Jon Jang and the Sounds of Struggle Part II: Black Music, Bruce Lee
by Jon Jang. Posted Feb. 15, 2019.
Act II
Black Music, Bruce Lee
Lead Me to Free Me
in (19)73!
During my first year as a student at UC Berkeley in 1972-73, I continued my obsession of buying black music recordings at Leopold’s, the independent record store, which was one block away from my dormitory. Before Leopold’s, the record store was called SOB (Students of Berkeley) where Francis Wong and his older brother Tom, who was a student at UC Berkeley during the late 60s, would purchase black arts music of resistance recordings.
Because UCB was a large university, I felt isolated living in the compact cubicle space in my dormitory and often escaped to San Francisco on weekend nights to attend concerts at Keystone Korner, the iconic jazz club located in the North Beach area. In June of 1973, I attended one of Rahsaan Roland Kirk’s Bright Moments concerts which was later produced on vinyl. Rahsaan created a sonic universe filled with a multitude of sounds, “shining sonic stars,” through his array of woodwind instruments. The sounds of Rahsaan’s ensemble moved in perfect alignment with each instrument. From the sublime to the playful ridiculous, Rahsaan’s talk story introductions would be sometimes deadly serious, sometimes humorous and sometimes both. This memorable life changing concert was a “bright moment” that revivified my life. This “bright moment” pushed me forward to envisage this decision: “I want to make music become a crucial part of my life.”
To the disappointment of my mother who wished and hoped that I would consider a different direction by studying to be a scientist like my late father, I dropped out of UC Berkeley and lived at home in Palo Alto to begin my piano study at age 19 with an elderly neighborhood piano teacher named Miss Helen Pfeiffer. By coincidence, my first piano lesson happened to fall on July 17, 1973, the sixth anniversary of John Coltrane’s transition onto ancestry. Three days later, my hero Bruce Lee, who spiritually lifted my Chinese American head up high, died unexpectedly and mysteriously at the young age of 32. In the same month, I saw the McCoy Tyner Quartet with saxophonist Azar Lawrence perform repertory from McCoy Tyner’s Enlightenment recording at the Keystone Korner. In August, Bruce Lee’s final film, Enter the Dragon, opened at theatres in United States. Within one month between mid-July to mid-August in 1973, I was on an emotional roller coaster ride. Two months later, the Wailers released their Burnin’ vinyl recording that had Get Up, Stand Up by Bob Marley and Peter Tosh. Black music, Bruce Lee led me to free me in ’73!
With a scant piano study of 18 months, I flew to New York and Ohio to audition to music schools and was accepted to all of them. I chose Oberlin College in Ohio because its music conservatory is not only an excellent music school, but also the college is one of the top small liberal arts colleges in the country. Having been accepted as a Piano Performance major in the Oberlin Conservatory, I could spend half of my course credits in piano performance every semester so that I could invest longer hours of practice and study on the piano.
Act III
A Black Warrior at the Logan Conservatory of Music of Oberlin College
“We’ll tell the story how we’ve overcome
For we’ll understand it better by and by.”
We’ll Understand It Better By and By song by Charles Albert Tindley
In response to the racist book, The Making of Jazz, by James Lincoln Collier in 1979, James Baldwin responded and wrote this excerpt from his essay, Of the Sorrow Songs: The Cross of Redemption: “This music begins on the auction block.” The history of black music is about the struggle for freedom. Dr. Wendell Logan fought the struggle to honor Afro American music in its respectful place at the Oberlin Conservatory of Music in the tradition that great artists Paul Robeson, Marian Anderson and Roland Hayes did when they performed black spirituals in the concert halls “because they belong there” as Paul Robeson stated many times.
Dr. Wendell Logan (1940-2010), who was a composer, saxophonist and Chair of the Afro American Music Department at the Oberlin Conservatory of Music, was my mentor and a father figure. Wendell Logan was a visionary leader, a deep thinker and a courageous warrior with a huge heart. Dr. Logan not only encouraged us to explore the highest level within ourselves, but whatever we expressed though the music had to come from a place of honesty and purity. Dr. Logan also nurtured and instilled the values of integrity, respect, dignity and led by example. Wendell Logan carried a strong sense of nobility.
All of my music works has Wendell in them. My work, Eleanor Bumpurs, was influenced by Dr. Logan’s Songs of Our Time (1969), a three-movement work that features excerpts of texts from The Riddle of the Sphinx by W.E.B. Du Bois, The End of Man is His Beauty by Leroi Jones (aka Amiri Baraka) and The Soft Man by Gwendolyn Brooks. Dr. Logan was motivated by a concern for and reaction to current social and political conditions found in this country.
During my first year at Oberlin in 1975, I was the only Asian American student who performed in the Oberlin Conservatory of Music’s Large Jazz Ensemble, as well as in one of the Oberlin Small Jazz Ensembles. Dr. Logan would create brilliant and engaging orchestrations of Charlie Parker’s Au Privave and Ornette Coleman’s Lonely Woman for the Oberlin Large Jazz Ensemble. I learned how Dr. Logan integrated the role of composer and artistic director to translate his musical ideas on paper to make highly successful artistic statement in the performance. I also learned how to curate a concert that was different than the 18th and 19th Century European Classical music practice.
Simultaneously, a group of white students in the College organized an “alternative” big band because they were only interested in performing “charts” by white big band jazz composers such as Sammy Nestico, Stan Kenton and Chuck Mangione. Their white privilege enabled them to receive “equal” course credit from Oberlin ExCo, the only student run for credit experimental college in the country. This racist act and approval not only disrespects and undermines Professor Logan and the Afro-American Music Department, it also marginalizes black music by giving power to the white students in the College (and ExCo mind you) over a distinguished black professor, who was only one of two composers on the Conservatory faculty to receive the prestigious Guggenheim Foundation Fellowship in the Conservatory. To make matters worse, the “alternative” whites only male big band in the College were granted the white privilege of holding rehearsals in the large orchestra room where the orchestra rehearsed. It was a Con Job 1.0 (Con is the common nickname in reference to the Conservatory often use to distinguish students who were in the College and students who were in the Con).
When I was walking through the Oberlin Conservatory locker area, I spotted Dr. Logan and noticed that he did not look right. In severe pain, Dr. Logan repeatedly urged me “to keep the music pure.” Later, I found out that Dr. Logan, who was in his mid-30s, slipped a disc and ended up staying in the hospital. As the Chair of the Afro American Music Department, Dr. Logan worked on “the plantation” as “a one-man band” with little administrative support and a heavy workload equivalent to 2 ½ to 3 times the regular teaching course workload of most professors. Not only that, Dr. Logan also had to contend with the daily struggle of racism.
I remember one time when Dr. Logan and I were going down in an elevator from his office to the ground floor in the Conservatory. When the door opened, a white woman Conservatory student was startled and scared by the appearance of Dr. Logan, a brawny black man who was on a football scholarship when he was an undergraduate student at Florida A &M. After taking an Afro-American Music History final exam, I was at the student bar with a white male College student who also took the exam. After I bragged that the test was easy, the white student reacted by blaming his poor performance on the “unfairness” and attacking Dr. Logan for his incompetency (inferiority). (All Dr. Logan did was momentarily put the needle on the wrong selection of the record). I turned to the jukebox and inserted $2.50 worth of quarters to spin consecutively ten times the Tubes White Punks on Dope just to mess with his racist clownin’. A number of white students and faculty just couldn’t learn to become comfortable having a black man as a professor and a “colleague.” They would have preferred placing a black professor in the invisible architecture of food services or security. And they did that by deporting Professor Logan and the Oberlin Jazz Ensembles out of the Conservatory building and into Hales Gymnasium, a dilapidated gymnasium in the College for a sentence of two decades. Con Job 2.0: Now you hear it (black music in the Con), now you don’t.
A similar comparison can be made with Professor Tommie Smith, who raised his black glove in silent gesture after he and John Carlos received gold medals at the 1968 Olympics. Despite Professor Smith’s superior history making achievements on an international level compared to the local no-name white faculty in the Physical Education Department, Dr. Smith was not granted tenure at Oberlin College by his white “colleagues.” A number of my white student friends were critical of the Olympic Gold Medal winner Professor Tommie Smith for his “lack of being articulate” (inferiority). When black NFL quarterback Colin Kaepernick’s ritualized the kneeling gesture in resistance to the legal lynching of black people by the police in recent years, Kaepernick inherited the Tommie Smith and John Carlos protest tradition of the silent gesture (name of Tommie Smith’s autobiography).
When pianist/composer Sir Roland Hanna was an artist in residence at Oberlin in 1976, I was one of the student pianists in the official Oberlin Conservatory of Music Jazz Ensemble who rehearsed Roland Hanna’s work, The Legend of Nat Turner in the orchestra rehearsal space! It was poetic justice that we would rehearse a work about a black man who led a slave rebellion against the white slave owners in Virginia in 1831 in this space where we oftentimes felt like we did not belong in the Conservatory. The work opens with spoken word narration with the rhythm section providing a funk vamp. Then the music shifts to an instrumental version of Deep River, the beloved spiritual arranged as an art song by Harry T. Burleigh that was reharmonized by Sir Roland Hanna. The student Jose Negron begins to sing, “I was born, born to harvest the corn.” It was a symbolic and a watershed moment that we will never forget. It was a transformative experience.
During my three years at Oberlin, Dr. Logan invited other prominent internationally known musicians/composers to as artist in residence such as Jackie McLean, Barry Harris, Leroy Jenkins, Sam Rivers and Anthony Braxton, who made a historic recording with four orchestras performed by students at Oberlin. Afterwards, Braxton recruited four students to tour in his large ensemble in Europe during the summer. Years later, Braxton was awarded the prestigious MacArthur “Genius” Award Fellowship.
Dr. Wendell Logan’s vision and practice of exposing a diversity of black musician engagement was very profound. While Jackie McLean encouraged us to learn Donna Lee by listening to the Charlie Parker/Miles Davis recording in 1947, Anthony Braxton’s 1974 recording inspired us to change it.
Because I was a piano performance major who studied 18th-20th Western European classical piano literature and performed recitals, I had the best of both worlds studying music with Professor Wilbur Price and Dr. Logan as well as other music worlds. With Wilbur “Bud” Price, Professor of Piano Performance, I also studied a diversity of piano works by French composers such as Maurice Ravel’s Jeux d’eau (1901), Claude Debussy’s Etudes (1915), Olivier Messiaen’s Catalogue d’Oiseaux (1956-1958) and Eric Satie’s absurd Embryons Desséchés (Dried up Embryos) (1913).
During 1975-78, there were very few Asian American students in the Oberlin Conservatory of Music unlike the present. Sachiko Hayashi and I were the only two Asian American students who graduated from the Oberlin Conservatory of Music in 1978. I was the only nonwhite student who performed in the West African Kora Ensemble and the Javanese Gamelan Ensemble. Taking courses taught and directed by Professor Wendell Logan, I was the only Asian American student to study composition and perform in both small and large jazz ensembles. I was also the primary pianist who performed many of Wendell Logan’s “classical music” works at the Faculty Composers Concert series.
Simply put, I was the first Asian American student outlier in the Oberlin Conservatory of Music. One white student described me as a “Chinese Frank Zappa.” A white professor in the piano performance department gave me an off handed compliment that I looked more like I was in the College instead of the Con because I grew a moustache, wore a beret and a T shirt with the image of Bob Dylan.
In the Afro American music history course that Dr. Logan taught, I learned about the power of spirituals and music from the black church. Whenever I saw Wendell grow weary as a result of the day to day grind of racism, I asked him, “How can you take all of this?” He responded by embracing a song about freedom from the black church: We’ll Understand It Better By and By by Charles Albert Tindley, who some say that We Shall Overcome, a Civil Rights anthem of 60s was based on Tindley’s I’ll Overcome. We’ll Understand It Better By and By and His Eye is on the Sparrow were some Wendell’s songs of survival.
Dr. Wendell Logan always carried a sense of nobility and his sentiment exalted. Dr. Logan encouraged us to pursue the highest and purest motive of the heart through the music and life. Respect the music, respect the artists was one of genuine philosophy that shaped our lives as musicians and arts citizens. When Dr. Logan allowed a couple of my compositions to be performed in a rehearsal, he reminded me to thank the musicians.
Dr. Logan was also a strong purveyor of the Afro American music tradition. In my opinion, he refused to use terms such as jazz combos and jazz clinics because it sounded sterile and marginalized the nobility of the music. He preferred the terms Large Jazz Ensemble to big band, Small Jazz Ensemble to jazz combo and works or compositions instead of tunes.
Oberlin College ought to consider renaming the Oberlin Conservatory of Music after Wendell Logan: The Logan Conservatory of Music. Because Jean-Frédéric Oberlin was a minister and not a musician, it’s appropriate. After all, the Logan Airport in Boston is named after Edward Lawrence Logan who was a lawyer, judge, military officer and politician. The Logan Conservatory of Music at Oberlin College would “ring with the harmonies” of liberation.
Act III, Scene 2
My Senior Recital and the Black Church
With scholarship funds running out, I was forced to perform my senior recital in September after only three years of study at Oberlin and two years prior to that. During the summer of 1978, the Conservatory building was closed and I was in need of a piano to prepare for my senior recital. I posted an advertisement in the town’s only bank and received a response from a black woman music teacher. Because she was about to undergo surgery followed by a rehabilitation period, she said I could practice at the Rust Methodist Church in exchange for my role as the piano accompanist at the Sunday services until she recovered.
On my first day, the black church congregation was shocked. I could hear whispers such as “What is this heathen or foreigner or oriental doin’ in our church?” After awhile, they finally learned to “accept” me.
When the time my senior recital came around, I invited the black church congregation. When they all came to listen to me perform works by Beethoven, Ravel, Schönberg and Thelonious Sphere Monk, I received a standing ovation from the full house of 500 attendees. For my encore, I improvised on Chopsticks. Dr. Logan explained to me: “If you give to the (black) community, they will give back.” What was profound about this moment is that there has long existed a schism between the College and the town of Oberlin where the black working class residents were often despised as “townies.” Not wanted. Although there have been incidents where the Oberlin College community has behaved like a sundown town, the black church community came anyway to my concert in the Conservatory!
Act III, Scene 3
Reflections on Arts Apartheid in the Con: Intersectionality of Race and Class
“To my mind, the ‘blues’ is one of your greatest musical assets, truly American despite earlier contributory influences from Africa and Spain.”
Ravel: Man and Musician by Arbie Ornstein
In 1974 before my first year at Oberlin, I read an essay in the San Francisco Chronicle written by Ralph J. Gleason with the headline: Wolfgang Better Than Sonny? Here is another way to spin this question to reach its broader meaning as a new headline: “Is 18th & 19th Century Western European Classical Music Better Than 19th & 20th Century Afro-American Music?” This excerpt from Gleason’s essay will help explain:
“During President B. Johnson’s Administration in the mid 1960s, he hosted a Culture Klatch affair to which the leading intellectuals, painters, performers and artistic VIPs were invited. Dwight McDonald, a prominent commentator, wrote in the New York Review that there were no American composers at this official government cultural event even though Duke Ellington and his Orchestra performed at this event. McDonald and his peer group infer that Duke Ellington is not a composer.”
This article helped prepare and amplify my developing perspective of the arts apartheid system at the Oberlin Conservatory of Music, as well as almost all music schools and departments in this country who teach Europe (music) only in an English only country. Here is a fictional white American character:” Because we are Americans, it is our patriotic duty to only learn about American music sung only in English.” By this logic, we should ban the performance of Beethoven’s Ode to Joy because it is sung in German and celebrate Billie Holiday’s recording of Strange Fruit. Music schools, departments and programs in this country share a strange sense of patriotism. If we believe in the cliché, “America is the greatest country in the world,” then why does (white) European music receive greater validation and economic and foundational support than (black) American music?
After I graduated with a B.Mus. degree in Piano Performance from the Oberlin Conservatory of Music in 1978, I recorded my eponymous album, Jang, four years later and on the eve of Thelonious Monk’s transition to ancestry. In defiance to the annual Mostly Mozart Festival, there is a photo of me with a placard on the back side cover of the vinyl recording that reads: Monk Yes, Mozart No. On the front side cover, there is a drawing of a piano with the brand name Jang instead of Steinway and a drawing of my hands in handcuffs with an inscription that reads US Music Institutions.
Editor’s Note: In recognition of the February 19, 1942 issuance of Executive Order 9066 which ordered all Japanese Americans on the West Coast to concentration camps in the U.S., I’m posting Jon Jang’s Redress Blues & Reparations Now! Observance of the Day of Remembrance will take place in many cities throughout the U.S. in mid-February.
Editor’s Note: Stay tuned for Part III of Jon Jang’s Sound of Struggle coming in March 2019.
