Here is audio, video and transcription. Here is part of the episode summary:
Coleman and Tyler explore the implications of color blindness, including whether jazz would have been created in a color blind society, how easy it is to disentangle race and culture, whether we should also try to be “autism blind.” , and Coleman’s personal opinion. experience of lookism and ageism. They also discuss what Coleman learned from JJ Johnson, the hardest thing about playing the trombone, playing sets in the Charles Mingus Big Band as a teenager, whether Billy Joel is any good, the reservations he has about his conservative fans, why the Beastie Boys are overrated, what he learned from Noam Dworman, why Interstellar is Chris Nolan’s masterpiece, Coleman Hughes’ production feature, why political debate is so toxic, what he’ll do next, and much more.
Here is an excerpt:
COWEN: How did you end up playing the trombone in Charles Mingus Big Band?
HUGHES: I participated in the Charles Mingus High School Jazz Festival, which they still do every year. It was new at the time. They invite groups from around the world to audition, identify a handful of good soloists and let them spend a night with the group. I sat down with the band and the band leader knew I lived nearby in New Jersey and so basically invited me to start playing with the band on Monday night.
I was probably 16 or 17 at the time, so I was taking NJ Transit to New York on a Monday night, playing two sets with the Mingus Band sitting next to people who had been my idols and who were now my mentors – people like Ku-umba Frank Lacy, which is a fantastic trombone; play with Art Blakey And D’Angelo And so on. Then I would go home at midnight and go to school on Tuesday morning.
COWEN: Why does the music of Charles Mingus special in jazz? Because it is for me, but how would you express what it is for you?
Here’s another one:
COWEN: If I understand you correctly, you are also suggesting that in our private lives we should be color blind.
HUGHES: Yes. Basically, yes. Or we should try to be.
COWEN: We should try to be. This is where I may disagree with you. So, I find that if I look at the media, I look at social media, I see disagreement – I think 100% of the time I pretty much agree with Coleman on these race-related issues. In private life, I’m less sure.
Let me ask you a question.
HUGHES: Of course.
COWEN: Could jazz music have been created in a colorblind America?
HUGHES: Could it have been created in a colorblind America – in what sense do you mean this question?
COWEN: There seems to be a lot of cultural creativity. The problem is that it may have required some difficulty, but that’s not my point. To motivate it, you need a certain sense of cultural identity – that the people doing it want to express something about their lives, their history, their communities. And for them, it’s not colorblind.
HUGHES: Interesting. My counterargument would be that, as far as I understand the early history of jazz, it was significantly more racially integrated than American society was at that time. In the sense that the culture of jazz music as it existed in, say, New Orleans and New York, was many, many decades ahead of the curve in terms of attitudes toward the way jazz people should live racially: interracial friendship, interracial relationship, etc. Yes, I would say that the philosophy of jazz was more colorblind, in my opinion, than the average American of the time.
COWEN: But there may be a portfolio effect here. Then yes, Benny Goodman hiring Teddy Wilson play for him. Teddy Wilson was black, as you probably know. And it works wonderfully. It’s just good for the world that Benny Goodman is doing this.
Couldn’t it still be that Teddy Wilson draws inspiration from something deep in his being, in his soul – about his racial experience, about his upbringing, about the people he knew – and that it’s where much of the expression of music comes from. ? It’s certainly not colorblind, although we can all agree that Benny Goodman was willing to hire Teddy Wilson.
HUGHES: Yes. Maybe – I would say maybe not culture– blind, although he is probably colorblind, in the sense that black Americans do not represent just one race. That’s what a black American would have in common – that’s what I What we have in common with someone from Ethiopia is that we are broadly the same “race”. We are not at all from the same culture.
To the extent that there is something called “African American culture”, which I believe there is, and which has given rise to many wonderful products, including jazz and hip-hop, yes, then I am perfectly willing to admit that it is a cultural product. in the same way that, for example, country music is like a product of largely southern culture.
COWEN: But here’s a bit of my concern. You’re going to see people privately broadcasting their cultural visions into the public sphere through music, television, novels – in a thousand ways – and these will inevitably be somewhat political once they are cultural visions. So there will be other views, and many of them you won’t agree with. Maybe it would be nice to say, “It would be better if we were all a lot more colorblind.” ” But given that these other non-colorblind views exist, shouldn’t you, in some sense, counter them by not being so colorblind yourself and saying, “Well, here’s a better way to think about black or color blind. African American or Ethiopian or whatever the identity is”?
Interesting everywhere.
