Jazz great Cassandra Wilson passed away at 70 recently. Wilson was praised for her voice and talent. John Horhn, mayor of her hometown, Jackson, Mississippi, called her an “extraordinary native daughter.” He said Wilson carried “the sound, spirit and history of Mississippi” everywhere. “With a low and smoky voice,” The New York Times noted, “she brought suave romance to standards from the Great American Songbook, but she also embraced covers of artists including Joni Mitchell, Van Morrison, Neil Young and the Mississippi bluesman Robert Johnson. She wrote the words and music for original compositions on albums like Blue Light ’Til Dawn (1993) and New Moon Daughter (1995), the second of which received a Grammy for best jazz vocal performance and sold more than 400,000 copies.”
However, a sour note soon entered the chorus. It turns out that Cassandra Wilson had conservative views. In tweets over the years Wilson praised President Trump as well as conservative intellectual Glenn Loury, defended actor Isiah Washington when he came out as a True supporter, called for blacks to help themselves, and ridiculed the idea of “white supremacy.”
Some of Wilson’s tweets:
I think jazz was born in America because independent thought patterns are encouraged and celebrated. Being free, it was important to make your mark.
I love the way this man thinks. It's a bit long but well worth the time. #GlennLoury
If this nation is "predominantly white supremacist," how is it we black folks aren't all dead?
Or these:
My questions are: What is the plan to help ourselves? How do we heal our broken and bleeding communities? The answers lie in policies, not parties.
I never heard my father or mother say they 'hoped' to be free. They were free and independent thinkers without question.
I celebrate standing on the shoulders of free folks. We are constantly reminded of enslavement. Not near enough stories of our freedom and triumph.
Wilson showed love for actor Isiah Washington when Washington came out as a Trump supporter. She also praised Trump himself.
Thank you, @realDonaldTrump! Great speech today by our @POTUS #FirstStepAct #Trueillumination #HBCU
Wilson’s views shocked a lot of music fans, but not me. There has always been a conservative streak in jazz. A book that should be read by every American is Moving to Higher Ground: How Jazz Can Safe Your Life by Wynton Marsalis. Marsalis is America’s most famous jazz musician. He is also a man who tolerates nothing less than excellence. Marsalis knows that jazz is a reflection of the democratic culture that birthed it. It is about meritocracy, but also getting along with others and realizing that human existence is often tragic but we always hope to do better. It’s about compromise while retaining core truths and fundamental excellence.
In Moving to Higher Ground, Marsalis writes that jazz is about “the importance of expressing the core of your unique feelings and the willingness to work things out with others.” Marsalis also celebrates Bach, Beethoven, and Matisse, arguing that they are only possible with hard work. Louis Armstrong, Dave Brubeck, Kurt Elling, Duke Ellington, John Coltrane and Miles Davis are not just artists of instinct but performers who spent hours in rehearsal. “Social order on the bandstand is determined by ability,” Marsalis writes. No DEI here.
Marsalis criticizes our “wild, out-of-control young people.” Kids need to appreciate artistic masterpieces, he argues, which are “an expression of feeling and a supreme expression of our humanity.” Marsalis argues that “we have an artistic imperative to understand and engage creativity and innovation, not merely as tools for economic growth but as tools for democracy and accomplished scholarship… The best jazz has always been the embodiment of integrity and conviction.”
Then there was the anti-communist jazz tour that occurred in 1958. That year musician Dave Brubeck played a series of concerts in Poland, which at the time was under a communist regime. Jazz had been banned in 1949 but the ban was lifted in 1955. One Polish journalist called Brubeck’s concert “a breath of fresh air to local music lovers and jazz aficionados, hungry for live performances of original American jazz.” Crowds followed Brubeck and his band around.
One musician who saw the Brubeck tour was Tomasz Stanko. Stanko was born in Poland in 1942. In 1948 the Soviet Union annexed most of the territories it had invaded in 1939, and Stalin banned jazz, which only existed in secret underground concerts. Stanko, who died in 2018, once recalled seeking out jazz in a communist system: “It was an adventure because it was hard to find records, but we were clever, we would always find a way. If someone was coming to Poland we would tell them what we wanted. And we would only get the best, of course.” It’s not an exaggeration to say that jazz helped bring down communism. “The message was freedom,” Stanko recalled in a New York Times interview in 2006. “For me, as a Polish who was living in Communist country, jazz was a synonym of Western culture, of freedom, of this different style of life.”
Brubeck, in a 1958 interview in Down Beat, described his tour: “Whenever there was a dictatorship in Europe, jazz was outlawed. And whenever freedom returned to those countries, the playing of jazz inevitably accompanied it.” In Poland, added the pianist, the word freedom “was in the mouths of everybody we had anything to do with.”
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