Prelude: Kelvin Sholar:
A LOT has been written about Black America in the last few weeks; mainly due to the Black Lives Matter Movement and various related events. For the record, I am a direct descendant of those Africans that were forcefully brought to America. I am also a direct descendent of the western Europeans that left an old land out of free will; to find the promise of a new life. I am a direct descendent of those Americans that were ALREADY here when the Europeans, English, Africans and many others came; that first nation of the TRUE Americans.
Racial politics abound in every direction I look today. Then, there is the music industry which is suffering globally. COVID-19 has endangered my career as a professional musician and educator. Personally, I haven’t performed since January, and I may not again until September. The combination of Covid-19, and the recent protests of racial inequality makes me feel like I am at the epicenter of a revolutionary explosion. I do my part to grow positively and help others to stay so.
I do enjoy reading about Black America, but I certainly love when someone writes from the experience and not just a speculation or tirade about it. Or even worse, to use Black America to incite evil, lies, ugliness, division and ignorance.
This brings me to my point! My good friend Quincy Stewart III is an excellent Jazz trumpeter and passionate educator that I met in my hometown of Detroit, Michigan in the early 1990s. After hanging out with Quincy in many different settings, I had learned that Quincy is a thinker as well as an artist, who cares about his society in and around Pontiac, Michigan and Black American culture. Nowadays, I look forward to reading what Quincy writes, or just listening to the music he posts. I’d like to share Stewart‘s offering for today, which he posted on his social media platform. I offered to re-blog his positive words and share it on my personal web presence. I hope you enjoy reading it as much as I do.
IT’S A MUTUAL ADMIRATION SOCIETY:
The Beauty of Black Culture in the Midst of an Ugly Country’s Agenda
By Quincy Stewart III
“It’s a mutual admiration society. We gravitate to each other because we all have a different sliver of The Great Story”.
-Kelvin Sholar
“I have been looking for a way to write about this subject. Because of the nature of the majority of my articles, it gets lost that at my core, I am an artist, I am a musician.
I used to call myself a “jazz musician.” That is before I understood the meaning of the word, “jazz” and before I understood the meaning and purpose for music in the first place. I simply call myself, a musician, period. Nothing more, certainly nothing less.
I got the title for this article from my long-time friend, Kelvin Sholar, international pianist, composer, joy-spreader at large and unclassified musician.
I posted myself playing a blues in Eb ( with quite a few hiccups along the way which I wish nobody would have seen but…naked we came, naked we return) and Kelvin responded with some humbling compliments, then our Midwest trumpet Captain, Dwight Adams chimed in, in similar fashion. After we all showered each other with compliments, Kelvin wrote what I considered to be as profound a statement as I have ever seen on American Black Music and even narrower, Detroit area black music and it was this:
“It’s a mutual admiration society. We gravitate to each other because we all have a different sliver of the great story. I love to see a man stick to his calling. We are supportive and strong. Thank you, guys. Even if everyone is against us, we can stay above taking ourselves out”.
Whenever I have played in Detroit, the musicians are supportive of whatever comes out the bell of my horn, good, bad or indifferent. In Pontiac, it is much closer. It is like a family conversation. Everybody knows everybody so well that it takes a lot to impress and so we often hear each other in Pontiac with what feels like indifference, but it is really not. It is the same as if one of your brothers or sisters speaks to you. You know how they talk and can often predict what they are going to say in certain situations.
That said, it is always refreshing to leave this town and go perform and people with fresh ears and no running tab of your history can genuinely appreciate who you really are.
In Detroit, I must say, because it is a bigger city, those musicians do not have the same kind of benign response to each other.
No matter how many times they hear each other, there is some acute listening going on by the other players for nuance and perhaps the different turn of a phrase that the player soloing had not done before. We could stand to try the same thing in Pontiac, though admittedly, I do not play here much either, for reasons aligned with the fact of too much familiarity breeds indifference and a dull ear for nuance and development.
-THE GREAT STORY-
When Kelvin wrote that wonderful phrase, just like in music, when one person takes a solo, the other may often get up behind that person, and because the following player has been listening intently, will take the player’s last phrase, quote it and use that as his or her theme to build further (variate) on that idea. It is a compliment to the first soloist and a way to extend the theme or phrase into a new direction because it is now in the hands of another creative soul to mold and shape however he or she chooses. This is what I am now doing with Kelvin’s beautiful phrase. I hope I do it justice if nothing else at least in the recapitulation stage….
The “Great Story” is Black People in America. It is a story of enormous courage, triumph; of overcoming obstacles, survival… the joy found in the blues, the “changes” we developed from those blues into complex harmonies and never losing the blues in the process, self-love, self-hate, finding love again and the deeply spiritual space we dug into the oppression, brutality and dehumanization of living black in America. The “Great Story” is black men bypassing every assault on our manhood to find regal stances in the fire and the dignity of resilience amid the inundation of emasculation.
Kelvin’s phrase resonates with the crackling sound of a trumpet to warn us of impending danger and the comfort of a tenor saxophone when the ebb-tide sweeps us under. The phrase resonates with the peace of the flute and matching sonority of the baritone which tells us that, yes, everything will be alright.
The GREAT STORY is that the eternal flame of Black Soulfulness and Black Resilience has been stomped on, doused and sanded in futility by the man who classifies himself as White. And, just like the Eternal Flame, it reignites with barely a sliver of light lost in the process.
When I think of the Great Story, my heart skips a beat at what a wondrous journey and privilege it is to be born “Black” in America. The indomitable spirit and the ease in which we slip from survival to survival, be it the lyncher’s rope or the Corona Virus’s grasp, we adjust. We will find a way to turn a phrase, create a way, make a dollar out of fifteen cents and wonder how mama fed us all with so little and it looked and tasted like a feast.
When I think of the Great Story, I still hear the screen door slam behind me on the front porch in the summertime at grandmother’s house in Cordova, Alabama. I can still remember the sound of the electric wires on the poles buzzing in the blazing southern heat of the day, while the crickets slept, preparing for their nightly concerts in the pitch-black, still hot Alabama nights. I can still hear the train passing by on the nearby tracks, headed for destinations, unknown.
I think of a community, Pontiac, with enormous heart and bursting with talent, ingenuity, black entrepreneurship and streets that were communal, family-driven and culturally intact. Everybody was from the south and either fled as refugees from the violent south or came to work right after WWII in the automobile manufacturing plants. The GREAT STORY is how we flourished under “segregation.” How “yes sir” and “no ma’am” were commonplace and even the “thuggiest” of thugs would defer to manners when adults were around.
The Great STORY is Malcolm X, Martin Luther King, Muhammad Ali, Jack Johnson, Bessie Smith, Lady Day, Louis Armstrong, Marcus Garvey, Fred Hampton, Sam Cooke and Charlie Parker. The Great Story is Fannie Lou Hammer and Medgar Evers.
The Great Story is my Grandmothers and Grandfather, Quincy Stewart, Sr. and Lucinda Bankhead and Katie Edwards who survived a deeply racist Alabama and Chapel Hill, North Carolina (respectively) and help raise my trifling little ass.
The Great Story is my Aunts and Uncles: Jerry, Charles, Paul, Jimmy, Gladys, Faye, Betty, and Milly. The great Story is my Father Quincy Jr. and Mother, Dorothy Mae; who did their level best to hold their heads up in racist Pontiac, in a time when it too was quite segregated, and provide for me and my brother Curtis- a way more excellent than theirs.
The Great Story is YOUR people. YOU, who took the time to read this far. The Black Story of YOUR life IS a Great Story. The other part of Kelvin Sholar’s great phrase was this and I will end with it: (Recapitulation):
“We gravitate to each other because we all have a different sliver of the great story”.
Now, because of this phrase I have a much clearer picture of how to play when I get a chance to solo, or even when I write a piece. I have been relying on just the right notes to convey chosen feelings instead of telling MY story. My “SLIVER”, my small piece of the beautiful puzzle which constitutes being black and part of that GREAT STORY is all I need to reflect on once the notes are under my fingers.
We gravitate to each other with a piece of the mosaic in our hearts and hands. We gravitate to each other to hear and possibly even see through the language of music the visual, the sounds, the tastes and smells of that Great Story in which we hold our sliver. And OUR GREAT STORY is so vast, so monumental and majestic, that a sliver is plenty. I now pass the phrase on to the next soloist….”