SOUND PROJECTIONS
AN ONLINE QUARTERLY MUSIC MAGAZINE
EDITOR: KOFI NATAMBU
WINTER, 2021
VOLUME NINE NUMBER TWO
B.B. KING
Featuring the Musics and Aesthetic Visions of:
BRANDEE YOUNGER
(October 31-November 6)
CHRIS DAVE
(November 7-13)
MATANA ROBERTS
(November 14-20)
NATE SMITH
(November 21-27)
T.J. ANDERSON, JR.
(November 28--December 4)
KEYON HARROLD
(December 5-11)
NICOLE MITCHELL
(December 12-18)
OLLY WILSON
(December 19-25)
KENDRICK LAMAR
(December 26-January 1)
JONATHAN BAILEY HOLLAND
(January 2-8)
WENDELL LOGAN
(January 9-15)
DONAL FOX
(January 16-22)
https://www.thehistorymakers.org/biography/wendell-logan-40
Wendell Logan
(1940-2010)
Interview Date
June 13, 2005Profession
- Category:
-
MusicMakers
EducationMakers
- Occupation(s):
-
Music Professor
Jazz Saxophonist
Music Composer
Favorites
- Favorite Color:
- Sky Blue
- Favorite Food:
- Seafood
- Favorite Time of Year:
- Summer
- Favorite Vacation Spot:
- Kingston, Jamaica, Brazil
- Favorite Quote:
- Be Prepared.
Birthplace
- Born:11/24/1940
- Birth Location: Thomson, Georgia
Biography
Composer, jazz musician, and music
educator Wendell Morris Logan, Ph.D., was born on November 24, 1940, one
of three sons born to Dorothy Mae Horton and Simuel Morris Logan. Logan
completed his elementary and secondary school education at the McDuffie
County Training School and the R.L. Norris High School. Logan earned
his bachelor’s of science degree in music from Florida A & M
University in 1962, his master’s of music degree from Southern Illinois
University in 1964, and his Ph.D. from the University of Iowa in 1968.
In 1994, Logan was a fellow at the Rockefeller Study Center in Bellagio,
Italy.
Logan taught public school in 1963 and worked as a teaching assistant
while completing the requirements for his Ph.D. in Iowa. Logan served on
the faculties of Ball State University from 1967 to 1969; Florida A
& M University from 1969 to 1970; and Western Illinois University
from 1970 to 1973. Logan accepted the invitation to develop a program
in African American music in the Oberlin Conservatory of Music, where he
went on to serve as the Chair of Jazz Studies and professor of African
American music.
As a musician, Logan performed throughout the United States and in
Europe, Africa, and the Caribbean. Logan’s music was recorded on
several labels, including Orion, Golden Crest, University of Michigan
Press, Morehouse College Press, and RPM Records. Logan received
numerous prizes and awards, including grants from the National Endowment
for the Arts, and the Ohio Arts Council, ASCAP Awards, a Guggenheim
Award, the Cleveland Arts Prize, and the Lakond Award from the American
Academy of Arts and Letters. Later compositions of Logan’s included
“Doxology Opera: The Doxy Canticles” and “Ask Your Mama.”
Logan and his wife Betty raised two children, Wendell Jr. and Philecia; they also had one granddaughter, Karen.
Logan passed away on June 15, 2010.
Tape: 1
- Slating of Wendell Logan's interview
- Wendell Logan lists his favorites
- Wendell Logan describes his parents' family background
- Wendell Logan describes his paternal grandparents
- Wendell Logan describes his maternal family's migration to Kanas City, Kansas
- Wendell Logan remembers the Asian population of Greenville, Mississippi
- Wendell Logan describes how his parents met in Mississippi
- Wendell Logan talks about his father's education and career
- Wendell Logan describes his parents' move to Georgia and his mother's education and career
- Wendell Logan recalls his brothers and jazz music in Kansas City, Missouri
- Wendell Logan remembers attending school in Thomson, Georgia
- Wendell Logan recalls the civil rights era
- Wendell Logan describes the sights and sounds of growing up in Thomson, Georgia
Tape: 2
- Wendell Logan describes his introduction to music
- Wendell Logan recalls his early musical influences
- Wendell Logan describes his experience as a music major at Florida A&M University
- Wendell Logan describes the sights and smells of growing up
- Wendell Logan describes his experiences at Florida A&M University
- Wendell Logan recalls teaching near Kincheloe Air Force Base in Michigan
- Wendell Logan talks about his family
- Wendell Logan describes pursuing his Ph.D. degree in music at the University of Iowa
- Wendell Logan describes transitioning from performing to composing music
- Wendell Logan describes his doctoral project at the University of Iowa
- Wendell Logan describes his mentors and the development of his musical style
Tape: 3
- Wendell Logan reflects upon developing his style as a composer
- Wendell Logan describes establishing a jazz department at the Oberlin Conservatory of Music
- Wendell Logan describes Oberlin Conservatory of Music's African American studies program in music
- Wendell Logan reflects upon African American music
- Wendell Logan describes his composition 'Ask Your Mama'
- Wendell Logan reflects upon the reception to his musical compositions
- Wendell Logan describes his experience on tour in Nigeria and Brazil
- Wendell Logan reflects upon his career goals and the absence of black students at Oberlin College
Tape: 4
- Wendell Logan reflects upon the lack of musical education for African American youth
- Wendell Logan describes outreach efforts at Oberlin Conservatory of Music
- Wendell Logan describes his work with the Gullah people of Georgia and South Carolina
- Wendell Logan describes the Gullah tradition of ring shouts
- Wendell Logan describes the inspiration for his composition 'Gullah Island Suite'
- Wendell Logan describes his mentor, Professor Richard Hervig
- Wendell Logan reflects upon his achievements
- Wendell Logan reflects upon his legacy
- Wendell Logan reflects upon challenges for aspiring young musicians
- Wendell Logan describes his hopes and concerns for the African American community
https://www.nytimes.com/2010/06/23/arts/music/23logan.html
Wendell Logan, Composer of Jazz and Concert Music, Dies at 69
Wendell Logan, a composer of jazz and concert music who more than two decades ago founded the jazz department at the Oberlin Conservatory of Music, long a bastion of high-level classical training, died on June 15 in Cleveland. He was 69 and lived in Oberlin, Ohio.
Professor Logan died after a short illness, Marci Janas, a conservatory spokeswoman, said. At his death he was chairman of the jazz studies department and professor of African-American music at the conservatory, which is part of Oberlin College.
Though Oberlin had been turning out world-caliber classical soloists, conductors and orchestral performers for generations, jazz there had long been an extracurricular subject at best.
Professor Logan, who played soprano saxophone and trumpet, joined the faculty in 1973 and began offering jazz classes soon afterward. But it was not until 1989 that he was able to make jazz studies a full-fledged major, in which students can earn a bachelor of music.
Besides composing many jazz works, Professor Logan wrote concert music, a discipline that black composers have historically been discouraged from pursuing. His compositional style integrated elements of Modernism, European classicism and African-American musical traditions like jazz, blues and gospel into a seamless whole.
Among his best-known concert works are “Doxology Opera: The Doxy Canticles” (2001), a gritty sung drama of race and morality with a libretto by Paul Carter Harrison, and “Runagate, Runagate” (1989), a setting of Robert E. Hayden’s poem about a fugitive slave.
In 1990 “Runagate, Runagate,” sung by the tenor William Brown, was featured in a program by the Black Music Repertory Ensemble, a Chicago group, at Alice Tully Hall in New York.
Reviewing the performance in The New York Times, Allan Kozinn wrote, “Mr. Logan’s music — a volatile mixture of angularity, harmonic haziness and expressive dissonance tempered with openly tonal sections — adds a palpable dramatic dimension to the narrative.”
Professor Logan’s jazz compositions include “Remembrances.” Reviewing a performance of that work by piano, bass and drums for The Times last year, Ben Ratliff called it “a stylish and mysterious ballad.”
Wendell Morris Logan was born on Nov. 24, 1940, in Thomson, Ga. His first musical studies were with his father, an amateur alto saxophonist.
He attended Florida A&M University, a historically black institution, on a football scholarship, graduating in 1962 with a bachelor’s degree in music. He earned a master’s in music from Southern Illinois University, Carbondale, in 1964 and a Ph.D. in music theory and composition from the University of Iowa in 1968.
Before joining the Oberlin faculty, Professor Logan taught at Florida A&M, Ball State and Western Illinois Universities. His honors include a Guggenheim Fellowship in 1991; his music has been recorded by Orion and other labels.
Professor Logan is survived by his wife, the former Bettye Reese, whom he married in 1962; two children, Wendell M. Jr. and Felicia Logan; two brothers, Alvin and Howard; and four grandchildren.
In interviews over the years, Professor Logan made clear that for him and his colleagues, the rubric “black composer” was a decidedly mixed blessing.
“I’m not particularly in favor of it,” he told The Atlanta Journal and Constitution, as the paper was then known, in 1994. “I think our music should be evaluated and played alongside everything else, and programmed with Beethoven and other contemporary composers. No one is asking for a special day: ‘Here’s the day for black American composers.’ That’s kind of demeaning. But it’s better than nothing.”
This is a more complete version of the story than the one that appeared in print.
A Memorial to Wendell Morris Logan (1940-2010)
|
On Tuesday, June 15, 2010, Wendell Morris Logan, an extraordinary composer, distinguished professor of music, and the principal driving force behind the establishment of the major Center for Jazz Studies at the Oberlin Conservatory of Music, died at the Cleveland Clinic in Ohio after an extended illness. He was 69.
Logan was born in Thompson, Georgia, on November 24, 1940, the son of educators. At an early age, he demonstrated exceptional intellectual curiosity and ability and was particularly interested in pursuing challenging creative games. It was, perhaps, his parents’ dedication to education that inspired him to excel academically at an early age and, ultimately, encouraged him to pursue an academic career in the field of music. Throughout his life, he also demonstrated a keen interest in a wide range of creative activities, including photography and the creation of stained and leaded glass artifacts. Following in his father’s footsteps, at the age of eleven Wendell began playing the trumpet and, later, the saxophone.
Professor Logan’s focus as an artist and scholar was music composition. His musical universe was an exceptionally broad one, encompassing the entire history of African American music, the written music traditions of the 20th century in Europe and the United States, and an awareness of a wide range of music cultures in Asia and the Middle East. As a child growing up in a small town in Georgia, he was also intimately aware of African American religious music, folk songs, and the rhythm and blues tradition, especially the music of James Brown, Little Richard, and the Jimmie Liggins band, each of whom frequently visited his hometown. He was also exposed to and deeply influenced by jazz.
Logan completed his undergraduate studies at Florida A&M University in 1962, earning a bachelor’s degree in music. He subsequently earned a master of arts degree in music from Southern Illinois University in 1964, and a PhD in music composition from the University of Iowa in 1968.
I met him at Florida A&M University in 1960, when I was a 23 year old assistant professor of music in my first year of teaching. I remember someone knocking on my office door one day and, when I opened the door, there was an athletically built young man standing there. He asked me if I was Professor Wilson, and, secondly, if I was a composer. I answered affirmatively to both questions, and he indicated that he was seriously interested in music composition and wished to work with me. I didn’t think of him as a student then, because I still thought of myself as a student. However, I did agree to work with him as a mentor, and we spent a lot of time discussing the written tradition of 20th century music and the jazz tradition. I also critiqued his music, introduced him to several 20th century compositional techniques, and encouraged him to pursue graduate study in music composition.
I was surprised that I had never seen him in the music department before our meeting, and he explained that he was a varsity football player on the starting team of the Florida A&M Rattlers and had already completed all of the requirements for the undergraduate degree in music. I recognized immediately that Wendell Logan was a unique individual who possessed exceptional intellectual and athletic abilities, a strong personality and an independent spirit. Ultimately, Wendell and his wife, Bettye, and I and my wife, Elouise, and our young families became close friends.
Logan served on the music faculties of Florida A&M, Ball State, and Western Illinois universities prior to his appointment to The Oberlin Conservatory of Music in 1973. At Oberlin, he initially taught classes in African American music and performance courses in jazz and, in 1989, he was successful in getting the conservatory to establish a major in jazz studies as an area of concentration for the bachelor of music degree. Logan also was successful in recruiting an outstanding faculty of experienced professional jazz musicians and extraordinary talented young students from all over the country, and within a ten year period, the Oberlin Jazz Studies program and its faculty and student ensembles emerged as one of the premiere programs in the nation. The crowning achievement of Professor Logan’s career as an educator was the May 1, 2010, opening of Oberlin Conservatory’s stunning, state-of-the-art Bertram and Judith Kohl Building, a $24 million facility designed to house the Jazz Studies program. The lobby of the Kohl Building was named after Wendell Logan. This magnificent building and the multiple generations of former students, and superb professional jazz musicians who have served as faculty and performed as guest artists at Oberlin, will become a living legacy of Wendell M. Logan’s contributions to Oberlin College.
As a composer, Logan’s work is exceptional in the wide range of human expression that it draws upon and conveys. Central to his musical voice is the capacity to reflect in unique ways the exquisite sensitivity and unabashed musical power of the African American musical tradition, while simultaneously shaping that musical experience by his personal vision of a 20th- and 21st-century human existence. Among his most important compositions in the written tradition are Proportions (1969) for chamber ensemble, which I had the honor to publish an article about, and to conduct for its California premiere; Runagate, Runagate (1989), a musical tour de force based on the poet Robert E. Hayden’s poem about a fugitive slave, composed for the superb tenor voice of the late William Brown and performed by Brown and the Black Music Repertory Ensemble at Alice Tully Hall in its New York premiere in 1990; and Doxology Opera: The Doxy Canticles (2001) based on a libretto by Paul Carter Harrison. To these three compositions, I must add two additional outstanding chamber ensemble pieces: Moments (1992) which was recorded in 1998 on the ACA Digital Recording label by the Thamyris Ensemble; and Transition (2005), commissioned by the Fromm Foundation and premiered by the San Francisco Contemporary Music Players. Logan also had a great affinity for setting the texts of African American writers throughout his career. Among his early works, Songs of our Time (1969) was based on texts by LeRoi Jones, Gwendolyn Brooks, and W.E. B. Dubois. Ice and Fire (1975), a duet for soprano and baritone with piano accompaniment, is a striking setting of two poems by the poet Mari Evans entitled “If There Be Sorrow” and “Marrow of My Bone.” Many of these compositions were recorded on Orion Records.
Collectively, all of the works mentioned above, as well as his jazz compositions, established Wendell Logan as one of the most original and independent American composers of his generation. Among the awards he earned as a composer were four awards from the National Endowment for the Arts, several ASCAP awards, three Ohio Arts Council grants, a coveted Guggenheim Fellowship, the Cleveland Arts Prize in Music in 1991, and the Lakond Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters in 1998. Logan was also selected as a resident fellow at the Rockefeller Foundation’s Bellagio Study and Conference Center in 1994.
Logan’s music created in the jazz tradition also reveals a unique imagination, consummate technical skill, and a rare ability to communicate directly to a wide range of listeners. The well-known jazz trumpeter from Detroit, Marcus Belgrave, who has been a member of the Oberlin Jazz Studies faculty for ten years made the following statement about Logan:
Logan was very businesslike, always had in his mind what to do down the road. That’s why I’m so proud of him, because he always had such a good vision of what he wanted to do. He felt jazz should be shared by everyone.
As a performer as well as composer, Logan founded several performance ensembles at Oberlin including the Oberlin Jazz Ensemble which made a tour of Brazil in 1985 that was sponsored by the United States Information Agency; the Oberlin Jazz Septet that performed at such eminent sites as the Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts and the Detroit Jazz Festival, and the Oberlin Jazz Faculty Octet that performed at several International Association of Jazz Educators Conferences.
Among Logan’s large catalog of jazz compositions and arrangements are several compositions recorded on the album Hear And Now (1990) by the Faculty Octet, plus the compositions “Shoo Fly” and “Remembrances” featured on the 2007 compact disc entitled Beauty Surrounds Us.
Professor Logan is survived by his wife, Bettye Reese Logan, whom he met at Florida A&M University and married in 1962; two children, Wendell M. Logan Jr. and Felicia Logan; two brothers, Alvin and Howard Logan, and four grandchildren.
https://diverseeducation.com/article/13956/Dr. Wendell Logan: Musical Mentor Remembered
Editor’s note: Diverse: Issues in Higher Education magazine was fortunate to interview Dr. Wendell Logan weeks before his untimely death on June 15. We express our condolences to Dr. Logan’s family and the Oberlin College community.
Oberlin College in northeast Ohio recently celebrated the opening of its new $24 million jazz and music studies building. The two-day event featured lectures and performances by actor and Oberlin alum Avery Brooks, comedian Bill Cosby and music legend Stevie Wonder.
But to many in attendance, the real star of the show was Dr. Wendell Logan, chair of jazz studies at the school’s Conservatory of Music and a music professor who built the jazz program over nearly four decades of “blood, sweat and tears.” His leadership led to the Bertram and Judith Kohl Building, which incorporates a state-of-the-art recording studio, storage space for about 700 instruments and the largest privately held jazz recording collection in the country.
The building’s commons area is named after Logan, who came to Oberlin in the 1970s when jazz was just an extracurricular activity. He has received more than a dozen awards, endowments and grants — including four from the National Endowment for the Arts, more than a dozen ASCAP awards and the Guggenheim Fellowship. The 69-year-old soprano saxophonist and composer has produced multiple recordings and compositions and performed all over the world.
“I am appreciative. Some of us are just lucky,” Logan said of the naming honor, which came as a surprise to him. “The students are the reason I stayed for so long [at Oberlin]. They are very bright and highly motivated.”
One of those talented musicians is Nina Moffitt, a professional singer who graduated from Oberlin last year and sang during a 3½-hour concert at the celebration headlined by Wonder. Moffitt, 23, spent all four years in the jazz ensemble.
“First of all, there is no jazz voice program at Oberlin. Wendell let me come in and study music with the instrumentalists, which is not the most conventional way for vocalists to study music. He is the reason I have become more exposed to music from the 1940s and ’50s and understand how it coincides with today’s music,” says Moffitt, who received a bachelor’s degree in anthropology but now performs in her native New York.
Students say Logan, whom Oberlin has honored with an endowed scholarship in his name, taught his classes with tough love.
“There was never one time he told me I was playing [the bass] right, but for him to constantly work with me made me better,” says Leon Dorsey, coordinator of jazz studies at the University of Pittsburgh. Dorsey and another former student of Logan’s, James McBride, a composer and author of Miracle at St. Anna and The Color of Water, helped create a scholarship for jazz studies students.
When Logan was hired at Oberlin as a jazz music instructor, students could not major in jazz. It did not become an official major until 1989.
The school’s jazz studies department had nearly 70 undergraduate students this past spring. About 90 are expected to enroll in the fall. “That was a lot of work, but we got it done,” Logan said.
As a child growing up in Thomson, Ga., Logan gained an early appreciation for the value of education.
His mom taught third grade and disabled children, and his father worked as an agricultural scientist instructing farmers on how to locate crops and vaccinate animals. Logan received a bachelor’s degree in instrumental music and trumpet from Florida A&M University, a master’s degree in composition from Southern Illinois University and a doctorate from the University of Iowa.
Logan said he remembered purchasing his first record by Lester Young, a jazz artist who played the saxophone and clarinet and played with Count Basie in the 1930s. Most recently, Logan counted legendary rap artist KRS-One, known for political and socially conscious lyrics in the 1980s and ’90s with Boogie Down Productions, as one of his favorites.
Logan was “just an unlimited source of information. That’s what makes him a great and extraordinary musical mentor,” says Dorsey. “The [Kohl] building is 37 years worth of work, mainly from Professor Logan.”
In his second year at Florida A&M University in Tallahassee, he heard Stravinsky’s Firebird Suite and was later introduced to the intriguing possibilities of 12-tone music. A tremendous hunger welled up in him—to compose his own music. Having initially studied with his father, Samuel Morris Logan, who created the first instrumental music program in Thompson’s public schools, he now delved hungrily into the fascinating realm of concert music under the tutelage of the distinguished African-American composers Olly Wilson and William Foster and music theory teacher Mrs. Johnnie V. Lee. It was she who encouraged Logan to become a composer.
After earning his B.A. from Florida A&M in 1962, he completed requirements for a master’s in music at Southern Illinois University (1964) and a Ph.D. at the University of Iowa (1968) while playing trumpet and working as an arranger with marching bands, concert bands and jazz combos. Though Logan was to compose many works in the jazz idiom, such as The Eye of the Sparrow (for flute, tenor sax, trumpet, double bass, piano and drums), Ballad for P.J. and Doin’ the Do, he would write many others for “classical” forces, sometimes even incorporating electronic elements. Among the later are his moving In Memoriam: Malcolm X for choir and magnetic tape and From Hell to Breakfast, a mixed-media piece that employed dancers, pre-recorded tapes, speakers and synchronized lighting.
By 1969 Logan’s compositions were not only being performed, but recorded. In the years that followed, (multiple) grants from the National Endowment for the Arts and Martha Baird Rockefeller and H.H. Powers funds, along with a dozen ASCAP awards and a Guggenheim, recognized both Logan’s talent and his versatility. If some of his compositions bore formal titles like Proportions for Nine Players and Conductor (1969), Music for Brasses (1973) and Three Pieces for Violin and Piano (1979), there were also obviously black-culture-inspired pieces such as Variations on a Motive by John Coltrane (1975) and Song of the Witchdoktor (1976) for flute, violin, piano and percussion.
Logan was drawn, almost from the beginning, to setting the words of African-American writers. Songs of Our Time (1969) was inspired by the words of LeRoi Jones, Gwendolyn Brooks and W. E. B. DuBois; while Ice and Fire (1975) was an affecting duet for soprano and baritone with piano accompaniment consisting of two poems by Mari Evans, “If There Be Sorrow” and “Marrow of My Bone.”
https://eastwindezine.com/jon-jang-and-the-sounds-of-struggle-part-ii-black-music-bruce-lee/
Jon Jang and the Sounds of Struggle Part II: Black Music, Bruce Lee
by Jon Jang
Act II
Black Music, Bruce Lee
Lead Me to Free Me
in (19)73!
During my first year as a student at UC Berkeley in 1972-73, I continued my obsession of buying black music recordings at Leopold’s, the independent record store, which was one block away from my dormitory. Before Leopold’s, the record store was called SOB (Students of Berkeley) where Francis Wong and his older brother Tom, who was a student at UC Berkeley during the late 60s, would purchase black arts music of resistance recordings.
Because UCB was a large university, I felt isolated living in the compact cubicle space in my dormitory and often escaped to San Francisco on weekend nights to attend concerts at Keystone Korner, the iconic jazz club located in the North Beach area. In June of 1973, I attended one of Rahsaan Roland Kirk’s Bright Moments concerts which was later produced on vinyl. Rahsaan created a sonic universe filled with a multitude of sounds, “shining sonic stars,” through his array of woodwind instruments. The sounds of Rahsaan’s ensemble moved in perfect alignment with each instrument. From the sublime to the playful ridiculous, Rahsaan’s talk story introductions would be sometimes deadly serious, sometimes humorous and sometimes both. This memorable life changing concert was a “bright moment” that revivified my life. This “bright moment” pushed me forward to envisage this decision: “I want to make music become a crucial part of my life.”
To the disappointment of my mother who wished and hoped that I would consider a different direction by studying to be a scientist like my late father, I dropped out of UC Berkeley and lived at home in Palo Alto to begin my piano study at age 19 with an elderly neighborhood piano teacher named Miss Helen Pfeiffer. By coincidence, my first piano lesson happened to fall on July 17, 1973, the sixth anniversary of John Coltrane’s transition onto ancestry. Three days later, my hero Bruce Lee, who spiritually lifted my Chinese American head up high, died unexpectedly and mysteriously at the young age of 32. In the same month, I saw the McCoy Tyner Quartet with saxophonist Azar Lawrence perform repertory from McCoy Tyner’s Enlightenment recording at the Keystone Korner. In August, Bruce Lee’s final film, Enter the Dragon, opened at theatres in United States. Within one month between mid-July to mid-August in 1973, I was on an emotional roller coaster ride. Two months later, the Wailers released their Burnin’ vinyl recording that had Get Up, Stand Up by Bob Marley and Peter Tosh. Black music, Bruce Lee led me to free me in ’73!
With a scant piano study of 18 months, I flew to New York and Ohio to audition to music schools and was accepted to all of them. I chose Oberlin College in Ohio because its music conservatory is not only an excellent music school, but also the college is one of the top small liberal arts colleges in the country. Having been accepted as a Piano Performance major in the Oberlin Conservatory, I could spend half of my course credits in piano performance every semester so that I could invest longer hours of practice and study on the piano.
Act III
A Black Warrior at the Logan Conservatory of Music of Oberlin College
“We’ll tell the story how we’ve overcome
For we’ll understand it better by and by.”
We’ll Understand It Better By and By
Song by Charles Albert Tindley
In response to the racist book, The Making of Jazz, by James Lincoln Collier in 1979, James Baldwin responded and wrote this excerpt from his essay, Of the Sorrow Songs: The Cross of Redemption: “This music begins on the auction block.” The history of black music is about the struggle for freedom. Dr. Wendell Logan fought the struggle to honor Afro American music in its respectful place at the Oberlin Conservatory of Music in the tradition that great artists Paul Robeson, Marian Anderson and Roland Hayes did when they performed black spirituals in the concert halls “because they belong there” as Paul Robeson stated many times.
Dr. Wendell Logan (1940-2010), who was a composer, saxophonist and Chair of the Afro American Music Department at the Oberlin Conservatory of Music, was my mentor and a father figure. Wendell Logan was a visionary leader, a deep thinker and a courageous warrior with a huge heart. Dr. Logan not only encouraged us to explore the highest level within ourselves, but whatever we expressed though the music had to come from a place of honesty and purity. Dr. Logan also nurtured and instilled the values of integrity, respect, dignity and led by example. Wendell Logan carried a strong sense of nobility.
All of my music works has Wendell in them. My work, Eleanor Bumpurs, was influenced by Dr. Logan’s Songs of Our Time (1969), a three-movement work that features excerpts of texts from The Riddle of the Sphinx by W.E.B. Du Bois, The End of Man is His Beauty by Leroi Jones (aka Amiri Baraka) and The Soft Man by Gwendolyn Brooks. Dr. Logan was motivated by a concern for and reaction to current social and political conditions found in this country.
During my first year at Oberlin in 1975, I was the only Asian American student who performed in the Oberlin Conservatory of Music’s Large Jazz Ensemble, as well as in one of the Oberlin Small Jazz Ensembles. Dr. Logan would create brilliant and engaging orchestrations of Charlie Parker’s Au Privave and Ornette Coleman’s Lonely Woman for the Oberlin Large Jazz Ensemble. I learned how Dr. Logan integrated the role of composer and artistic director to translate his musical ideas on paper to make highly successful artistic statement in the performance. I also learned how to curate a concert that was different than the 18th and 19th Century European Classical music practice.
Simultaneously, a group of white students in the College organized an “alternative” big band because they were only interested in performing “charts” by white big band jazz composers such as Sammy Nestico, Stan Kenton and Chuck Mangione. Their white privilege enabled them to receive “equal” course credit from Oberlin ExCo, the only student run for credit experimental college in the country. This racist act and approval not only disrespects and undermines Professor Logan and the Afro-American Music Department, it also marginalizes black music by giving power to the white students in the College (and ExCo mind you) over a distinguished black professor, who was only one of two composers on the Conservatory faculty to receive the prestigious Guggenheim Foundation Fellowship in the Conservatory. To make matters worse, the “alternative” whites only male big band in the College were granted the white privilege of holding rehearsals in the large orchestra room where the orchestra rehearsed. It was a Con Job 1.0 (Con is the common nickname in reference to the Conservatory often use to distinguish students who were in the College and students who were in the Con).
When I was walking through the Oberlin Conservatory locker area, I spotted Dr. Logan and noticed that he did not look right. In severe pain, Dr. Logan repeatedly urged me “to keep the music pure.” Later, I found out that Dr. Logan, who was in his mid-30s, slipped a disc and ended up staying in the hospital. As the Chair of the Afro American Music Department, Dr. Logan worked on “the plantation” as “a one-man band” with little administrative support and a heavy workload equivalent to 2 ½ to 3 times the regular teaching course workload of most professors. Not only that, Dr. Logan also had to contend with the daily struggle of racism.
I remember one time when Dr. Logan and I were going down in an elevator from his office to the ground floor in the Conservatory. When the door opened, a white woman Conservatory student was startled and scared by the appearance of Dr. Logan, a brawny black man who was on a football scholarship when he was an undergraduate student at Florida A &M. After taking an Afro-American Music History final exam, I was at the student bar with a white male College student who also took the exam. After I bragged that the test was easy, the white student reacted by blaming his poor performance on the “unfairness” and attacking Dr. Logan for his incompetency (inferiority). (All Dr. Logan did was momentarily put the needle on the wrong selection of the record). I turned to the jukebox and inserted $2.50 worth of quarters to spin consecutively ten times the Tubes White Punks on Dope just to mess with his racist clownin’. A number of white students and faculty just couldn’t learn to become comfortable having a black man as a professor and a “colleague.” They would have preferred placing a black professor in the invisible architecture of food services or security. And they did that by deporting Professor Logan and the Oberlin Jazz Ensembles out of the Conservatory building and into Hales Gymnasium, a dilapidated gymnasium in the College for a sentence of two decades. Con Job 2.0: Now you hear it (black music in the Con), now you don’t.
A similar comparison can be made with Professor Tommie Smith, who raised his black glove in silent gesture after he and John Carlos received gold medals at the 1968 Olympics. Despite Professor Smith’s superior history making achievements on an international level compared to the local no-name white faculty in the Physical Education Department, Dr. Smith was not granted tenure at Oberlin College by his white “colleagues.” A number of my white student friends were critical of the Olympic Gold Medal winner Professor Tommie Smith for his “lack of being articulate” (inferiority). When black NFL quarterback Colin Kaepernick’s ritualized the kneeling gesture in resistance to the legal lynching of black people by the police in recent years, Kaepernick inherited the Tommie Smith and John Carlos protest tradition of the silent gesture (name of Tommie Smith’s autobiography).
When pianist/composer Sir Roland Hanna was an artist in residence at Oberlin in 1976, I was one of the student pianists in the official Oberlin Conservatory of Music Jazz Ensemble who rehearsed Roland Hanna’s work, The Legend of Nat Turner in the orchestra rehearsal space! It was poetic justice that we would rehearse a work about a black man who led a slave rebellion against the white slave owners in Virginia in 1831 in this space where we oftentimes felt like we did not belong in the Conservatory. The work opens with spoken word narration with the rhythm section providing a funk vamp. Then the music shifts to an instrumental version of Deep River, the beloved spiritual arranged as an art song by Harry T. Burleigh that was reharmonized by Sir Roland Hanna. The student Jose Negron begins to sing, “I was born, born to harvest the corn.” It was a symbolic and a watershed moment that we will never forget. It was a transformative experience.
During my three years at Oberlin, Dr. Logan invited other prominent internationally known musicians/composers to as artist in residence such as Jackie McLean, Barry Harris, Leroy Jenkins, Sam Rivers and Anthony Braxton, who made a historic recording with four orchestras performed by students at Oberlin. Afterwards, Braxton recruited four students to tour in his large ensemble in Europe during the summer. Years later, Braxton was awarded the prestigious MacArthur “Genius” Award Fellowship.
Dr. Wendell Logan’s vision and practice of exposing a diversity of black musician engagement was very profound. While Jackie McLean encouraged us to learn Donna Lee by listening to the Charlie Parker/Miles Davis recording in 1947, Anthony Braxton’s 1974 recording inspired us to change it.
Because I was a piano performance major who studied 18th-20th Western European classical piano literature and performed recitals, I had the best of both worlds studying music with Professor Wilbur Price and Dr. Logan as well as other music worlds. With Wilbur “Bud” Price, Professor of Piano Performance, I also studied a diversity of piano works by French composers such as Maurice Ravel’s Jeux d’eau (1901), Claude Debussy’s Etudes (1915), Olivier Messiaen’s Catalogue d’Oiseaux (1956-1958) and Eric Satie’s absurd Embryons Desséchés (Dried up Embryos) (1913).
During 1975-78, there were very few Asian American students in the Oberlin Conservatory of Music unlike the present. Sachiko Hayashi and I were the only two Asian American students who graduated from the Oberlin Conservatory of Music in 1978. I was the only nonwhite student who performed in the West African Kora Ensemble and the Javanese Gamelan Ensemble. Taking courses taught and directed by Professor Wendell Logan, I was the only Asian American student to study composition and perform in both small and large jazz ensembles. I was also the primary pianist who performed many of Wendell Logan’s “classical music” works at the Faculty Composers Concert series.
Simply put, I was the first Asian American student outlier in the Oberlin Conservatory of Music. One white student described me as a “Chinese Frank Zappa.” A white professor in the piano performance department gave me an off handed compliment that I looked more like I was in the College instead of the Con because I grew a moustache, wore a beret and a T shirt with the image of Bob Dylan.
In the Afro American music history course that Dr. Logan taught, I learned about the power of spirituals and music from the black church. Whenever I saw Wendell grow weary as a result of the day to day grind of racism, I asked him, “How can you take all of this?” He responded by embracing a song about freedom from the black church: We’ll Understand It Better By and By by Charles Albert Tindley, who some say that We Shall Overcome, a Civil Rights anthem of 60s was based on Tindley’s I’ll Overcome. We’ll Understand It Better By and By and His Eye is on the Sparrow were some Wendell’s songs of survival.
Dr. Wendell Logan always carried a sense of nobility and his sentiment exalted. Dr. Logan encouraged us to pursue the highest and purest motive of the heart through the music and life. Respect the music, respect the artists was one of genuine philosophy that shaped our lives as musicians and arts citizens. When Dr. Logan allowed a couple of my compositions to be performed in a rehearsal, he reminded me to thank the musicians.
Dr. Logan was also a strong purveyor of the Afro American music tradition. In my opinion, he refused to use terms such as jazz combos and jazz clinics because it sounded sterile and marginalized the nobility of the music. He preferred the terms Large Jazz Ensemble to big band, Small Jazz Ensemble to jazz combo and works or compositions instead of tunes.
Oberlin College ought to consider renaming the Oberlin Conservatory of Music after Wendell Logan: The Logan Conservatory of Music. Because Jean-Frédéric Oberlin was a minister and not a musician, it’s appropriate. After all, the Logan Airport in Boston is named after Edward Lawrence Logan who was a lawyer, judge, military officer and politician. The Logan Conservatory of Music at Oberlin College would “ring with the harmonies” of liberation.
Act III, Scene 2
My Senior Recital and the Black Church
With scholarship funds running out, I was forced to perform my senior recital in September after only three years of study at Oberlin and two years prior to that. During the summer of 1978, the Conservatory building was closed and I was in need of a piano to prepare for my senior recital. I posted an advertisement in the town’s only bank and received a response from a black woman music teacher. Because she was about to undergo surgery followed by a rehabilitation period, she said I could practice at the Rust Methodist Church in exchange for my role as the piano accompanist at the Sunday services until she recovered.
On my first day, the black church congregation was shocked. I could hear whispers such as “What is this heathen or foreigner or oriental doin’ in our church?” After awhile, they finally learned to “accept” me.
When the time my senior recital came around, I invited the black church congregation. When they all came to listen to me perform works by Beethoven, Ravel, Schönberg and Thelonious Sphere Monk, I received a standing ovation from the full house of 500 attendees. For my encore, I improvised on Chopsticks. Dr. Logan explained to me: “If you give to the (black) community, they will give back.” What was profound about this moment is that there has long existed a schism between the College and the town of Oberlin where the black working class residents were often despised as “townies.” Not wanted. Although there have been incidents where the Oberlin College community has behaved like a sundown town, the black church community came anyway to my concert in the Conservatory!
Act III, Scene 3
Reflections on Arts Apartheid in the Con: Intersectionality of Race and Class
“To my mind, the ‘blues’ is one of your greatest musical assets, truly American despite earlier contributory influences from Africa and Spain.”
Ravel: Man and Musician by Arbie Ornstein
In 1974 before my first year at Oberlin, I read an essay in the San Francisco Chronicle written by Ralph J. Gleason with the headline: Wolfgang Better Than Sonny? Here is another way to spin this question to reach its broader meaning as a new headline: “Is 18th & 19th Century Western European Classical Music Better Than 19th & 20th Century Afro-American Music?” This excerpt from Gleason’s essay will help explain:
“During President B. Johnson’s Administration in the mid 1960s, he hosted a Culture Klatch affair to which the leading intellectuals, painters, performers and artistic VIPs were invited. Dwight McDonald, a prominent commentator, wrote in the New York Review that there were no American composers at this official government cultural event even though Duke Ellington and his Orchestra performed at this event. McDonald and his peer group infer that Duke Ellington is not a composer.”
This article helped prepare and amplify my developing perspective of the arts apartheid system at the Oberlin Conservatory of Music, as well as almost all music schools and departments in this country who teach Europe (music) only in an English only country. Here is a fictional white American character:” Because we are Americans, it is our patriotic duty to only learn about American music sung only in English.” By this logic, we should ban the performance of Beethoven’s Ode to Joy because it is sung in German and celebrate Billie Holiday’s recording of Strange Fruit. Music schools, departments and programs in this country share a strange sense of patriotism. If we believe in the cliché, “America is the greatest country in the world,” then why does (white) European music receive greater validation and economic and foundational support than (black) American music?
After I graduated with a B.Mus. degree in Piano Performance from the Oberlin Conservatory of Music in 1978, I recorded my eponymous album, Jang, four years later and on the eve of Thelonious Monk’s transition to ancestry. In defiance to the annual Mostly Mozart Festival, there is a photo of me with a placard on the back side cover of the vinyl recording that reads: Monk Yes, Mozart No. On the front side cover, there is a drawing of a piano with the brand name Jang instead of Steinway and a drawing of my hands in handcuffs with an inscription that reads US Music Institutions.
Editor’s Note: In recognition of the February 19, 1942 issuance of Executive Order 9066 which ordered all Japanese Americans on the West Coast to concentration camps in the U.S., I’m posting Jon Jang’s Redress Blues & Reparations Now! Observance of the Day of Remembrance will take place in many cities throughout the U.S. in mid-February.
Editor’s Note: Stay tuned for Part III of Jon Jang’s Sound of Struggle coming in March 2019.
