"A Heart Attack or a Healing"
That time Richmond's preeminent music critic compared Black sacred music to an Elvis convention
The end of Black History Month and the beginning of Women’s History Month present a good opportunity to discuss multicultural education through the arts. Richmond bandleader, educator, and entrepreneur James “Plunky” Branch wrote in 1998 that “February can be a time of enlightenment and openness, not just to Black culture, but to multicultural experiences.” Let’s look back at when and why Plunky wrote those words. I wonder what, if anything, has changed in 26 years.
“Cultural institutions created by members of the dominant white society and now immersed in an amalgam of very different cultural traditions may feel besieged. Much greater efforts will be needed to forestall the wrenching dislocations that a transition to a more multiethnic society may entail.”
—D. Antoinette Handy, Director of the Music Division, National Endowment for the Arts, 1989-1993
(Audio excerpt: “The 21st century, quo vadis: NEC, the arts and diversity: Where do we go from here?”, D. Antoinette Handy/New England Conservatory, Apr. 20, 1995)
I remember multicultural education from when I was in elementary school. It was the late ‘80s and early ‘90s in Henrico Country, Virginia. In addition to studying Disneyfied versions of Captain John Smith and Pocahontas, we learned about an elusive though apparently historically significant figure I knew as Lee Jackson King.
It wouldn’t be exaggerating to call Lee Jackson King a larger-than-life historical figure because he was, in fact, three men: Confederate Generals Robert E. Lee and “Stonewall” Jackson, as well as the Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.
Lee-Jackson-King Day, or what the Washington Post in 1999 called “Virginia’s peculiar holiday,” began to take shape between 1984-1986 after years of campaigning by then-state senator L. Douglas Wilder to get the Commonwealth to recognize Dr. King’s birthday. Recognize it they did. In their own “peculiar,” Southern way.
“Wait! We can’t have Martin Luther King Day? It’s Martin Luther King-Lee Day? I was like, ‘What? What the heck! What is that?’ I had no idea…I didn’t know where I was.”
—Clarence Penn, jazz drummer from Detroit and a student of Ellis Marsalis at Richmond’s Virginia Commonwealth University in the late ‘80s and early ‘90s
(Oral history excerpt: Clarence Penn, Oct. 20, 2021, phone interview by the author)
Dr. James A. Banks, one of the leading scholars in the field of multicultural education, calls this—albeit a particularly perverse example—the “Heroes and Holidays” Approach to the integration of ethnic content into the curriculum. The alternative is the Transformative Approach. Ideally, this approach “changes the basic assumptions of the curriculum and enables students to view concepts, issues, themes, and problems from several ethnic perspectives and points of view.” How do Richmond’s music educators exemplify this approach, especially in terms of social action? Let’s revisit one example from 1998 involving another larger-than-life historical figure from the South—John Coltrane.
Franzo and Marina King founded the St. John Will-I-Am Coltrane African Orthodox Church in San Francisco in the late 1960s, inspired by Coltrane’s 1957 spiritual reawakening and overt turn toward sacred music following 1965’s A Love Supreme. (For an excellent deep dive into A Love Supreme, see fellow Substack-er Ethan Iverson’s October 2021 piece in The Nation.) Coltrane is the church’s patron saint and services largely revolve around the music of A Love Supreme.
Trane didn’t discover religion in the ‘60s. He was brought up in it. Coltrane’s grandfathers William W. Blair and William H. Coltrane (thus his middle name) were both African Methodist Episcopal ministers in North Carolina. According to John Coltrane: His Life and Music by Dr. Lewis Porter (on Substack HERE), Coltrane’s mother Alice attended Livingstone College, affiliated with the AME Zion church, and she “played the piano accompaniment for the choir at Reverend Blair’s services when she was at home.”
It is a natural arc from the young Coltrane’s childhood a few doors down from the AME church in High Point, NC, through performing alongside Thelonious Monk (who spent two years in a touring evangelist’s band) to composing and recording A Love Supreme. As Plunky wrote in 1998, “Are there no Black musicians worthy of sainthood? Is it not possible for John Coltrane to be seriously held in that kind of esteem?”
In 1996, filmmaker Jeff Swimmer released the short documentary The Church of Saint Coltrane about Franzo and Marina King’s San Francisco church. On February 13, 1998, the documentary was screened at the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts in Richmond, followed by a performance of Coltrane’s music by the J. Plunky Branch Quartet. The Richmond Free Press—an independent, Black-owned weekly newspaper—called Trane “one of the greatest jazz innovators of the century,” whose influence was still felt at the King’s church: “There, Sunday services are five-hour jam sessions interspersed with liturgy, sermons and fellowship.” The Black History Month event was sponsored by the VMFA and the Richmond Jazz Society. Tickets cost $6.
In the days before everyone carried YouTube and Wikipedia around in their pockets, young musicians in Richmond got their information from the traditional sources: home, school, church, musicians in the community, record stores, public and commercial TV and radio, mainstream media outlets like the Richmond Times-Dispatch, public arts institutions like the VMFA, and non-profit arts education organizations like the Richmond Jazz Society.
Now, anyone can go online and see what NPR’s Jazz Night in America has to say about the church of Coltrane. In 1998, a year before Napster went online, about 300 Richmonders paid their six bucks and went to the VMFA. Or read about it in the paper the next day.
If you were in the latter group, your education began like this: “To take Jeff Swimmer’s film ‘The Church of Saint Coltrane’ as seriously as the Virginia Museum presented it last night, it helps to have never been to an Elvis convention.” Clarke Bustard—RTD music critic for 27 years, whose coverage of Black music was generally favorable—wasn’t having “the ecstatic spirit of jazz.”
Despite panning the participants’s reverence for Trane, Bustard saw the event as significant enough to write not one but two reviews. The first came out the next morning, a chilly Valentine’s Day (“Jazz Icon Saddled with Sainthood,” Times-Dispatch, Feb. 14, 1998). The second, more manifesto than review, in the subsequent weekend’s Sunday edition (“Worshiping at Alter of ‘Saint’ Saxophonist,” Feb. 22, 1998).
The RTD’s critic took issue with what he termed the presenters’s cultural evangelism, claiming they were “intent on promoting this music as if it were some kind of mystical potion for the soul.” He compared the “grass-roots canonization” of Coltrane to Elvis and Princess Diana, deeming such efforts “tacky, tawdry, teetering between the laughable and the pitiable.” Though he praised the performance by Plunky’s quartet, Bustard described Coltrane’s music as “melodically undernourished and repetitious,” known “casually at best” outside of a few aficionados. His manifesto concluded like this:
“Musical purpose, not musical style, is the issue. Once music has been adopted as a religious artifact, believers will try to make it off-limits for more worldly pleasures. Something to consider before you sanctify music that moves you.”
J. “Plunky” Branch, one of those “aficionados,” immediately returned fire in a February 23 letter to the editor of the Richmond Jazz Society’s newsletter Bright Moments!… (Vol. XVIII, No. 2; ed. B. J. Brown, with assistance from Desiree Roots and Steven Clark):
“This type of attack on Black art and music must not go unchallenged. Our music is too important a part of our culture to be demeaned. Music has been our refuge and our inspiration. Also, it is a serious matter when widely circulated publications disparage the quality and confront the producers of cultural arts. Attitudes and patterns of financial support can be unfavorably swayed by misinformed public opinions.”
Plunky knew what he was talking about. A veteran community arts organizer and non-profit funding entrepreneur, he had publicly taken on Richmond’s Federated Arts Council (comprising the VMFA, the symphony, the ballet, and major corporate donors) in the late ‘70s and early ‘80s for its lack of equity in funding Black arts organizations in the capital region. This activism and organizing, among other things, contributed to a flourishing Black arts renaissance in 1980s Richmond that included the founding of the Richmond Jazz Society, the VCU Jazz Studies program, and the Richmond Jazz Festival.
From the perspective of multicultural education, Plunky’s critique of Bustard is all the more powerful in that it highlights the critic’s cultural ignorance, rather than focusing on his racial paternalism. “To take John Coltrane’s music as seriously as some of his adherents do,” Plunky argued, “it would help to have personally witnessed or experienced some religious ecstasy through some form of Black music.” Musical purpose, as Bustard had contended, is the issue. But the Times-Dispatch’s classical music critic lacked perspective to properly describe, analyze, and interpret the purpose of the RJS/VMFA Coltrane tribute.
This, as Banks argued, is the goal of the Transformative Approach to cultural integration in education—acquiring the ability to experience life from “several ethnic perspectives and points of view.” Plunky’s editorial addresses not only Bustard’s point of view, but also those of the filmmaker Swimmer, the tribute’s presenters and producers of cultural arts, John Coltrane and the jazz avant-garde and their adherents, Duke Ellington, Sufi Muslims, Buddhists, Black Baptists, Catholics, Santeria and Juju Shamanism, early Christians, James Brown, and ultimately enslaved African people:
“To the Africans brought here as slaves and forbidden to speak in their native tongues and forbidden to play their drums, the music meant more than the entertainment value of a particular song or form. To some of the descendants of those slaves, Black music is as serious as a heart attack or a healing.”
So, where are we now?
Virginia’s Lee-Jackson holiday was retired in 2020 to make way for an Election Day holiday and “move on” from remembrance of the Lost Cause. NPR reported on the continuing relevance of the church of Saint Coltrane in stories from 2020 and 2021. Though the “death” of jazz has been widely reported (for decades), Trane’s A Love Supreme continues to be relevant to the hip hop generation, in particular Kendrick Lamar, whom Pharrell Williams likened to Miles Davis and John Coltrane.
And yet, problems big and small abound. Trying to keep up with my young Columbia University students, I added Lamar’s 2015 album To Pimp a Butterfly to the last week of my syllabus for a required undergraduate course called “Masterpieces of Western Music” (Ethnic Additive Approach). When I went to the music library to put a copy on reserve, I discovered an embarrassing omission, especially considering Lamar had been awarded the Pulitzer Prize by Columbia’s president Lee Bollinger in the building next door six years prior. Columbia Libraries doesn’t own a single copy. As Handy tried to warn us back in ‘95, cultural institutions “may feel besieged.” DAMN.
Plunky’s February 1998 defense of “those who treat and present Black cultural programs seriously” is one of the greatest arguments I have ever read for multicultural music education and deserves to be more widely considered. I discovered it quietly awaiting a more enlightened and open era of multiculturalism in VCU’s Special Collections library. Since collaborating on this research, Plunky assures me it will soon rejoin our discourse in full.
“Black music history is American music history.”
—James “Plunky” Branch, Richmond bandleader, educator, and entrepreneur
(Oral history excerpt: J. Plunky Branch, Aug. 4, 2021, phone interview by the author)
I began this discussion at the intersection of Black History Month and Women’s History Month. If I had to choose a patron saint of music education in the Commonwealth of Virginia, it would be Undine Smith Moore, the so-called Dean of Black Women Composers.
Moore’s students exemplify the Decision-Making and Social Action Approach, having founded cultural institutions like Harlem’s Jazzmobile (Billy Taylor) and the Boston Jazz Society (Carrington), while transforming others from within such as the New York Philharmonic (Leon Thompson) and the University of Maryland College Park (George Ross).
Imagine if Bustard had studied with Moore, who acknowledged Coltrane’s influence on her compositional style alongside Black folk music and Bach. Moore was once asked at a panel on undergraduate education, “What unique challenge might be posed by Black music to a student of music theory in distinction from those traditionally offered in theory classes?” (Reflections on Afro-American Music, de Lerma, 1973). She replied:
“The challenge of analyzing and dissecting styles which include the unique use of melody, rhythm, harmony, tone color, texture, design, and the non-tempered scale. For example, Black music offers the opportunity to come to grips with more complex rhythm, with varied scale structures, with improvisation in a set style, with chord structure, etc. and with the deliberate use of voices and instruments to create a non-European Sound; a special type of contrapuntal texture. The several Black musics, spirituals, gospel, jazz, have their individual stylistic characteristics as definable as the Bach chorale style. The process of keen and disciplined musical mind [sic]. It is a good area for research.”
Amen.
Maaaan, the depth and quality of writing here is a profound, mind-blowing pleasure. Thank you!