I am listening to “When the Saints Go Marching In” (well, it will turn to another tune shortly). The band is going to change shortly, but I love it anyway for as long as last. Do you know that “When the Saints Go Marching In” was what New Orleans bands used to play behind musician’s hearses going through town on their way to the graveyard? Jazz is a music rooted in the earth. It wails in trumpets and bassoons, and when it has lyrics its themes are love, sex and death: all the good things in life. Worse, in Billie Holiday’s “God Bless the Child,” it even sings about money. And in the old classic “Johnny and Frankie” and Louis Armstrong’s “Mack the Knife.” I guess a Jew is not supposed to say that these are the things that matter most in life. Yet there is the sheer vicarious joy of listening to music subversively written about the “riffraff,” the “down of outs.”
The secret to the earthiness of Jazz is that it is music played for entertainment. In Europe, music used to be commissioned by the Church or the King. Oh, there may have been music that the underprivileged called their own, but if it existed it was held in low regard. Yet baptized in African American spirituals, the music which would become America’s most liked and listened to until the sixties was birthed in Classical Composer Scott Joplin, song writers like W.C. Handy, and the original–if unrecorded and largely forgotten–jazzman Buddy Bolden. Buddy Bolden worked in dens of prostitution and was after a few years time placed in a mental institution. Yet while he lived he invented improvisation, and Louis Armstrong was one of those enthralled by his music. Back then, New Orleans was not known for hurricane Katrina but the city’s music… It was the hottest in the country. I won’t bother you with more History of Jazz–except for Scott Joplin and W.C. Handy tunes you can find a fuller of Jazz history in the Ken Burns series.
Anyway, after reading my first class of Abraham: Past and Present: “The Call”, I wanted to spend some time listening to some music as I researched Avivah Gottlieb Zornberg’s The Beginnings of Desire: Reflections on Genesis for my next class… Mom, meanwhile, was out visiting my Uncle Charlie. My work for the day ends with the words,
We are trav’ling in the footsteps
Of those who’ve gone before
But we’ll all be reunited (but if we stand reunited)
On a new and sunlit shore (then a new world is in store)
O when the saints go marching in
When the saints go marching in
O Lord I want to be in that number
When the saints go marching in
And when the sun refuse (begins) to shine
And when the sun refuse (begins) to shine
O Lord I want to be in that number
When the saints go marching in
When the moon turns red with blood
When the moon turns red with blood
O Lord I want to be in that number
When the saints go marching in
On that hallelujah day
On that hallelujah day
O Lord I want to be in that number
When the saints go marching in
I hope the textual part of this is long enough to justify the song.
There’s nobody who knows Jazz who doesn’t know “When the Saints Go Marching In.”