Why Is Dave Brubeck Crying?

Home , Dave Brubeck, Jazz, Jazz (miniseries), The War (miniseries)

CHAPTER 4

The ghost makes itself known to us through haunting and pulls us affectively into the structure of a feeling of a reality we come to experience as a recognition. Haunting recognition is a special way of knowing what has happened or is happening. —Avery Gordon, Ghostly Matters The promise of attention to feelings in the classroom as a hauntagogical strategy is intimated in Gordon’s appreciation of the potential leadership of the ghost. The last chapter ended with a nod to the hopeful possibility of attending to feelings as intimated by Nel Noddings in her article “Social Studies and Feminism.” In this chapter I explore haunting recognition in film and imaginative literature that have proven compelling to my students. Such film and literature prompts emotional responses in the classroom and can be used to point students towards the adult responsibilities of coming to know their complex personhoods and their relationships to power; together, these two responsibilities constitute personal growth. Might these recognized emotions propel students forward into a haunted site and teach them to appreciate how the global egalitarian project supports their personal growth projects? I offer three stories in this chapter—one exploring curriculum centered on use of a film clip from Ken Burns’s documentary miniseries, Jazz (2000), the second on the teaching of critical theorist Michael Apple’s famous article, “Cheap French Fries,” and the third on my study with my students of Barbara Kingsolver’s Animal Dreams (1990)—with the understanding that all three stories illustrate how affect is implicated in the translation from the personal to the political in the classroom. Summarizing the common lessons of the three stories, I propose the process of examining the emotional pulls that characterize (psychoanalytic) transference relationships. Sometimes, that examination uncovers a haunting, and sometimes, if we are lucky, the uncovery leads us to formulate a something-to-be-done. I end the chapter with the announcement that my philosophical allies and I find in social reconstructionist education our something-to-be-done, having been led to its practices by our attachments to freedom, equality, and fraternity.

ON TEACHING JAZZ The first story examines use of a film clip that features beloved and recently deceased jazz pianist Dave Brubeck from the 2000 PBS (Public Broadcasting Service) production of the documentary mini-series, Jazz. The series was both widely appreciated and, in my opinion, accurately criticized for its attempts to

65 CHAPTER 4 tailor content for a middle-class demographic. While it is clear that this criticism has merit, I hope readers who were troubled by the way the series marginalized some of the complexity and richness of the contemporary jazz scene and/or failed to tap a more harshly realistic critique of race and class politics in the United States will still be able to hear my story. I chose as curriculum a five-minute sequence from Episode Seven of Jazz, “Dedicated to Chaos”; its beginning images are set during World War II. Dave Brubeck begins by talking about freedom in relation to jazz against the backdrop of the war; he identifies freedom with the United States in one very specific metaphor. Describing what jazz players experienced that spoke of freedom, Brubeck says: “They were…away from the constriction of the written music…but improvising on top of it. This is the thing I love about jazz. It’s about the United States—the way it expresses freedom.” Brubeck is concerned with freedom, but his metaphor falters when it becomes clear that his conception of freedom includes freedom from racism. The interview with Brubeck leads into the disruption of his “jazz-freedom-United States” chain of associations through his recognition that white supremacist race relations had not changed in the United States during his absence from the country. When his integrated band returns from World War II, its African American members are barred from entering the front door of a Texas restaurant. Tracking the clip sequentially, after Brubeck’s positive introduction of his “jazz-freedom-United States” chain of associations, the series narrator, Keith David, tells us that Brubeck’s dad wanted him to become a cattle handler and stay home and work the ranch in California: “But Brubeck loved jazz.” After graduation from college, Brubeck enlisted, married on a brief leave, and was shipped out to Europe in the summer of 1944, fully expecting to go into combat. When he and his fellow enlistees landed, they were immediately transported to Verdun and assured they’d be sent to the front immediately. But when a piano player was requested to enhance the live entertainment organized for the newly arrived enlistees, Brubeck volunteered. A colonel who heard him play said he should not go to the front, but instead, stay behind and form a band. The Wolfpack Band that Brubeck organized played for the soldiers through the rest of the war. Although the army was segregated, the band was not. The integrated group lived in close quarters, sharing their life stories and every minute of their waking and jazz-making lives. Their work included its share of soldiers’ risks: because they played so close to the front they were once strafed by German planes, and at the Battle of the Bulge, the band was lost behind German lines for hours. The Wolfpack Band remained integrated and together right through the end of the war. “When Dave Brubeck and the Wolfpack Band got home, nothing in America had changed,” the film’s narrator then tells us. Brubeck himself continues: “We landed in Texas and we went to the dining room to eat, and they wouldn’t serve the black guys.” One of them said he wouldn’t eat their food, and crying, turned to Brubeck: “I wonder why I went through all this?”