The Pursuit of Freedom and Justice Through Jazz

Last September, an assembled group of judges and lawyers in a courtroom at 40 Foley Square were welcomed with a performance of “All the Things You Are” by a group of four musicians led by the great Wynton Marsalis, present to deliver the Second Circuit’s Annual Thurgood Marshall Lecture, titled, “The Pursuit of Freedom and Justice Through Jazz.” At concerts of the Jazz at Lincoln Center Orchestra, where he is the managing and artistic director, Marsalis sits in the trumpet section in the back of the orchestra with the other trumpet players. Moreover, he delegates solos and the introduction of sections to other members of the orchestra, including the composers and arrangers of the pieces, although he takes his turn performing solos and making introductions. At the Second Circuit event, his three fellow musicians were all very young; two were attending Harvard Law School with internships or clerkships respectively for Judges Raymond J. Lohier, Jr., and Barrington D. Parker, Jr. Thus, the evening also gave insight into Marsalis’ mentorship, for which he is well known. 

Chief Judge Debra Ann Livingston introduced the lecture honoring “Justice Thurgood Marshall’s life and legacy as a person, a civil rights person and a judge,” as follows:

Thurgood Marshall’s work . . . as the lead attorney in Brown v. Board of Education and as the founder and first Director-Counsel of the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational fund, powerfully shaped the trajectory of our country’s history. He was a force for the good, not just for a generation, but for all generations of Americans, and particularly for those among us who, as attorneys, pledge to serve justice and the rule of law. 

Judge Lohier introduced Marsalis as follows:

He’s a world-renowned trumpeter, bandleader, composer[,] educator and . . . the world’s leading advocate and exponent of what I’ll call American Jazz. . . . He serves as Managing and Artistic Director of Jazz at Lincoln Center in New York. He’s the Director of Jazz Studies at the Juilliard School and president of the Louis Armstrong Educational Foundation. . . . 

[He] started practicing trumpet at age six and began training worldwide at age 19. He’s . . . the foremost trumpeter of our era in both jazz and classical music. He has been nominated 32 times for a Grammy Award and has won nine Grammys. 

In 1997, he became the first jazz artist to be awarded the Pulitzer Prize in music in recognition of [his] magnificent album, “Blood on the Fields.”

The evening was punctuated with music like “Take the A Train” and Spike Lee’s father Bill’s haunting version of “John Coltrane, John Coltrane, John Coltrane.”

Marsalis Spoke of His Early Life

Marsalis first heard of Frederick Douglass from a comic book on a family visit to The Cabildo Museum in New Orleans as a seven-year-old. “I told y’all earlier we were always going to stuff that nobody else went to or wanted to go to. . . . The Free Southern Theater, some lecture on something, the symphony. My momma had us up in there with our Sears & Roebucks suits on.” 

Much later, he and his father read a book about Frederick Douglass together upon his father’s deathbed. Marsalis noted that, in an 1857 speech, Frederick Douglass summed up a lot of what the most conscious jazz musicians believe about the endless pursuit of freedom, equality and justice. He said:

This struggle may be a moral one, or it may be a physical one, and it may be both moral and physical, but it must be a struggle. Power concedes nothing without a demand. It never did and it never will. 

Marsalis noted that he was made to understand “that the pursuit of freedom could not be taken out of its historical context and that people have always struggled and fought for freedom and for equality and for justice.”

Marsalis grew up in segregated New Orleans. His father, a jazz musician, had standards that he imposed upon his children, which Marsalis describes as follows:

[A]t the dawn of the civil rights movement, when my father was a young man learning the language of modern jazz, he connected, as many did, the struggle for freedom with the fundamentals of jazz. But he did not separate those engaged with the struggle by race, which made him very unusual for someone who had grown up in absolute segregation. He would often say in a barber shop, in a 1970s barber shop, filled with Afros, Afro Sheen and Afro photos and discussions about “we” – what we need, what we need to do, what we are about – discussing the problems of racism, he would say: “Who is ‘we’? The only ‘we’ I recognize is whoever shows up to solve a problem with me.” 

When Martin Luther King was murdered, my three brothers and I were sent to integrate a school that had never had Black students. This was in Kenner, Louisiana, where we had also absolute segregation. . . . [W]ith white folks and America in general – because there was a deep prejudice, and your place in the culture was the subject of that prejudice. . . . 

Well, my role then, even as a kid, was to openly question the stereotypes and minstrel show behavior. . . . 

It was important for me to get other kids to see another world that had intelligence, humor, confusion and a depth of human feeling that also included them. . . . And there’s no way in the world your worldview is going to be changed by another nine-year-old kid. . . . 

Being exposed to jazz and a higher cultural understanding, all those things we never wanted to go to, gave me the responsibility to reshape the myth of our collective American experience from a more holistic perspective. And you would be shocked how many of the students after that time would say, “Huh, we don’t like it, but we never thought about it that way. . . .” 

The birth of jazz in the 1890s was seen as an act of cultural integration that needed to be stamped out immediately. Those early efforts to kill it failed, and by the mid-1930s, jazz was publicly integrated by Benny Goodman, with Lionel Hampton and Teddy Wilson. Billie Holiday recorded “Strange Fruit” right before 1940. Duke Ellington recorded “Jump for Joy,” celebrating the end of segregation in 1941. By the 1960s, the most engaged jazz musicians openly participated in the civil rights movement with very powerful musical and public statements.

Marsalis then gave a brief “roll call of names and recordings that, perhaps, you haven’t heard,” starting with “John Coltrane: “Alabama,” “A Love Supreme”; Sonny Rollins: “Freedom Suite”; Max Roach: “Freedom Now, We Insist”; Charles Mingus: “Fables of Faubus,” “Meditations on Integration”; Dave Brubeck: “The Real Ambassadors”; Art Blakey: “The Freedom Rider”; Nina Simone: “Mississippi Goddamn!!!”; and Rahsaan Roland Kirk: “Clickety Clack.” He stated: “If you check them out, they will speak most powerfully to the music’s dedication to freedom, and those records still sound like they were recorded yesterday. And certainly we don’t have musicians who play today as well as these musicians played then.” He added, “I heard most of these recordings as a teenager, and I understood them to be significant to the American freedom struggle.”

Out of respect for that travail, I have recorded some original consciousness music every decade of my adult career. It now stretches across four decades. They are . . . “Rise,” which was my first symphony in 1999; “From the Plantation to the Penitentiary” in 2007; “The Jungle – Symphony No. 4,” which was in 2016; and “The Ever Fonky Lowdown” in 2018. And it’s ever funky and it’s lowdown. . . .

There’s a story in this generation that has never been told, that is not one of victimization and whining and crying all the time and seeking agency through victimhood. It’s the actual American story that is the truth of people trying to work things out in a time in which there was really very halfhearted political interest and great corruption on both sides. . . .

Were it not for the civil rights movement and for the struggles of people of all religions and all races and ages, that would certainly not be possible. It would still be some type of dream. It is not a dream. I live this.

The audience erupted into heartfelt applause in response to the rare intimate performance and a speech that eloquently combined the lived experience of a jazz icon and his thoughts about the intersection of jazz and social justice.