Last week, upon the invitation of philosopher and author Lene Rachel Andersen, I gave a short address as part of the Global Bildung Festival. Having studied two of her many books, Metamodernity: Meaning and Hope in a Complex World and The Nordic Secret: A European story of Beauty and Freedom (co-authored by Tomas Björkman), I was honored that she asked me to participate.

I titled my presentation “Bildung and the Blues.” The relation between a term of German origin such as “Bildung”—a concept that relates how individuals and groups of people learn and grow through education and self-development to cultivate skills, habits, and values that contribute to society—and the American form of music called the blues, innovated by Black Americans, is likely not readily apparent. The intention of my short speech was to highlight connections between the Blues and Bildung beyond the distance posed by geographic and cultural origin.

What follows is the address, plus some content that I would have included if I’d had more than the allotted eight minutes. Given that I’ve coined an expression—the blues idiom wisdom tradition—I figure it’s about time I began fleshing out that tradition as I perceive and conceive it. This is a small step in that direction.

The blues is a wisdom tradition deriving from the Black American people in North America. The blues has many dimensions: musical, poetic, literary. The blues is also an attitude, way of life, and worldview. My mentor Albert Murray coined the expression “blues idiom” to capture the richness of the blues.

I’ll explore these dimensions and connect the Blues Idiom directly to Bildung in the latter part of my brief remarks.

From a planetary perspective, the so-called blues scale is close to the pentatonic scale, which is practically universal in human cultures. The blues, then, connects to music culture globally.

In the United States, the blues is the roots music of many of the nation’s styles, from gospel and jazz to country & western and rock and roll. As a form, the blues most often has a repeated 12-bar cycle, a call-and-response melodic structure, a American Negro or Black American vocal timbre, and a harmonic system that connects to Christian church music tradition, and, as mentioned above, other music across the world.

Blues and jazz musician Jonathan Batiste received the most nominations for the 2022 Grammy Awards, set to air on April 3rd.

He happens to be a colleague of mine via our connection to the National Jazz Museum in Harlem. His song for Record of the Year, “Freedom,” is a blues. It’s not happenstance that the title of that song, “Freedom,” is fundamental to not only Black American life and history, but to American democracy itself. For Black Americans, there’s a direct connection between the lack of social, political and economic freedom of our early sojourn here and the manifestation of the blues form at the turn of the 20th century.

But when you listen to Batiste’s “Freedom,” you don’t feel down and out, depressed, or downtrodden. You join his celebration of life despite the pain in life. Albert Murray called this nuance the distinction between the blues as such and the blues as music.

The blues is also poetry. The great American writer and democratic theorist Ralph Ellison once said—“As a form, the blues is an autobiographical chronicle of personal catastrophe expressed lyrically.”

The sentence preceding that basic definition is a classic poetic and literary description, with customary Ellison eloquence:

The blues is an impulse to keep the painful details and episodes of a brutal experience alive in one aching consciousness, to finger its jagged grain, and to transcend it, not by the consolation of philosophy but by squeezing from it a near-tragic, near comic lyricism.

The blues as music also plays a vital social function. In Murray’s Stomping the Blues, he describes this dimension of the culture of Afro-Americans, in a ritual domain, as the Saturday Night Function and the Sunday Morning Church Service, two sides of the blues idiom, secular and sacred.

On Sunday morning, rituals of devotion and propitiation were enacted by the souls of Black folk “making a joyful noise unto the Lord.” On Saturday nights, the other side of the tradition, a community of blues people engaged in purification rituals to banish the mess and cruelty of life, and in fertility rituals . . . to continue the human species!

You play the blues to get rid of the blues by facing your troubles straight-up and straight ahead, admitting that life can be unfair and random, but yet and still: you dance, groove, have a good time, and get it on, baby, lettin’ the good times roll—to stomp the blues, even if just temporarily. In the blues idiom tradition, you know those shadowy blue devils will likely be back tomorrow to try to get you down and throw you off course.

The blues idiom, as an orientation to life and worldview somewhat similar to Stoicism, understands that tragedy, pain, death, and even injustice are givens, yet creates beauty in form and meaning to affirm the sheer fact that we’re alive. In the collection Conversations with Albert Murray, Murray defined the blues idiom as “an attitude of affirmation in the face of difficulty, of improvisation in the face of challenge. It means you acknowledge that life is a low-down dirty shame yet confront that fact with perseverance, with humor, and above all with elegance.”

From Schiller and Goethe to Ellison and Murray

On p. 144 of The Nordic Secret, Lene Rachel Andersen writes about two iconic Germans who extended, elaborated, and refined the idea of Bildung, Friedrich Schiller and Johann Wolfgang von Goethe. “If we talk about scaffolding personal development, Schiller and Goethe are an example of two geniuses who became each other’s ladder and scaffolding as they both climbed, each in his own way,” she wrote. From Goethe derived the literary tradition of the bildungsroman; for Schiller, the relationship between moral and aesthetic education and freedom, personal to political, was key.

With respect to the blues idiom, the same can be said for Ralph Ellison and Albert Murray—they were two geniuses who became “each other’s ladder and scaffolding as they climbed, each in his own way.” Over the course of their relationship and in their writings and interviews, they honed and developed concepts and perspectives that synthesized their lived experience as Black American men with the highest of American values and meanings within a Western humanist tradition. I’ve come to call this dynamic relationship the Ellison-Murray Continuum. The two attended the historically black college Tuskegee Institute together in Alabama in the 1930s. Ironically, they became two of the most important literary minds and cultural theorists that America produced in the 20th century. What’s ironic is not the fact that they accomplished this while being racialized as “black,” rather, it’s that they both attended Tuskegee, a college in the deep South founded by Booker T. Washington, who advocated for the development of trade and industrial skills primarily, not artistic and intellectual mastery.

The great scholar and co-founder of the NAACP, W.E.B. Du Bois, was a product of another institute of higher learning for Negro Americans built in the aftermath of the Civil War, Fisk University. He attended and graduated from Harvard and did graduate work at the University of Berlin thereafter in the late 19th century. Du Bois, in comparison to Booker T., was more in favor of the cognitive development provided by a liberal arts education.

Historically, Black colleges were a manifestation of the intense, life-giving hunger for education by formerly enslaved persons, so they could advance from being illiterate peasants to educated contributors to their communal group and American society. Though many, many obstacles were put in our way, slowly but surely we began to rise, with the Harlem Renaissance in the 1920s, and, among many other examples, the Negro debate students at Wiley College, who defeated the national debate champions from USC in 1935, a story depicted in 2007 starring Denzel Washington, The Great Debaters.

At the law school of one of the most prestigious historically black colleges and universities (HBCUs), Howard University, the legendary Charles Hamilton Houston devised the legal strategy that ultimately ended legalized racial segregation. Thurgood Marshall, who argued and won the Brown v. Board decision at the U.S. Supreme Court in 1954, and who became an Associate Justice of the Supreme Court in 1967, was a student of Charles Hamilton Houston’s. Significantly, also contributing to the legal brief in the case for Linda Brown, a ten-year old girl from Topeka, Kansas, was law professor Charles Black Jr., who at the age of 16 in Austin, Texas in 1931 had a mind-altering experience by witnessing the power and blues genius of the paterfamilias of the jazz idiom, Louis Armstrong, in person. I recounted this incident in “Jazz, Social Justice, and a White Boy from Texas.” The example of Charles Black demonstrates a direct link between aesthetic insight, cultural education, moral development, and social advance.

These accounts of educational and artistic excellence contributing to social change and advancement, moving the U.S. closer to the promises of the social contract contained in its founding documents and principles, laid the ground for Ketanji Brown Jackson, who will likely to become the first Black American woman to serve on the Supreme Court.

The Global Bildung Manifesto defines Bildung as: the combination of the education and knowledge necessary to thrive in your society, and the moral and emotional maturity to both be a team player and have personal autonomy and also knowing your roots and being able to imagine the future. This definition, considered in light of my comments above, definitely aligns with the blues idiom, for Black Americans imagined a better future and innovated a culture both rooted and cosmopolitan.

And, as CEO of the Jazz Leadership Project, I can assure you that jazz music epitomizes in principle and practice the emotional and moral maturity to exercise both personal agency and autonomy while being a member of a team, an ensemble. By engaging one another with soulful skill and mature collaborative capacities, respecting the individual voices and sounds of each musician while subordinating ego for the sake of the group and the music, jazz musicians have resolved the dualistic divide between the personal and the social, through culture.

Thank you.

A Speech: “Bildung and the Blues”

From Schiller and Goethe to Ellison and Murray

Expanding Borders: Points of Negotiation

The Power of Participation and Belief in Second Chances