Sonny, Sonny,
Sonny. Thank you once again Mr. Rollins
for opening up your Aeolus lungs this morning and filling my sails. We’re moving now. Dolphins leaping off the side of the boat,
cutting through traffic, stopping on a corner, turn, lights, go. Music crafted for the complexity of urban
pedestrians. Helios must have heard my
call and swapped an ‘o’ for a ‘u’ as even the sun has now made an appearance in
particulate Beijing.
I found an album I didn’t know called “Sonny Rollins First
Recordings 1957.” I’m not sure why it’s
called that. He’d been recording for
years. Perhaps this set was on January 2nd
of that year. I can’t find a damn thing
about it on line, including who was playing on the date. The “Sonny Moon for Two” is slow and pensive. I’ve long had a vinyl version of this on “A
Night at the Village Vanguard” when he is playing with the mighty Elvin Jones
on drums and Wilber Ware on bass, also from 1957. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Night_at_the_Village_Vanguard
I have been fortunate enough to see the distinguished gentleman
on two occasions, years ago. One time
was in a big impersonal auditorium at Tufts University when I was grad student
at the Fletcher School. We were way up
back and he called out to everyone “what do you want to hear?” No one said anything and there was a
prolonged moment of awkwardness. The
hall was just too big.
Another time was down in the city off Union Square at a
small venue the name of which escapes me and it has long since closed. I remember the Village Voice had simple blurb
next to his picture saying “’Ta da’. The
world’s greatest musician.” I went with
a Senegalese friend who was so excited.
“I called my brother and said you are not going to believe who I am
going to see tonight, man!” And it was a
much better vibe. It seemed that as
Sonny stood there, strong, swinging his hips, feet planted that he was
connected down into the entire city and to everywhere that night.
The world could easily have missed the greatest
musician. Born in NYC of West Indian
parents, Sonny Rollins was sent up to Rikers Island at the age of twenty for
armed robbery. I taught in Brownsville
Brooklyn for years and I can remember going and visiting students who’d been
put away in Rikers. It looks different
up close than it does flying over it on your way out from LaGuardia
airport. I remember standing in line
with so many young mothers with their kids.
No one is happy. Kids are running
and screaming. Mothers are whacking them
around, hard. How many other “world’s
greatest” people, are stuck inside, on account of their own choices or
otherwise?
Presumably Sonny gave himself a talking to and came out
blowing. How important it is to forgive,
to reframe, to start anew and hold yourself to something higher. Not every person sitting in Rikers Island
will get that chance. But hope certainly
is audacious and indomitable. Who would
have believed that that kid with the deep eyes, sitting there in cell in 1950
would have been awarded a medal by a black president, exactly 60 years
later?
I’ve been pushing this theme of reconciliation in North Asia
for most of this week. It has my
attention. Every month for so long now, I’m in Seoul and then Tokyo and then
back home to Beijing. I’m across to
Taipei. I’m over to Hong Kong. I’m riding down to Shanghai. Conversations in each city, polite, business
like, until the day is done. And then people
begin to reflect on otherness.
People’s opinions about their neighbors don’t offer much
nuance. The attitudes, the prejudices
are all predictable. People distrust,
dislike and often hate one another.
Generally these opinions are buttressed by no physical exploration of
the place concerned, whatsoever. People
who are smart, and worldly default to racist reductions that in another context
would be impermissible. Binary, 你死我活[1]there
is no way out. Outsiders nod, chew
along for the ride and figure, that’s how
it is.
I am other to it all.
There are of course feelings of distrust and hatred towards America and
Americans as well, with corresponding cross winds the other direction. But I think it is safe to say these are
usually complicated feelings, a mixture of love and hate, admiration and
disdain. Your average Beijing cab driver’s
take on Japan is mixture of hate and loathing.
The 700-year-old hatreds in Belfast or Derry that seemed
completely frozen in perpetuity, finally can and do thaw. There is a confluence of economic, political
and spiritual possibilities mixed with great, great humility that allows a
Martin McGuiness to shake hands with a Queen Elizabeth. And we all know that there’s plenty of
pungent hate still left lapping about.
The point is that what was clearly immutable, wasn’t really at all.
Regular readers will know I am reading Maya Angelou’s “I
Know Why the Caged Bird Sings” with my daughter these days. Consider the ground covered from the life she
depicts as a ten year-old African American girl in St. Louis in the 1930s to
the proud woman she was receiving the Presidential Medal of Freedom from Barak
Obama two years ago. To quote Ms.
Angelou "We are growing up beyond the idiocies of racism and sexism."
Could a little girl imagine a black president from the St. Louis of 1938? Could a monarch during the
vitriol of ‘the troubles” imagine a
photo op with the man who all but certainly gave the order to blow apart her
“Uncle Dickie?” I do think it’s
important that we insist upon a long view where idiocy of racism, for example,
eventually gives way to reason and reconciliation. Where new generations do get to start anew.
Sonny got a chance to start anew. And, eventually, he made the best of it, and
became the best of them. Other guys
didn't. It’s true. And other conflicts continue on, unerring,
seemingly forever. But if we’ve seen
racial reconciliation, if we’ve seen in our life, ignorance that gives way to
moral clarity, if we believe in the potential of the species to evolve, we
should insist on it, wherever we are.
I’ve grown tired of chewing along here in North Asia. This may be how it is. But it needn’t be.
[1]
nǐsǐwǒhuó: lit. you die, I live (idiom);
irreconcilable adversaries / two parties cannot coexist
No comments:
Post a Comment