This week I was honored with a chance to talk to two of my living heroes Mr. Tavis Smiley and the venerable Dr. Cornel West for their weekly Radio Broadcast “Smiley and West” from Public Radio International.

Although I expect my next conversation with these two fine gentlemen to be about my work, this week I was asked to elaborate on a comment left on their “Speak Out Hotline” regarding what I heard as their challenge to mainstream media and public officials to comment more on the long-standing hypocritical relationships our government has sustained with the now crumbling regimes in North Africa. I don’t know how our talk will be edited, but I’m posting this for anyone interested in my notes on my position.

The episode should air Friday morning and can be downloaded from their official website www.smileyandwest.com.

A Criticism of Unilateral Criticism
1. There is a difference between criticism and critical analysis, and our current climate of reductionist criticism creates an environment where something that might be subtle and complicated can easily be painted or construed as unilaterally hypocritical.

TWO DANGERS OF CRITICISM OVER CRITICAL ANALYSIS:
1. DISCOURAGES transparency
2. ENCOURAGES imperialist arrogance. Takes away leadership’s incentive to learn how not to disrespect and ultimately underestimate other world leaders, whether or not we agree with them.

***We don’t want to be complacent, but we have to project the sense that we are open to more multi-dimensional and sometimes very difficult truths.***

SO:
A. Yes! ENCOURAGE TRANSPARENCY. That’s what I think you’re aiming for hoping that transparency can yield more responsible decisions. But ‘m not convinced that we encourage transparency with criticism. I think we have to be more creative in our approach.

B. I would hope we could DISCOURAGE our current “SELECTIVE” IMPERIALIST ARROGANCE and ENCOURAGE UNILATERAL RESPECT, especially among leaders we don’t agree with. (For example, maybe if we had “respected” Hitler and his power among his people we wouldn’t have underestimated him…) We must be mindful about how to approach that. Acknowledge that now we’re doing it only with countries we need something from. How can we, the people, propel that into broader policy? Again, I think we have to be more creative.

For those of us who believe in the vision and peaceful warriorship of Dr. King the truths we pursue and reveal have nothing to do with being right. Now as far as I’m concerned, it’s fine for Mr. Smiley and Dr. West to go on about it because you try to speak from love and, from what I can tell of your listenership, you’re preaching to an already glorious choir. But It doesn’t make sense for us to get mad when our elected officials prove that they’ve never seen the promised land. We share this planet with them so it’s up to us to get them there. We have to show them the way, cause if we don’t, we’re all going down together.

A FRUITLESS SCENARIO
Politicians are like crazy teenagers who think they know everything and will say whatever they think we want to hear in order to get us off their backs. Always trying to get one over on us and don’t even know it when they’re in over their heads until it’s too late. The “responsible world citizen” meaning one who still feels some degree of responsibility for creating a better human experience, can seem like the well-meaning, nagging parent that criticizes everything the child does. If we want the child to tell us the truth, we have to let them know we’re open to hearing it. Some times our anger and disdain does the opposite. So we don’t want to be complacent, but we have to project the sense that we are open to more multi-dimensional and sometimes very difficult truths.

Jazz singer and fierce, self-made woman René Marie was featured on NPR’s homepage today, along with a clip from her controversial rendering of the “Lift Every Voice and Sing” as sung to the tune of “The Star Spangled Banner” from her folk/jazz/blues/gospel/freedom suite “Voice of My Beautiful Country.”

Read the full story here.

I’m glad the conversation is still open about this. Incidentally, Liz and I went by personal invitation to see Ms. Marie perform this piece when her ensemble debuted it in Denver back in 2008. By the end of the piece, Liz was in tears and Ms. Marie’s audience was on its feet. They had all been “taken to church” in a way I rarely experience in the best of Jazz clubs these days.

Incidentally, Ms. Marie had also asked me to attend the fated event that led to this amazing controversy. I didn’t get to go due to a debilitating spider bite of all things. She had said she wanted me there “for support,” but to be quite honest, I really didn’t get what she meant.

Call me naïve, but I never could have imagined the rage and controversy that bringing these two beautiful, resonant and hopeful songs together would stimulate. I guess growing up Black American, I had never had the disadvantage of learning to fear this song known as the “Black National Anthem.” Furthermore, I never imagined that any song, much less one so fundamentally peaceful and humanist in nature, could inspire such vitriol, regardless of the context in which it was delivered.

I think it can sometimes be an act of compassion not to threaten the fearful at every turn, and because of that at times as musicians and artists, the many roles we play can show up as duplicitous. But as much as I appreciate the calming effect of pleasantries as it were, I fear for a culture whose art appreciators can no longer accommodate challenge. I mean, in what context can you reveal a song like “Dixie” as the strange-fruit-terror it is for some of us, if not in jazz?

The jazz language is plenty rich and nuanced enough to do the work of revelation and reconciliation in a context where angst and anger aren’t even relevant. It can point to fuller truths, dark and light, in ways that can do so much as to point to new possibilities for the evolution of the species, and yet its “appreciators” are driving a market where opportunities for these challenges and revelations are less and less likely to occur.

This being said, the seemingly conservative audience in Denver LOVED the challenges posed by Ms. Marie at those Dazzle performances in Denver – all of which were sold out, including a last minute added matinee. Perhaps it was because the artist had the opportunity to build a bridge for the listener – place her journey with each song in a broader context and help repel quick assumptions.

I just feel like there must have been a time when the artist was granted a little more autonomy – a little more authority – like a medicine man, poet or preacher… and that seat made the tough truths they delivered go down more like a much needed asofoetida tonic, never mind how unpleasant the taste. But nowadays it seems, and this is certainly not to discredit the very real virtues of the placebo affect, that otherwise fertile minds have become slaves to a market that in large part only distributes sugar pills.

I wish you all could have been there at those first Dazzle performances. At the show Liz & I attended, the audience applause was so enthusiastic, it could only be hushed by Ms. René’s humble encore: an a cappella rendering of “How Can I Keep From Singing.” Oh, you should’a seen me cryin’ like a baby during this one! I guess my tears could be a function of the fact that as an artist and a singer, I’ve been very much a “tree in the forest” for as long as I’ve been making music. I’m sure you can imagine that despite all the voices and the endless beauty present in any internal landscape, it can quite lonely out here in the forest, and I sometimes find it difficult to persist. But in the two and a half minutes it took for Ms. René to sing this ageless tune, I was reminded of just how penetrating our simple, quiet honesty can be. How could I keep from singing?

From what I know of her, René Marie is an artist who does her best to remain true to the still small voice of her inner experience, and for that reason alone, I hope you all go out and get her new recording, “My Beautiful Country.”

OK! I am celebrating people!

For once, my typical creative-person angst has chosen to subside and right now I am deep in the throws of a total anti-crisis. I’m sure my life-long torrential pursuit of purpose and meaning will re-surface in its usual incarnation of self-doubt and ennui, but in this moment, I feel like I may actually have some idea about who I am after all, whatever on earth that means.

So here’s the deal:

Lately I’ve been asking myself some of those existential questions that at some point in my life I could take for granted as self-evident, only to later realize I didn’t have words to clearly articulate their answers.

They are:
1. What is my ikigai/raison d’etre?
2. What would I like to be when I grow up/ Who would I like to be in this lifetime?
3. What would I like to do with this lifetime?
4. What’s the point of my art?
5. Why music?

When I went to reeeeeaaalllllly focused in on trying to discover answers for these questions, the words “to awaken compassion” kept popping up… but the light didn’t really start to fade in until today while I was shamelessly reveling in my love of music.

Now I love music. Have I mentioned that before? I love music so earnestly, so deeply, that it’s actually kind of embarrassing. I’m like a teenager who has a crush so all they know how to talk about is object of said crush. “Music this, music that…Did music call today? I wonder if music likes me back…I bet music is gonna go find a prettier girl, etc.” I’m a one trick pony, a broken record, a hopeless obsessive.

I used to assume that the love of music was enough reason to pursue it. I used to say the one good thing about my relationship with music was that at least it left no ambiguity regarding what I would be doing with my life. (Boy did I miss the mark on that one.) Recently, let’s say intermittently over the last 3-4 years, I’ve been going through a season where that basic precept has been in question. Pouring my very best love and intentions into the music I’ve made had yielded only marginal external validation. Knowing this was not an unusual circumstance for people living alternative lifestyles of the creative persuasion, I was left wondering why the validation factor mattered to me, and if it mattered so much to me, why even bother trying to make art? Better I should just get a little office job, and quietly humble myself into I life without passion.

After a while, it became clear that passion or not, music was not going to “go quietly into that good night.” No matter how uncertain I felt creatively, music just kept showing up. For example, the whole time I was recording “Out From Yonder,” my most successful (and incidentally, my most self-representative) recording to date, making music was as essentially “uninspired” as going to the toilet. A fundamental function of my being, but certainly nothing to write home about.

Well life threw me a few curve balls last year, and these days, I’m just so thankful for all of the love in my life that this particular line of questioning and self doubt has essentially has been rendered irrelevant. Simply put, I am in love with making music, and though we can’t ever really predict who or what we fall in love with, we sometimes get glimpses into why our love feels so penetrating.

Well folks, today I caught just such a glimpse out of the corner of my eye. It flickered in the light a little, and when I turned my head to face it dead on something rang out as both focused and true. What was it about music that hit so close to home for me? I’m still figuring out what this means, but it suddenly became clear that it is music’s unique and immediate ability to awaken compassion that was my hook!

Well that’s all well and good you might say. A lot of people would agree that music has some mysterious ability to access emotion, or that it’s fundamentally a social modality. There’s certainly plenty of research being done on why that may be, indeed how music may have been an integral part of our evolution. But my question was why would music’s ability to “awaken compassion” be such a hook for me in particular?

I quickly realized that as far as I can tell, my soul/heart/mind/being/higher self’s clearest motivation has always been to awaken compassion. Sounds a bit lofty and somewhat self-important I know, but this theme is present in nearly every conversation I’ve ever had, certainly every conversation I can remember. I seem to always be trying to find pathways to awakening other people’s compassion, primarily for themselves, although I sometimes enter the rocky terrain of trying build bridges towards compassion for others. Now this fundamental motivation, my home key if you will, can go all over the map when it starts modulating. It can manifest as naïve, self-righteous, tedious even. But it is the most persistent presence in my life in fact… and when I follow this feeling down its windy little rabbit hole, it goes straight to the center of what I know how to experience as being-ness itself. It goes to that space and FILLS IT COMPLETELY.

…

This feeling can and does distort itself into an intense yearning or desire, but it too has a steady nature that lies beneath its more emotive manifestations. It appears to remain constant, despite my relentless efforts to assess it, judge it, subjugate it, question it, devalue it or entirely dismiss it based on my ego based orientation to it. I will admit that because this fundamental vibration could care less what I think of it, I do take a little comfort in knowing that it at least appears to point at something that is “basically good.” With my luck, I could have been born with a fundamental playing in the key of serial killer.

The interesting thing is, my egoic self seems to have a tendency to want to direct this intention/vibration inward and apply language like “awaken compassion in myself, awaken myself to compassion, awaken to my own compassion” etc., but the fundamental actively asserts itself “against” this language demanding that I (ego) try to understand that while those things may very well be involved in helping it accomplish its goal, they are by no means the “point” as it were. It goes on to assert that it is not necessary for me to “wait” to be fully awakened to compassion in order to go about the work of awakening compassion in others…it says I shouldn’t delude myself into thinking I need it any less than others do, but that in this lifetime, it is others that matter. it won’t tell me why and it says, quite frankly, it doesn’t have to.

All of this is a lot of words that boil down to the following:

1. What is my ikigai?
To love my family and to use music to awaken compassion.

2. What would I like to be when I grow up/Who would i like to be in this lifetime?
a vessel for awakening compassion

3. What would I like to do with my lifetime?
To use music to awaken compassion in others in order to help alleviate the suffering of suffering

4. What’s the point of my art?
to awaken compassion

5. Why music?
Because of its unique ability to awaken compassion

That’s it. That’s me in a nutshell. If i look back, those answers have been true for as long as I can remember, but they’ve been too close to my nose for me to see. Maybe they’ll shift into something else later, but for this moment now, I think I know who I am.

Yay!