 Anthony Appiah in his book Cosmopolitanism (Norton, 2006; page 97) wrote that, “Once we have found enough we share, there is the further possibility that we will be able to enjoy discovering things we do not yet share.”
By Daniel Garrett
Sometimes I think that the most exhausting part of any work is paying attention. I do not mean, simply, the attention of an editor’s noticing whether the names of musician Cannonball Adderley and writer Darryl Pinckney are spelled incorrectly, or the attention of a reader dismayed by an article that goes on and on, but the more significant attention required to move beyond the habits of one’s provinces, and the prejudices of one’s era, in order to see culture, or a work, or an individual, clearly and with wholeness. It is easiest to put a label on something or someone and pretend that there is no profit in further investigation (label someone by ethnicity or sexuality and there is no need to wonder if the person ever had an original idea or novel experience); and, once the label is attached, one can go on and concern oneself with gossip and squabbling, money and sex, tribalism and vanity, with social status and social approval. (I have moments of frightening suspicion when I wonder if such squabbling is not the truth of human nature.) However, the artists and thinkers who matter most to me insist on a deeper reality—these are artists and thinkers who claimed the world and have been claimed by it, but more important than that, and a matter of endless invention and rebellion, they are artists and thinkers who speak for individual being: whether poets such as Emily Dickinson, Rainer Rilke, Anna Akhmatova, Robert Lowell, and John Koethe; the novelists Henry James, Thomas Bernhard, Dawn Powell, Chinua Achebe, James Baldwin, and Toni Morrison; painters such as (Michelangelo Merisi, known as) Caravaggio, Cezanne, Van Gogh, and Francis Bacon; film directors Bertolucci, Eric Rohmer, Ousmane Sembene, Andre Techine, and Michael Winterbottom; the philosophers Plato, Nietzsche, and Merleau-Ponty; and essayists such as Montaigne, Walter Pater, T.S. Eliot, Roland Barthes, Susan Sontag, Pauline Kael, and Kwame Anthony Appiah. Through creativity and thought, through passion and vision, through sheer originality, these artists and thinkers dissolve the barriers that others see as fundamental, the beliefs that others feel as essential: these artists and thinkers achieve freedom, for themselves and for those brave enough to deny provinces and prejudices. I hope for far-ranging vision for myself; and when involved in a conversation with anyone I remain curious about how far he or she can see—and concerned about the consequences of what remains unseen.
(Here, below, is Part 2 of “Illumination, An Internet Interview with Greg Thomas”)
Daniel, Compulsive Reader: One of the things that I think is interesting about your canonization piece is that you acknowledge differences of opinion—and that is one way of teaching the cultural and political conflicts, and not simplifying cultural or social history. Is it probable that each generation will have to have its own interpretation—of culture; of history—in order to make its way in the world?
 Greg, Jazz It Up: Probably so, but each generation should learn the lessons of past generations so as to not repeat mistakes, sure, but also to determine what aspects of that history they desire to continue because of proven communal, social and cultural value. I’d never indict a whole generation, but from what I see of urban youth around me, their styles and manner, I’m very concerned. I have begun to employ a one-on-one strategy with black boys, teens and young men whom I see walking around with their pants so low that their underwear shows: I gently and privately say something like this: “Every generation has its styles, true. But once you get older, you’re likely to look back and realize how silly that style looks. Be an individual, don’t just blindly follow a trend that began in prisons, with inmates who didn’t have belts to wear. It’s UNDERWEAR, which means you wear it underneath your pants!” Come on, you gotta know something’s wrong big time, when we go from southern black folk wisdom like, “Boy, don’t be tearing your drawers in public” to our young men actually walking around town in public with their undergarments showing, on purpose.
Daniel, Compulsive Reader: In your canonization piece, you say about the essayist and novelist Albert Murray, “Murray has been a native insider to the jazz scene since the late 1930s, when he was a student at the Tuskegee Institute. He was close with his idol, Duke Ellington, who called him ‘the unsquarest person I know.’ He is the author of the as-told-to biography of Count Basie, Good Morning Blues, and Stomping the Blues, a perspicacious poetics on jazz and the blues idiom, as well as ten other books, including three novels and a book of poetry. Stomping the Blues places the music within an indigenous, ritualistic context. To Murray, the blues are not a lamentation based on the sociological status of blacks; to the contrary, Murray posits that the blues represents a confrontational and affirmative attitude toward life. Even though life is a low-down dirty shame (with no ultimate purpose), those with heroic aspirations respond to the inevitability of the blues with nimbleness and elegance on the dance floor of life.” Could you say more about what you think about Albert Murray and what evidence you find to support his interpretation of the blues?
Greg, Jazz It Up: I respect and love Albert Murray, and was honored to recently videotape Henry Louis Gates Jr. presenting Murray with Harvard University’s W.E.B. DuBois award, with special guests such as Wynton Marsalis and George Wein in attendance.
Go to a blues club some night, even today in 2007. Although what Murray calls “the blues as such” may be a tale of woe, blues music and musicians (which includes jazz musicians) partake in a life-enhancing ritual that has folks grooving to the universality of the stories, and even engaging in fertility rituals once they leave the club! Jazz, as a fine art, is what Murray calls “the fully-orchestrated blues statement,” so that confrontational and affirmative attitude is present there in spades too.
And the implied diss to sociology in the quote of mine above was intentional, as the insights of Murray (and Ellison before him) reveal how limiting sociological categories are with respect to capturing and reflecting the full range of black American experience, whether cultural or psychological. And this is a pernicious state of affairs: sociological terms become a basis for public policies and for terminologies used by the media. I know what I’m talking about here: I have years of experience in the media, and I majored in public policy in college. So, this isn’t some petty academic dispute. Lives and lifestyles hang in the balance of how others perceive us and in how we perceive ourselves. In part because of the flawed thinking and reasoning of the social sciences, we’ve gone from calling our neighborhoods “ghettos” to describing our collective mental state as supposed “self-hatred” to nowadays some of us actually buying into the ahistorical twaddle called “post-traumatic slavery disorder”! Give us a break from such nonsense! Variations on victimization will get us nowhere fast, though it might get book contracts for those who posit that drivel for profit and to meet the publication requirements of so-called institutions of higher learning. How can you be a victim and have such influence on the world’s styles and culture? How can you be a victim when you have survived enslavement and in spite of continued social repression maintain your faith, and your groove, and still you rise?! How can you understand and achieve the heights of life itself as a fine art when you don’t recognize the hero and heroine within? We know life for black folk is tough. What’s new? Is it as hard for us today as it was in slavery, or during Jim Crow? Hell no, though the reality of a 50% unemployment rate for black men in New York City is a frightening social statistic and cause for shame and protest, not to mention what’s happened in New Orleans post-Katrina. Nonetheless, let’s count our blessings anyway, and keep swingin’! We owe it to our ancestors and our future generations to give nothing less than our best.
Daniel, Compulsive Reader: Albert Murray and Ralph Ellison were friends, and there is a correspondence—a relationship; a similarity—among some of their ideas (and some of their letters to each other can be read in the book Trading Twelves). In your May 7, 2002 Salon essay, you Greg Thomas write that, “The lifestyles and traditions of black Americans are, in Ellison’s eyes, much more than a sociological tale of unremitting woe, misery and defeat. The story of American blacks, central to the nation’s struggle to realize its democratic principles, represents a heroic instance of a supremely creative response to social and economic repression.” What are some of the lifestyles and traditions Ellison found valuable; and what are some of the ongoing traditions that you now find valuable?
Greg, Jazz It Up: Let’s go to the text, as my elder friend Playthell Benjamin is fond of saying. In 1963, in the heat of the civil rights movement, Ellison gave critic Irving Howe one of the fiercest literary ass-whippings of last century, in an essay titled, “The World and the Jug.” Howe thought that Ellison (and James Baldwin) should be as “angry” as Richard Wright in their writings. Regarding Invisible Man, Ellison strongly disagreed: “The real question [is]: How does the Negro writer participate as a writer in the struggle for human freedom? To whom does he address his work? What values emerging from Negro experience does he try to affirm?
I started with the primary assumption that men with black skins, having retained their humanity before all of the conscious efforts made to dehumanize them, especially following the Reconstruction, are unquestionably human. Thus they have the obligation of freeing themselves—whoever their allies might be—by depending upon the validity of their own experience for an accurate picture of the reality they seek to change, and for a gauge of the values they would see made manifest. Crucial to this view is the belief that their resistance to provocation, their coolness under pressure, their sense of timing and their tenacious hold on the ideal of freedom are indispensable values in the struggle, and are at least as characteristic of American Negroes as the hatred, fear and vindictiveness which Wright chose to emphasize.”
I find these qualities and ideals, forged in the smithy of oppression, in the heat of survival, and in the multi-generation fight for freedom as citizens of this nation, highly valuable. I pray that in spite of the current devolution of black American culture, we can somehow, someway not lose them.
Daniel, Compulsive Reader: Your Salon essay commemorated the fiftieth anniversary of the publication of the complex and rich novel Invisible Man, and in that essay you noted the criticism its author Ellison has received through the years for not subordinating art to politics. I find that political impotence inclines people to want to use whatever else might have influence, such as art—but I do not think that political meaning can be substituted for aesthetic meaning; and I think that artistic force mostly has artistic effects. You wrote that, “Black nationalists were miffed at the character of Ras the ‘Exhorter/Destroyer,’ a rabble-rousing West Indian ‘community organizer’ who views the world in Invisible Man almost exclusively through the lens of race. Ras is ready to resort to violence against his foes, black or white, to achieve his separatist goals. Even today, black nationalists are wary of Ellison’s work; to them, it’s too pro-American, and too inherently critical of their narrow or romantic preoccupations with Africa or with the blackness of blackness.” What you describe is a failure of insight, a failure of empathy, and even a failure of politics in Ras and those who identify with him. Why do you think such failures persist?
Greg, Jazz It Up: Those failures persist because black folks are still discriminated against, and some of our people turn to folk ideologies such as black nationalism or Afrocentricity as a source of pride, and a salve against psychological misery. Some think it’s a source of historical accuracy, but they are sadly mistaken. I invite all those who subscribe to such thinking to read the work of historian Wilson Jeremiah Moses, the preeminent scholar of black nationalism. They may find that 19th century black nationalists put to shame the 20th and 21st century advocates of that belief. They should also check out Stephen Howe’s Afrocentrism: Mythical Pasts and Imagined Homes. So while I understand the basis for such a limited view, I’ve studied too much history to go for that anymore. Afrocentrists and black nationalists, for instance, skirt the issue of African complicity in the slave trade. If human beings were reduced to chattel, someone didn’t just buy them, someone had to sell them also. Read Hugh Thomas’s The Slave Trade for more on the subject of the slave trade. Plus, European Enlightenment ideals led to the eventual destruction of the slave system. The very idea of human freedom and democracy are Western notions, even if it took the Old and New Worlds hundreds of years to live up to those ideals by banning the slave trade.
However, one thing that black nationalists have correct is the necessity of black Americans using our economic and cultural weight to our own advantage. Harold Cruse, in The Crisis of the Negro Intellectual and Plural but Equal, made it clear that ethnic groups rise to prominence under capitalism based on economic and cultural power. We’ve been so focused on political and civil rights gains that economics and finance have not been addressed adequately by black leadership, although economic development is part of their rhetoric. Unfortunately, the overwhelming focus on race and racism obscures the gains that we have made in the past 40 years, and how we can best chart the course for future advancement. Some leaders, such as the Rev. Dr. Calvin Butts, a neighbor of mine in Harlem, and pastor of the historic Abyssinian Baptist Church, don’t just talk the talk. Through the Abyssinian Development Corporation, Rev. Butts, Sheena Wright and their staff now control hundreds of millions of dollars worth of real estate uptown. But we are so far behind other groups who have long understood that in a capitalist society, money talks and rhetorical b.s. walks, that such efforts are just the beginning of what in actuality is the next stage of the movement: economic empowerment.
Daniel, Compulsive Reader: What is your assessment of Arnold Rampersad’s biography of Ralph Ellison?
Greg, Jazz It Up: I’m saddened by the fact that someone whom I believe has a fundamental dislike of Ralph Ellison chose to paint such a biased portrait of Ellison’s life and achievements. Rampersad, who by the way isn’t a native black American, claims that Ellison’s inability to finish the second novel was directly linked to his increasing distance from black folks. I disagree in the strongest terms. Ellison, even withstanding what can be judged as his personal faults, was a supreme example of black American achievement. And I’m not only referring to Invisible Man, a canonical novel of the 20th century. As quiet as it’s kept, in his splendid essays, Ellison defined black American culture! This is no small feat, since identity is so crucial to a people’s understanding of themselves and their role in history as well as their collective present and future. Further, Ellison made it clear that black Americans and the profound culture we created is central to American culture writ large. As my late friend and mentor Michael James used to say: Multi-generation black Americans are co-creators of America. Dig that, and think about the implications of that fact the next time someone who is a more recent entry into the United States of America has the nerve to treat you as if you have second-class status. If you know thyself, you won’t fall for either being patronized or one-upped by those who stand on your ancestors’ shoulders.
But Ellison didn’t stop there. Check out what he said to three young black writers in 1967: “Any people who could endure all of that brutalization and keep together, who could undergo such dismemberment and resuscitate itself, and endure until it could take the initiative in achieving its own freedom is obviously more than the sum of its brutalization. Seen in this perspective, theirs has been one of the great human experiences and one of the great triumphs of the human spirit in modern times. In fact, in the history of the world.”
Note that this statement was made to three young black writers in a piece called “A Very Stern Discipline” in Conversations with Ralph Ellison (University Press of Mississippi, 1995). These were not the only black writers that Ellison spoke with for posterity. There’s also Leon Forrest, Hollie West, James Alan McPherson, Robert Stepto, Michael S. Harper, Ishmael Reed, Quincy Troupe and Steve Cannon, all from that same collection.
Ellison sent money to the NAACP Legal Defense Fund, and to Jesse Jackson’s two presidential campaigns. He stayed in touch with friends from his birthplace of Oklahoma, and was tight with Romare Bearden, Nathan Scott, and Albert Murray. The notion that Ellison withdrew himself from black people is a damn lie. He lived in Harlem on Riverside Drive for many decades before he died.
What Ellison would not do, based on his own conception of his function as a writer, is become a spokesman. He didn’t see that as his role. But since he knew that black folks are fundamental to the American enterprise, he did feel obligated to, as young folks say these days, “represent” our people in the upper reaches of literary society, and in various organizations. This wasn’t a desire to just be around white people, as implied in the biography. He was drawn to those who shared his passions for art, literature, culture, freedom and democracy, no matter their “race.” It’s also important to note that Ellison’s own experience with the left during the ’30s and 40s shaped his views on the dangers of political engagement for an artist. Moreover, I think that he was bruised by being unfairly and ignorantly called an Uncle Tom by younger blacks influenced by the black power movement on college campuses during the aftermath of the struggle in the ’60s. His skin and attitudes likely thickened thereby. Calling Ralph Ellison a Tom is a stupid as calling Louis Armstrong a Tom, when he was the paterfamilias of the jazz idiom!
Ellison may not have been able to complete the second novel, but his first and only novel along with his brilliant, insightful essays and interviews are a testament to his legacy way more than Rampersad’s slanted biography, which I concede was well-researched. Still, I agree with Darryl Pinckney’s review in the New York Review of Books; Pinckney contends that Lawrence Jackson’s Ralph Ellison: Emergence of Genius gives a much better account of the story of Invisible Man and its genesis. Those interested in Ellison’s biography owe it to themselves to read that very good work, and not depend only on Rampersad’s hit job.
Daniel, Compulsive Reader: Do you know the works of Charles Johnson and Percival Everett (and if so, what do you think of them)?
Greg, Jazz It Up: I’m not familiar with the work of Everett. But I’ve read several of Johnson’s works of fiction, which I’ve liked. Some criticize him for stock characterizations. I’d have to take another look at the novels before offering any sort of critique. He also wrote a work of literary criticism worth checking out: Being and Race: Black Writing since 1970 (Indiana University Press, 1988). (I did an internet search on Percival Everett—thanks for turning me on to his work—and I’ll definitely check him out, probably starting with Erasure , the main character of which is named Thelonious ‘Monk’ Ellison. I bet it’s hilarious.)
Daniel, Compulsive Reader: Who are some of the people we have not mentioned who are doing literary work—creative or critical; fiction, poetry, or scholarly work—that you value?
Greg, Jazz It Up: There are many. I’ll name just a few. I value the integrative mind and writings of Ken Wilber, one of the greatest American philosophers of modern times. I respect the work of Colson Whitehead, of whom I first became aware in the Village Voice , but who took the leap to novel writing, and is quite good. I think that Deepak Chopra’s How to Know God is perhaps a modern-day spiritual classic by way of his explication of various conceptions of God over time, from the punitive Old Testament deity to a perspective that incorporates insights from quantum physics and other of the sciences. New Yorker writer Malcolm Gladwell is excellent too. He’s exemplary of my notion of scholarly depth and journalistic accessibility as rendered in The Tipping Point and Blink. Jim Camp’s Start With No is perhaps a new paradigm for negotiating and sales. As you can see, my reading tastes are quite varied. I also appreciate the work of T. Harv Eker (Secrets of the Millionaire Mind), Harriette Cole (Choosing Truth: Living an Authentic Life), and Gary Renard (The Disappearance of the Universe and Your Immortal Reality), among many others. I’m reading through A Course in Miracles, which can be termed as a modern-day Bible. It’s extraordinarily profound on psychological and spiritual levels, and points to forgiveness and acceptance of God’s everlasting love as the way back home.
 Daniel, Compulsive Reader: I admire Susan Sontag for her interests as well as her insights: she seems to have been someone who surveyed the cultural landscape, identified what was important, and devoted herself to neglected aspects of what was important, making her work rare, significant, and useful. In Susan Sontag’s book Where the Stress Falls (Farrar, Straus, 2001), Sontag writes about writers such as Machado de Assis, Roland Barthes, Danilo Kis, and Borges, as well as about poetry, film, photography, bunraku puppet theater, opera, dance, travel, and politics. Although in the past writers such as W.E.B. DuBois (The Philadelphia Negro, and The World and Africa) and Richard Wright (The Color Curtain, and Pagan Spain) gave themselves permission to discuss the whole world, it is hard for me to imagine today an African-American writer who would cover such terrain. What art forms, other than music and literature, do you enjoy? Do you think that you might write more about them in time?
Greg, Jazz It Up: I enjoy dance and the visual arts also, but I don’t feel versed enough in the specifics of those idioms to be a critic in those areas, although I have written a little about black dance. The work of Albert Murray covers a very wide terrain also, as does the writings of his former protégé Stanley Crouch, though, while often brilliant, I don’t think Crouch’s insights reach anywhere near the level of originality as Murray’s. Albert Murray is, in my opinion, the most original black American thinker and writer of the 20th century. Even more than Ellison, whom I’d say is a close second.
Daniel, Compulsive Reader: Decades ago, in his “Princes and Powers” piece in Nobody Knows My Name (Collected Essays, Library of America, 1998), James Baldwin reported on a Paris conference of colored intellectuals and writers, and Baldwin noted George Lamming’s acknowledgement of the varieties of experience that are encompassed by the word Negro—which merely means black—and the tension that exists between blacks and others and among blacks, a tension that is a fact, a complexity that is a fact, and which can be strength—for the consciousness that tension suggests, but often people attempt to deny that complexity, attempt to see everything as simple. Why attempt to see those relationships as simple, when such a view does not change reality, and can hamper one’s actual movements and strategies?
Greg, Jazz It Up: Well, we live in a middle-brow culture that doesn’t prize intellectuality, especially when it comes in a darker hue. Complexity is not something that the American media handles too well either, perhaps except for public television and select cable channels. To begin to melt down the stupid, inaccurate, lying notion of race, I wish the media would, when referring to black folks, identify ethnicity. By which I mean identifying us by national and ethnic origins, and not just lump all blacks, whether from Africa, the Caribbean, or South or North America, together as if the color of our skins automatically connotes shared experience. That said, I’ll say this directly to your point above: since many people of color (including, for example, Latinos or Hispanics) share political interests, it makes sense to build alliances based on those interests. But when it comes to culture, it’s important to be clear on what makes us distinct.
Daniel, Compulsive Reader: I find myself drawn more and more to the idea of the cosmopolitan, though some people find the idea, and the reality, threatening; and I recall that Anthony Appiah in his book Cosmopolitanism (Norton, 2006; page 97) wrote that, “Once we have found enough we share, there is the further possibility that we will be able to enjoy discovering things we do not yet share.” Any comment?
Greg, Jazz It Up: I too am drawn to the idea of cosmopolitanism, and Appiah’s statement aligns with my point directly above. The danger of the concept, however, is being so of the world that little or no roots remain. Like jazz, I think that we can adapt the best of styles and thoughts and cultures from around the world while remaining rooted in our indigenous experiences.
Daniel, Compulsive Reader: What, if anything, does society, or a community, owe to its artists and intellectuals?
Greg, Jazz It Up: Respect, places to publish and perform works, and a way to make a living in the life of the mind or in artistic endeavors. That notion is better appreciated in countries like France.
Daniel, Compulsive Reader: What is—or should be—the root of cultural authority?
Greg, Jazz It Up: In-depth knowledge of world history, and the varieties of cultural traditions over time and place. That provides a foundation for the true appreciation and apprehension of one’s own cultural configuration—value system, myths and rituals, technologies of survival, artistic creativity, kinship patterns, culinary preferences, secular and sacred percepts, etc. That’s why Albert Murray could intellectually swing with such authority. He published his first book, The Omni-Americans, at the age of 54, after having spent over 40 years studying world drama, history, geography, anthropology, literature and literary criticism, music and aesthetics. He was a native insider to the Negro American tradition as a black southerner from Alabama, who traveled the world after joining the Air Force. He drank in the work of the best writers of the ages, from ancient times to his own. Then he synthesized that knowledge with his understanding of his own idiomatic, vernacular tradition, and has created a grand cosmological conception that directly connects black American culture vis-à-vis the blues and jazz to the greatest artistic achievements of all times and places. Cultural authority on this level is as rare as geniuses are few.
Daniel, Compulsive Reader: In a piece called “The Problem with Black Masculinity and Celebrity” in Michele Wallace’s book Dark Designs and Visual Culture (Duke University Press, 2004), Michele Wallace says that the so-called black leadership that receives the greatest publicity is narcissistic, vaguely ridiculous, and inept, and that while there are genuine black thinkers in many fields, they do not always seek fame—rather, they are concerned with real work, with real issues. What do you think of that?
Greg, Jazz It Up: I think she has a good point, especially in this age of celebrity. For instance, the fact that someone with your depth and catholicity of tastes, Daniel Garrett, does not write for the top publications in the land is an indictment. But something tells me that you gonna keep swingin’ anyway!
Daniel, Compulsive Reader: Who are the people you would name as the icons (or simply, the most significant individuals) of, or for, your own generation?
Greg, Jazz It Up: Two immediately come to mind—Wynton Marsalis and Mae Jemison, the renowned scientist, medical doctor and astronaut. Both of these individuals have ascended to the highest levels of their fields, inspire young people, are cosmopolitan yet rooted in their southern black American culture. One of the nicknames that I’ve given to Wynton (and this is the first time I’ve shared this beyond a handful of people) is IG: Inspiration to our Generation. I have high admiration for the aforementioned Sheena Wright, a lawyer with one of the sharpest business minds you’ll find, and a tough negotiator to boot. Yet she remains grounded, down to earth with a hearty sense of humor, rooted in her culture and community, while raising a family. I also respect Greg Fierce and Maurice Coleman, who are making waves within the banking industry. In media, I admire Tavis Smiley, whose efforts are inspired by commitment, compassion, and abiding concern for the fortunes of black folk and the country’s direction. George Moorer, a Harlemite, a single-father, and founder of Brownstone Digital, Inc., may become the next Robert Johnson.
Daniel, Compulsive Reader: You wrote “An Open Letter to Oprah Winfrey” that appeared on All About Jazz’s web pages April 29, 2007, in which you asked Winfrey to present jazz musicians as performers and speakers. What are the things that could be done by musicians, institutions, and the general public to support jazz?
Greg, Jazz It Up: So much! The black community, both individuals and institutions, can better recognize jazz as a cultural treasure by supporting organizations such as the National Jazz Museum in Harlem, Jazz at Lincoln Center, and the Jazz Foundation of America. And the United States government can make more resources available to jazz musicians, starting with doing the right thing in New Orleans. It’s a crying shame that an inept, corrupt administration has so bungled the relief efforts of a place so central to the history of jazz and the nation. I’m inspired by Oprah’s contributions to our culture and the general society. My “Open Letter” was written to implore her to consider representing the voices of jazz musicians, both their musical voices as well as their intelligent viewpoints. Just as Ken Burns’s documentary series on jazz boosted sales of jazz recordings, Oprah could do the same, overnight.
Daniel, Compulsive Reader: What are some of the ideas, observations, and perceptions that you have been contemplating recently (not necessarily connected with jazz or literature)?
Greg, Jazz It Up: The necessity to build wealth for future generations. Along that line, more black folks facing up to the fact that our bodies will die, and therefore we should create wills. Also, the import of spiritual growth, so that in our everyday lives we truly treat one another as brothers and sisters, no matter what our ethnic or national origins, religious or non-religious beliefs, or gender. And although as creatures of culture, and as critics, it’s important to be grounded in culture, ultimately, from a spiritual vantage point, we need to transcend even culture. Cosmopolitanism with a spiritual core.
Daniel, Compulsive Reader: What does being human mean to you Greg Thomas?
Greg, Jazz It Up: Being human is living a spiritual experience within the confines of a physical body. But our bodies and our egos are the biggest barriers to spiritual realization and transformation. My statements above regarding masculinity and femininity also touch upon my conception of what it means to be human.
Daniel, Compulsive Reader: If you had to name ten works or inventions, from any field, from all fields, from throughout history, as the most important, could you, would you; and if yes, what would they be?
Greg, Jazz It Up: Not in any particular order, here goes:
1. The printing press
2. Agriculture
3. The works of Shakespeare
4. The holy books of various religions, whether major and minor
5. A Course in Miracles
6. Democracy
7. Improvisation, not only in jazz, but in life itself
8. Music
9. The internet
10. Dostoevsky’s novels
Daniel, Compulsive Reader: What would you Greg Thomas like to achieve with your career?
 Greg, Jazz It Up: I’d like to extend the highest values of my culture via educational work, the written word, and broadcast journalism. I will also build wealth to live the lifestyle that my sweetheart Jewel and I envision, to provide for the future of my wonderful, smart, beautiful daughter Kaya, and to support the causes and organizations whose work aligns with my values and desire for a better United States of America and the world. My aspirations are personal and cultural, local and global. Thanks for giving me the opportunity to illuminate my perspectives on life, humanity, literature, music, culture, gender, and all other topics that your incisive questions brought to the table of consideration. I wish you the best in your career, Daniel. You deserve heightened recognition and exposure, and I hope this interview is one small drop that will ripple to your benefit.
(Internet Interview, July 2007)
Greg Thomas is a writer, educator and cultural critic whose critical orientation is grounded in the wise advice of his paternal grandfather, Horace Thomas Sr., who urged him to always differentiate between constructive and destructive criticism: one builds up, the other tears down. Thomas views his cultural and career work, some of which is detailed in the Q&A above, as fulfillment of a black American ancestral imperative.
ADDITIONAL INFORMATION:
Greg Thomas’s “Jazz It Up!” Program:
http://www.jazzituptv.com
Greg Thomas All About Jazz page (which has links to his recent jazz writings):
http://www.allaboutjazz.com/php/contrib.php?id=3311
The National Jazz Museum in Harlem:
http://www.jazzmuseuminharlem.org
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Daniel Garrett, Louisiana-born and a longtime New York resident, and a graduate of the New School for Social Research, is a writer of fiction, poetry, drama, journalism, and criticism; and he has written about books, film, and music for The Compulsive Reader. Daniel Garrett’s first short fiction story was done in sixth grade and was set in Africa, and as a teen he wrote lyrics and narratives and plays on diverse subjects, and in college, in addition to studying writing, philosophy, politics, and other subjects he took courses in African art and music, and he interned at the African-American Institute and published a couple of unsigned articles in its publication Africa Report; and he has since written on African music and on films focused on Africa, as well as on varied African-American topics. Featuring exploration of a wide range of subjects, including painting and sculpture, and the natural environment, Daniel Garrett’s work has appeared in The African, AllAboutJazz.com, American Book Review, Art & Antiques, The Audubon Activist, Cinetext.Philo, Film International, The Humanist, Hyphen, IdentityTheory.com, Option, PopMatters.com, Rain Taxi, The Review of Contemporary Fiction, and World Literature Today. Garrett’s “Iconography: Ideas, Images, and Individuals in Film, Books, and Life” was featured by Offscreen.com. Daniel Garrett is the founder of the Cultural Politics Discussion Group at ABC No Rio and Poets House, which took as its motto “knowledge, discourse, friendship, and social responsibility.” He values individuality.
Author contact: dgarrett31@hotmail.com or d.garrett.writer@gmail.com
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