8
American Dreams and Creations
AMERICAN DREAMS AND CREATIONS
“Please imagine that the drum method of speech is so exquisite that Africans can, without recourse to words, recite proverbs, record history, and send long messages. The drum is to West African society what the book is to literate society.”
Shanghai Blues,
william zinsser
I say to you today, my friends, even though we face the difficulties of today and tomorrow, I still have a dream. It is a dream deeply rooted in the American dream. I have a dream that one day this nation will rise up and live out the true meaning of its creed: “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal.”
I Have a Dream,
martin luther king, jr.
If it’s true that a woman didn’t design Barbie, you don’t know how much saner that makes me feel. Of course, that doesn’t ameliorate the damage. There are millions of women who are subliminally sure that a thirty-nine-inch bust and a twenty-three-inch waist are the epitome of lovability. Could this account for the popularity of breast implant surgery?
Our Barbies, Ourselves,
emily prager
One of the best ways to understand a people is to know what makes them laugh. Laughter encompasses the limits of the soul. In humor, life is redefined and accepted. Irony and satire provide much keener insights into a group’s collective psyche and values than do years of research.
It has always been a great disappointment to Indian people that the humorous side of Indian life has not been mentioned by professed experts on Indian Affairs. Rather the image of the granite-faced grunting redskin has been perpetuated by American mythology.
Indian Humor,
vine deloria, jr.
WILLIAM ZINSSER
Shanghai Blues
Born in New York in 1922 and educated at Princeton University, William Zinsser worked for the New York Herald Tribune from 1947 to 1959 as a features editor, drama editor, film critic, and editorialist. From 1971 to 1979, Zinsser taught at Yale University. Drawing on both his teaching and writing experiences, he has written, among other books, On Writing Well and Writing with a Word Processor. Currently a freelance writer, Zinsser contributes regularly to numerous publications.
Suggestions for Prereading or Journal Writing
1.
Most of us have at least one area in which we have talent (or would very much like to have talent). Imagine that you have become a world-renowned celebrity in the art of your choice. Write a mini-autobiography of yourself, concentrating on how you became so accomplished in this area. What factors influenced and motivated you? Did you ever get discouraged? Did anyone serve as your inspiration? What advice do you have for others who may want to follow in your footsteps?
2.
What internal qualities does a person need in order to be outstanding at something? What external factors contribute to a person’s success? Use specific examples to accompany your explanation.
3.
If you could have dinner with three famous artists (from the field or fields of your choice), whom would you invite and why? What might you learn from each of these people?
———
Jazz came to China for the first time on the afternoon of June 2nd, when the American bassist and French-horn player Willie Ruff introduced himself and his partner, the pianist Dwike Mitchell, to several hundred students and professors who were crowded into a large room at the Shanghai Conservatory of Music. The professors and the students were all expectant, without knowing quite what to expect. They knew only that they were about to hear the first American jazz concert ever presented to the Chinese. Probably they were not surprised to find that the two musicians were black, though black Americans are a rarity in the People’s Republic. What they undoubtedly didn’t expect was that Ruff would talk to them in Chinese, and when he began they murmured with delight.
Ruff is a lithe, dapper man of fifty who takes visible pleasure in sharing his enthusiasms, and it was obvious that there was no place he would rather have been than in China’s oldest conservatory, bringing the music of his people to still another country deprived of that commodity. In 1959, he and Mitchell—who have played together as the Mitchell-Ruff Duo for twenty-six years—introduced jazz to the Soviet Union, and for that occasion Ruff taught himself Russian, his seventh language. In 1979, he hit on the idea of making a similar trip to China, and he began taking intensive courses in Chinese at Yale, where he is a professor of both music and Afro-American studies. By last winter, he felt he was fluent enough in Mandarin to make the trip.
Now Ruff stood at the front of the room, holding several sheets of paper on which he had written, in Chinese characters, what he wanted to tell his listeners about the origins of jazz. He looked somewhat like an Oriental sage himself. “In the last three hundred and fifty years, black people in America have created a music that is a rich contribution to Western culture,” he began. “Of course, three hundred and fifty years, compared to the long and distinguished history of Chinese music seems like only a moment. But please remember that the music of American black people is an amalgam whose roots are deep in African history, and that it has also taken many characteristics from the music of Europe.” Ruff has an amiable voice, and as he spoke the men and women in the room were attentive but relaxed—not an audience straining to decipher a foreigner’s accent. “In Africa, the drum is the most important musical instrument,” Ruff went on. “But to me the fascinating thing is that the people also use their drums to talk. Please imagine that the drum method of speech is so exquisite that Africans can, without recourse to words, recite proverbs, record history, and send long messages. The drum is to West African society what the book is to literate society.”
I wondered what the audience would make of that. Not only was China the oldest of literate societies; we were in the one Asian city that was encrusted with Western thought as transmitted in books, in journals, and in musical notation. Even the architecture of Shanghai was a patchwork of Western shapes—a residue of the days when the city had a huge foreign population and was divided into districts that were controlled by different European countries. At the conservatory, we were in the former French concession, and its main building was in a red brick French Provincial style, with a sloping red tile roof and a porte cochère. Another French-style building housed the conservatory’s library of a hundred thousand books about music. Newer buildings served as classrooms and practice rooms, and the music that eddied out of the windows was the dreary fare of Western academic rigor: vocal scales endlessly rising, piano arpeggios repeated until they were mastered, chamber groups starting and stopping and starting again. We could have been in Vienna of the nineties or Paris of the twenties. In any case, we were a long way from Africa. And we were farther still from music created spontaneously.
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“In the seventeenth century, when West Africans were captured and brought to America as slaves, they brought their drums with them,” Ruff continued. “But the slave-owners were afraid of the drum because it was so potent; it could be used to incite the slaves to revolt. So they outlawed the drum. This very shrewd law had a tremendous effect on the development of black people’s music. Our ancestors had to develop a variety of drum substitutes. One of them, for example, was tap dancing—I’m sure you’ve all heard of that. Now I’d like to show you another drum substitute that you probably don’t know about—one that uses the hands and the body to make rhythm. It’s called hambone.” There was no translating “hambone” into Mandarin, but Ruff quickly had an intricate rhythm going to demonstrate, slapping him-self with the palms of his hands and smacking his open mouth to create a series of resonating pops. Applause greeted this proof that the body could be its own drum.
“By the time jazz started to develop, all African instruments in America had disappeared,” Ruff went on. “So jazz borrowed the instruments of Western music, like the ones that we’re playing here today.” He went over to his bass and showed how he used it as a percussion instrument by picking the strings with his fingers instead of playing them with a bow. “Only this morning,” he said, “I gave a lesson to your distinguished professor of bass, and he is already very good.”
Moving on from rhythm to terrain more familiar to his listeners, Ruff pointed out that jazz took its structural elements from European harmony. “Mr. Mitchell will now give you an example of the music that American slaves found in the Christian churches—Protestant hymns that had been brought from Europe,” he said. “Slaves were encouraged to embrace Christianity and to use its music. Please listen.” Mitchell played an old Protestant hymn. “The slaves adopted these harmonized melodies and transformed them into their own, very emotional spirituals,” Ruff said when Mitchell had finished. “Mr. Mitchell and I will sing you a famous Negro spiritual from the days of slavery. It’s called ‘My Lord, What a Morning.”’ With Mitchell playing a joyful accompaniment, the two men sang five or six choruses of the lovely old song, Mitchell carrying the melody in his deep voice, Ruff taking the higher, second part. The moment, musically beautiful, had an edge of faraway sadness. I couldn’t help thinking of another alien culture onto which the Protestant hymns of Europe had once been strenuously grafted. It was just beyond the conservatory gates.
“Mr. Mitchell will now show you how the piano can be used as a substitute for the instruments of the orchestra,” Ruff said. “Please notice that he uses his left hand to play the bass and also to make his rhythm section. Later, he will use his right hand to play the main melody and to fill in the harmony. This style is called ragtime.” Mitchell struck up a jaunty rag. The students perked up at the playful pattern of notes. Ruff looked out at his class and beamed. The teacher in him was beginning to slip away; the musician in him was telling him to start the concert.
Mitchell and Ruff met in 1947, when they were servicemen at Lockbourne Air Force Base, outside Columbus, Ohio. Mitchell, then seventeen and a pianist in the unit band, needed an accompanist, and he gave the newly arrived Ruff, a sixteen-year-old French-horn player, a crash course in playing the bass. Thus the duo was unofficially born. When they were discharged, they followed separate paths and lost contact. Mitchell went to the Philadelphia Musical Academy. Ruff went to the Yale School of Music, where he studied with Paul Hindemith. Venturing out with his master’s degree in 1954, he was told that no American symphony orchestra would hire a black musician, and he accepted an offer to join the Tel Aviv Symphony as first French horn. Shortly before he was to leave, he happened to turn his television set on to “The Ed Sullivan Show.” Lionel Hampton’s orchestra was playing, and as the camera panned over to the piano Ruff saw a familiar figure at the keyboard. Mitchell, it turned out, had been Hampton’s pianist for the past two years. Ruff telephoned him backstage at the CBS studio. Mitchell hinted of imminent vacancies in the brass section. A few days later, Israel lost—and Hampton got—a superb French horn.
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The Mitchell-Ruff Duo—“the oldest continuous group in jazz without personnel changes,” Ruff says—was formed in 1955, when the two men left Hampton and struck out on their own. They were booked regularly by the major night clubs as the second act with the great bands of the day: Louis Armstrong, Duke Ellington, Dizzy Gillespie, Miles Davis. “They were our mentors,” Ruff recalls. “They’d play a set and then we’d play a set and they’d hang around and tell us what we could be doing better. We learned everything from those men. Count Basie’s band raised us. In 1956, they were the hottest band in the country—they were the most expensive band and we were the cheapest—and we sold out Birdland every night. One evening, Miles Davis brought Billie Holiday in to hear us, and we just about fell through the floor. We were still just kids.”
Meanwhile, they caught the attention of another set of patrons—a group of older women in New York who had formed an organization called Young Audiences to introduce elementary- and high-school students to chamber music. For teachers, the women chose young professionals who could communicate with words as well as with music, and Mitchell and Ruff were the first people they selected to teach jazz. Ruff recalls, “It was done under the supervision of the founders—Mrs. Lionello Perera, a great patron of music, and Mrs. Edgar Leventritt, who started the Leventritt Competition—and Nina Collier and several other ladies who sat on the board. They taught us definite techniques, such as how to catch the attention of children, and they also gave us lessons in grooming and enunciation and conduct. They were very stern and really quite unpleasant, but instructive. Everything they told us turned out to be true.”
Armed with these graces, Mitchell and Ruff hit the road for Young Audiences, often giving seven or eight performances a day, going from school to school, first in New York and later in Boston, Baltimore, and San Francisco. They did a tour of Indian schools in New Mexico. The duo alternated these forays with its stands in Manhattan clubs. Then, in 1959, it went to Russia. Ruff himself arranged the trip with Soviet officials after the State Department, which had been trying for two years to get Louis Armstrong into the Soviet Union, declined to help. In Russia, the two Americans found a thirst for jazz that surprised even them; when they left Moscow, nine hundred people came to the station to see them off. Mitchell, in turn, still remembers being moved by Russian songs that resembled spirituals he had heard in the black churches of his boyhood. Whether a scholar could find any such link doesn’t matter to him; in music, he operates on an emotional level that has no need for evidence. “I felt a mysterious bond between their people and my people,” he says. “I think I connected with their suffering.”
Not long after that trip, the house of jazz began to crumble. Television was the new medium and rock the new musical message. “Night clubs started closing in the very early sixties,” Ruff recalls. “The number of jazz performers who quit, died, or just disappeared was astounding. Many of them moved to Europe. Three of the greatest rhythm players—Oscar Pettiford, Bud Powell, and Kenny Clarke—had been living in Paris and playing for peanuts because they couldn’t find any work in the United States. How devastating it was for us to play in Europe—as we did quite a bit then—and see so many of these great men so reduced!”
Mitchell and Ruff survived because of their teaching bent. They caught the attention of two venerable booking agencies, Pryor-Menz and Alkahest, that wanted a young act to give concerts for college audiences and also explain the music, and thereby found the format—sixty or seventy concerts a year, mainly at colleges—that has been their principal source of income to this day.
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A new tool came their way in 1967, when CBS Television sent them to Brazil to make a one-hour film tracing the African roots of Brazilian music. Ruff recognized the value of film as a teaching device, went back to college to study film, and has since visited Bali, Senegal, and the pygmies of the Central African Republic to make films about the drum music and language of those societies. He always came back to Yale (where he and I lived in the same college) elated by new rhythmical affinities that he had found among diverse cultures and among seemingly unrelated forms of life. His seminars on rhythm began to make startling connections as he brought Yale professors into them from such disciplines as neurology, limnology, geology, art, English, astronomy, physiology, and physics. The professors, in fact, became almost as elated as Ruff. We flew to Shanghai on a Chinese 747—Ruff walked up and down the aisles trying out his Chinese on the passengers—and the next day we called on Professor Tan Shu-chen, deputy director of the Shanghai Conservatory of Music, who was, so far, our only contact. Two years ago, Ruff had sought the sponsorship of the Center for United States–China Arts Exchange, the group that has been sending American musicians to China, but he got no response. Ruff felt that no matter how many great American artists went to China—Isaac Stern, the Boston Symphony Orchestra, Roberta Peters—the music that they played and sang would be European music. The indigenous music of America was jazz, and the Chinese had never heard it in a live performance. (When Ruff asked a Chinese man on the plane whether his people were familiar with jazz, he said, “Oh, yes, we know Stephen Foster very well.”) Lacking official support, Ruff decided to go anyway. He booked himself and Mitchell on a two-week tour to Shanghai and Peking, the two cities that had major conservatories, and then went looking for money. He got a grant from Coca-Cola that would cover their expenses and the costs of filming their visit.
To have Professor Tan as our host was all that we could have asked. He had come to New York last winter in connection with the film “From Mao to Mozart—Isaac Stern in China,” in which he describes his imprisonment during China’s Cultural Revolution. Ruff invited him to visit the Yale School of Music, in the long-range hope of fostering some kind of collaboration that would help both institutions—an exchange of teachers or students or manuscripts between Yale and the Shanghai Conservatory, for instance. While Professor Tan was at Yale, he attended a class in which Ruff and Mitchell were playing, and he invited them, in turn, to give a concert at the conservatory. That was all that a born improviser needed to hear. Now we were at the conservatory, and Professor Tan was showing us around. He had arranged the jazz concert for the next afternoon.
The Shanghai Conservatory of Music, which was founded in 1927, and which prides itself on being part of the cultural conscience of China, has six hundred and fifty students—the youngest are eight years old—and three hundred teachers. Most of the students live on the campus. Quite a few are from Shanghai, but a large number are recruited from all over China by faculty members, who hold regional auditions.
The conservatory has five departments of instruction—piano; voice; strings and winds; composing and conducting; and traditional Chinese instruments—and two of musicology. One of these is a musical-research institute. The other, devoted to Chinese traditional and folk music, was recently formed to broaden the conservatory’s involvement with the heritage of its own country. But the tilt is definitely Westward. Most of the conservatory’s original teachers were Europeans, and many of its graduates have lived in the West and won recognition there. The curriculum, from what I could hear of it, was rooted in Europe: Bach, Scarlatti, Mozart, Beethoven, Brahms, Schubert, Chopin, Verdi. The biggest class that we saw consisted of a forty-piece student orchestra, led by a student conductor, playing Dvo;akrák’s Cello Concerto.
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Professor Tan was a product of this tradition—and was one of its first casualties when the Cultural Revolution struck. He was born in 1907, and as a boy he studied violin privately with Dutch and Italian teachers who were living in China. When he joined the Shanghai Municipal Orchestra, in 1927, he was its first Chinese member. He recalls the conductor, an Italian named Mario Paci, as a man of such fierce temper that he constantly broke his baton. Thus he learned at an early age that one of the liveliest currents running through Western music is high emotion among its practitioners.
Professor Tan turned to teaching in 1929—at one point, he was teaching violin at six different colleges in Shanghai—and rejoined the symphony in 1937. By that time, it had four Chinese members; obviously, Shanghai was still a creature of the West. But that era would soon come to an end. During the Second World War, the Japanese occupied Shanghai, foreigners were interned in concentration camps, and the colonizing grip of the West was finally broken.
It was no time or place for a musician to make a living—“One month’s salary would buy one shoe,” Professor Tan recalled—and, seeking a more practical trade, he went to architecture school and earned his degree. He returned to music after the war, however, joining the Shanghai Conservatory in 1947, and becoming its deputy director in 1949, when the Communists came to power in China. The school then began its biggest era of growth. The student body and the faculty were greatly expanded, and European music regained its hold. But the older students were also required to go away and work for three months every year on farms and in factories. “The peasants and workers disliked Western music because it belonged to the rich people,” Professor Tan recalled. “And our students couldn’t practice much, because they met so much criticism. At the conservatory, we never knew where we stood. Periods of criticism would alternate with periods of relaxation. It was an uneasy time. In fact, just before the Cultural Revolution I was thinking of retiring from teaching. I had a sense of a coming storm. We are like animals—we can feel that.”
The storm broke on June 5, 1966. The first winds of the Cultural Revolution hit the conservatory from within. “On the first day, posters were put up and meetings were held denouncing the director, Professor Ho Lu-ting,” Professor Tan said. “The next day, the attack was aimed at me. I was accused of poisoning the minds of the students. My crime was that I was teaching Mozart. I happen to be a blind admirer of European and American people and music and culture, so everything I had been teaching was poison. Bach and Beethoven were poison. And Brahms. And Paganini.
“At first, it was only posters and meetings. Then the conservatory was closed, and much of our music was destroyed. We were beaten every day by students and by young people who came in from outside. Boys of ten or eleven would throw stones at us. They really believed we were bad people—especially any professor who was over forty. The older you were, the worse you were. For a year, more than a hundred of us older teachers were beaten and forced to spend every day shut up together in a closed shed. Then there was a year when we had to do hard labor. Ten professors died from the strain; one of them had a heart attack when a young guard made him run after him for a mile. He just dropped dead at the end. Then came the solitary confinement. Our director was kept in prison, in chains, for five years. I was put in the worst room they could find here—a very small room in the basement, hardly any bigger than my bed. It had no light and no windows, and it was smelly because it was next to a septic tank, and there was nothing to do to pass the time. I was kept there for fourteen months.”
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In 1971, Professor Tan was allowed to go home to live with his family pending the verdict on his “crimes,” but he still had to do physical labor at the conservatory during the day. Needless to say, no Western music was played there. Finally, in 1976, the Gang of Four was overthrown, the professors were declared innocent, and the conservatory was reopened. Professor Tan told me that among the students he readmitted were some who had beaten and tormented him. I said that I could hardly imagine such forbearance. “I didn’t think about that,” he said. “The past is the past.”
Professor Tan is a small, gentle man with white hair and a modest manner. He dresses in the informal work clothes that everybody wears in Shanghai; nobody would take him for one of the city’s cultural eminences. He moves somewhat slowly and wears fairly strong glasses—marks, perhaps, of his long captivity. “The students have made astonishing progress since 1976, because now they can play wholeheartedly,” he told me. “I love being able to teach the violin again. It’s such an enjoyment to hear people who are truly talented. Yesterday, a girl played the ‘Scottish Fantasy’ of Max Bruch, and although I was supposed to be teaching her, I only sat and listened and never said a word. It was just right.” He was equally pleased by the thought of bringing jazz to his students. “I’ve never seen any jazz musicians in China,” he said. “Nobody here knows anything about jazz. When I heard Mr. Ruff and Mr. Mitchell play at Yale, I realized that it was very important music. I wanted my teachers and my students to hear it. I wanted them to know what real American jazz is like.”
When Mitchell finished his ragtime tune, the audience clapped—apparently glad to hear some of the converging elements that Ruff had talked about earlier. “Now we’re going to give you an example of blues,” Ruff said. “Blues” was another word that didn’t lend itself to Mandarin, and it sounded unusually strung out: “bloooooze.” Ruff continued, “One of the fundamental principles of jazz is form, and blues are a perfect illustration. Blues almost always have a twelve-bar form. This twelve-bar form never changes. It wouldn’t change even if we stayed here and played it all night.” He paused to let this sink in. “But you don’t have to worry—we aren’t going to play it that long.” It was his first joke in Chinese, and it went over well. Mitchell then played an easygoing blues—a classic sample of what came up the river from New Orleans, with a strong left hand ornamented by graceful runs in the right hand. Ruff joined in on bass, and they played several twelve-bar choruses.
After that number, Ruff brought up the matter of improvisation, which he called “the lifeblood of jazz.” He said that when he was young he had worried because his people hadn’t developed from their experience in America a written tradition of opera, like Chinese opera, that chronicled great or romantic events. “But later I stopped worrying, because I saw that the master performers of our musical story—Louis Armstrong, Ella Fitzgerald, and so many others—have enriched our culture with the beauty of what they created spontaneously. Now please listen one more time to the blues form, and count the measures along with me.” He wanted his listeners to count, he said, because the rules of jazz require the improviser, however wild his melodic journeys, to repeat the harmonic changes that went into the first statement of the theme. “After you count with me a few times through, Mr. Mitchell will begin one of his famous improvisations,” Ruff said.
Mitchell played a simple blues theme, emphasizing the chord changes, and Ruff counted the twelve bars aloud in English. Mitchell then restated the theme, embroidering it slightly, and this time Ruff counted in Chinese: “Yi, cr, san, si, wu, liu, qi, ba . . .” This so delighted the students that they forgot to join him. “I can’t hear you,” Ruff said, teacher-fashion, but they kept quiet and enjoyed his climb up the numerical ladder. Afterward, Mitchell embarked on a series of dazzling improvisations, some constructed of runs like those played by Art Tatum, some built on strong chord progressions (he can move immense chord clusters up and down the keyboard with incredible speed); next, Ruff took a chorus on the bass; then they alternated their improvised flights, moving in twelve-bar segments to an ending that seemed inevitable—as if they had played it a hundred times before.
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Changing the mood, Ruff announced that Mitchell would play “Yesterdays.” Jerome Kern’s plaintive melody is hardly the stuff of traditional jazz, nor was Mitchell’s rendition of it—a treatment of classical intricacy, closer to Rachmaninoff (one of his heroes) than to any jazz pianist. The students applauded with fervor. Staying in a relatively classical vein, Ruff switched to the French horn, and the two men played Billy Strayhorn’s “Lush Life” in a vein that was slow and lyrical, almost like a German lied, and that perhaps surprised the students with its lack of an obvious rhythm.
The next number was one that I didn’t recognize. It moved at a bright tempo and had several engaging themes that were brought back by the piano or the French horn—the usual jazzmen’s game of statement and response. Twice, Mitchell briefly introduced a contrapuntal motif that was a deliberate imitation of Bach, and each time it drew a ripple of amusement from the professors and the students. It was the first time they had heard a kind of music that they recognized from their own studies.
“That number is called ‘Shanghai Blues,”’ Ruff said at the end. “We just made it up.” The audience buzzed with amazement and pleasure.
I had been watching the professors and the students closely during the concert. Their faces had the look of people watching the slow approach of some great natural force—a tornado or a tidal wave. They had been listening to music that their experience had not prepared them to understand. Two black men were playing long stretches of music without resorting to any printed notes. Yet they obviously hadn’t memorized what they were playing; their music took unexpected turns, seemingly at the whim of the musicians, straying all over the keyboard and all over the landscape of Western tonality. Nevertheless, there was order. Themes that had been abandoned came back in different clothes. If the key changed, as it frequently did, the two men were always in the same key. Often there was a playfulness between the two instruments, and always there was rapport. But if the two players were exchanging any signals, the message was too quick for the untrained eye.
I could tell that the music was holding the Chinese listeners in a strong grip. Their minds seemed to be fully engaged. Their bodies, however, were not. Only three pairs of feet in the whole room were tapping—Ruff’s, Mitchell’s, and mine. Perhaps this was a Chinese characteristic, this stillness of listening. Moreover, the music wasn’t easy. It never again approached the overt syncopation of the ragtime that Mitchell had played early in the program; that was where the essential gaiety of jazz had been most accessible. Nor did it have the flat-out gusto that an earlier generation of black musicians might have brought to China—the thumping rhythms and simpler harmonies of a James P. Johnson or a Fats Waller. It was not that Mitchell and Ruff were playing jazz that was pedantic or sedate. On the contrary, I have seldom heard Mitchell play with more exuberant shifts of energy and mood. But the music was full of subtleties; even a Westerner accustomed to jazz would have been charmed by its intelligence and wit. I had to remind myself that the Chinese had heard no Western music of any kind from 1966 to 1976. A twenty-one-year-old student in the audience, for instance, would have begun to listen to composers like Mozart and Brahms only within the past five years. The jazz that he was hearing now was not so different as to be a whole new branch of music. Mitchell was clearly grounded in Bach and Chopin; Ruff’s French horn had echoes of all the classical works—Debussy’s “Rêverie,” Ravel’s “Pavane”—in which that instrument has such uncanny power to move us.
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After “Shanghai Blues,” Ruff asked for questions.
“Where do people go to study jazz in America?” a student wanted to know. “What kind of courses do they take?”
Ruff explained that jazz courses, where they existed at all, would be part of a broad college curriculum that included, say, languages and history and physics. “But, really, jazz isn’t learned in universities or conservatories,” he said. “It’s music that is passed on by older musicians to those of us who are younger.”
It was not a helpful answer. What kind of subject didn’t have its own academy? A shyness settled over the room, though the students seemed full of curiosity. Professor Tan got up and stood next to Ruff. “I urge you to ask questions,” he said. “I can assure you that jazz has many principles that apply to your studies here. In fact, I have many questions myself.”
An old professor stood up and asked, “When you created the ‘Shanghai Blues’ just now, did you have a form for it, or a logical plan?”
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“I just started tapping my foot,” Ruff replied, tapping his foot to reconstruct the moment. “And then I started to play the first thought that came into my mind with the horn. And Mitchell heard it. And he answered. And after that we heard and answered, heard and answered, heard and answered.”
The old professor said, “But how can you ever play it again?”
“We never can,” Ruff replied.
“That is beyond our imagination,” the professor said. “Our students here play a piece a hundred times, or two hundred times, to get it exactly right. You play something once—something very beautiful—and then you just throw it away.”
Now the questions tumbled out. What was most on the students’ minds quickly became clear: it was the mystery of improvisation. (The Chinese don’t even have a word for improvisation of this kind; Ruff translated it as “something created during the process of delivery.”) All the questions poked at this central riddle—“Could a Chinese person improvise?” and “Could two strangers improvise together?” and “How can you compose at such speed?”—and during this period Ruff took one question and turned it into a moment that stood us all on our ear.
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Was it really possible, a student wanted to know, to improvise on any tune at all—even one that the musicians had never heard before?
Ruff’s reply was casual. “I would like to invite one of the pianists here to play a short traditional Chinese melody that I’m sure we would not know, and we will make a new piece based on that,” he said.
The room erupted in oohs and cheers. I caught a look on Mitchell’s face that said, “This time you’ve gone too far.” The students began to call the name of the young man they wanted to have play. When they found him in the crowd, he was so diffident that he got down on the floor to keep from being dragged out. But his friends dragged him out anyway, and, regaining his aplomb, he walked to the piano and sat down with the formality of a concert artist. He was about twenty-two. Mitchell stood to one side, looking grave.
The young man played his melody beautifully and with great feeling. It seemed to be his own composition, unknown to the other people. It began with four chords of distinctively Chinese structure, moved down the scale in a stately progression, paused, turned itself around with a transitional figure of lighter weight, and then started back up, never repeating itself and finally resolving the theme with a suspended chord that was satisfying because it was so unexpected. It was a perfect small piece, about fourteen bars long. The student walked back to his seat, and Mitchell went back to the piano. The room grew quiet.
Mitchell’s huge hands hovered briefly over the keys, and then the young man’s melody came back to him. It was in the same key; it had the same chords, slightly embellished near the end; and, best of all, it had the same mood. Having stated the theme, Mitchell broadened it the second time, giving it a certain majesty, coloring the student’s chords with dissonances that were entirely apt. He gave the Chinese chords a jazz texture but still preserved their mood. Then Ruff joined him on his bass, and they took the melody through a number of variations, Mitchell giving it a whole series of new lives but never losing its integrity. I listened to his feat with growing excitement. For me, it was the climax of years of marvelling at his ear and at his sensitivity to the material at hand. The students were equally elated and astonished. For them, it was the ultimate proof—because it touched their own heritage—that for a jazz improviser no point of departure is alien.
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After that number, a few more questions were asked, and Mitchell and Ruff concluded with a Gershwin medley from “Porgy and Bess” and a genial rendition of “My Old Flame.” Professor Tan thanked the two men and formally ended the concert. Then he went over to Mitchell and took his hands in his own. “You are an artist,” he said.
Later, I told Mitchell that I thought Ruff had given him an unduly nervous moment when he invited the students to supply a melody.
“Well, naturally I was nervous, because I didn’t have any idea what to expect,” he said. “But, you know, that boy phrased his piece perfectly. The minute he started to play, I got his emotions. I understood exactly what he was feeling, and the rest was easy. The notes and the chords just fell into place.”
Suggestions for Writing and Discussion
Reread Ruff’s opening speech to his Chinese audience (paragraph 3). What do you learn that you never knew before? If you were a member of the audience, would you want Ruff to continue on? Why or why not?
Ruff explains that in America, so powerful was the drum believed to be that its use was actually banned by whites who feared their slaves’ responses to the drumbeat. What did masters fear from the drum? In your opinion, were their fears justified? Can music inspire people to act in ways they would not act if the music were absent? Explain.
Zinsser gives a solid explanation of how Mitchell and Ruff learned jazz. Who were their teachers, and what influences were instrumental in their success as artists?
4.
Zinsser also explains that besides being gifted musicians, both Ruff and Mitchell were excellent teachers of music. What do you think—should a teacher in a certain discipline also be an accomplished practitioner in that field?
5.
Why does Ruff decide to go to Shanghai in the first place? What does this reveal about his character? When Tan decides to invite the jazz musicians to the conservatory, what does this action reveal about him?
6.
Examine Professor Tan’s education and his subsequent experience as a teacher and a musician. Can you see any similarities between any of his experiences and those of Mitchell and Ruff? Explain.
7.
Argue that the Chinese practice of sending students to farms and factories for three months out of the year is either beneficial or detrimental to an educational experie...
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