Call and Response

“Art thou troubled? Music will calm thee.”  —from an old spiritual

Call and Response is a primarily a “jazz blog” written by a now-retired high school English teacher. Saying that I write a jazz blog does not automatically mean that I am a “jazz writer”; I make no pretence of having the kind of writing chops necessary to write effectively about jazz. That said, I do write about jazz, but not about jazz primarily.

As a blog, this one seems to be all over the place. Just look at all the categories.

I initially started blogging about my experiences studying jazz ethnomusicology at Washington University in St. Louis. That was my first real post. I figured, hell, I’ll write about jazz, but that didn’t work out right away.

Because I went to San Miguel de Allende in Mexico one summer to study Spanish—my first trip to Mexico—I thought it reasonable to write about my experiences learning Spanish. I’ve been back to Mexico a few times and used my blog to describe my experiences so friends and family could read about what the wife and I were doing.

Then, since I was a high school English teacher, I started writing about education.

That led to politics.

Then to memoir.

And since I’ve been a jazz programmer for the last fifteen years for a weekly radio show broadcasted on a local public radio station (Coast Community Radio, Astoria, OR, coastradio.org), it was only natural at some point I would start writing about jazz.

The jazz gave me a reasonable focus for this blog, and even though I still find new categories to write about, I continue to return to writing about jazz. I discovered that everything I was interested in writing about was in some way connected to jazz anyway, so that’s when I decided to rename my blog “Call and Response.” Whatever I’m “hearing” at the time might become a suitable blogging topic; I only have to listen for it.

The idea of “Call and Response” has been around a long time as a description of what is going on musically in blues and jazz music, and its origins are deeply embedded in African-American culture. Call and Response is an invitation or invocation to act out, musically, the human experience of communicating, which is always improvisational. That’s how I see this blog: improvisational communication.

To see this idea in action, look no further than in a Black Baptist Church anywhere in the south on Sunday morning. The Black minister “exhorts” or calls out to the congregation to Praise God Almighty! and the congregation responds with an Amen or a Glory Hallelujah or a Tell It Like It Is!

Ralph Ellison described the idea of call and response as the “inevitability of action and its consequences as in the musical discourses among musicians in jazz and blues.”   Where segregation sought to isolate and disenfranchise communities and silence their discourse, music and song, the blues and jazz sustained and vitalized black communities.

One final point: this blog, like any expression of art, or religion, or even politics, requires an audience for it to be “complete.”   Though some may argue the point of “art for art’s sake,” the audience is key. I know Louis Armstrong was always delighted when anyone liked the way he played music (something about that swing rhythm).  He never took their “delight” for granted.  Pops understood that because jazz in part was a celebration of the Black experience, if we delight in his music, our delight then becomes an affirmation of that experience. We need only respond to his call. Jazz in its performance—like the preacher in his pulpit or the politician at the podium or the writer in his garret—is a kind of social bargain that can only be fulfilled if we, listener, voter, reader, respond to “The Call.” And when we do, when we respond, we fulfill the promise of that bargain.