Supporting Jazz and the Arts in Crisis: A Manifesto
Pain is the truth of art. Art is not a hobby or a pastime. It is the result of an internal battle royal, one between the quest for safety and the desire to matter.
—Seth Godin
Growing up, we learn that food, clothing and shelter are the bare necessities of life. Considering the uncertainty and distress caused by COVID-19, the swiftly accelerating economic downturn, and the tsunami of job losses, focusing on the arts may seem like a luxury.
It most assuredly is not! Art is a necessity not a luxury. Art and artists are essential for life beyond the level of physical survival and subsistence.
But the conquest of the physical world is not man’s only duty. He is also enjoined to conquer the great wilderness of himself. The precise role of the artist, then, is to illuminate that darkness, blaze roads through that vast forest, so that we will not, in all our doing, lose sight of its purpose, which is, after all, to make the world a more human dwelling place.
—James Baldwin
James Baldwin
Art and Artists as Essential to the Business of Living
While celebrating everyday heroes who work in hospitals and nursing homes, deliver food to the needy, and labor behind cash registers in grocery stores, risking exposure to the virus, let’s also remember artists who wrestle within their souls to uncover truth and tap into the proverbial treasure chest of creativity. They deserve respect and a livelihood for their labors too. As Congress, the administration, and the Federal Reserve take action to keep the economy afloat, businesses alive, and people able to survive, let’s consider the role of art and artists— who most often work as freelancers and independent contractors — as deserving of special, specific support also.
Artists bring us joy, make us cry, cause us to reflect and question. Art is the way human experience translates into style. Artists reenact human feeling into visual, sonic, dramatic, and choreographed form. Mythologist Joseph Campbell once said that “The goal of life is rapture. Art is the way we experience it.” Campbell’s friend and blues idiom philosopher, Albert Murray, loved to say that artists “provide basic existential equipment for living” and are like priests or medicine men were back in the day.
Nobel Laureate Toni Morrison
Grand master writer Toni Morrison understood that “art is not mere entertainment or decoration, that it has meaning, and that we both want and need to fathom that meaning . . . the impulse to do and revere art is an ancient need—whether on cave walls, one’s own body, a cathedral or a religious rite, we hunger for a way to articulate who we are and what we mean.”
Along with articulating human identity and cultural meaning, art is aligned with freedom. “. . . it is in the very spirit of art to be defiant of categories and obstacles,” wrote Ralph Ellison. “They are, as transcendent forms of symbolic expression, agencies of human freedom.” He also believed that art, especially literature, served the social good by “preserving in art those human values which can endure by confronting change.”
Ralph Ellison
Ellison’s friend and fellow novelist Robert Penn Warren agreed that the value of art relates to society, as the “process by which, in imagining itself and the relation of individuals to one another and to it, a society comes to understand itself, and by understanding, discover its possibilities of growth.”
Walt Whitman and Frederick Douglass on Art
Iconic figures of the 19th century also realized the utter and indispensable centrality of the arts to human life generally and American civilization in particular. Walt Whitman’s insights into the intrinsic relation between poetry and literature to American democracy and personality come to mind.
The literature, songs, esthetics, etc., of a country are of importance principally because they furnish the materials and suggestions of personality for the women and men of that country and enforce them in a thousand effective ways.
—Walt Whitman
The great writer, abolitionist and orator Frederick Douglass was the most photographed man of the 19th century; the import of the visual medium at the dawning of the Age of Photography was for him a key theme. At a time in which the most popular art form in the United States was minstrelsy, Douglass used the photographic image as a counter-image for a counter-narrative of meaning against the irrational lies of dehumanizing racists who cared more about property than human beings as humans.
Art is a special revelation of the higher powers of the human soul. . . It is a process of soul-awakening self-revelation, a species of new birth, for a new life springs up in the soul with every newly discovered agency, by which the soul is brought into a more intimate knowledge of its own Divine powers and perfections, and is lifted to a higher level of wisdom, goodness, and joy.
—Frederick Douglass
Supporting Jazz and the Arts Now
Jazz calls us to engage with our national identity. It gives expression to the beauty of democracy and of personal freedom and of choosing to embrace the humanity of all types of people. It really is what American democracy is supposed to be.
—Wynton Marsalis
All of the above points to the clear, unequivocal value of the arts and artists. Jazz, in particular, is the basis of our work. Our business enterprise and this very blog is marinated in the practices and principles of jazz music, our nation’s greatest representation of infinite potential in sound. Without jazz musicians paving the way by their heroic example, our work would have no criterion for existence.
The National Jazz Museum in Harlem holds a special place in my heart and soul because for years they gave me a public platform to share my love and knowledge of the music with the people. (I’m grateful to Jazz at Lincoln Center for the same privilege.) With a very small staff of workers and volunteers, the Jazz Museum in Harlem does excellent work to continue the legacy of jazz in Harlem and throughout the city. They are under the same lockdown as all other cultural institutions and so-called “non-essential businesses” in New York City.
Donate to the National Jazz Museum in Harlem.
Jazzmobile, founded by Dr. Billy Taylor, has been producing and promoting free jazz concerts all over New York City since the 1960s. Their workshops for aspiring musicians give youth the chance to learn from professionals who point the way to artistry. In fact, Jazzmobile was the very first nonprofit arts and cultural organization devoted to jazz.
Jazzmobile deserves your support.
Wynton Marsalis, who leads the largest jazz organization in the world, is enduring the shuttering of the halls of Jazz at Lincoln Center, and the weight of responsibility for the employment of dozens of dedicated staff. Wynton has taken many hits over the years from critics and assorted playa haters, the vast majority of whom can’t hold a candle to him on the bandstand or in the boardroom, but not even 9/11 or the economic downturn of 2008 carried the ominous clouds of this moment. An institution like JALC, which has a huge overhead, relies on steadfast board support and live audiences to fulfill its mission.
Consider supporting Jazz at Lincoln Center.
Yet of all the organizations that support jazz artists, the one that likely impacts more at-risk blues and jazz musicians than any other is the Jazz Foundation of America. Through thick and thin, JFA has been there for countless artists. They need your help now more than ever. That’s why Jewel and I made a donation to JFA this weekend.
Help blues and jazz musicians in need by donating to the Jazz Foundation of America.
Call and Write to Your Congressional Representatives
To advocate for the arts and artists overall, we join Harlem arts impresario Voza Rivers in urging Congress to allot $4 billion to the National Endowment for the Arts.
The American Federation of Musicians has made it easy to write to your representatives. Go to this page, fill in your information, and your zip code will trigger a page with a form letter that you can edit and send to your reps.
Take action now, and share this information with others so they can do so too. Thank you.
Coda: Toni Morrison Redux
In her last collection of essays, speeches, and meditations, The Source of Self-Regard, Toni Morrison left us a literary masterpiece of astonishing moral clarity and aesthetic integrity. In it, you’ll find an essay titled, “The Individual Artist.” Her closing outchorus there sums up the intent of our post here:
I do not want to go into my own age without Social Security, but I can; I do not want to go into my old age without Medicare, but I can, I’ll face it; I do not like the notion of not having a grand army to defend me, but I can face that. What I cannot face is living without my art. . . I came from a group of people who always refused to live that way. In the fields we would not live without it. In chains we would not live without it—and we lived historically in the country without everything, but not without our music, not without our art.
—Toni Morrison