my hand. I’ll fall dead with my hammer in my hand.” That’s what artists all over America have
thought when extracting the guts of the American soul for those essences that make us one,
that awaken us to who we are. I’m telling you that Edgar Allan Poe sang
the blues before the blues were even born, and Harriet Beecher Stowe wrote Uncle Tom’s
Cabin, and a lot was in it and a lot wasn’t in it, but things are never important for
what they aren’t, especially in art. That book told people what the Constitution
knew: slaves were people, and no matter how much it was mocked, it really wasn’t funny. That book made people aware, but oh those
stubborn spirituals. Those spirituals were Asian, they were Irish,
African, so many things. Those spirituals told you every man was one
man way before the DNA told you that. Slaves reaching across time to connect the
Old Testament and the New, and Moses and freedom, and Jesus and freedom, and made it all be
right now… They couldn’t even read. Couldn’t read, but they knew. I’m telling you, these songs brought people
together because singing gives a community purpose, and they put everything in those
songs, and that music made us believe, and it called us home. Oh yes, people were in chains in the land
of freedom but would soon be free. [Sings] Joshua fit the battle of Jericho,
Jericho, Jericho; Joshua fit the battle of Jericho, and the walls came a-tumbling down. Every one of us here tonight knows these songs. You didn’t say, “What was that?” when
I started singing it. Count Basie’s Kansas City band was the greatest
community organization to ever leave a city. They swang and stomped the blues from Billingham,
Washington, to Fort Lauderdale, Florida, and his two greatest bands were called New and
Old Testament. There’s Lester Young holding his Old Testament
saxophone on a 90-degree angle with a leaning porkpie hat echoing Ralph Waldo Emerson’s
“Self-Reliance” talking about “You got to play your own song if you want to join
the throng, baby.” He poured totally original lyricism into song
after song, and all over the country, people argued about life and love and loss and freedom
and God and who they were or who they wanted to be or who they wanted their kids to be. Here we are fighting each other over freedom,
but we were fighting each other to some good music. There’s no two armies on earth ever had
better fight songs, and ironically, the music drummed out in Congo Square in New Orleans
was six and four together. Let’s see what that sounds like. [Drummer plays beat on high hat] One, two,
three, four, one, two, three…one two three four five six, one two three four five six,
one two three four five six, one two three four five six, one two three four five… You’ve got to watch that six and that four. Here’s something deeper than that. The South’s theme “Dixie” is in four,
and the North’s “Battle Hymn of the Republic” is in six. You know what I’m talking about. “I wish I was in the land of cotton; old
times dar am not forgotten; look away, look away, look away, Dixieland.” Let’s hear that four. [Band plays “Dixie”] Two, three, four. One, two, three, four. One, two, three, four. One, two, three, four. It hurts me to hear it. [Laughter] Man: Hurts me to play. Wynton: But we all still know it. “The Battle Hymn of the Republic” in six
becomes Philip Sousa’s “Washington Post” march, which becomes the New Orleans parade
anthem “Didn’t He Ramble,” which ends up being the Mickey Mouse theme. Let’s see. [Band plays “The Battle Hymn of the Republic,”
“Washington Post,” “Didn’t He Ramble,” and the Mickey Mouse theme] I’m trying to
tell you all this stuff was connected before the DNA told you. When they finished cursing, blaming, and killing
each other, they realized “Hey, we’re still on this land, and we’re still together,”
and we marched in the streets to the tune of “We Shall Overcome” and “Ain’t
Gonna Let Nobody Turn Us Around,” and Mahalia Jackson sang spirituals and songs that sounded
like angels with an approach influenced by the most devilish blues singer of them all,
the Empress Bessie Smith. Those songs they sang and the way they sang
them…well, they were all you knew. Those songs were all you needed to know and
all that you would ever need to know. Martin Luther King was in jail in Birmingham
living Henry David Thoreau’s treatise on civil disobedience: “Under a government
which imprisons any unjustly, the true place for a just man is also in prison.” Well, King was using the Constitution and
the powerful American art of negotiation to pursue freedom while Louis Armstrong told
President Eisenhower and the nation they’d been breaking the Constitution down there
in the South for years. This constitution is something, and Dr. King
and Louis were not alone. Americans of all stripes joined the struggle
and the people at last became free legally. I’m trying to tell you, this liberty was
serious stuff. Brother killed brother over it. Churches were bombed and kids killed. John Coltrane, with his healing tenor saxophone,
brought us together and reminded us of who we are at our best when he recorded “Alabama.” [Band plays “Alabama”] Yes, once you turned this freedom loose, it
could go anywhere, and the people used their freedom to buy entertainment. They sat to watch burlesque and a vulgar blackface
imitation of darkies and coons, and P.T. Barnum said a sucker was born every minute,
and those drums were still beating in Congo Square, but nobody was minding them. [Band plays] Some Americans hated everything homegrown
and thought that everything from Europe was cultured and everything American just had
to be unsophisticated. Ask Cole Porter why the Broadway musical was
not sophisticated enough to be art. Ask cornetist Bix Beiderbecke, lyric hero
of the Jazz Age, why his bourgeois Iowa family disowned him for playing jazz. But people still sang and danced, and they
wrote and nurtured our arts, though it was underappreciated and thought to reek of snobbery
and upper-class airs. Emily Dickinson stayed home and focused on
the everlasting to sweeten the bitterness of being barely published, and nobody read
Melville—they still don’t—and few respected Poe, but this art, in all its forms, speaks
across time. It calls us home. Even now tonight, it’s calling us home. By the time the first of Franklin’s 1790
money was given to Philadelphia and Boston, some very proud musicians were marching in
the streets of New Orleans inventing a new form of American music. It brought together marches and minstrelsy,
light opera and society dances, Catholics and the sanctified church, and nasty whorehouse
songs and spirituals, too. It sat all of them right down in the same
room with Mardi Gras revelry to hear that same sermon again about freedom and one person
and balance with every person, except now they weren’t talking, they were playing. King Buddy Bolden led the way with his cornet. That music was syncopated, so people danced;
and it was the blues, so people danced with feeling; and it was jazz, so they danced with
feeling and accuracy; and it was improvised, so they
danced with feeling, accuracy, and abandon. [Band plays “Buddy Bolden’s Blues”] Many people called it the devil’s music,
and jazz and the blues were reviled by the Black church and eschewed by the education
system. Yeah, the American artist has always been
in a type of limbo squeezed between three unsatisfied masters: the critical expert validated
by European taste—influences of the education system—the church, and the court of fickle
public opinion. For the true expert, nothing homegrown was
ever good enough. Let’s ask Whitman, whose eroticism and celebration
of the common man and common things and insistence on his own meter was wholly American but considered
unsuitable by experts. The church, they didn’t want to hear all
that stuff about bodies. And the court of public opinion: “We like
him, but he’s a strange fellow.” His crime? Telling us who we are: “I hear America singing…Each
singing what belongs to her and to no one else.” That sounds like Thelonious Monk. America was singing, and nobody thought nothing
of it. Ask all the Negro preachers who railed against
the blues for generations while the blues was coming out of every decent singer in their
choir. Ask them and all those who wanted to save
souls “What were the benefits of denying what came from our very souls in search of
our true selves?” That’s the Constitution, Walt Whitman, Twain,
Duke Ellington, August Wilson. I played at August Wilson’s funeral. Do you know what he wanted me to play? “Danny Boy.” And you want to know what his stipulation
was? Learn the words. If an artist sings deeply enough, they take
you to the frontiers of your soul, and that frontier is freedom: freedom to feel, to feel
the sensual nature of the is and the is-ness of things, the “This is what I feel, and
you know you feel it too.” All over this country people argued about
life and love and loss and God and freedom and who we are and want our kids to be, and
every arts program was cut from every school, and a machine came in and replaced the drum. Those same drums that you got to mind because
they are memory, and we forgot. “Yankee Doodle keep it up, Yankee Doodle
dandy; mind the music and the step, and with the girls be handy.” Mind the music and the step; W.C. Handy, father of the blues. His father was a minister, and young Handy
grew up with a religious tension that went all the way back to Adam and Eve. Hawthorne told us about this stuff in The
Scarlet Letter, and Handy understood what Whitman understood: living boiled down to
love and making love. Here’s Whitman: “Hair, bosom, hips, bend
of legs, negligent falling hands all diffused, mine too diffused, ebb stung by the flow and
flow stung by the ebb, love-flesh swelling and deliciously aching.” That’s the same story Handy’s music told
the congregation when Aunt Hagar interrupted her preacher in “Aunt Hagar’s Blues.” [Band plays “Aunt Hagar’s Blues”] [Sings] Old Deacon Splivin, his flock was
given a way of livin’ right; Said he, “No wingin’, no ragtime singin’ up here tonight”;
Up jumped Aunt Hagar, oh, she shouted with all her might; “Oh, ain’t no use of preachin’;
Oh, t’aint no use of teachin’; Each modulation of syncopation just tells my feet to dance,
and I can’t refuse; When I hear the melody, oh Lord, the melody they call the blues; Just
hear Aunt Hagar’s children harmonizin’ to that old mournful tune; It’s just like
a choir from on high broke loose, broke loose; If the devil brought it, the good Lord sent
it right on down here, right on down here to me; Just let the congregation join while
I sing those lovin’ Aunt Hagar’s blues. Oh, yes. If the devil brought it, the American artist
had the responsibility of developing our taste for it and putting it before a public opinion
that was, as time passed, untutored, then very willing, briefly learned, and then ultimately
exploited. The artist had to walk a tightrope with an
audience whose expectations were first formed by the minstrel show and the novelty performance,
but at least those popular entertainments were assessed with homegrown taste. Let’s ask the famous German string quartet
who came to the White House to enlighten President John Tyler in 1841. After a couple of stirring movements, the
president reportedly chased them out with his cane, and he was heard to shout behind
them, “Don’t ye know any Virginia reels?” Ask all those who think a blinking screen
or a new computer program or any other technological advance is in itself artistic substance. Artists effortlessly speak across time because
the technology of the human soul does not change. Ask Eugene O’Neill, who absorbed the spirit
of the Greeks through the spirit of Wagner’s acolyte Nietzsche, who told him what Whitman
said was what Buddy Bolden said when he opened his horn up in New Orleans and set the slaves
free and called all his children home: “Wake up! Wake up!” They all spoke the same language—the language
of the soul and the mind and of the body—and they were out on prairies in the West telling
tall tales and playing tunes for people to gather around. That’s what they were doing, and they just
kept on doing it. As Elvin Jones, great drummer with John Coltrane’s
Classic Quartet, once said after being informed by a patron in New York’s Village Vanguard
“A lot of people don’t like your music,” “Well, they better start liking it, because
we’re going to keep on playing it.” And they did, and their hearts broke as the
audience they craved—the audience whose lives they were playing—would rather hear
some fresh-faced, well-meaning musicians from another country sell a watered-down version
of the blues. Not that they were wrong for playing it, but
it had to seem strange to somebody. [Band plays] Behind the masks of poet, musician, playwright,
dancer, painter, those artists will always turn your face to the fire because they speak
an undeniable truth about who we are. By 1993, more than 200 years after his death,
Benjamin Franklin’s Philadelphia trust was valued at more than $2.25 million and his
Boston trust at almost $5 million. People in Boston know a little more about
money. [Laughter] Sweeping the country at this same
time—1993—was the return of the minstrel show under the guise of youth culture, and
the new plantation was the inner city. Let’s sample some of the misogynistic similarities
between the old minstrel routine and the new. This is from a Christy Minstrel songbook from
1850: “One evening at a ball, ha, ha; a thick-lipped wench so rall, ha, ha; she fell
in love with me, ha, ha; she fell in love with me, ha, ha; I danced with her all night,
ha, ha; she did my finger bite, ha, ha; I hit her with all my might, ha, ha; an spoiled
the wench’s sight, ha, ha.” What about the 1992 counterpoint, the rap
anthem “Ain’t Nothing but a G Thang”? [Laughter] “Try to get close, and you’re
bound to get smacked; My little homey Snoop Doggy Dogg has got my back; Never let me slip,
‘cause if I slip, then I’m slippin’; But if I got my nina, then you know I’m
straight trippin’; And Imma continue to put the rap down, put the mac down, and if
your woman wanna trip, I have to put the smack down; Yeah, and you don’t stop.” I guess some things don’t stop, and something’s
always for sale, and we forgot because those drums were now machines, and we lost the memory
and the meaning, and folks mistakenly thought it had something to do with being real. What’s real is the fact that our country
has always been enriched and expanded when the folks who don’t understand one another
or just plain don’t like one another figure out how to come together or are forced together. What art came from this glorious tension of
slavery and freedom; and Europe and Africa; and New and Old World and Old, Old World. Those American slaves could have cared less
about European tastes. They were working with basics. They were working with what they knew had
to be adapted to this new situation, so they transformed everything they touched through
improvisation, and because their situation required so much humor to survive, they syncopated. [Band plays percussion] Now, here comes one of the deepest American
truths: the minstrel show. I’ve got to lean over to talk about this. Let me run us through the progression. Random black folks on the plantation imitating
the ways of white folks are imitated by itinerate white entertainers who blacken up and create
plantation skits. Plantation owners then cull through their
slaves for the most talented who then imitate the white entertainers’ imitation of black
folks imitating white folks. [Laughter] These selected blacks are then
imitated by professional white performers, and after the Civil War and the rise of black
minstrelsy as an enterprise, white professionals were then imitated by black professionals. That’s why you can’t separate this stuff. Don’t have nothing to do with being real
or from the hood. It’ll make Yankee Doodle’s head spin. He told us “Mind the music and the step,”
the dance, and with the music, dance, comedy, and other variety-show aspects of minstrelsy,
generations of American show people were trained. The minstrel show also allowed white artists
to don a mask behind which they could speak on issues of sex, politics, and race with
unprecedented freedom. Boy, once you turn freedom loose, there’s
no telling where it might go. So, the first generation of free Afro-Americans
were introduced to America under the divisive lyrics and skits of the minstrel show. It was the blues before the blues. But when the Fisk Jubilee singers toured Europe,
they told no jokes, nor did they dance the buck-and-wing. They sang the purest pianissimo anyone had
ever heard, and where people came to hear savages recently freed from the plantations,
they heard an ancient and modern human cry and a yearning for respect and dignity
and love. You know, Scott Joplin, he was studying with
the German-born Julius Weiss, and Joplin gave us the timeless optimism of ragtime. Well, anyway, ragtime wasn’t nothing but
syncopated marches mixed with banjo figures. The March King, John Philip Sousa, lived near
the Washington, DC, neighborhood where James Reese Europe grew up, and the youngster Europe
studied the violin with Sousa’s bandmaster, Enrico Hurlei. Europe, who was Afro-American, played music
for Vernon and Irene Castle, who popularized ballroom dancing for white Americans who had
come from the farms to the city. Together, the Castles and Europe came up with
the foxtrot, the turkey trot, the quickstep, the two-step, the twist, the glide: all kinds
of stuff. The Jazz Age, and Duke Ellington is right
here in DC playing tight, corny, whiny social dance music, and he hears Jelly Roll and King
Oliver and the Original Dixieland Jazz Band and all of them down there in New Orleans
playing scalding hot jazz coming up north to Chicago and New York. He hires some New Orleans musicians to combine
high society with the deep down and dirty. No one remembers the Jazz Age because now
it’s the Swing Era, and Duke is burning up miles of highway all over this land, and
everybody is broke. What they danced and sang, well, that was
all they knew, it was all they needed to know, and it was all they would ever need to know. After the war, people are running away to
the suburbs and running so hard they’re forgetting all kinds of stuff about who we
are, and the people in the cities get lost, too. People were trying to bring America’s art
to schools, and here’s Duke Ellington at Ohio State University. His tenor sax man, Big Al Sears, befriends
a student trombonist named Alan Freed, and they keep in touch. Freed goes into radio and has a show in Cleveland
called The Moondog Show, and Big Al writes a song called “Castle Rock.” “Castle Rock”? “Castle Rock.” Big Al goes on Freed’s show, and Freed loves
Big Al so much he plays the song seven times in a row. He starts calling these songs—these blues
shuffles—he calls them rock ‘n’ roll. It wasn’t nothing but what Basie had been
playing and Louis Jordan played and Fats Domino and them down in New Orleans, but pretty soon,
Freed started producing rock ‘n’ roll shows with integrated bands, and he had Big
Al in one of these bands. Well, American Bandstand approaches Freed
with a television spot, but they say, “Uh, you got to lose these colored boys.” Freed says, “Hey, man, Big Al has been with
me since I was in college. I’m not going to fire this man. This is my man.” They say, “Too bad.” They hired Dick Clark and did away with the
band altogether to avoid any unpleasantry. That’s marketing. Anyway, black folks had Soul Train on TV,
[Laughter] and funk was the rage. No one remembered that rock ‘n’ roll was
a merger of gospel, country, and the blues played by musicians of all hues influenced
by jazz. No one remembered Alan Freed and Big Al Sears. No one remembered that Louis Armstrong had
played with Jimmy Rodgers on “Blue Yodel No. 9” and that the country, R&B, and pop
charts all had the exact same number-one song in 1955: Carl Perkins’s “Blue Suede Shoes.” No one remembers that a two-beat groove is
the same in all forms of American music, from Appalachia to Harlem to Opelousas; so is the
blues. They only remembered slavery and segregation,
and they put Chuck Berry in jail for the wrong kind of integrating, and rock took on a distinctively
different face, only to have musicians from Britain come here in the 1960s to reintroduce
to us our own pre-segregated rock ‘n’ roll. [Laughter] Had the nerve to call it the British
Invasion…our own tradition coming back to us as an echo of the blues draped in sexuality
without the blackface. Nobody remembered that the American arts were
integrated long before baseball, but by the time the dust of the rock revolution had cleared,
some kind of way rock ended up being white and the definitive national music, and the
blacks ended up with the minstrel show again. This new minstrelsy was complex too, as suburban
whites imitate the inner-city blacks who embrace the bourgeois disaffection expressed in heavy
metal nihilism fueled by the white misconception that black people are freer with their emotions
and sexuality. [Laughter] That’s why you can’t separate
this stuff. Mind the music and the dance. No one remembers how hard-fought the integration
of our arts was, and few cared to remember what any of the dances meant, and the country
was in peril. The stock market crashed because of greed,
and all over the country, people argued about life and love and loss and freedom and God
and who they were or who they wanted to be or who they wanted their kids to be, and some
people took their own lives, while other people became more alive. It was at our lowest point that we reached
for who we were, instead of what we were, and the classic dimensions of the American
experience as expressed in art flourished. George Gershwin and Jerome Kern, they kept
on writing shows, and those songs and shows spoke to the aspirations of millions of immigrants
who came to this country wanting to participate in the American experience and to millions
of Americans. Here’s Cole Porter, here’s Irving Berlin
with that one piano that’s in the same key that he just does a little something and it
moves into different keys. [Laughter] Here’s Rodgers and Hart to tell
us who we are with an enduring body of romantic, American popular song that still speaks to
the matters of the human heart in every type of human circumstance imaginable. We made films that defined the genre, and
we listened to bands swing all over the country on radios, and we danced. Dizzy said dancing never made nobody cry. We danced all over this land to the living
room radio, and then we began to fill ballrooms, and what glorious music. In the nation’s most trying economic times,
we swang. This was our thing, and we knew how to do
that. It was the two-beat foxtrot of high society,
the four-on-the-floor jump of Kansas City Swing, the sophistication of Eastern Seaboard
stride piano, and an instrumental virtuosity that came straight from Sousa and all those
Crescent City men who sang through horns in the South. The sweet ballads of singers like Billie Holliday,
Frank Sinatra, Ella Fitzgerald fronting impeccably-clad jazz orchestras; the call and response of
brass and woodwind that echoed democratic discourse from as far back as the Constitution;
and Latin rhythms that put another accent on the beat. Intricate orchestrations that defied the norms
of instrumentation; Duke Ellington. Woody Herman. Glenn Miller. And they burned up miles and miles of highway
bringing their brand of freedom to a populace in search of true meaning. Benny Goodman and his orchestra go on tour
with a library full of songs arranged by New York bandleader Fletcher Henderson, who was
six years old when his father was freed by General Sherman, and as the band goes West,
fewer and fewer people turn out, and Benny begins to replace the Henderson arrangements
with corny, stock arrangements. Finally, the band reaches Los Angeles, damn
near broke and demoralized. They are booked for three weeks at the Palomar
Ballroom, and to their surprise the room is packed! They play those stock arrangements in the
first set; 4,000 couples are bored to death. Drummer Gene Krupa tells Benny “Hey, man,
we need to go out swinging.” They break out the Henderson charts, and that
night 8,000 people in the heart of the Depression lost their minds. [Laughter] Those people renewed their souls
and danced their feet off, launching the Swing Era. What they heard was Afro-American. It was Jewish. It was Creole. It was the blues. It was improvised. It was syncopated. It was jazz. It was the sound of freedom. I’m telling you that what they played and
the way they played it, it was all you knew, it was all you needed to know, and it was
all you would ever need to know. It was all-American. In the 1980s, I presented an award to Dizzy
Gillespie, and Benny Goodman was presenting Morton Gould with the same award. When I met Benny Goodman, there was absolutely
no feeling of any mutual experience between the two of us. I knew his name and had heard a few of his
recordings, but I didn’t know who he was. With all of my education, I was the perfect
product of a disrespectful American youth culture, a school system segregated by information,
and a decade of retrenching under the mind-numbing philosophies of black nationalism and good-ol’-boy
Southern exclusion. I could only respond with distaste at the
fact that he was called the King of Swing. I knew absolutely nothing of his pioneering
integration of American art. I didn’t understand that I was a part of
his legacy. On the night of my senior prom, I played a
gig with Lionel Hampton’s band, big band. In the trumpet section was Jimmy Maxwell,
who played in Benny Goodman’s great bands from 1939–1943. I never played in a big band. I was nervous. They were all professionals, men. Jimmy Maxwell took care of me like I was his
son. At the end of the night, he gave me his trumpet
stand. He said, “Here, son, you’re going to be
a great trumpet player. You can play.” I didn’t know Jimmy Maxwell had played with
Benny Goodman. I was coming from New Orleans. I knew I was part of Louis Armstrong’s legacy;
still, no real understanding of who this man was and what he meant to the world. I didn’t like the handkerchief. [Laughter] I didn’t understand what it took
for Winslow Homer to paint black people with dignity in the 19th century. I had never heard of Winslow Homer. I surely didn’t understand why any of this
could be important to me. It was old. I went to Romare Bearden with a drawing of
what I wanted him to put on my album. [Laughter] He looked at it and said, “That’s
what you want me to do?” The funny part is I was a star product of
an American education system. My father is a teacher and a musician and
quite erudite. I went to a great high school with good teachers,
made good grades, and was still totally ignorant to the riches of my artistic heritage as an
American. We all were. I didn’t understand how hard-fought the
victories of American culture were. The best of the American arts and the way
they’ve been sung and swung provided human meaning to the questions posed by the Founding
Fathers more than 150 years earlier. It told you to be yourself and love what made
you you. It told you to listen deeply to others and
find the beauty of originality in them. Through swing, the most flexible rhythm ever
played, it told you how to balance your individuality with the desires of the group. It let you know “Hey, we have a history,
a depth, a tradition that requires skill and study but demands you apply those skills to
search the frontiers of your soul.” It told you that innovation and creativity
holds hands with the tried and true. For 30 years, I have traveled up and down
this unpredictable, unruly country. I have played in elementary schools, in high
schools, concert halls, parks, malls, [Laughter] colleges, prisons, hospitals, community centers,
in parades, cathedrals, churches, clubs, dives, even on a New York City subway, and after
almost every performance, people wait: parents, teachers, kids, grown-ups, grown-up kids. They wait, they enjoy the easy formality of
the occasion, and they ask questions, and they all want to know the same thing: “Are
we together, and is everything gonna be all right?” I realize that we all yearn for a new American
mythology. We want to embrace one another, but we just
don’t know how, and the answer is not more education, but more substantive and more culturally
rooted education. [Applause] Man: That’s it. Wynton: Thinking about all them kids. The primary justification for the value of
education is not some competition with other countries for technological jobs or to win
the so-called science race or to beat anyone. Our arts demand and deserve that we recognize
the life we have lived on this land together. [Applause] In this time, we need to be educated
in who we are, and with the arts, education extends far outside the classroom. In a paraphrase of his 1967 classic, The Crisis
of the Negro Intellectual, Harold Cruse could just have easily spoken not just to Blacks,
but to all Americans: “Without a cultural identity that adequately defines itself, the
American cannot even identify with the nation as a whole. He is left in the limbo of social marginality,
alienated and directionless on the landscape of America, in a variegated nation not yet
decided on its own identity. The fact of the matter is that Americans,
as a whole, are in doubt of their nationality, as well as their cultural identity.” Huh, yes, more in doubt because we have forgotten:
forgotten to embrace the arts we developed over hard-fought centuries. American politics and economics are very flexible,
and they can work in any cultural context. But don’t you let those wigs fool you. If our political and economic system doesn’t
serve our cultural interests, how do we rebuild those systems when they are in distress or
fail? We have an embarrassment of artistic riches
in trust, and we’re not collecting our inheritance. You better believe Boston and Philly took
Franklin’s money, but our arts are of no value to us, and when you don’t consider
the song of yourself, you become lost, and when you’re lost, you do lost things, and
if you’re lost long enough, you stop looking to be found. That’s why we’ve become fearful and uncertain
about our way of life. In this time of redefining the American identity,
who will teach our young the rituals of romance through dance, liberating them from a culture
which separates kids and parents with phony rhetoric, sexual exploitation, and an amateurish
drum beat? Who will have the courage to teach the most
heroic songs and stories of what we have done all over this land and demand that the best
of who we are is the national story? Who will teach the music of our country and
bring races of people together in practice, not in slogan, to share our integrated national
identity? Who will sing the living tale of America to
our kids to counter-state marketing slogans and rescue them from the isolation of technological
gadgets? As we rebuild our dismantled arts education
piece by piece in response to the lack of culture and integrity we see in our way of
life, let us teach our kids how to be free. Lyndon Johnson, in addressing civil rights,
said, “So, it is the glorious opportunity of this generation to end the one huge wrong
of the American nation and, in doing so, to find America for ourselves with the same immense
thrill of discovery which gripped those who first began to realize that here, at last,
was a home for freedom.” That generation did what it could to make
America the frontier of progressive living in the world. Now the challenge of this generation is to
find the frontier of our collective souls. Though it is a soul with a history of slavery
and injustice and struggle, it is also a soul with freedom and striving and great triumph. You can’t get past the truth of yourself. It’s always there because it was there,
and it is there. And when you acknowledge that truth, you understand
it’s not something you have to hide, it’s something to proudly show because where you
come from ain’t where you’re going, but if you don’t know where you’ve been, you
might just end up where you started or further back. As we forward our agendas for our various
arts causes, let’s remember there is only one cause, and whether that cause is expressed
in artists visiting schools or museum trips or arts curricula or master classes or community
bands, or artist diplomats, swing dance competitions, the agenda is larger; the agenda is larger
than our individual agendas. We need to look in our hand to find the key
we’ve been searching for. It’s what the Constitution started, Congo
Square ratified, the Civil War sealed, the repeal of Reconstruction tested, Ellis Island
cosigned, the Depression matured, two world wars proved, the civil rights movement affirmed,
Vietnam and Iraq sobered, and now it’s time to realize this is our story. This is our song. If well sung, it tells us who we are and where
we belong. What is in those songs and the way we sing
them is all you know, it’s all you need to know, and it’s all you will ever need
to know. Thank you. [Applause; band plays]
