The Universal Music of Freedom

“Jazz is the universal music of freedom,” Wynton Marsalis told the audience Saturday night. “It’s not surprising that both Hitler and Stalin tried to exterminate the music and everybody who played it.” Jazz at Lincoln Center’s biggest concert before the election was, appropriately, a program with a political theme: “Let Freedom Swing: A Celebration of Human Rights and Social Justice.” The ambitious idea was to present six famous speeches on the subject of freedom (read by celebrity orators), which also provided the basis for a set of newly commissioned extended compositions by six veteran jazz writers.The speeches were the words of Nelson Mandela (as read by the Reverend Dr. Calvin Butts), Vaclav Havel (read by Mario Van Peebles and Alfre Woodward), Lyndon Baines Johnson (Glenn Close), Eleanor Roosevelt (Patricia Clarkson), Robert F. Kennedy (Keith David), and Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. (Dr. Butts again). This was also a rare occasion when the Lincoln Center Jazz Orchestra was fronted by a conductor, David Berger, who worked closely with Mr. Marsalis in the earliest days of the organization.Both texts and music had common themes. Most speeches came around eventually to one idea: No men are free until all men are free. As Mr. Mandela put it, “Your freedom and mine can not be separated.” This was underscored by the words of Archbishop Desmond Tutu, who referenced the African concept of “Ubuntu,” which he translated as “I am human because you are human.”The compositions consisted primarily of upbeat, affirmative sections (though never jivey or light-headed), which were contrasted with slower and more mournful movements. Even when the subject matter was grim – both Mr. Mandela and Mr. Havel were writing from prison – none of the pieces were dirge-like or funereal. And most were composed in the vocabulary of orchestral jazz as it existed before 1960.The first title, inspired by Mr. Mandela and Archbishop Tutu, was a collaboration between Darius Brubeck – who has lived, studied, and composed in South Africa for most of his career – and the African jazz composer Zim Ngqawana. It did not conform to my preconceived idea of traditional African music, or resemble the music of that other jazz composer named Brubeck, who happens to be Darius’s father. The basic orchestral colors were Ellingtonian, reminiscent of Duke when he evoked an exotic land (as in “The Far East Suite”).Alto saxophonist Ted Nash caught everyone by surprise, however, with an out-and-out free jazz solo using overblown notes independent of chordal structures.For the words of Havel, Lincoln Center commissioned a piece from the Czech composer Emil Viklicky. Mr. Viklicky’s work was the most ambitious, longest, and, in some ways, the least successful: The other composers would take a short paragraph or so of a speech, then follow that with an orchestral interlude. Mr. Viklicky, contrastingly, tried to provide an extended setting for the words themselves, and Mr. Van Peebles and Ms. Woodward read excerpts from Mr. Havel’s letters through the entire length of the piece.The words of Johnson and Roosevelt were trusted to Jimmy Heath and Toshiko Akiyoshi, two venerated composers who were both adults at the time of the Voting Rights Act in 1965. It’s not reading too much into the music to imagine that Mr. Heath put into it much of what he must have been feeling as an African-American when that historic bill was made law.Mr. Heath’s and Ms. Akiyoshi’s compositions were in many ways the boldest of the evening. Ms. Akiyoshi’s “Let Freedom Swing” seemed to owe the least to any kind of programmatic concept or concert presentation; she simply served up a very optimistic, flat-out swinger. Mr. Heath’s “Passion or Fashion,” narrated by Glenn Close (in Cruella DeVille black-and-white), built majestically up to a percussion solo in which Herlin Riley seemed like a modern Joshua, breaking down the walls of a Jim Crow Jericho with his drumsticks.“Day of Affirmation,” inspired by an anti-Apartheid speech given by Senator Robert Kennedy in South Africa and composed by the comparatively young Darin Atwater, had the band chant several phrases of the text. Large sections were ingeniously set in 3/4, a time signature not normally associated with freedom.Finally, Billy Child’s “The Fierce Urgency of Now” was based on a writing of Dr. King, in which he in turn quoted an ancient Islamic poet (“The moving finger writes”). In this passage, Dr. King made clear his nonviolence policy was not merely passive, but an assertive, even aggressive action, which required more moral strength and tenacity than any act of violence. Mr. Child, the only one of the composers who performed with the orchestra, captured Dr. King’s sword of righteousness, his passion and conviction, in the most modern sounding work of the evening. He employed modality in a way similar to the more late 1960s compositions of Andrew Hill and Herbie Hancock, and he used dark dissonances and a spiraling swing to show that Dr. King’s movement meant business.As it happened, the major standing ovation of the evening was not given to any of the musicians, composers, or readers, but to Kofi Annan, the secretary general of the United Nations, and his wife. Somehow, none of the performers minded.

The Universal Music of Freedom

The Universal Music of Freedom

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