Montage work, including Pass if not in reopening old ents an unparalleled opportunity to experi- Over and its prede- wounds: the protago- ment and to speak to a diverse America that cessor, Breach, as at- nist in Tuvalu is a black exists nowhere in physical space. “I’m not tempts to use theater woman looking back asking people to forget their hatred as a way as “therapy.” (Breach on her adolescence in of glossing over it, but to engage with their presents a young writ- Los Angeles, amid the hatred as a way of letting it go.” er-teacher trapped O.J. Simpson trial and But for transformative emotional journeys between compet- violence in her own through storytelling, Nwandu believes the- ing expectations and home. Now, Nwandu ater remains the place where it’s truly pos-

struggling to forge NWANDU ANTOINETTE OF COURTESY says, the challenge is sible for humans to really connect. In her her own identity.) She Director Spike Lee filmed a Steppenwolf to marshal those ele- words: “We are meat packets who need to stands by those plays, performance of Nwandu’s debut play, ments to leave the au- sit next to other meat packets sometimes, Pass Over, for Amazon Studios. and the version of her- dience with something at a very basic level.” self who wrote them, but now sees them as more than a reiteration of pain. In Tuvalu, Nwandu meditates on the no- “masochistic” at the root, she says. “I’ll never The current political moment sharpens tion of apocalypse. What happens after the hurt myself to make art again.” the urgency of that challenge. Living through worst happens? What new kinds of relation- But Nwandu’s childhood also bequeathed what she calls “the day-by-day formation of ships and realities become possible in the her artistic instincts: the theatrics of the a fascist state” has given her a new mission: wake of true disaster? But for the moment, church, the particularities of her family dy- to build community through storytelling and in the midst of intensive rewrites, she can’t namic, and the ideas of ’80s popular television. create a space to heal. For Nwandu, televi- be much more specific than that. “I just don’t And she remains interested in autobiography, sion, especially in the era of streaming, pres- want to pin it down yet, even for myself.” Hot Pursuits Bassist Matthew Berlin by lydialyle gibson

atthew Berlin ’89, a jazz and Goodman, Lena Horne, blues bassist who also knocks Louis Armstrong, Ella around in folk, ragtime, and clas- Fitzgerald, and Billie M sical and performs sometimes Holiday. “His band was three or four nights a week, is quick to tell incredibly tight,” Berlin people that he’s not a real musician. “A hack,” says. “The feel was that he insists, half-kidding. His regular job is as they were swinging so a trust and estates lawyer in a Boston firm. hard, and it just was so But the truth is, he’s been a musician—a se- effortless and clean and rious one—longer than he’s been anything dignified and cool.” else. “It’s just always been there,” he says. That’s a feeling the That comes through in his most recent album tries to repli- project, a jazz album released this year: I cate: the way the pia- Just Want to Be Horizontal. Berlin produced it no intro to a song like and played bass; the album is a collaboration “Lover Come Back” with two of his oldest friends and band- opens up into a win- mates: singer Samoa Wilson and the leg- some, easy swing; the endary folk guitarist Jim Kweskin (whose way the guitar and bass eponymous 1960s jug band attracted imi- take their time soaking tators including the Grateful Dead and the into the notes of the Nitty Gritty Dirt Band; for this album, Kwe- title track, “I Want to skin gathered a nine-piece jazz ensemble). Be Horizontal”—a 1934 The album takes its title, and its inspira- jazz ballad transformed Matthew Berlin tion, from the music of swing pianist Teddy here into a modern Wilson (no relation to Samoa), who ran a blues—while Wilson’s voice glides across and Kweskin made a point of unearthing old studio band in Kansas City during the 1920s the melody. Many of the album’s songs were verses, lost in the intervening decades, even and ’30s and played with jazz greats Benny recorded by Teddy Wilson’s band; Berlin as they updated some of the arrangements.

54 March - April 2020 Photograph by Stu Rosner

Reprinted from Harvard Magazine. For more information, contact Harvard Magazine, Inc. at 617-495-5746 Montage “So, these old songs that people think they know?” Berlin says. “They often have these beautiful parts that just dropped out over C hapter & Verse time. We wanted to restore those.” Correspondence on not-so-famous lost words Berlin’s first instrument was a cello; he started taking lessons when he was six. His parents were accomplished avocational mu- Margeret Lindsey hopes someone knows the source of “Unmeasur’d space is the sicians: Gerald Berlin was a prominent civil- Lord’s habitation, His hand upholds creation’s realm...”—“the beginning of a hymn-like rights attorney and a clarinetist who played chorus which was one of the pieces our school choir sang at a schools’ competition occasional concerts with the Boston Sym- at the Sydney Town Hall some 60-plus years ago. Certain things on Google are some- phony Orchestra and wrote classical mu- what similar textually, but no cigar, and there is nothing musically. Any assistance would sic criticism for The Jewish Advocate; Miriam be most welcome; this has been driving a friend and me mad for decades.” Berlin, Ph.D. ’57, was an expert in Russian history who taught at Wellesley and Har- Send inquiries and answers to Chapter and Verse, Harvard Magazine, 7 Ware Street, vard and played piano and flute. “She could Cambridge 02138, or via email to [email protected]. sight-read anything,” Matthew Berlin says: “Beethoven, Brahms, Bartok.” Berlin showed some talent, and his par- Van Halen, Cheap Trick, and Blondie. bass. Then he dove back into classical music, ents pushed him to practice every day, en- At the same time, music became a kind of taking classes at the New England Conserva- visioning youth symphonies and conserva- deliverance. After some rough teenage years, tory and considering a professional career. tory auditions. Instead, he pushed back. during which he sold his guitar, withdrew Tendinitis ended those thoughts (“My “The cello became a focal point of resistance from playing, and struggled “basically with arm felt like it was on fire,” he says), and Ber- and self-determination,” he recalls. When how to get along with the rest of the world,” lin found solace in a different kind of music, he was 14, he took the $350 he’d earned dur- a return to music’s structure and discipline leaving the rigors of the conservatory for the ing a summer job and bought a bass guitar led him back to himself. He fudged his way open, easygoing jazz scene in Barcelona. The (a “cheap little Fender knock-off”) and an into a jazz band in tenth grade, pretending culture there, he says, recognizes the arts amp, and started teaching himself licks from he knew more than he did about the upright “as a part of the fabric of society, and so you

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Harvard Magazine 55

Reprinted from Harvard Magazine. For more information, contact Harvard Magazine, Inc. at 617-495-5746 Montage could always get work. Kids like us could trated in social studies and played with the lin headed to law school at the University of put in for a grant and somebody would find Harvard-Radcliffe Orchestra, the Bach So- Oregon: “Eugene has a great music scene.” the money to put up a stage and lighting for ciety, the Mozart Society, and a handful of Today he plays regularly with half a dozen a concert at two o’clock in the morning at campus ensembles and pop-up jazz clubs. Boston-area bands with evocative names: some square in the old Barrio Gótico.” “My days were just totally lit up, after the the Dixie Cookbook, the Busted Jug Band, A year later he came back, renewed, to academics, with jazz and classical music.” Jazz Is in the Air, the Racky Thomas Blues Cambridge and Harvard, where he concen- That was also true after college, when Ber- Band. Whenever he puts together an ensem- ble of his own, he calls it the Berlin Hall Rep- ertory Orchestra, a nod to the juke joint that Legal journalist Adam Co- his grandfather, a Latvian immigrant, ran o p e n b o o k hen ’84, J.D. ’87—last seen in above the family’s dry-goods store in New- these pages with an excerpt port News, Virginia. For some years, Berlin from his book on eugenics, played and traveled with country-bluesman Court-Ordered focusing on University lead- Howard “Louie Bluie” Armstrong, “the last ers’ support for that species of the great black string-band musicians.” of social engineering (“Har- When Berlin goes to other cities for work, Inequity vard’s Eugenics Era,” March- he tries to set up gigs with musician friends, April 2016, page 48)—has who are scattered all over. But most of his now cast his eye at the past half-century of Supreme Court jurisprudence. What he has found is summed up in “The more you play the title of his new book, Supreme Inequality: The Supreme Court’s Fifty-Year Battle for a More Unjust America (Penguin Press, $30). The introduction begins with several a tune, the more examples, including an African-American catering assistant at a university who was racially harassed at her workplace, followed by this one: dimensions open up....

Jack Gross, an Iowa insurance execu- Court manipulated age discrimination law It’s like discovering a tive, had a similar difficulty with the to reject his case. “One of the things I Court a few years earlier. He was one of have always counted on was the rule of cathedral inside a group of high-performing workers over law,” he said. Gross was also upset that, the age of 50 who were demoted by his in addition to losing the damages the jury something very small.” company on the same day. Gross was had awarded him, he was out more than forced to hand his responsibilities over $30,000 in legal expenses. “That is mon- performances are local: Sinatra standards at to a younger worker he supervised. A ey,” he said, “that was intended to help a cocktail fundraiser with pianist Shinichi jury ruled that he had been a victim of my grandchildren get a college education Otsu, or Chicago-style electric blues with age discrimination and awarded him so they wouldn’t have to starve their way the Tall Richard Blues Band at a club on the damages. through like I did.” South Shore. Last October, on one of the late The Court overturned the jury’s ver- …As shattering as decisions like these mild evenings of the year, he was in Somer- dict, again by a 5-4 vote. Gross met the have been for individuals, in the aggregate ville’s Davis Square, busking with the Dixie standard of proof required in race and they add up to something much larger: a Cookbook, which plays early New Orleans sex discrimination cases. The Court de- systematic rewriting of society’s rules to jazz. An instrument case stood open for tips cided, however, that victims of age dis- favor those at the top and disadvantage at their feet, as the quartet filled the plaza crimination had a high- those in the middle and with jaunty syncopation: “My Blue Heaven,” er burden of proof, at the bottom. The Su- “We’re in the Money,” “Tiger Rag,” “Sweet even though the federal preme Court has Sue.” Students and after-work commuters laws against race, sex, played a critical role in lingered, while children gamboled over from and age discrimination building today’s Amer- a nearby restaurant’s outdoor tables, drag- used identical language. ica, in which income ging their fathers by the hand. The dissenting liberal inequality is the largest “One thing I’ve learned,” Berlin says, “the justices accused the it has been in nearly a more you play a tune”—whether an impro- majority of “unabashed century. The Court’s visation or rehearsed set pieces—“the more …judicial lawmaking.” decisions have lifted up dimensions open up, the more space for in- …The financial and those who are already terpretation.” In improvised music, “The emotional toll on the high and brought down opportunity for open landscapes is quite losing parties in these those who are low, extraordinary, but even if you’re playing cases has been consid- creating hundreds of the same tunes over and over, it’s like you erable. Jack Gross was millions of winners and find these little internal structures. It’s like

devastated when the Jack Gross WONG/GETTYALEX IMAGES losers. discovering a cathedral inside something very small.”

56 March - April 2020

Reprinted from Harvard Magazine. For more information, contact Harvard Magazine, Inc. at 617-495-5746