Dizzy with Muezzins in Calcutta

The chairs were wooden. The stage was rudimentary. We sat under blurred Calcutta skies. But the sounds were heavenly.

Dizzy Gillespie was throwing his trumpet’s innovations to the self-professed cultural capital of India, Calcutta. Jazz. It may have been music, but for me it was everything – everything that was different from my teenage perception of straitjacket India and our old masters, stodgy rule-ridden backward and aristocratic England. Instead, it was America.

And all this before the real hallelujah moment.

A pause. The next number’s coming soon. The trumpet is at Gillespie’s lips. When suddenly another sound fills the air. It’s the muezzins from Calcutta minarets hailing prayer-time for the city’s Muslims. Clashing sensibilities – how dare our native sounds interrupt this 1st world gift!

But Gillespie, my American hero, is not thrown. Gillespie, he pauses, trumpet to lips, allowing his craven audience a moment to distance it self from coarser instant reactions. We begin to hear the muezzins anew. As mostly non-muslims, the sounds finally take on a haloed tone, framed as they are this evening by a foreign meter and a foreign man. As always in India, if the Western master honors, so do the colonial servants.

The muezzins’ melodies tail off. (Had I never noticed before that muezzins’ called out together, their voices interlacing in what seemed, through my overblown teenage imagination, to be in fact – Jazz?) And as the audience slowly readjusts, my American hero’s innovations take off. Gillespie takes the muezzins’ lead, picking up their melody, then taking it away to somewhere else.

And what an amazing place that was. The ascendance of America for me, was confirmed. Where else, I asked, who else, could produce this strange and wonderful music in this unpredictable manner. Who else could produce this ability to be so fluid with boundaries, driven only by the sense of possibility, and creating something unconscionably new.

[Post script: Of course, today I know that my foreign inability to parse out the different Americas allowed me to lump this uniquely African American musical tradition with it's built-in openness and innovation, with a monolithic perception of America. ]

America as Gillespie & Ali

It dawned on me recently that while I was growing up in Calcutta, a series of introductions to America were all black.

Two key informers of my vision of America, both mediated through my father, were Dizzy Gillespie (and jazz in general) and Muhammad Ali’s autobiography. The former as a live interaction under Calcutta skies, the latter, read off family bookcases, but reinforced and regurgitated as ‘Elocution’ at my school, La Martiniere. More on these soon.

Differing Realities

On another work-related project, I spent last Saturday interviewing amazing students for our Summer Math and Science Honors Academy for students of color. These students were inspiring. Not only are they smart, dying to get off the streets or couch and study over the summer – many live hard lives that they simply take for granted.

Not all will get in, and it breaks my heart.

Instead, I have to read articles such as the recent one in the Wall Street Journal. It straight-facedly describes “bought” community service sessions for rich kids -

‘work in a village in vietnam’ for 2 weeks, snorkel off the coast for four: 5000 dollars; college applications look good with ‘community service’ on those resumes: priceless.

And if that wasn’t wierd enough, the article slips out one-liners that lament the case of the student (whose parents can afford afore-mentioned application booster) who has to look for that little extra something since those ‘lucky’ students of color have affirmative action – or whatever remains of it.

So would the wall street journal students exchange their life with one of the students I interviewed? Here’s what Chris Rock has to say:

There ain’t no white man in this room that will change places with me – and I’m rich. That’s how good it is to be white. There’s a one-legged busboy in here right now that’s going: “I don’t want to change. I’m gonna ride this white thing out and see where it takes me.”

And the movie version: go watch Crazy/Beautiful. Carlos gets on a bus for 2 hours to get to the school from which Amy can’t wait to cut class. They fall in love. But that romance trajectory is full of moments that make you squirm. Amy just completely misses the reality and limited set of choices that make up Carlos’ life. The movie’s got its problems, but it sure makes the point of the yawning gap and completely different starting assumptions of the two worlds.