ESSAY
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Jazz and Protest: A Reappraisal
IN EARLY NOVEMBER 2006, near a Chicago exit ramp during rush hour, an avant-garde jazz devotee named Malachi Ritscher set himself on fire to protest the war in Iraq. In an online suicide note he wrote: "Our so-called leaders are the real terrorists in the world today, responsible for more deaths than Osama bin Laden." He also expressed regret for not slashing Donald Rumsfeld's throat during a chance encounter in 2002. His wrath toward the Bush administration was valid in some respects ("torturing and trampling human rights inside and outside our own borders"), even prescient ("our economy is a house of cards"). Otherwise, Ritscher's note was a dubious ultra-left polemic, revealing signs of mental instability. His death was a tragedy.
When Peter Margasak, a Chicago jazz journalist, posted an account of Ritscher's death on his blog, readers began leaving comments - many expressing shock and dismay, others glorifying the man's self-destruction. "Sensitivity to injustice is NOT mental illness," wrote one person. "True spiritual conviction is rare," wrote another. "Enlightment [sic] I call it," wrote another. Some held that the lack of national media coverage indicated a conspiracy to quash Ritscher's message.
In his note Ritscher declared: "I would prefer to be thought of as a ‘spiritual warrior.'" The irony is that by late 2006, seas of innocent Iraqi blood were on the hands of Islamist "spiritual warriors" who believed in the nobility of incinerating themselves for a cause. Romanticizing Ritscher's act, and his obvious personal pain and anguish, was not just unseemly; it also pointed to a widespread moral confusion among an antiwar left utterly convinced of its virtue. As a microcosm of that left, the jazz and improvised music world - long associated with struggles for social justice - could not but reproduce these flaws.
Writing just before the 2006 midterm elections, Ritscher disdained the two-party system (not without reason) and scoffed at hopes for liberal reform. Had he stayed alive, he would have witnessed an unstoppable wave of support for a professed jazz fan named Barack Obama - a development that once again raises the question, after decades of agitation for a better world: Will jazz and the creative arts be a force for strident revolutionary dogma, or for principled democratic advocacy and human rights? There's a difference, and as we move from the manifold disasters of the Bush era to the substantial promise of the Obama administration, it's never been more important.
Jazz and Cultural Tensions
Jazz as "freedom music" is an idea with a long and indelible history. Percussionist and writer Jesse Stewart holds that in the decades following the Emancipation Proclamation and the passage of the 13th Amendment, African-Americans developed a "new collective mindset," which "may have played a crucial role in the proliferation of new cultural forms, including jazz, in the 1890s." But the black freedom struggle, much like the music itself, was just beginning.
Jazz as "freedom music" is an idea with a long and indelible history
Segregation, lynching, the systematic negation of equality: this was the environment that turned jazz into "a hothouse of fractious politics and warring stylistic ideologies going back to the 1930s," to quote University of Vermont professor John Gennari. As the century progressed, the protest messages grew more overt: We Insist! Max Roach's Freedom Now Suite, Charles Mingus's "Fables of Faubus," Nina Simone's "Mississippi Goddam," Archie Shepp's "Malcolm, Malcolm, Semper Malcolm" ... the list goes on. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., in his opening address to the Berlin Jazz Festival in 1964, said: "Much of the power of our Freedom Movement in the United States has come from this music." The point wasn't lost on J. Edgar Hoover's FBI, which maintained dossiers on Roach and other jazz greats, as Andrew W. Lehren reports in the April 2009 issue of JazzTimes.
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