A Talk on Jews & Jazz

I was asked to speak on the subject of "Jews and Jazz" for our local synagogue. Here's what I said. 

Ah Christmas. Whenever I think of it, I think of sleighbells and glistening children, open fires and chestnut-nosed reindeer. But whenever I think of Christmas, I also think of Jews. Not only the birthday boy over about whom all the fuss is about, but also all those songs. From White Christmas to Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer. It's a cliché to point out that so many Christmas songs were written by Jews. Of course, some of the same songwriters wrote the most famous jazz standards of the age: from The Way You Look Tonight and All the Things You Are to Strange Fruit and Summertime. But since tonight's Torah Portion is Terumah and the theme is "gifts we give from the heart," I'd like to speak about another aspect of Jews and jazz. 

But first I'm going to tell you something else this drash isn't about. Did you know that Louis Armstrong wrote a memoir entitled Louis Armstrong + the Jewish Family in New Orleans, Louisiana., the Year of 1907? Louis and his mother lived with and worked for the Karnoffskys, a Litvak family. He played a tin horn to attract people to their junk wagon and they helped him buy his first trumpet. It's really moving to hear the young Armstrong empathize with the discrimination this poor white family experienced. He wrote, "I was only seven years old but I could easily see the ungodly treatment that the white folks were handing the poor Jewish family whom I worked for." Armstrong wore a Magen David all his life, partially in recognition of this family and he supposedly could speak quite a bit of Yiddish. De vunderful vorld, nu, maybe it's a bissel gut?

Like much of American culture, from its origin until about 1930, jazz was segregated, and black and white musicians were not allowed to perform together, though they sometimes, invisibly. made recordings. For example, there's an early integrated 78 by Louis Armstrong. 

But it's significant that at the beginning of the swing era, when jazz became a mainstream music for both black and white audiences, it was Jewish bandleaders who first included black musicians in their bands. Benny Goodman who led a hugely popular big band—he was the Taylor Swift of the time—very visibly broke the colour bar by including black musicians, notably at his famous 1938 Carnegie Hall Concert which featured jazz legends such as Lester Young, Count Basie and Johnny Hodges. Even before this, the Jewish big band leader, Mezz Mezzrow attempted to create an integrated orchestra but was stopped Nazi sympathizers.

Perhaps the most powerful expression of Jewish and black solidarity is the iconic song Strange Fruit made famous by jazz singer Billie Holiday's 1938 recording. It was written by Jewish high school teacher, Abel Meeropol. The song is a chilling representation and condemnation of lynching.

These efforts at integration and civil rights prefigure later Jewish efforts such as those of Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel who famously joined John Lewis and Martin Luther King in the third Selma to Montgomery march, amongs other actions. 

It is powerful to think of Jews, who weren't really considered "white" for much of the 20th century, using whatever position they had to support and advocate for equality and human rights. These Jews certainly understood racism: the reason that most of them were in North America was because their families emigrated to avoid pogroms and persecutions in Europe. And they first wrote these songs, formed these bands, made these recordings in the 30s as Nazis and other fascists were coming to power in Europe.

 I became a jazz fan since I began listening to the music of John Coltrane at the same time as I began studying for my Bar Mitzvah. When I went to synagogue and heard the chanting of the cantor, I heard echoes of Coltrane’s freeform improvisations. A solo voice keening, birling, undulating. I heard the expression of another kind of identity – what I imagined was an alternative to the four-square harmony of Western culture. 

Coltrane’s Alabama features the plaintive cantillation of Coltrane’s tenor saxophone, not weepy but a single voice in mourning. In Alabama, I heard the deep grief for four young girls murdered by the Ku Klux Klan in a Birmingham church. Coltrane expressing his sorrow and blessing them with this secular prayer. Sanctifying their experience. What felt like “our” experience, even though, I, of course, knew almost nothing of this and came to it as a middle-class white Jewish teenager, fifteen years later in suburban Ottawa. But it revealed something about the world. This was what was important. This was how one responded with courage and a sense of empathy and morality. 

So Jazz for me is deeply embedded with the idea of compassion, empathy, and fellow-feeling. Do Unto Others. This, to me, is a powerful expression of Terumah,"Gifts we give from the heart." Whoever we are, wherever we are, we are all in this together. We give from the heart, not only in material, spiritual and emotional ways, but by understanding "All the Things You Are," all the things We are, understanding our essential and elemental connection to each other. 

And to quote Louis Armstrong—you remember him from It's a Wonderful World, written by two Jews, by the way— he said, With money in your pocket, you are wise and you are good looking and you sing well, too." No, that's the wrong quote, I mean the other Louis quote, “Seems to me it ain't the world that's so bad but what we're doing to it, and all I'm saying is: see what a wonderful world it would be if only we'd give it a chance. Love, baby - love. That's the secret.”