Black Sound, White Light

Dear Brooklyn Jazz Musicians,

A decade & a year I have lived among you, lost sleep attending the same 1 a.m. jam sessions, fallen victim to the MTA, gone to the same shows at the Jazz Gallery, ShapeShifter and Smalls in countless shared and separate moments. This week I’ve seen you march, write Odysseyian narratives about discovering your ‘privilege,’ black out your profile and repost, over and over, the same black and white picture of Miles Davis at the police station in 1959 after police beat him for no reason other than his Blackness. We can assume they didn’t know he recorded ‘Kind of Blue’ the week earlier.

Brooklyn Jazz musicians, this is a lament not just from this week but the entirety of my tenure being ‘one’ of YOU. Your musicianship is truly lovely but as much as I believe you have fundamentally good intentions, your whiteness is showing and dare I say it shines…

At those same 1 a.m sessions we’ve both been attending for years, I am the often only Black person there, playing an instrument that has largely become a metaphor of my journey in this life as a Black man: regardless of how I sound, you will hear me but never truly listen. A Black man who plays flute? I am doubly invisible. At said session, I will play my heart and mind out until steam whistles through my ears but you never make eye contact or shake hands when the tune’s finished. I may invite you to a session at my home and perhaps you will come, but you will never have me over to yours.

I will show up at the session you lead three weeks in a row where you will refer to me as ‘buddy’ then ask my name after I’ve put $5 in the tip jar. “I’m the same Black flute player that showed up last week” is what I will say in my head, but not aloud as I fear your tip-induced affability might break. At said session you will have me wait until “it’s time for a ballad” and you will not ask what I’d like to play because you assume I don’t know tunes even though I went to jazz school just like the horn player who arrived after me but who you allowed to play before me even though he didn’t know the head to ‘Serenity’ and I did...

I will ask to sub in your big band whereupon you will ask for examples of saxophone playing on my website. My word that ‘I’m no Kenny Garrett but I can play your charts (in 11/8)’ will not be good enough for you. I will play better flute/alto flute/ piccolo/clarinet/ bass clarinet than the popular, white alto saxophone wunderkind you hire for ‘woodwind stuff’ who constantly moves headjoints and barrels while playing for intonation’s sake, but you will never invite me to play your music. When I peruse said saxophonist’s website, I will see no proof of woodwind playing. You simply believed him, a courtesy you were not predisposed to extend to me.

When I play lyrically, you will say I’m melodically simple. When I reference the same Cannonball Adderley/Joe Henderson/ Mark Turner records we’ve all checked out, your sideways glance says “derivative and uninspired”. You will however call your European friend’s lyrical playing “beautiful” and their more algorithmic playing “amazing.” You’ll say “They’ve done the heavy lifting”. I will point out the double-standard. You will dismiss my observation as bitterness and trash-talking.

I will be sociable without obsequiousness, but you will always choose to make conversation with the friends you came to the session with or the semi-famous musician in the house band who you will hire for your next record date which you believe will be the strong selling point for me to buy your album. Or you will talk with the visiting European cat because after three beers you are sure he will invite you to a fortnight-long tour wherever he’s from. You believe I have nothing to offer you. I must always have something to offer you.

You will assume I have no gigs, then respond with shock to learn that’s not so. You will then try to segue into said gig even if it is only $50 and moreso if it is $75. If I’m performing someone’s original music, you will try harder. You will assume I paid for my album reviews and will not believe my bandmates & I can draw 40 – 50 people out to a New York show. Apropos of nothing, you will jokingly suggest I move to Harlem and think you’re being funny.

When we see each other in the audience of a Manhattan show, you will recognize my face but never greet me though we’re standing just three feet away at the back of Smalls listening to the same tenor player whose sound we love, whose playing lured us away from our home, in whose music we both lose ourselves.

I know you’re not the one who accused me of stealing my own instruments when leaving a concert venue, or the other one who denied me access backstage before my own show, which I then played with shaking hands.

I know you are not the Broadway mogul who asked, ‘So do you read music?’ or the bandleader who switched to another horn player with higher visibility and lower melanin. While you accept that I have experienced all this in NYC in the last two years, you question whether race was the common denominator. You believe you are objective and that my silence confirms your interpretation. I have offered you a glimpse into my reality and you reject it as race-baiting so I no longer share stories with you. But you’re not losing any sleep over it.

You say “Black Lives Matter”, Brooklyn Jazz musicians, yet the small groups, big bands and sessions in this borough are almost totally bereft of Blackness beyond the shadows cast by your $9 Belgian ales. I know you marched and posted and love that obscure record with Cannonball & Harold Land but outside of the cherished musician friends I can count on my hands, I have not felt welcome among you/us even after a decade & a year.

If you are a white jazz musician living in our beloved Brooklyn, understand that you can articulate BLM in your own life, right now. Should a project/ gig/ session/hang opportunity come up consider me/us: we can play our minds out and will do it like it’s the last thing we get to do in this life. Abandon your assumptions about our taste and availability. Remember that Black collaborators are valuable, period, not just if they’re high profile, brand-name players who will draw press. Remember that jazz at 1 a.m. in Prospect Heights should be community, not the NBA.

Here is an easy place to start: say hello the next time we’re at the same post-COVID session. Try to make conversation even if it’s awkward. I’ve always listened. Will you?