Satchmo Meets Amadeus
"The classical music of globalization"
(StudienVerlag 2006)
Impressionistic musings on Satchmo Meets Amadeus
Sometime around Y2K, I found a tasty piece of vinyl at a San Antonio thrift-store for a quarter: The dissection and reconstruction of music from the past as performed by the inmates of Lalo Schifrin’s demented ensemble as a tribute to the memory of the Marquis de Sade (Verve 1966).
For short: Schifrin/Sade. I found it stuck under my rickety shopping-cart wheel, making the metal hinges swing the rolling basket in circles. This is sort of what the music did to my mind.
When I played this piece at parties, almost no one had a frame of reference for a rollicking mesh of blues, Bach, bebop, and “Bossa Antique” -- harpsichord scatting and chamber improv on cello and viola just didn’t seem to catch on.
But to me, it was perfect: An Argentine pianist/bandleader -- the guy who penned “Mission Impossible” and dozens more themes -- dredging classical baroque notions into a bluesy jazz idiom for a kind of soundtrack for my strolls, years later, into the hills of Salzburg.
Mozart would have sat in on that jam session.
You see, across nation and time and cultural context, jazz persists and continues to inform such experiences of world waltzing. As Salzburg historian Reinhold Wagnleitner puts it in his excellent collection Satchmo Meets Amadeus, jazz is “the classical music of globalization.”
I had the pleasure of meeting Reinhold at a recent Salzburg Global Seminar, and I wanted to share with him my stories of musical admixture, my own head medley produced by Bootsy and amplified by Wagner (maybe with a few beats by DJ Qbert).
The essence of his anthology, based in cross-disciplinary symposia from New Orleans to Salzburg: That Satchmo meets Amadeus every time we recognize the glorious, global connections between classical, pop, and our current mass culture. From the uneasy navigation of their hometown limitations, to the enshrining of each with an invisible TRADEMARK insignia, Pops and Moze created music that really moved, from Salzburg to Vienna, from New Orleans to Chicago to New York, and their tunes (properly received) turned the idea of classical versus pop, of high versus low culture, right on its powdered-wig head.
But more than that, Satchmo Meets Amadeus explodes the dichotomy between controlled, complex, classical execution versus naïve, “native” jazz genius. (In the shadows, observe the tired, hung-out-to-dry notion that jazz was purely African in provenance, later stolen by white people for someone else’s profit.)
Consider the Jews expelled from Europe, Austria included, who spread the tidings of classical music and helped build an industry of American production and distribution, recognizing genius where others saw only “race records.” Consider the Sicilians in New Orleans who taught voice, instrumentation, and arrangement to black people. Consider New Orleans as the biggest opera city in 19th century USA, mounting Mozart for Sidney Bechet, Buddy Bolden, and of course Satchel Mouth, among others.
Contrasting the catch-all put-down of “world music” as currently conceived, Satchmo Meets Amadeus gives true meaning to jazz as the first authentic world music, a sound forged in the uniquely spiced pot of New Orleans gumbo that included Creoles, Euros, Indios, and Africans of every diasporic shade and savor. From these origins, jazz went up the Mississippi to the Northern industrial corridor, on to New York, and out to the rest of the world, recognized finally and especially through the traumas of World War as the true sound of liberation.
The operative metaphor, here, is apt and American: The shot-gun wedding. Satchmo Meets Amadeus is a sort of nuptial presided over with a rifle. Like the deep Southern, Scots-Irish/Appalachian blood-feud brought to a boil by a bastard child and a marriage pressed at the end of a gun barrel, this book brings together global players divided only by historical amnesia but now thrown into conversation by the cataclysms of the 20th century, immanently unpacked in the idiom of globalization.
Highlights include Penny von Eschen’s re-hash of Satchmo Blows up the World (Harvard UP 2004), here sliced down to a meditation on “The Real Ambassadors” during the Cold War, touching on Louis Armstrong’s partly-Pepsi-sponsored tour of Africa in 1960-61, capturing the glaring contradiction of Jim Crow America touting black musicians to fight Cold War race perceptions. This piece carries over into essays about both Nazi contradictions with respect to jazz and the contradictory uses of Satchmo/Amadeus in pop/tourism.
Deeper still, historic pieces dig into the related histories of the Habsburg Monarchy, Salzburg, and New Orleans, within the context of colonial bartering and power-positioning. While recognizing the place of jazz as “the American high modernist contribution to world culture,” other pieces -- such as “New Orleans: An American Pompeii?,” by Lawrence N. Powell -- struggle to place Satchmo/Amadeus at the center of our current concepts of globalization. Given the rate of global change, will New Orleans merely be the first of various cities leveled and lost to climate shifts? And what will we have learned, really, from Satchmo/Amadeus, beyond tourism soundtracks, if their global import becomes sunken lost treasure?
In addition to the big questions, I take away from Satchmo Meets Amadeus a personal connection with Reinhold Wagnleitner at the Salzburg Global Seminar this July 2007. I enjoyed his personal narratives of trying to open up the Salzburg scene, to get past classical stagnation with the energy of jazz. His stories about musicians, tunes, and concerts remind me of my own love for such cities as San Antonio, for its unique contributions to American and global cultures.
(See, also, period pictures of Reinhold in his ’70s jazz/rock combo Pentameter, for which he played bass and injected new music into the Salzburg youth scene, documented in Satchmo....)
Behind today's trademarks and copyrights, you can still find the spark of musical revolution and a true global avant-garde, now on MP3 blogs and electronic platforms of digital convergence. What’s the next variation, Mozart? What’s the time signature and key, Satch?
Perhaps a sequel? A reprise, titled FLACO MEETS FALCO, A "Texe-Mexe" Odyssey featuring Mozart-as-Mestizo on the Frontiers of New Sanzburgtonio? Or Wolfie's Beautiful Big Enchilada, maybe Sir Douglas Sahm as Hill-Country Jedermann, or From Yodel to Grito: Alps Meet Hicks in the Trans-Atlantic Tradition of Country Yelping...etc., etc., etc., usw, &c.
[Reinhold Wagnleitner, with musicians Valerie Capers and John Robinson, plus daughters Anna and Ella, after the Salzburg Seminar International Studies Program 20 Jazz Concert and Banquet...]
Checking Out
Review of Hotel America: Scenes in the Lobby of the Fin-de-Siecle, by Lewis Lapham (Verso, 1996)
The United States at the end of the century is like a top-flight hotel from the Gilded Age turned transient flop-house. The service is slipping, the management ignores the repair calls and the menial help doesn't even speak English. Enter the lobby, though, and a picture of embalmed opulence presents itself, as if to make up for all the problems with nice floral arrangements and classical Muzak.
In a recent interview, Harper's editor Lewis H. Lapham explained his vision of a country slouching toward the millennium: "Americans want to identify with somebody in the elevator of the Four Seasons, not people cleaning up garbage in the alley." According to Lapham's new collection of editorial "Notebooks," most Americans remain lost in the lobby despite dreams of elevation, wandering a post-Cold War terrain of confusion and diminished opportunity.
Lapham threads the theme of confusion through essays touching on issues and events from 1989 to the present, pinpointing how the promises of democracy run thin on the reality of oligarchy: "The United States by 1989 had so arranged its financial affairs that 10 percent of the population held at least 70 percent of the nation's wealth, and 5 percent...owned all the nations capital assets." Expanding on this fact, Lapham shreds conventional political wisdom with acerbic and incisively crafted prose, exploding the official fictions of foreign policy ("What Washington has always wanted in Panama is not a democratic government but a gamekeeper who could be trusted to manage the rabbits") and domestic intrigue ("What is wanted in Washington is the illusion of reform, not the thing itself").
But while Lapham succesfully picks apart the official story like a scab on the country's underbelly, he fails to deliver sustained proposals for reform. A recurring disclaimer: "I've never been very adept in the arts of practical advice."
—by Benjamin Ortiz
NewCity 25 January 1996
Low Riders on the Storm
Review of Roll Down Your Window: Stories From a Forgotten America, by Juan Gonzalez (Verso, 1996)
DESTINATION: "Forgotten America." The barrios, disempowerment zones, projects and factory floors where real people work, sweat and try to make better lives. Brought to you by free raid agreements, disinvestment and U.S. capital flight toward Latin American maquiladoras, where labor and environmental standards are weak and average pay is eighty-eight cents an hour.
LOCAL COLOR: The borderless lives of the impoverished, targeted by ruthless corporate mugging and then ignored by the business-as-usual pages of daily papers. "The real heroes of our time," not the welfare cheats and pathological felons reported at every turn.
YOUR GUIDE: Juan Gonzalez. Raised in El Barrio; educated with brick in hand in the riots and protests of the sixties and seventies; mobilized as a founding member of the Puerto Rican Young Lords Party; and led by the needs of the powerless. A unique voice in the New York Daily News -- Latino, pro-labor, bilingual and not affaid to break it down: "Government refuses basic maintenance precisely because the cities are now so black and brown that the wealthy downtown enclaves and well-to-do suburban areas simply will not allow it."
SIGHTS/SOUNDS: Muzak salsa flavors visions of rent strikes; union busting; multi-racial riots in L.A.; systematic racist police brutality; financial scams bred by a legal system biased against the poor; toxic working conditions created by executive greed and indifference; layoffs coupled with executive pay raises; anti-immigrant hysteria; dictator states funded with U.S. dollars; indigenous revolution in Chiapas; the anti-Castro embargo; crumbling urban infrastructure; and gated suburban communities.
CRUISE CONTROL: Drive past police checkpoints, mega-prisons under construction, high-tech surveilance facilities and cities on fire, roll up your window and turn on the-air conditioning. "Rage gathers in the shadows ... Quadruple the jail cells and you will not lock it up. Break all the unions and you will not chase it away."
—by Benjamin Ortiz
NewCity 15 February 1996
Americanizing in Tongues
“I think that Christ was a heavy radical.” As a statement of politicized spirituality by a religious Latino, this comment suggests progressive associations with Catholic liberation theology, especially for those familiar with ’80s Latin American solidarity movements.
But Arlene M. Sánchez Walsh—a DePaul University professor of religious studies—records these thoughts from John Luna, a 50-something Southern California Chicano and member of the Vineyard ministry, a post-denominational strand of evangelical Christianity labeled charismatic. Where Luna challenges his church to “walk a picket line or be willing to do a sit-down,” another Latino evangelical—Cruz “Sonny” Arguinzoni, a founder of Victory Outreach Pentecostal ministries—clarifies his political outlook for Sánchez Walsh: “The Kingdom of God is not a democracy.”
In these instances of fieldwork from Latino Pentecostal Identity: Evangelical Faith, Self, and Society, Sánchez Walsh captures a sense of diversity among Latinos and within burgeoning Pentecostal and charismatic ministries...
...which claim 5 million of the 37 million U.S. Latinos. Spanning more than a century, the history of Latino participation in American Pentecostalism runs from retrogressive to radical chic, as the Christian evangelical movement has come to recognize pop culture, consumer merchandising and immigrant ministry as growth areas to seize on a growing sense of disappointment with Catholicism and alienation from mainstream Protestantism.
With imminent changeover of the papacy, priestly scandals and crises in Catholic dogma, it is significant that in Latin America (home to almost a third of the world’s Catholics), a quarter of the population is now Protestant. And evangelical Christians are making the greatest inroads by seeking converts among marginal populations in such places as jails, halfway houses and migrant-worker fields and among gangs and drug addicts.
“The idea of a monolithic progressive Latino political consciousness, free of spiritual impulses, has never existed,” she writes. “Indeed, for nearly a century, classical Pentecostals (Assemblies of God), Pentecostal social missions (Victory Outreach), and, more recently, charismatics (the Vineyard) have served as alternative vehicles for spiritual attainment and social service.”
Sánchez Walsh constructs a trenchant history while maintaining rigorous analysis. Separating the rhetoric of easy accommodation from the history of Latino subordination and gender inequity within these churches, she challenges readers to understand Pentecostalism as one route to empowerment and social engagement that U.S. Latinos have made their own while preserving a sense of ethnic difference.
Yet the story of Pentecostal and Latino assimilation into evangelical Christianity is not one of a simple conversion narrative. Sánchez Walsh disputes media coverage, scholarship and conventional wisdom that Latinos share a Catholic ethos, especially given generations of Latinos have been neither Catholic nor mainstream Protestant. At the same time, Sánchez Walsh points out, “Latino churches tend not to incorporate themselves into the larger political right culture of conservative evangelicals. Latino evangelicals tend to be much more mainstream and less conservative on social issues. For example, they would want public education, amnesty for immigrants, more resources for education in urban areas, gang prevention, a whole host of issues that keep them from the Christian right.”
Central to Latinos in Pentecostalism is the ideology of the Holy Spirit—with its subordination of racial and social differences to spiritual insight—and the transcendence of language barriers through speaking in tongues.
Moreover, Pentecostalism has provided opportunities for higher education through Bible colleges, leadership and employment, and a cultural bridge for immigrants, sometimes through cooptation of folk and pop culture into a Christian mold. Still, Sánchez Walsh criticizes the anti-intellectualism, legalism and insularity of Pentecostalism. And her work is meant to counter similar protective shields in academic, cultural and political contexts that dismiss religious ideology and the position of experience one might have from within a community of faith. “To view evangelicals as a monolith is wrong,” she says. “And it is another kind of orthodoxy to draw the line of authenticity at religion as somehow having a simple ulterior, right-wing motive.”
As published in In These Times as Americanizing in Tongues