Jazz and the Abstract Truth

by Tzvi Gluckin

When I was twenty-two I worked part-time in Midtown selling New York Philharmonic tickets to High School band directors. I shared a small apartment in Brooklyn with Botz and two guys from Jamaica.

My liberalization first began in college. I left the safety of North Jersey for a Jazz Studies degree from a music school in New England. I grew my hair long and began to dig being multicultural. I played the guitar.

The criticism came early.

“You play too white, man.”

“I do?”

“You need to be more black.”

I turned my back on Iron Maiden and got into Mingus, Dolphy, Coltrane, Monk.

“You need to learn about funk.”

I discovered James Brown and somebody taught me about backbeat.

Public Enemy was next. I became a radical. I made my parents watch Spike Lee movies.

My cultural journey into Black America was regularly jolted by the almost monthly tirades by Winton Marsalis in Downbeat magazine.

“The white man is stealing our culture.”

He might have been right but I didn’t want to hear it. I played the guitar well and I knew the genre better than anybody.

My black friends were more succinct, “You play pretty good…for a white guy.”

For some reason I just didn’t fit in.

I met Al while still in college. Al was an ethnic Italian from Long. He was earning a degree in classical composition. We met at a gathering of Free Jazz intellectuals. Everyone there was either rich or crazy. I think I was wearing a “Metallica” t-shirt.

Al was the first person who understood me; he was also an alienated white kid. We talked about Schoenberg, microtonal composition, read a lot of Bukowski and enjoyed insulting each other.

“Heeb.”

“Wop.”

Al was determined to teach me how to eat. He brought me to his parents’ home and fed me. His father called me “Jerusalem.” They were good people, they stuffed me till I couldn’t move and let me crash on the couch.

I tried to return the favor. I brought Al to a restaurant in Downtown Manhattan and bought him kasha.

“This is the “soul food” I grew up on,” I told him.

“You’re feeding me sand,” he said.

Our friendship had its limits.

My Jamaican roommates stopped talking to white people. Small groups of militant youth would assemble in the living room. They’d speak in hushed tones. They wanted to take over City College. They began to vandalize the apartment. Someone wrote, “The white man is for the Devil” on the wall.

I was jealous. I envied the fact that they knew who they were. I had no idea who I was.

I thought about Al. He knew who he was.

It occurred to me that I also belonged to an oppressed minority.

I confronted my roommates.

“I laugh at your four-hundred years of suffering!”

Silence.

“Three thousand years my people suffered!”

They thought I was crazy.

I didn’t believe it either. I decided to move to Ghana and get a Masters in ethnomusicology. I took up African drumming.

Ghana didn’t work out, I couldn’t go, I went to Europe instead.

My youth hostel in Paris had a mandatory all-day lockout. I’d spend my mornings in a bookstore reading a used copy of Malcolm X. In the afternoons I’d wander aimlessly.

I began to think I was Malcolm X. I’d rant and vent and talk about revolution.

But I wasn’t a sixties radical. I was a sheltered Jewish kid from the suburbs. I processed Malcolm’s oratory through my personal filter. “These assimilated American Jews with their Anglicized last names and nose jobs. Fight the power!”

I traveled for about five months. Israel was the last place I went. I got there in early September.

On the Jewish holiday of Simchas Torah I was herded into a small, packed room of about 150 men dancing with incredible intensity. The noise was deafening.

Someone threw a sheet over me and handed me a Torah scroll. I was sweating profusely and dancing when I realized something that blew my mind; there wasn’t a band playing. All the noise was generated exclusively by men singing and stamping on the floor. I couldn’t believe it. Judaism was as tribal as any Third World ethnicity I could have tapped into. It wasn’t about the High Holiday fashion show, liberal politics or church organ I’d been exposed to over the past twenty-five years. The Jewish people were a primal funky earth culture.

I looked up at the Head Rabbi. He looked like a Zulu chief straight out National Geographic. The purple sash and spear were replaced by a black suit and white beard. His eyes had the same intensity and ethnic pride.

I’d found my people; they were just a bit more conservative.

About four months later I was alone in a Jerusalem study hall. It was late. I looked up at the hundreds of beaten books staring down at me from the shelves.

Then it hit me.

These books were written for me. I didn’t have to apologize and pretend I was something I wasn’t in order to learn them. They were mine.

Had I gone to India and sat on a mountaintop they would have told me, “You meditate pretty good …for a Jewish guy, why don’t you go to Israel and check out your own people.”

I’d found my culture, my heritage, my people.

I was home.