On the Trail of Harmony
A Special Commentary
by Lisa Ann Terzo
A friend of mine was talking about how interesting it was that Mitt Romney and Barack Obama are opponents: the Mormon Saint and the Black President. Republican versus Democrat doesn't come into play into this commentary...I don't think. Not now. Not ever. I Think. It's too hard on me. Anyway....I am pretty sure that the two factions can get along. Of course, Obama needs to win, in my opinion... But, that's for another commentary.
The reason I say this is because today is June 1 and June is the month of weddings. Oh, we love weddings! And I attended the most interesting of weddings years ago. The bride was a white Mormon girl, blond and fair, yet far from meek. The groom was Baptist and a Chicago native. Oh, and did I mention he was Black? Both of them were great people, and our friends. My husband and I were delighted to attend their wedding, but already knew that some things would be awkward.
We arrived at the resort venue where the wedding was to be held. Already seated were a large gathering of gingham-and-lace-dressed women and men sporting conservative suits. They brought the necessary piety to the occasion. Filing in fashionably late, yet tremendously entertaining to observe, was the groom's family. They brought the necessary love to the occasion.
So, the Pastor the happy couple had chosen came to gather us all together in prayer and love and bless the marriage of our brother and sister in God's name. And so we did.
Then we sat at tables and ate very bland food and consumed NO ALCOHOL! None was offered. Of course. There was also no coffee.
At eight pm the gingham gang gathered up their little programs and wedding favors, hugged their daughter, looked at the rest of us like we were the downfall of humankind, and left.
And then an amazing thing happened.
Music started. Yeah... FUN MUSIC... CELEBRATION MUSIC! And all the dumb chairs were moved out of the way and we all danced! The resort brought in Champagne and other libations, including fun little snack appetizers that actually TASTED good. Yep. We wound up laughing and dancing the night away celebrating the marriage of our two wonderful friends, a Morman Girl from Mesa and a Baptist Black Man from Chicago. It was truly a blessed day.
11:45 pm. On the way home, I said to my husband, " Do you think it will last?"
"Oh absolutely! This isn't a marriage based on expectations of religions and families. It's based on love."
Jerome and Marybeth have been married for nearly 15 years now.
Yep. we can get along.
* * * * * * * * * * * * * *
First, allow me to say a heart-felt thank-you to Lisa Ann for volunteering to write the above commentary. In my opinion, it was delightful and insightful, and in these parts you get high marks for both qualities. Well done, my friend!
Second, because she latched onto a phrase that she admits she had not heard before, her above piece led me to recall the title of my all-time favorite recorded music, an album by Charles Mingus called The Black Saint and the Sinner Lady, released on Impulse! in 1963, with liner notes by the bassist/composer's psychologist. Since Lisa Ann sometimes serves a similar function for me, I thought it appropriate to include the doctor's words here and then to hook you up with a YouTube recording from the album, just to confuse the hell out of you. It's not easy music. That's all I will say.
When Mr. Mingus first asked me to write a review of the music he composed for this record, I was astonished and told him so. I said I thought I was competent enough as a psychologist but that my interest in music was only average and without any technical background. Mr. Mingus laughed and said he didn't care, that if I heard his music I'd understand. This is the uniqueness of this man: he jolts with the unexpected and the new. He has something to say and he will use every resource to interpret his messages. After all, why not have a psychologist try to interpret the projections of a composer musician? Psychologists interpret behavior and/or ideas communicated by words and behavior - why not apply this skill to music? It's certainly a refreshing approach that Mr. Mingus suggests.
As Nat Hentoff has stated, "Mingus is ingenuous," ever growing, looking for change and ways to communicate his life experiences, his awareness and feelings of himself and life. His early and late life sufferings as a person and as a black man were surely enough to cause sour bitterness, hate, distortions and withdrawal. Yet, Mr. Mingus never has given up. From every experience such as a conviction for assault or as an inmate of a Bellevue locked ward, Mr. Mingus has learned something and has stated it will not happen again to him. He is painfully aware of his feelings and he wants desperately to heal them. He also is cognizant of a power dominated and segregated society's impact upon the underdog, the underprivileged and the minority. Inarticulate in words, he is gifted in musical expression which he constantly uses to articulate what he perceives, knows and feels.
To me this particular composition contains Mr. Mingus' personal and also a social message. He feels intensively. He tries to tell people he is in great pain and anguish because he loves. He cannot accept that he is alone, all by himself; he wants to love and be loved. His music is a call for acceptance, respect, love, understanding, fellowship, freedom - a plea to change the evil in man and to end hatred. The titles of this composition suggest the plight of the black man and a plea to the white man to be aware.
He seems to state that the black man is not alone but all mankind must unite in revolution against any society that restricts freedom and human rights.
In all three tracks of Side I there are recurrent themes of loneliness, separateness and tearful depression. One feels deeply for the tears of Mr. Mingus that fall for himself and man. There can be no question that he is the Black Saint who suffers for his sins and those of mankind as he reflects his deeply religious philosophy. His music tells of his deep yearning for love, peace and freedom. A new note has crept into his music. Where once there was a great anger now one can hear hope. As with much of his past music, Mr. Mingus cries of misunderstanding of self and people. Throughout he presents a brooding, moaning intensity about prejudice, hate and persecution.
In the first track of Side I there is heard a solo voice expressed by the alto saxophone - a voice calling to others and saying "I am alone, please, please join me!" The deep mourning and tears of loneliness are echoed and re-echoed by the instruments in Mr. Mingus' attempt to express his feelings about separation from and among the discordant people of the world. The suffering is terrible to hear.
In track B, the music starts with a tender theme. It is a duet dance song in which many emotions of relatedness are expressed - warmth, tenderness, passion. The music then changes into a mood of what I would call mounting restless agitation and anguish as if there is tremendous conflict between love and hate. This is climaxed by the piercing cries of the trombone and answering saxophones as if saying the "I" of personal identity must be achieved and accepted.
Track C begins with the happiest of themes. Here Mr. Mingus himself plays a classical piano reverie backed by a lyrical flute and cymbals. It is sweet and soft and has a lightness rarely seen in Mr. Mingus’ music. But once again the music shifts into a tonal despair and brooding anguish. The theme suggested by the title is the peace and happiness of the free person contrasted with the pain and tears of the black man. Mr. Mingus uses many forms of technique and instrumentation to reflect his meaning. He told me his use of the Spanish guitar was meant to mirror the period of the Spanish Inquisition and El Greco’s mood of oppressive poverty and death.
Side II develops all these themes in a very carefully worked out musical composition in concert style, repeating and integrating harmony and disharmony, peace and disquiet, and love and hate. The ending seem unfinished but one is left with a feeling of hope and even a promise of future joy.
Mr. Mingus thinks this is his best record. It may very well be his best to date for his present stage of development as other records were in his past. It must be emphasized that Mr. Mingus is not yet complete. He is still in a process of change and personal development. Hopefully the integration in society will keep pace with his. One must continue to expect more surprises from him.
Edmund Pollock, Ph.D., Clinical Psychologist
As Nat Hentoff has stated, "Mingus is ingenuous," ever growing, looking for change and ways to communicate his life experiences, his awareness and feelings of himself and life. His early and late life sufferings as a person and as a black man were surely enough to cause sour bitterness, hate, distortions and withdrawal. Yet, Mr. Mingus never has given up. From every experience such as a conviction for assault or as an inmate of a Bellevue locked ward, Mr. Mingus has learned something and has stated it will not happen again to him. He is painfully aware of his feelings and he wants desperately to heal them. He also is cognizant of a power dominated and segregated society's impact upon the underdog, the underprivileged and the minority. Inarticulate in words, he is gifted in musical expression which he constantly uses to articulate what he perceives, knows and feels.
To me this particular composition contains Mr. Mingus' personal and also a social message. He feels intensively. He tries to tell people he is in great pain and anguish because he loves. He cannot accept that he is alone, all by himself; he wants to love and be loved. His music is a call for acceptance, respect, love, understanding, fellowship, freedom - a plea to change the evil in man and to end hatred. The titles of this composition suggest the plight of the black man and a plea to the white man to be aware.
He seems to state that the black man is not alone but all mankind must unite in revolution against any society that restricts freedom and human rights.
In all three tracks of Side I there are recurrent themes of loneliness, separateness and tearful depression. One feels deeply for the tears of Mr. Mingus that fall for himself and man. There can be no question that he is the Black Saint who suffers for his sins and those of mankind as he reflects his deeply religious philosophy. His music tells of his deep yearning for love, peace and freedom. A new note has crept into his music. Where once there was a great anger now one can hear hope. As with much of his past music, Mr. Mingus cries of misunderstanding of self and people. Throughout he presents a brooding, moaning intensity about prejudice, hate and persecution.
In the first track of Side I there is heard a solo voice expressed by the alto saxophone - a voice calling to others and saying "I am alone, please, please join me!" The deep mourning and tears of loneliness are echoed and re-echoed by the instruments in Mr. Mingus' attempt to express his feelings about separation from and among the discordant people of the world. The suffering is terrible to hear.
In track B, the music starts with a tender theme. It is a duet dance song in which many emotions of relatedness are expressed - warmth, tenderness, passion. The music then changes into a mood of what I would call mounting restless agitation and anguish as if there is tremendous conflict between love and hate. This is climaxed by the piercing cries of the trombone and answering saxophones as if saying the "I" of personal identity must be achieved and accepted.
Track C begins with the happiest of themes. Here Mr. Mingus himself plays a classical piano reverie backed by a lyrical flute and cymbals. It is sweet and soft and has a lightness rarely seen in Mr. Mingus’ music. But once again the music shifts into a tonal despair and brooding anguish. The theme suggested by the title is the peace and happiness of the free person contrasted with the pain and tears of the black man. Mr. Mingus uses many forms of technique and instrumentation to reflect his meaning. He told me his use of the Spanish guitar was meant to mirror the period of the Spanish Inquisition and El Greco’s mood of oppressive poverty and death.
Side II develops all these themes in a very carefully worked out musical composition in concert style, repeating and integrating harmony and disharmony, peace and disquiet, and love and hate. The ending seem unfinished but one is left with a feeling of hope and even a promise of future joy.
Mr. Mingus thinks this is his best record. It may very well be his best to date for his present stage of development as other records were in his past. It must be emphasized that Mr. Mingus is not yet complete. He is still in a process of change and personal development. Hopefully the integration in society will keep pace with his. One must continue to expect more surprises from him.
Edmund Pollock, Ph.D., Clinical Psychologist
Not quite so special commentary
by Phil Mershon
Harmony eludes us far too often in this life. I really hate that. I'm inclined to think that fear causes this disjuncture. Why did American slave owners of the eighteenth and nineteenth century commonly forbid the teaching of reading to their chattel? Why, in 1955, was a black fourteen-year-old boy beaten in Mississippi, his eye gouged out, his face blown off by gun fire and his body tossed into the Tallahatchie River for the offense of flirting with twenty-one-year-old Carolyn Bryant, who just happened to be white? Why are so many twenty-first century Americans comforted by their own paranoia of a man whose policies are very much consistent with those of his predecessor, the major difference apparently being that (a) the man who is the target of the paranoia is better looking than the predecessor, and (b) the one man is black and the other white?
Fear. Fear. And fear.
One of the things that used to drive me crazy when I was a little boy was not being able to figure out why some white people spoke so badly of some black people on account of race. I mean, slavery had been a pretty bad thing, after all. It was something that white people, it seemed to me, should seriously regret and that, if anything, they should be extremely nice to black folks if, for no other reason than to make amends. This was not an attitude that I picked up from my parents, I assure you. I really don't know where I came by the idea. Maybe it was just my own precocious innocence, but that hardly seems likely. More probable is that way back then I had not yet developed The Fear.
White people--many of them, at any rate--live in a constant state of fear because of what they perceive as black rage. White folks know that slavery was unimaginably wrong, just as they know that the denial of basic human rights to black people for much of the one hundred plus years following emancipation (what a stupid word, implying as it does that one group has the right to "free" another) was horribly wrong. Here's something else that white people know. They know that black people know that white people tell nigger jokes and spic jokes and wop jokes and mick jokes and whore jokes and jap and chink jokes and retarded little children jokes and deformed people jokes and any other kind of cruelty they can imagine. And those white people are vaguely terrified that one day everyone else will just rise up and say something like, "Hey! That's not really funny! How'd you like it if I busted your head, ofay?"
They would not much like it, I suspect.
Two uniquely American religions exist today and both of them seek to heighten The Fear. One is Mormonism and the other is the Southern Baptist Convention. Both emphasize what they consider the inherent inequality of human beings, Mormons embracing this through the philosophy that some men can walk with God while the majority never will, the Southern Baptists expressing this view through their willful acceptance of the separation of men and women, of the divine and the wretched, and the saved and unsaved. Fundamentalist Mormonism (by which I do not necessarily mean those who practice polygamy) believe that Cain was black and that he was the devil. Seth was white and he was good. Those two spawned the remainder of mankind. Remind you of anyone?
Back when Willard Romney was still using the "He's a nice guy" approach in his attacks, here is what the White Man said: "The President's a nice guy, but we just can't afford him for four more years. Our kids can't afford him. We have to get back to machine who know what is it takes to get America strong again. I spent my life in the private sector and I want to use my experience to get America working again for the American people," Romney told FOX News. Translation: "I'm not a racist, but my supporters are and it would be advantageous to me if you'd believe that nigger was a socialist."
Before someone out there decries me for being a Democrat or something, let me make it clear that my own political beliefs, such as they are, exist far beyond the confines of either major political party being shoved down the throats of the American people. I consider myself what I like to call a Bertolucci Whacko, if it has to have a name. A Bertolucci Whacko is a person who opts for a leftist form of anarchism but who believes that Art gets things done in ways that politics never can. So that's me. Or in the words of Stevie Van Zandt via Jackson Browne:
I ain't no communist
And I ain't no capitalist
And I ain't no socialist
And I ain't no imperialist
And I ain't no Democrat
Sure ain't no Republican
I only know one party
And that is Freedom.
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