It’s personal

I spent the first year of my life in San Francisco, went with my family back to Chicago, and have come back to spend my adult life in the Bay Area. Aside from the cultural and climate appeal, I moved to San Francisco in the late 1960s to fulfill my service to the country, as a conscientious objector. That would be a service alternative to the military, but, as defined, in the national health, safety or interest. My claim to conscientious objection was grounded in these profound experiences: my visits to my grandfather, my father’s father, who was a Baptist minister in Alabama; the deep spirituality of my mother and father, a spirituality manifest in their respect for the entire world and the peoples in it, rather than through a formal organized religion or rote church-going; and my introduction to Zen Buddhism, which first gave me the ability to fully accept spirituality that was not framed within the Judeo-Christian references of the general society.

Between Chicago and San Francisco, there were four years at St. John’s College, in Annapolis, Maryland. The two important factors were the curriculum at the school and my being away from home. The studies at St. John’s are fashioned around what are called the Great Books of the Western World, the primary texts through which European thought has been expressed and has evolved. From my college preparatory curriculum in high school (including 5 years of math and 3 years of Latin), it was a natural segue to a traditional liberal arts program. In retrospect, though, I have come to see that the Eurocentrism (for lack of a better word) of the curriculum and my being away from home brought a confluence of experience that has parallels in the intellectual class of the colonized which Franz Fanon wrote so passionately about. In other words, there had to be and was for me an awakening to and a learning about my own history that was irrelevant to my college years, and therefore delayed. The tendency would be to evaluate my own history through the lens of the dominating culture’s perspective on that history: that perspective has necessarily been of one self-identified as greater looking at the lesser. Not until I, and like-minded others from many backgrounds, examined myself and other cultures through different lenses was I able to discover the variety and depth that had been un-“discovered.”

For me, the most powerful access to a more inclusive truth about myself, my history, our history, our society as a whole, has turned out to be through music. That began with how strongly I felt the emotional connection with various musicians, in diverse genres and from diverse backgrounds. In that context, my connection with African American musicians—from folk, to blues, to jazz, to avant-garde—was an inspiration to examine my personal history more deeply. Having been academically tracked, there was an education waiting for me that concerned how the passion of art and culture merges or does not merge with our intellectual selves. Beginning with my own instruction in music as a saxophonist, I continue to learn how people have separated art and education for reasons that I have come to understand as maybe pathological. At the least, the reasons are based on conflicting psychological, political and ultimately spiritual views of the world. My own process of understanding how artistic expression is integral to intelligence continues to feed me and has many links.

The improvisation that is so rich in the jazz tradition does not come from the jazz tradition. Rather, it brought about that tradition. That is, improvisation is a natural human approach and response to both the familiar and unfamiliar. It is especially cogent in difficult situations, whether they are of our own making (artistic complexities) or out of our control (natural or manmade emergencies). One of my areas of interest and study is how to understand and appreciate improvisation for its social and cultural potential. It is not just a coincidence that the African American experience has spawned jazz and that improvisation continues to be more easily a part of African Americans’ approach to day-to-day life. Similarly, it is not a coincidence that how we approach life has much to do with how we approach learning. Whether we talk about pedagogy or andragogy, there are attitudes that facilitate learning.

The structure of classrooms, the method of instruction, is clearly not independent of the learning that goes on there. Of particular importance to me is group learning. As we can talk about solo improvisation or group improvisation, we can consider learning as taking place within an individual or within a group. Group learning is a process that still feels like a new pair of shoes to many people, but I think that group learning has to be understood as a major mode of education. Our previous emphasis on individual accomplishment (the first hand raised, the brightest, the most likely to succeed) has helped obscure some important factors relating to knowledge. Among the questions that have traditionally received low priority: Knowledge for whom? When do we learn about each other? How do we learn from one another?

I could put it simply: When I am performing, I am not satisfied if how I and others learn is not part of the agenda. When I am teaching, I am not satisfied if how I and others create is not part of the agenda.

The Spirit Lives

Music is about

first things first