https://youtubetranscript.com/?v=AONAPQpWyE0
Welcome everyone to another Voices with Reveki. In fact, this is the beginning of a three-part series, maybe a little bit longer, depends how much we get into it. But at least we’re planned for three. I’m joined by Greg Thomas. And well, Greg and I have interacted a couple times before, and I’ve been very impressed. I frequently use jazz metaphors to describe what I’m doing. And Greg is a jazz musician, but he also is a musicologist, and he also integrates his understanding of music and the intelligence that goes into music into a leadership program. He and I, I think, are going to be working together on a leadership program. So there’s a lot here. There’s a lot here to unpack, and I’m really looking forward to it. So first of all, welcome, Greg, and just tell us a little bit about yourself and how you intersected with my work and what you propose we’re going to discuss today. Sure. I’ll be glad to. Well, first of all, thank you, John, for accepting my invitation. I followed your work ever since Awakening from the Meaning Crisis. I’ve listened to dozens of your online conversations, followed other series, for instance, several that you did with our mutual friend, Greg Enriquez, and also your most recent series, After Socrates. And Greg and I hosted a series at the store, recall, in which we featured you in conversation with Steve McIntosh, political philosopher. So I am CEO of the Jazz Leadership Project, which is a company that I run along with my partner in life and business, Joel Kinch Thomas, and we present jazz music as a model and metaphor for leadership and team cohesion within the workplace. That’s a very summary. And we use specific principles and practices that I’ll be sharing today that I’ll be able to actually go a little deeper than normal because of your work and how I see an integration or at least an interplay between the two. That sounds fascinating. Thank you. Thank you. So to bring folks up to date, when I wrote you in January of 2023, here are the titles I recommended. And the first one will be what we talk about today, Jazz as an Embodied Art and an Ecology of Practices. Two, Democracy as Antagonistic Cooperation for E Pluribus Unum. And three, Race versus Cultural Intelligence, the Agent-Arena Relationship. Wow. That’s a lot. Perhaps you saw the talks I gave in Prague on democracy. I did. Yes. Okay. So good. So we’ll be able to bring that to bear. Well, take us away. Let’s get going. This is a lot. All right. So although these are the topics we’re going to focus on, John, it’s my desire and intent for our exchange. My intention is for the models and frameworks that we both use in our work to actually be in conversation. Yeah, of course. So our conversation represents a dialogue between two persons, yes, but also between worldviews and world spaces. So it’s my hope that this conversation is illuminative for each of us and your audience. And for me personally, I hope to deepen my own grasp of the implications and meanings and virtues that inspirate your work and gain more precision in my own understanding of your thought. How’s that sound? That’s a great framing. That’s a really great good faith framing. So long words. Okay. So I want to start by riffing on a statement that Christopher Mastro Pietro made in episode 22 of After Socrates. He said, it is the gesture of his proposal rather than the exactitude of his content that opens up the relationship. I know you remember that. Yes. Yes. And he always speaks that poetically. I love it. I love it. And so I’m just going to reiterate, I’m really grateful that you accepted this proposal. And though I anticipate that our exchange will clarify much of the content we’ll be discussing, I want to express again my thanks for this opportunity for a relationship that’s going to allow us to begin in dialogue and aspire to extend, elaborate, and refine into dialogos. Now that last expression, extend, elaborate, and refine was a favorite saying from a sage that I counted as a mentor, Albert Murray. He’s the author of numerous works on American culture and identity, blues and jazz and Black American experience. And in describing how artists stylized raw experience into art, into what he called aesthetic statement, he would say that the process is extension, elaboration, and refinement. Now, of course, extension is a part of 4E cognition. Exactly. And for me, points to culture and cultural intelligence, which allows us to extend our biological inheritance into that which makes humans human. But for this conversation, let’s focus on music. Okay. But as you said earlier, you often reference and allude to jazz, in particular moments during your presentations and dialogues. What’s been your experience with jazz and why do you make that metaphorical move, John? So my experience with jazz, I’m not a musician. I can’t play music. I mean, I tried several times. One of the things when I’m going to do when I retire, if I retire, is I bought a flute and I’m going to take up the flute. My partner knows how to play the flute. She’s going to teach me and I’m going to take formal lessons. But my experience with jazz has been very much from the outside. And I’ve been to a few jazz performances and I was deeply impressed by them in a way that I never got when I was just listening to the music like off of a record. But when I went and I was there and I got to participate in watching the jazz being produced and also the ritual involvement of the audience, I was very profoundly impressed. It left a very deep impression on me. That’s one stream. The other stream is I do Tai Chi, Chuan and related arts. And very often, first of all, in the ancient Chinese texts, you don’t do Tai Chi. You play it the same verb as playing music. And then also along with that, the more Anglo-American authors will pick up on sort of the jazz opportunity to talk about jazz as the music that is happening in Tai Chi, Chuan, things like that that they come across. And so I have some sense from the inside by doing Tai Chi, Chuan and the way it resonates, at least metaphorically, with people who produce jazz. So that, I mean, it’s not an in-depth, but experience. It’s nothing like what you have or anything like that. And so I feel a little bit intimidated. But nevertheless. Well, I’m sure that hearing you say that when you talk about your audience, you’re intimidated by me. You can be intimidated, not that you try to be, but the level of erudition that you bring is very deep, John. So I really appreciate that. But that’s one of the reasons why I want to go even deeper. Now I’m going to take folks inside an exchange that we had. One time, you, Greg Enriquez and Jordan Hall, the three of you engaged in a colloquia, a really beautiful conversation. And I was so moved by the conversation that I emailed each of you, but together. And I said, check out this song. And it was a song from an album called Peyton’s Place by a great trumpeter from New Orleans, Nicholas Peyton. And it was called The Three Trumpeters. And it was Nicholas Peyton, Wynton Marsalis, who I’m sure most of the people here have heard of. He is a world class and famous jazz trumpeter, composer, Pulitzer Prize winner, head of Jazz at Lincoln Center as artistic and managing director. And the late Roy Horgrove, who’s from Dallas, Texas, Wynton and Nicholas are from New Orleans. And these three trumpeters, you could hear the different personalities and they played together and against each other. And it was just, and so I was so moved that I emailed and each of you were like, well, thank you. So this has been kind of brewing for a while with me, but I want to actually ask you another question. Please. What about the blues and blues music? Because there’s a very strong connection between blues and jazz that I want to actually start off with. So what’s your, what’s your conception or take on the blues? I haven’t listened to very much blues. I mean, I know I can hear blues elements in other people. You know, Led Zeppelin has some blues going on in it, which is interesting. And the Beatles talk about muddy waters. I mean, I know, you know, there’s a bit of blues. Some of Bill Withers, I think is blues. And I listened to that. So again, I’m not completely ignorant, but my experience of it has been limited. But again, there’s moments when that music I find particularly powerful. I was watching an otherwise unremarkable movie. It’s a, from a genre I tend to avoid because I criticize it, a romantic comedy, but for some reason or other, I was dragged into watching it called Notting Hill. And there’s a passage where the main character, or at least the main male character has broken up with the female and he’s walking along. And they did a little bit something clever with the cinematography as he walks from sort of scene to scene. He’s also walking across the seasons and getting a sense of extended passage of time. That was pretty interesting. But then what made it really stand out for me and is they were playing Ain’t No Sunshine When She’s Gone as that was going through. And it, for me, it brought out the experience of grief in a way that little else can do. And that he’s going through the grief. And of course, they’ve got the metaphor, the visual metaphor of him walking the journey and the passage of the seasons and time is passing both slowly and quickly in that weird paradoxical way when you’re in grief. But the music really grabbed me and it resonated. And there was a moment where that, in that moment, that movie lifted off from being just a silly rom-com. And it was like, I don’t know who wrote that scene or what did it. It was like, oh. So again, that touched me very deeply. The capacity for that music. I want to say something and it’s a little bit critical. We have a lot of pop music about people breaking up. And I find that music usually useless. I’m sorry, that’s harsh terms, but I’m just saying how it affects me. I find it useless. It doesn’t evoke grief nor does it provoke any insight into the experience or does it invoke any sharing of a common humanity around that experience, all of which are very important to grief. Instead, it’s a kind of just wallowing. So, I mean, there’s some exceptions, I think. But to your point, those exceptions are when the music starts to sound, at least to my ear, more like blues in a profound way. I hear you. Albert Murray, to speak of him again, he liked to talk about re-levels of sophistication and the stylization of art. And he would say that there’s folk art, pop art, and fine art. So, folk art is fairly conventional, conservative. So, if you hear a 12-bar blues playing by Muddy Waters or blues guitarist even earlier, not even electric guitar, you’re talking Muddy Waters, you’re talking electric. Let’s say it’s acoustic guitar or harmonica player, as the train is going by and they’re blowing the harmonica and singing. And he would say that’s the folk level. So, that’s something where it doesn’t change that much. These are fairly conservative forms that pretty much stay the same. Pop art, he says, is the widest. Pop art can tap into folk art, into fine art. The problem is this lack of depth. And that’s what you’re pointing to. He says fine art is the ultimate extension, elaboration, and refinement that you’re striving for as you stylize raw experience into art. And this is where he says masterpieces are. So, when you have a masterpiece song, a masterpiece solo, a masterpiece interpretation, a masterpiece composition, it withstands the test of time, riffing on time that you mentioned, because of its depth, its emotional depth. Fine art, and this is one of the ways I describe fine art, it has way more emotional depth and range than usually folk art or pop art. The great American philosopher, Suzanne Langer, she would say that art is feeling and form. So, the deepest feelings and range of human experience in terms of our emotions is found in fine art. But I want to focus on the blues because, first of all, let’s talk about it as music very briefly, but then let’s get into it in terms of meaning, the deeper application of the blues. So, the blues is really good time music. You listen to the blues not to cry, you listen to the blues to actually have a good time. And it’s a foundation for jazz and other forms of music, particularly American music, as you mentioned. And it’s usually based on a repeated 12-bar cycle, a call and response melodic structure, a vocal timbre, or timbre, should I say, that’s Negro-American, Black-American, Afro-American. And it’s a harmonic system that connects to Christian church music and other musics across the world through the pentatonic scale. The pentatonic scale and the blues scale is very similar. Okay. Now, but this is the deeper dimension in my estimation. The blues sensibility is really an underappreciated wisdom tradition and idiom. It’s a way of being in the world. So, I want to give you some quotes from some people that you’ve heard of and some people that you may not have heard of, but they all focus on this deeper dimension of the blues. Let’s start with Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King. In 1964, there was a jazz festival that he actually wrote notes for and it was published in the program. And in it, he said, everybody has the blues. Everybody longs for meaning. Everybody needs to love and be loved. Everybody needs to clap hands and be happy. Everybody longs for faith. In music, especially this broad category called jazz, there is a stepping stone to all of these. So, that’s a blues jazz connection. But he continued, jazz speaks for life. The blues tell the story of life’s difficulties. And if you think for a moment, you will realize that they take the hardest realities of life and put them into music only to come out with some new hope or sense of triumph. This is triumphant music. The great novelist Toni Morrison in 1994, she engaged in a public conversation with Cornell West that was published in the Nation magazine. And in it, she said, the blues is about some pain, some loss and some other things, but it doesn’t whine. Even when it’s even when it’s begging to be understood in the lyrics, the music contradicts that feeling of being a complete victim and completely taken over. There’s a sense of agency, even when someone has broken your heart. The process of having the freedom to have made that choice is what surfaces in the blues. I don’t see it as crying music. Now, in response, Cornell West said, he was responding to something she once wrote. He says, you once said that there’s no vengeance and bitterness in the blues, even though there’s dogged determination. But then he said for himself that the blues tradition that goes, say, from Leroy Carr to your own work is not just music. It’s an idiom. It’s a way of being in the world. It’s mature and it takes unbelievable courage, persistence, practice, discipline, and energy to be a mature, compassionate, decent person. Now we’re going to get to some of the people that I say are, for me, the central figures in the blues idiom wisdom tradition. The others are riffing on the same ideas. But in terms of my own development, I first became familiar with the work of Albert Murray through the work of Stanley Crouch, the late cultural critic and essayist and novelist. He would write liner notes for Wynter Marsalis. He would write for the Village Voice about jazz and other topics. He would mention this guy, Albert Murray. So I started to check out Albert Murray. I read Albert Murray’s The Omni Americans, Saw to a Very Old Place, The Hero in the Blues, Stomp in the Blues, The Blue Devils of Nada. It was really profound for me because a lot of the things that I would have a sense of, connections. I listened to music from the time I was, I mean jazz from the time I was in high school. I really just fell heads over heels in love with jazz. But it was only reading Ralph Ellison, Stanley Crouch, and Albert Murray that I got into this deeper philosophical dimension of the blues and jazz. So one of the things that Stanley said, he was writing about Wynter Marsalis and the composition that he wrote based on Afro-American, the church tradition. He said, the blues is the sound of spiritual investigation in a secular frame. Oh, say that again. That’s just say that again. That’s a wonderful, that’s a wonderful. The blues is the sound of spiritual investigation in a secular frame. And through its very lyricism, the blues achieves its spiritual penetration. And then later he said, the blues is the aesthetic hymn of American culture. Wow. Okay. There’s a lot in there. Can I ask, may I ask you some questions at this point? Please do. Okay. So first of all, you know, there’s tremendous connections being made to philosophy, wisdom, and spiritual investigation. And obviously in a way that’s very interesting to me, spiritual investigation within a secular format, something that’s very interesting to me given a lot of my work. So there’s a lot of questions I want to ask you, like as even a cognitive scientist. So what I hear you saying is that the blues allows you to articulate and bring in tension, allows you to articulate and bring intelligibility to things and to question things and to open them up. But that’s not being held just by the propositions of the, but it’s being held by the song, the music and the words together. Right. And so could, and this of course deeply intrigues me because it, you know, it invokes the non propositional as playing a significant role in the activation of wisdom. And, you know, in music we’re, we’re playing with emotion and we’re playing with gesture and we’re playing with our salience landscaping. We’re doing all this stuff. So there’s a sense in which you’re, to me, you’re invoking meaning as something distinct from just intensity. The whining is just conveying the intensity of an emotional experience. That’s exactly what it’s supposed to do, but it’s not articulating it. It’s not bringing it up for reflection and reframing. It’s not allowing us to get any insight into how we’re showing up in this experience. And I am I right in hearing you saying that the blues is allowing all of that. It’s affording all of that. It’s guiding people to do that in a powerful way. So absolutely. There’s a key distinction between having the blues and playing the blues. Right, right, right. So having the blues is, you know, feeling despondent, you know, melancholy, down, depressed, but playing the blues is looking at and dealing with and confronting straight no chaser to name a song by the loniest monk. And then basically saying, well, what you’re going to do, you know, how are you going to deal with it? So if you take a blues chorus, the first four bars are stating what the situation is. Then that situation is repeated. But then for the last eight bars, there’s some type of resolution or response to the situation. So it’s actually an affirmative art form in that way. Albert Murray argues that it’s actually heroic when you look at the people who created the blues, my ethnic and cultural kinfolk, Black Americans, Afro Americans, and what we went through in this nation during enslavement, during the Jim Crow period. One of the things that Albert Murray says is, you know, we didn’t have Freudian psychology, you know, we didn’t have Adlerian psychology. We didn’t have that. So you create what you need. So it’s in the art forms, in the dance, in the music, in the way of speaking, in the way of moving. You mentioned gesture. That your highest values are actually expressed. So Ralph Ellison actually wrote once that, you know, when we didn’t have political, social, and economic freedom, what do we have? We had our culture, we had our cultural expression where our highest values could be put into the spirituals and into the blues. And then what did it do? It infused all of American music, because it’s something about the blues that’s not just confined to those who created it. The blues can relate to the fact that we all struggle. We all go through pain, you know, and was it in Buddhism, life is suffering. That’s a blues lyric. Stanley Crouch once said, he was a dear friend of mine, and he was very, very, he introduced, went Marsalis to Albert Murray. And then when Winton was coming on the scene, like when he was making waves by playing the classical trumpet tradition, and he was starting to play jazz, but he didn’t really, even though his father was a great jazz pianist, he needed more grounding. So when he came to New York from New Orleans, he met Stanley Crouch, and Stanley Crouch introduced him to Albert Murray, and that changed everything. But Stanley once said that the greatest blues line of all time is, Father, why has thou forsaken me? That’s one of the greatest, if not the greatest blues line, you know. Let me get up on that. So that’s the most profound thing to say. And you’ve already said, you know, you did the quote about spiritual investigation, and there’s a connection between the blues and the spirituals that are within the church. So, and so I’m going to try and ask this very carefully. There’s something more than psychological therapy then going on in the blues, right? Because we’re pushing beyond, it makes you feel better, maybe give you some insight into your, so not denying that there’s a therapeutic aspect, but I want to ask you, what is there in that beyond the therapeutic aspect that constitutes this like this spiritual inquiry? I’m totally with you. I just want to pull this book off the shelf. Please. I do that all the time too. Stopping the Blues by Albert Murray. Okay. And what he talks about is the mythic and ritual foundation of the blue. Right. And the function it served for what Cornel West calls blues people. So no, it’s not just about the individual psychologically feeling better. As you’re playing the blues and singing the blues, first of all, you are acknowledging your issues. You’re not repressing them. You’re not hiding them. You’re not denying them. You are saying life is tough. It ain’t fair. You might not wish this situation on your worst enemy, but in the process of doing that publicly in what Albert Murray called the Saturday night function, you have a communal sharing of the expression of the truth of the reality of your situation. But as I said, having the blues and playing the blues is different. You’re counterstating what Murray called the blues as such in the very act of playing the blues and playing with the blues. And now let’s get into the ritual and mythic aspects. Because as you well know, rituals, what do you call it? What do you call it? Religio. What’s your word for a ritual? Yeah, that connectedness. Yeah. It’s often grounded in mythic structures. Yes. When you look at what he calls the Saturday night function, you have, and I’ll just focus on the ritual dimensions. It starts with a purification ritual where you banish the evil spirits and you do that by engaging in fun and dancing and and expressing yourself and having a good time. And so it temporarily stomps the blues. I get back to why I say temporarily, but then it goes from a purification ritual to a fertility ritual. And the purpose of that is so that as we say in the vernacular, you can get it on and continue the species. So the Saturday night function is something like after a long, hard week of work, you can kind of let loose. But then there’s the Sunday morning church service. So you’ve got a secular, sacred dynamic on the weekends. So Saturday night, you stomp the blues. Sunday mornings, you sing a joyful noise into the Lord. But in terms of the music, the foundation is the same. We make these distinctions between sacred and secular. There are distinctions, but musically that kind of dissipates because the spiritual is the first great musical art form of Black Americans. Then the blues came at the turn of the 19th century. It was codified around 1910 by W.C. Handy. And then blues infused other forms of American music, country and western, jazz, what ended up becoming R&B and rock and roll. And what ended up happening is gospel music was actually based on the blues initially. Oh, really? Yes. Thomas Dorsey, who became one of the greatest gospel composers, he wrote a song that I bet you’ve heard, Precious Lord. Yes, of course. Take my hand. Yeah. Leave me on. Here I stand. He wrote that song after a tragic accident where his family was killed. And he wrote that song in order to express his grief and his crying out to the Lord. But before then, he was a blues musician playing with Mar Rainey, one of the great blues queens. So actually, when you listen to early blues and even early gospel, that blues form is right there. So there’s a sacred, secular connection that’s really pretty deep. So they’re bleeding into each other. They’re bleeding into each other in a deep way. Totally bleeding into each other. All right. Now I’m going to give you a classic quote from Ralph Ellison, 1945, an essay called Richard Wright’s Blues. The blues is an impulse to keep the painful details and episodes of a brutal episode, I’m sorry, brutal experience alive in one’s aching consciousness, to finger its jagged grain and to transcend it, not by the consolation of philosophy, but by squeezing from it a near tragic, near comic lyricism. As a form, the blues is an autobiographical chronicle of personal catastrophe expressed lyrically. So you can hear the poetry as a part of this. Now Albert Murray, he coined the expression blues idiom. And he once described the blues idiom as an attitude of affirmation in the face of difficulty, of improvisation in the face of challenge. It means that you acknowledge that life is a low down dirty shame, yet confront that fact with perseverance, with humor, and above all, with elegance. See, so you can feel the deeper dimensions of the form. It’s not just about wallowing and being downtrodden and being a victim. In fact, it’s the opposite of that. So that’s powerful. I mean, there’s an allusion to Boethius and the consolation of philosophy in the quote. That’s right. That was a very contrast illusion. Yeah, yeah. So he’s making a contrast there. I mean, but with that sort of Christian stoic approach. Can you open up that contrast a little bit more? Because you’re also saying from a different angle that there’s something philosophical about the blues. Yeah. And so there’s a contrast here. Can you pull that contrast out a bit? I’m glad you said that. I mean, in many ways, the blues is American existentialism. Right. What is existence about? What is life about? You have a people who were brought to, you know, as part of the transatlantic slave trade. They were largely tribal, but you had some very trained people. First of all, sometimes you had people who were royalty where they were. You had people who were master craftsmen and various things. You had master musicians. You had all kinds of different peoples and they had to come together. And when you have a catastrophe, a cultural catastrophe like that, what ends up happening is that the very, the most crucial and essential aspects of the culture remains, not the surface stuff, the deepest part. So what ended up happening, and this gets into the embodiment dimension, that there’s a percussive orientation, a dance beat orientation to Black American style that comes from that tradition. Now, when you talk about existentialism, you’re saying, you know, what is this all about? I mean, Black Americans had to, they got very familiar, yes, with suffering, with oppression, domination, but they also got very familiar with absurdity. The absurdity of the situation, you know? And this is something that Ellison deals with a lot. He says that, you know, America, the blues and Black American culture are suffused with a tragic comic sensibility. So you deal with the tragic dimensions of life, but it’s like, unless you’re going to commit suicide, you should develop the capacity to laugh, to find a way to experience joy, even if it’s momentary, in the midst of your pain. Now, the momentary piece that I alluded to earlier is this. Murray says that you’re not going to stop the blues, but for so long. Saturday night, you know, you go through your purification ritual, then your fertility ritual. Sunday morning, you go through a ritual of devotion and propitiation. But Monday morning, the blues is going to be back. That’s the reality of our existence as human beings. The blues will be back. Challenge, struggle, that is going to be with us. So it is an existential philosophy. It has ontological dimensions, you know, in terms of being. It has epistemological dimensions. So you can look at the different aspects of philosophy. So yes, Ellison made a distinction between the constellation of philosophy, alluding to both of his. But I would say it’s more about, from his perspective, the poesis, the poetic dimension. That’s what he’s emphasizing more so there. It’s interesting because Stephen Blackwood has written a book. He gave me a copy. I haven’t read it yet, Anboethius. But he tries to argue that there’s actually a musical structure within the constellation that has been largely ignored. And there’s a poetic, rhythmic, poesis structure that is doing a lot of the work that has been overlooked. At least if I understand what the book is about from just sort of skimming the beginning and talking. Right. Okay. That doesn’t mean the quote is inept because the point about Stephen’s work is most people don’t understand that aspect about the constellation of philosophy. So I mean, when you were talking about that, that sense of exile and that concretization down to the fundamentals, I mean, and speaking mythologically, I mean, that reminds me of the Jewish exile in Babylon and that sort of stuff. And you get the Psalms also do something like what you’re talking about a lot. The Psalms that were written at that time, but even some of the others, right? And there’s a big reflection about like, why did this happen to us? What does this mean? What is reality like such that this… Was there much identification with that mythological framework sort of? Oh, great question. Absolutely. And when you look at, I mean, the Black American church tradition, I mean, adapting to Christianity and using the story of Moses and the deliverance of a people as inspiration. Right. That definitely was a big part of it. And then in the spirituals, there are always all these allusions to the Old Testament and the New Testament, deliverance, resurrection, all that’s there. But it’s a very interesting thing. And the here on the blues, one of the things that Murray suggested, he says, I know we focus a lot on Moses. He says, but I like Joseph of Joseph and his brothers, Thomas Mann. I like the fact that he was enslaved and he was a dreamer. He was a visionary, the imaginal. Yes. And he was able to end up advising the king and rising up. So he focused more on that because I think more of the improvisational aspect of Joseph. But I do want to share another quote from Murray because, you know, he again, he was he was a sage to me. He was a mentor. I met him in the early 90s and he was a mentor. I met Wynton and we became friends in the early 90s, 1993 to be in fact. So one of the things that Murray said is that as an art form, the blues idiom by its very nature goes beyond the objective of making human existence bearable physically or psychologically. That’s what you alluded to before, John. He says the most elementary and hence least dispensable objective of all serious artistic expression, whether aboriginal or sophisticated, is to make human existence meaningful. Yes. Man’s primary concern with life, you’re going to love this, is to make it as significant as possible. Right. And the blues are part of this effort. So there’s a kind of meaning that is realized in both senses of the word in participating in the blues that allows one to confront perennial problems of injustice, alienation and absurdity. That’s what I’m hearing you say. Absolutely. Yes. That’s powerful. That’s powerful. And there’s a ritual there. There’s the non propositional. Right. I mean, the four P’s, I love the four P’s because, you know, I can look at the jazz lens. So in many ways, we’re using the propositional to explain what, you know, you have to use the propositional, you know, but the procedural in jazz is the skill set. We’re going to transition to jazz now. The skill set to play jazz, to be able to express your own identity through your instrument, to be able to play well with others and improvise well with others takes a lot of procedural skill. So, I mean, to do it, you’re going to have to learn your scales, your chords, you’re going to work on what we call your sound. You’re going to learn song forms, the blues, the 32 bar song form, like, you know, based on I Got Rhythm by George Gershwin. You’re going to learn how to play certain patterns over certain chord changes in various keys. You’re going to learn the American song book tradition. That’s the basis of a lot of the songs you hear in jazz, either directly or variations on those songs. And that’s just to prepare you to be able to get on stage to play with others in the first place. So, I played alto saxophone and started playing in high school, minored in music at Hamilton College, where I played alto saxophone, first alto in the Hamilton College big band. And my teacher in high school, Cesar Demoro, who played both classical oboe and classical alto sax and jazz, tenor sax and jazz alto sax, he says, Greg, you learn all of the scales, the chords and the patterns. You work on your sound. You do your long tones. You really, he says, but when you get up on stage, you throw all of that away and just play. You know? So, you use the procedural to take you into the participatory and the perspectival, because what we’re doing is, I think what we’re doing is we’re toggling, John, between the propositional and the perspectival. I’m giving a perspectival perspective on the blues and jazz that not a lot of people know about, because frankly, it’s a wisdom tradition. That’s a homegrown tradition, right, in the United States that people are not even aware of, but don’t acknowledge as such. This is a very powerful and insightful proposal. I mean, I’m impressed by it. And I think you’re making a good case for it being a wisdom tradition, a homegrown wisdom tradition. Is part of the case also the opposite, that many Americans are unaware of it, they’ve lost touch with it, and therefore they’ve lost access to a powerful wisdom tradition? Is that also part of what you’re… Absolutely. I mean, that was a lament of Ellison and Murray. They came along, you know, they were born, Ellison in 1914, Murray in 1916, Ellison from the Midwest, Oklahoma, Murray from Alabama, deep south. They both went to Tuskegee Institute in the 30s, Ellison two years ahead of Murray. And so they’re at the origins of jazz as a revolutionary art form in the United States with Louis Armstrong and Sidney Beshay. And then in the 30s, it was literally the popular music of the country. So it was the soundtrack for everybody. And they danced to it and everything. And so what they started seeing over time, 40s, 50s, and definitely by the 60s, was that the dance element, this is the embodied piece, that the dance element became less and less. And it became more of a concert music on the concert stage where you would move and tap your feet. But the dance dimension, so they felt a sense of loss about that. Now, in terms of the ideas we’re talking about, I would have to say that because of the falsity and fallacy of the concept of race, I would have to say that because of many ideas from postmodernism to neo-Marxism to one of the things that Murray, he has a coinage. He says, Marx, Freud, social science fiction, where the structural and then the psychological, and then creating what he called the folklore of white supremacy and the fake lore of black pathology. So you have this folklore, these folk ideas that’s based on a fallacious, hierarchical, racial categorization, which we’ll get into in some of our other conversations, that got in the way really of this tradition being acknowledged as tradition. Now, there’s no question that black American music writ large has been influential around the world. And so people understand that influence and that power. There are academics and scholars who are aware and who do talk about the power of music and the deeper meanings. But this particular tradition, not only is it not well known, it’s not highlighted as much even by black American scholars for a variety of reasons. So yes, there’s a sense that, and I, as a holder of this lineage, it’s something that I think is of value, not only to the United States, but to the world. So I’m doing what I can to share it. This is why I’m sharing this with you, John, because as deep as you are, as profound as you are, you’ll be able to connect it and get it right away, what I’m trying to get at. Because it’s not just what I’m saying propositionally, it’s the way I’m saying it. It’s the passion. See, passion recognizes passion. The passion that you bring, the soulfulness that you bring when you speak and when you share, we’re fellow travelers in that sense. I can’t help it. I can’t just be and just not move my body while I can’t do that. Should we transition to jazz or would you like to stay with the blues? No, I don’t mind transitioning to jazz, but I do want to ask, like at one point, it is the popular music of the country, jazz is at least. I always associate with F. Scott Fitzgerald and the great Gatsby and all that because he talks about how jazz. The jazz days they call it. So when jazz and the blues, I mean, they obviously evolved into, but they’re eventually eclipsed by rock and then by pop and then by other things more recent. And there’s many musicologists have noted the decline of melody and certain other things happening. So is that eclipsing also part of the forgetting of the wisdom tradition associated with it? Thank you for mentioning that. Absolutely. I mean, if you look at R&B, you have a gentleman named Lewis Jordan, who jazz saxophonist, he had a big band and he is the tie between or among blues, jazz, R&B and rock and roll. He’s a central figure, Louis Jordan. And he had a song called Caldonia. What makes your big head so hard? You know, another one, you know, my baby’s got big feet, you know, stuff like that fun stuff. But yes, it was eclipsed. One, I think the reason was because in jazz itself, as the quotient of virtuosity increased in the 40s, they were virtuosos from the beginning. Louis Armstrong, I mean, he was like, like Gabriel, he was a Promethean figure in American, American culture. Bebop is a style that came in the 1940s with a very high level of virtuosity. And that started the breakdown where it was more listening than dancing to it. And then by the time you get to the 50s, when rock and roll started to become more popular and R&B started to become popular, and in the 60s, both and pop music, it definitely eclipsed it. But like many things, jazz was still around. You still had great music being played, written, and the music itself evolved through various stages. And it’s still here. And it still inspires people around the world. I see. Because I mean, I don’t know if there’s a single idiom or ethos or orientation. Rock is such a big behemoth. But it’s grounded in the blues. It’s grounded in the blues. It’s the Rolling Stones, like you said, the Beatles and others. And it’s not just the blues, but it’s really grounded in that idiom, that blues idiom. The 12-bar form, various songs, Black American musicians whose songs and whose playing they were very inspired by. Yeah. But you want to say something or ask something? No, I was just wondering along what we’re talking about here. I imagine that’s still the case from a lot of musicians. But I don’t know if the music has stayed grounded in the blues. That’s a good question. I would say that you had, early on in jazz, you had the apprentice tradition in terms of passing on. You’re talking about intergenerational transmission of knowledge. It was really based on the Master Craftsman model. So you had beginner, intermediate, advanced. You have the apprentices who are just learning. And they become journeymen. And they usually are doing that on stage and traveling with bands. And you have the older musicians who are schooling them and making them aware of the ways that things are and should be. What ended up happening in the 50s and 60s, you had jazz becoming part of educational programs. And that was another thing that ended up happening where you’re trying to codify what was basically an oral tradition. They certainly had written charts and composition. Don’t get me wrong. But that was also a part of taking it out of the original cultural context, ritual context. So there are many, many reasons. And you’re alluding to and suggesting many of them. So in jazz itself today, you have a real, I mean, you could even say jazz itself went through a traditional, modern, postmodern kind of evolution, if you call it that. And today you have just a flowering of all kinds of different approaches and styles. But when you’re talking about at the epitome of the art form, the people who are still influencing others, and Wynton Marsalis, Christian McBride, Jason Moran, Jonathan Baptiste, who won Grammys in this last year, he’s from New Orleans, there’s still a foundation of the blues that is still central. Because if you don’t have blues, if you don’t have some element of swing, if you don’t have a little what Jelly Roll Morton called a Latin tinge, kind of Afro-Hispanic elements, if you don’t have four-four or three-four swing, it’s not jazz. I mean, those are the elements, the fundamental elements of jazz. So it’s still there, but you have such a variety of approaches now. And you’ve got people around the world who adapt jazz to their own cultural traditions. And so you find that in the music. So there are many reasons. But as you’re doing with the Neoplatonic tradition, these traditions, as James Carr says, what’s James Carr’s great book, Finite and Infinite Games? And I remember your conversation with Carr, I think it might have been his last one before he passed on the store. I think so, unfortunately, yes. He talks about how, if you talk about culture and cultural forms and cultural traditions, the thing that’s powerful about them is that they can be reclaimed in later times. I mean, this is this happened all through Western history. I mean, if you talk about the influence of Aristotle, I mean, it rises and falls. I mean, the Renaissance, the Enlightenment, the reclaiming of the wisdom of ancient times. I mean, so these can happen. And of course, the blues and jazz are way more recent than the Neoplatonic. So yeah, it can be reclaimed and accessed again. Yeah. Okay. That was very good. So if you want to transition to jazz now, that’d be great. I do. Thank you. So I would just say that one of the things that Wynton Marcellus says is that jazz fuses the Apollonian and the Dionysian just to riff. Oh yeah. Oh yeah. The intellectual, spiritual and the sensual. Okay. So that’s one riff. Okay. Murray has a blues Indian worldview that undergirds jazz music. He also called this a secular form of existential improvisation and it’s summed up in his phrase, elegant resilience, which is swinging jazz and flow in hip hop. Literally in hip hop, they call it flow. Okay. Right. All right. Now, I want to get to the embodiment piece. And as we go through the principles and practices, we’ll get to the ecology of practices. I’m going to give you a quote from Murray’s book, The Briar Patch File, where he said that a definitive characteristics of the descendants of American slaves is an orientation to elegance, which he describes as the disposition in the face of all the misery and uncertainty in the universe to refine all of human action in the direction of dance beat elegance. I submit that there is nothing that anybody in the world has ever done that is more civilized or sophisticated than to dance elegantly, which is to state with your total physical being an affirmative attitude toward the sheer fact of existence. It’s affirming life, John. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Okay. So what I like to do is just go through very, very quickly. I’m not sure how much time we have left. Can we get a time estimate? Because I don’t want to give a short trip, but I also want to make sure we have enough time to dive into it. How’s 10 minutes? Is that enough, do you think? I’m going to make it be enough. Let’s do 15. Let’s do 15. Okay, great. 15 would be better. Yes. Okay. Thank you. So we have four jazz principles in the Jazz Leadership Project. The first two are individually oriented. The second two are group oriented. Excellent. Right off the bat. That’s great. Yeah. Right off the bat. That’s great. Yeah. Yeah. Thank you. Thank you. So the first two are a foundation of individual excellence. I already said what you have to do in terms of your procedural knowledge to be able to play jazz. You got to learn a lot of stuff. You got to go through a lot of hours of practice just to be able to do it. But the second, and this is a very important idea that’s going to show up throughout our series, antagonistic cooperation is the second principle. Antagonistic cooperation, which can also be called competitive cooperation or as Zack Stein calls it, cooperative opposition. This actually comes from the hero’s journey tradition. It’s a phrase that Ellison and Murray love to refer to. And they did throughout their exchanges from the 1950 to 1960 found in their book called Trading 12’s, Collected Letters. It was something that Murray’s friend, Joseph Campbell used, but he got it from Heinrich Zimmer, mythologist Heinrich Zimmer. And so antagonistic cooperation, we basically say it’s a way of approaching challenge, competition and conflict. And instead of looking at it as a negative, you use it to grow, to learn, to develop yourself, to become better and be able to go deeper. Okay. The next two, the two group oriented ones are shared leadership. Shared leadership is a mutual accountability, responsibility, and a respect for the potential of each person in a musical group, in an organization, in the society as citizens to be leaders in their own right. We know that in terms of democracy, there’s an idea of the sovereignty of the citizen. We can talk about this, of course, in more detail later. So shared leadership acknowledges that, but it’s not the highest principle. The highest principle is what we call ensemble mindset. And we really work to develop and coin some of these. Some of these are ensemble mindset is a coinage of ours. Antagonistic cooperation isn’t, shared leadership isn’t. That’s in the leadership literature. But collaborative, we define ensemble mindset as collaborative co-creation via collective intelligence. Dr. Keith Sawyer, he was a student of Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi. He called this state of collective flow group genius. That’s the title of a book and he’s a jazz pianist too. Okay. He wrote a book called group genius? Group genius. I’m going to find out. Okay. So next we’ll go into the practices. I deem these an ecology of practices. Now the entire ecology, you alluded to it earlier. You’ve got the musicians who are performing, which also have the audience and there’s a feedback loop with the audience going on. So that’s a part of the ecology also. I did an interview with the late great jazz guitarist, Pat Martino. And one of the times, he was like a jazz mystic as was Wayne Shorter. And when I interviewed him, he says, Greg, when we’re playing and grooving with the audience, that’s a part of the entire dynamic of going, he says, even the people walking outside the club also. So this ecology of practices though, there are six of them. The first three are more individually oriented. The next three are more group oriented. Okay. So the first three, we start with what we call in the shed. That’s a vernacular expression within jazz that says, you’ve got to engage in deliberate practice. You got to work on your horn. You got to work on your sound. You got to work on your rhythm. You got to work on your rhythm. You got to work on your rhythm. You got to work on your rhythm. You got to really put in the time. So they call that in the shed. The second is your sound. One of the key values and virtues in jazz was developing your own sound. One of the things that great teachers of the music, when they hear a student go through the process that they have to go through, which is learning the styles and solos of masters. It’s like when you’re learning your field and you’re reading the prominent iconic figures of the field, that’s necessary for you to master that field. But the question is, what will your stamp be? What’s your voice? What’s your sound? Not just mimicking others. Go ahead. That’s why I entitled this Voices with Verveki. Thank you so much for that. Yes, exactly. Exactly the reason. So your sound, what is your voice? What are you bringing to the table? Okay. And then there’s big ears. Big ears is another way of saying deep ears. And the music, when they say someone has big ears, they’re not insulting them. They’re saying that they listen really deeply. And we break that out into three levels. We say attentive listening, where you’re really present and attentive. Then there’s empathetic listening, listening with the heart, with the heart open. And then there’s generative listening, which we call soulful listening, where it’s totally embodied and you’re actually engaging in communication that allows you to go from dialogue to dialogos. You’re able to really, and what gentlemen at MIT with Theory U, whose name is escaping me, but people will probably know Theory U, he calls generative listening, listening from the future. So to me, that connects into the imaginal. Okay. The next three are group oriented. All right. The first is improvisation. It’s a fundamental to jazz, but it’s not just fundamental to jazz. It’s really fundamental to life. We didn’t know exactly, we didn’t have a script for this. So you’re going to be creating as you’re going, playing off each other, and you’re going to be tapping into the range of possibilities that are there. Okay. So what we call our very short way of calling improvisation, we call it wise spontaneity. Yeah. I like that. The Taoist would really love that. That’s fantastic. Yeah. Right. Then there’s syncopation. Syncopation is a fundamental to rhythm in jazz, where you accent the off beats or the unexpected beats, or you accent the upbeat as opposed to the downbeat. Syncopation, we equate that with being prepared for the unexpected that comes along. For JLP, Jazz Leadership Project, we equate all of these to the workplace. Okay. Then the last is swinging. Swinging is with all of its going together. The drums are riding the cymbal. These are metaphors because when you think about people who weren’t able to move, they weren’t able to have full control over their lives. They created a form of where swinging, where you have the drums riding the cymbal and the bass walking, riding, walking. They’re doing that together to create a buoyant rhythmic groove upon which others can then solo. The piano player when this is going on is comping, which is complimenting and accompanying. Okay. And swinging, Albert Murray called the velocity of celebration. Wow. So swinging is like the ultimate. That’s like the ensemble. That’s the actualization of ensemble mindset. It’s an ecology of practices that if we could play the song that’s on the slide, which is Billy Boy, which is a folk song. That’s a folk tune, Billy Boy, right? But the version of it that I want folks to hear is the fine art version of it. This is the Miles, this is a trio, the rhythm section that the Miles Davis quintet in the mid-50s played. Red Garland on piano, Paul Chambers on bass, and Philly Joe Jones on drums. And they play Billy Boy where all of the principles and the practices are there in this short three-minute excerpt. So I would love if we could hear that experience. So one thing I’m hearing, and this is what makes it philosophical, is all of these principles and practices don’t stay in the jazz music. They are designed and you’re playing them and you’re practicing and then you’re embodying them with the intent of transferring them broadly and deeply into your life as a whole. Absolutely, yes. It’s a way of trying to, remember I mentioned folk, pop, and fine art. It’s a way of trying to make the very life you live like a fine art. Yes, yes. Your everyday existence in terms of yourself, in terms of your engagement with other people, and in terms of the work that you do to try to help make this world a better place. Yes, yes. It definitely has deeper dimensions. You know we only scratched the surface. No, and we’re going to keep going. I mean this has been, I really have learned a lot and I’ve enjoyed it. You’ve really brought out the philosophical spirituality, the ritual cognition. It’s just been really impressive. I take it that by putting the learning context into this musical format, that actually helps people take it up and understand it because you’re giving them so much beyond the propositional and then they can carry that. John Roussin talks about the musicality of being. There’s the rhythms and the melodies and the harmonies of our existence as we try to make sense of it. I think that that is just really powerful. It’s very powerful. Thank you so much. You said it. Absolutely. This has applications on an individual level, an interpersonal level. It has applications on an intersubjective level and I would even say a transjective level. Yes, I think so too. I think very much. Okay, well this has been excellent, Greg. Thank you so much. I mean this has been wonderful and you’ve whetted my appetite for the next two that we’re going to record. I’m really looking forward to it. I like to leave my guests with the opportunity for parting words. They don’t have to be summative or anything. There can just be a parting thing you want to leave the audience with. I’ll just use one of my expressions that sometimes I sign off with this. It’s an expression that comes from the music, keep swinging. Excellent. Thank you so very much.