Weekend self-care open thread: The art of Keith Jarrett, and the permeability of race

I chose the picture of Keith Jarrett that I chose because, well, I may be about to blow some of y'all's minds.

Keith Jarrett is white.

I know that blew my mind when I found out. I said, no way. He has to be Black!

This goes to show how our ideas of race and ethnicity are malleable and fungible. Earlier this week I wrote about just that topic as relates to Cubans and Hispanics at large. 

Mr. Jarrett, safe to say, didn't try to pass for Black. He has always said in interviews that he's white. But even the likes of the late, great Ornette Coleman, who was a hero of Mr. Jarrett's, were flummoxed that he was white. Terry Gross interviewed him, and he told the Coleman story:

GROSS: Did you think that a lot of people assumed you were African-American because your hair was really curly and looks like an Afro?

MR. JARRETT: Yeah. And a friend of my ex-wife's was arguing with me and her that I had to be black, no matter what I said. And once Ornette, backstage, said something...

GROSS: This is Ornette Coleman?

MR. JARRETT: Yeah, Ornette Coleman. One of the earliest times I was in the same room with him, he said something like, `Man, you've got to be black. You just have to be black.' I said, `I know. I know. I'm working on it. I'm...'

(Full disclosure: I, too, had a pretty big 'fro in the 1980s. Not because, heaven forbid, I got a perm, or anything like that. I guess having 9% sub-Saharan ancestry gives one certain traits.)

He knows that early in his career he benefited from his appearance. And, as a jazz musician, he participated in the political and social ferment around Black liberation. And, needless to say, he was shunned by the more militant. But from the same Terri Gross interview, there's this:

MR. JARRETT: Yeah. Well, you know, at the same Heidelberg festival, there were some black musicians, or black audience members, trying to disrupt my performance because they claimed it wasn't black music. And, of course, it wasn't. One reason was that I wasn't black. But this was a jazz festival. They were claiming not only was it not black music, but it wasn't jazz and it shouldn't be at this festival. And this was, I guess, during the time when, you know, the Black Muslim thing was pretty big.

And I went backstage afterwards, and I was rather heartbroken because I thought, `Gee, these are fellow musicians or, like, people who like music, and why are they doing this?' And I was just sitting alone in my dressing room probably very upset, and a man and his daughter knocked on--a man knocked on the door, blacker than any of the guys who were trying to disrupt the stuff on stage, who was actually from central Africa. And he and his daughter came back and said, `Mr. Jarrett, we just want to say that that was so beautiful.' And I thought, `OK. Well, this is going to be just a political problem for me. It isn't the music, it's just the politics.'

Race matters. And it doesn't. Race is a construct created by the dominant to keep others in their place. And concepts of race are ever evolving. It's easy to say that "the only race is the human race". And I believe that, and live my life by that. But to ignore the fact that concepts of race permeate and dominate human culture would be to stick our heads in the sand. We have to acknowledge race and its perils to, eventually, transcend them. Not transcend them in the sense of making us all homogenized. But to transcend the idea that one's race and ethnicity give them a superiority over others. "I don't see color" is usually said by those who see only color. A true post-racial society needs to be one where difference is not only accepted, but celebrated. The world's cultures must be revered for the uniqueness they bring to the human family. But first we must confront those differences, and transform them from a point of contention to a place of revelation.

For this weekend's self-care, we celebrate a man whose art derives from Black culture, and who exemplifies the vagaries of what we call "race".

Please share in the comments.

I pulled the Terry Gross excerpts from this excellent blog post.

As always, dear friends, be ever excellent to yourselves and those around you.

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