For six years, I’ve thrown myself into the work that is now Our Trespasses: White Churches and the Taking of Neighborhoods. The launch is close - February 20. Register for the launch party below. But first….
It is Saturday night in Concord, NC, a town best known for the noxious noises and fumes of a racetrack, or the constant traffic of a large shopping mall. But when you step into the Kodiak Lounge, in a renovated downtown building, the roaring motors fade. The long and narrow room still has too much sheen to be mistaken for some Greenwich Village haunt, but the suggestion is clear. This space is for listening.
By seven, every seat is full. Drinks are on the way. The band gathers under the blue lights at the front of the room, shuffles some music across their stands, and is ready to begin. The room is eager to hear them.
Well, everyone is eager except for the three white ladies at the front table, whose names are–I’m pretty sure about this–Karen, Karen, and Karen. They seem to have gotten lost on the way to the Applebee’s over near the mall.
But the rest of us have gathered to hear the jazz quintet Civil Disobedience, led by New York-based bassist David Ambrosio. They’re at the second stop of a tour through the southern United States. For most of the week, they’ll play small rooms in places like Concord, or Mars Hill, NC, the sorts of places that world-class jazz musicians don’t often stop.
Ambrosio’s group is presenting music recorded for Blue Note Records in the late 1960s, but most of which has gone unheard, even by students of the jazz tradition. Ambrosio first heard the material after Peter Watrous, former jazz critic for the New York Time, introduced him to it. “Watrous brought me some Bobby Hutcherson records, a bunch of Jackie McLean records,” Ambrosio told me. “So I started transcribing it because I loved it and wanted to learn it myself, and to play it with some ensembles I was teaching…. Watrous gave me the idea–’you could form a band with this stuff.’”1
Ambrosio didn’t put that band together immediately, but he eventually came back to the idea. “I started looking into these records, and I noticed two different things. One was that every one of these records was recorded in the late 60s but wasn’t released until one to two decades later, if not three. The other thing I noticed was that many of the themes had to do with what was going on at the time, you know, socially and politically. I thought, ‘wow, that’s really deep. These are important [works], and they haven’t been heard.”
All this was happening around 2017. Ambrosio was nearing 50 years old. The 50th anniversary of Dr. King’s assassination was approaching. And, the country was in the midst of years of protest over civil rights issues that remained unresolved, in many cases the same issues that Hutcherson and McLean and their colleague Joe Chambers were writing about in the late 60s. “Being an activist myself, this music brought together several things for me.,” he said. Ambrosio connected to the music on multiple levels, for its political immediacy, its artistic excellence, and its enduring freshness. He thought audiences would connect with the music as well.
He put together an all-star band. His first call was Victor Lewis, the legendary New York percussionist whose career spans 50 years of touring and recording with everyone in the jazz scene. Filling out the quintet were saxophonist Donny McCaslin, trumpeter Jason Palmer, and pianist Bruce Barth. They played their first gig in December 2017 for a sold-out room at the now-closed Jazz Standard, one of New York’s major jazz clubs, to excellent reviews. Between scheduling and the hiatus of touring during COVID lockdowns, though, the band never got on the road until recently.
One of the challenges of communicating social themes–or any linguistic meaning–with instrumental music is the extreme limitations of language. A composer has a title, and that’s pretty much it. Everything else to be derived from a piece is “at the very edge of semantic availability,” as the Welsh cultural theorist Raymond Williams said. The literary theorist Brent Hayes Edwards writes about sound’s ability to “capture and retain and even revisit a precise historical transcript of complex affective experience.” That ability “suggests the infinitely fertile interface between music and literature in African diasporic culture….” A few words can do a great deal of work.2
Given that his hour-long sets have only a few words, I wondered about the affective experience or the historical transcript that Ambrosio wanted to communicate to his audiences.
“The first thing I want them to hear is something that makes them feel good,” he said. “One thing I’ve learned in the world of activism is that you still need to feel good about what you’re doing. If you’re just grinding and grinding, and you feel bad, it’s not going to be effective.”
I found his answer surprising.3 When I think of the year 1968, feeling good is not the first thing that comes to mind. I suspect that most Americans would think of the extremes of that moment. The murder of Dr. King. The uprisings that followed King’s assassination. The Vietnam War. The Weather Underground started in 1969. The Black Liberation Army and the Black Panther Party were active at the same time.
The most common images of the late 60s are of militancy, and of the violent quelling of that militancy by forces determined to maintain the status quo. But the music Ambrosio presents does not rage. It is filled with joy. It is mournful. It is playful and hopeful.
Militancy, of course, is not the opposite of joy. Apathy is. But still, the music is a helpful reminder of how social movements work. They send into the streets and the halls of power people who are seized by conviction. Liberation is serious business. Some people give their lives for it. But the end of movements, even revolutionary ones, is flourishing. The rage gets the press, but what nurtures any revolutionary moment is a longing for thriving communities. Thriving comes through peace with justice, which is the only kind of peace there is.
The most common images social movements are deadly serious, and at the same time the work is also tender: nursing one another’s broken dreams, binding up wounds, wiping tears, dreaming a new world where children do not suffer, cooking nourishing meals for friends and strangers. Movements produce not only freedom, but also great laughter.
The flourishing that movements envision is like a quintet breathing together. Everyone is cheering one another on. Each person plays their role with all of their senses and faculties engaged.
Beyond the artistic excellence that makes their joy obvious, Ambrosio hopes that the music will provide some exposure to an important moment in American history. The clearest example of this was the quintet’s performance of “Poor People’s March,” written by saxophonist Harold Land. During the set, he took about one minute to offer a quick overview of the Poor People’s Campaign, the important work that Dr. King was leading at the time of his assassination. This campaign is one of many hopeful but relatively unknown chapters in American history, one that has now gotten a revival through the work of Rev. Dr. William Barber and his collaborators. Ambrosio’s presentation is direct, but not confrontational. The soloists play with joy. Victor Lewis’s drums are effervescent. Land’s composition still sounds inspired, and inspiring.
As he prepared for the tour, Ambrosio listened to Dr. King’s speeches. One speech he listened to multiple times recently is the “Blueprint” speech. Dr. King delivered it on October 26, 1967 to the students of Barratt Junior High School in Philadelphia. The speech was directed to those Black students there, but his words ring true for many audiences. King has three points about setting forward the blueprints for one’s life. He says, “Number one in your life’s blueprint should be a deep belief in your own dignity, your own worth, and your own somebodiness. …Always feel that your life has ultimate significance.” Secondly, King advises, “you must have as a basic principle the determination to achieve excellence in your various fields of endeavor.” And lastly, “in your life’s blueprint, must be a commitment to the eternal principles of beauty, love, and justice....So you must be involved in the struggle of freedom and justice.”
The audience in Concord, NC, almost 60 years later, was different than Barratt Junior High. The presenters were a mixed-race quintet of relatively anonymous musicians, not the most well-known preacher, Black or otherwise, in the world. Nevertheless, those moments from the late 1960s still spoke: beauty, joy, justice, freedom, artistic excellence of the highest order.
Set over, we all stepped back into the streets of Concord convicted by the significance of the music and buoyed to continue playing our own parts in the struggle for freedom.
The Our Trespasses launch party!!: My new book, Our Trespasses: White Churches and the Taking of American Neighborhoods officially hits bookstores and mailboxes on February 20. You should order a copy today from your local bookseller.
On the evening of Feb 20, I’m having a fabulous event. We’ll gather at the historic Grace AME Zion Church, only of only a handful of structures left from the old Brooklyn neighborhood, where most of the book is set. I’ll have some readings. I’ll be joined by sociologist Piko Ewoodzie for some discussion of the work. You’ll have a chance to hear from Brandi North Williams, a descendant of the North family. Their North family’s story drives the narrative forward. We’ll sign books and join in the merriment of the moment, which has now been six years in the making. Please plan to join by registering with the Eventbrite link below. Note that the event is free, but there is an option to help cover the space rental costs in that link.
Among the records the Ambrosio is referring to are Bobby Hutcherson’s Spiral, Medina, The Kicker, Total Eclipse, and Patterns, and Jackie McLean’s record Consequences. One of the constants across these records, and many like them, is drummer and composer Joe Chambers.
The quotes are from Edwards’ fascinating book Epistrophies: Jazz and the Literary Imagination (Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 2017) 16. Edwards includes the Raymond Williams quote as well. Connected to my own recent work, Avery Gordon also cites this idea from Williams in Ghostly Matters.
I take Ambrosio to mean something like “joy” when he says “feeling good,” though admittedly those are distinct but related ideas.
I’m going to listen to this music. We can all use some joy and hope right now!