The Importance of Art

Last week, Irvin Mayfield appeared at UL Lafayette as an artist in residence for three days. During that time, he spoke with students in various classes including literature and music classes, he performed with the UL Jazz Combo I and his quintet, and he strengthened my beliefs in the power of the arts and the humanities in society. This post could devolve into a lifelong look at how the arts have affected me throughout my life, but I'm not going to do that. Instead, I'm going to just make a few observations regarding my thoughts about the arts and humanities. He speaks about these ideas in his interview with Judith Meriwether on KRVS. 


To begin with, I've always felt that music resides at the pinnacle or artistic expression in regards to its ability to communicate emotion and feeling to not just an audience but to the performer as well. Without knowing the words, if there are any, a composition can move you in certain ways whether that's making you fell joy, sadness, anger, or any other emotion. At the concert last Tuesday and at the world premier of James Syler's Congo Square on Friday night, this belief struck home with me again. The Irvin Mayfield Quintet performed a piece from Dirt, Dust, and Trees entitled "Angola." The piece explores themes of struggle and persecution that appear in Gaines's works. Speaking about the song, Mayfield said that he asked Gaines why all of the heroes in his novels die, and Gaines replied by simply telling him that they must because they cannot live in a world that treats them the way that it does. "Anogola," which takes its name from the infamous Louisiana State Prison, reluctantly moves the listener through the pain and struggles of numerous individuals, mostly African American males, who are incarcerated in this country for no other reason than their class status or color.

I had heard this song once before at the Ernest J. Gaines Award for Literary Excellence ceremony; however, last week the piece carried a heavier weight for me, not because of anything different since the first time I heard it performed a month earlier, but because of the sounds that evening. It opens with just the drum for a few measures then the piano and bass enter creating an ominous, almost desperate feel. Sitting in Angelle Hall, the Jamison Ross started the song, and all I could notice was that when he hit the bass drum, the snare drum, and the hi hat the sound left the stage, traveled to the back of the auditorium, then returned, albeit a little quieter. At that moment, my mind shifted to Marcus standing before Bonbon's horse in the fields, to Jefferson, feeling like a hog, in the jail cell in Bayonne, to Charles Blow's son being accosted by police at Yale, to mothers and fathers having to tell their sons to keep their hands on the wheel when being pulled over just because of the color of their skin, to rappers being pulled over by police-again because of their skin. The list could go on, and on, and on, and on. Once Max Moran's walking bass line and Joe Ashlar's piano introduced themselves, I began to drift, and get lost, not even recalling much of the song until Irvin and trombonist Michael Watson blared on their horns and brought me out of my thoughts back to that jail cell in Bayonne, a fictional jail cell, where Jefferson anguishes about what has happened and what will eventually happen to him. Jefferson screams in that cell, wanting to be recognized as a man, a person, a human being with thoughts and ideas. He gets that recognition, from Grant, from Paul, and from others, but not until he sits in Gruesome Gertie and perishes. That is what the sounds coming from the stage that night did for me. That is what they said to me at that moment. 

On Monday, Mayfield spoke with an English class about art and its importance. Constructing the class around a conversation, he asked the students to help him define words such as "idea" and "event." As the class progressed, other words appeared and entered the conversation. At one point, the discussion moved towards what constitutes creativity and art; here, the question of whether or not the building the students were sitting in should be considered a form of creative expression. Some students looked puzzled, and others agreed that it should. As the conversation moved towards the planning of cities and neighborhoods, then to the French Quarter and its history, I thought about what architecture says about the society, and specifically I thought about the Louisiana State Capital. I've written about the capital on this blog before, but what I did not mention is the fact that the capital contains numerous carvings relating to Louisiana history. One aspect of that history that does not appear is slavery. There are images of settlers interactions with Native Americans and of what appear to be slaves, but could be share croppers, in the fields. However, there are no images of slave auctions, scourging, of other aspects. History contains the good and the bad, and shouldn't both be exposed lest we forget where we came from? 

Continuing my thoughts about the capital, I had an opportunity to speak with Mayfield at a reception and he started discussing how corporations and the government use art to control. That's why we don't have those images in the state capital. Think about at MLB, NBA, and NFL games. What does art have to do with these events? At each one, every night, someone performs "The Star Spangled Banner." Why? The singing of our national anthem began in earnest in sports in the seventh inning of the first game of the 1918 World Series between the Boston Red Sox and the Chicago Cubs. Why is this important? It's important because America, 17 months earlier, entered World War I. The anthem became a patriotic rallying cry, as we saw after September 11. Once the owners realized that people responded to the song, they began to have it performed again and again. I'm not saying that the anthem is a bad thing; I am only saying that we need to think about how art and artistic expression relate to events that we may not even consider them being a part of and what that incorporation means. The NFL started to get bigger after a couple of specials on NBC that had artistic merit and led to the creation of NFL films. It brought the game closer to the fans by making it personal and artistic.     

With all of that said, I want to leave you with a couple of parting thoughts and questions. What teachers do you remember from your educational career? For me, it's the English teachers. Granted I'm in English, but those are the teachers I remember the most. It can't be a coincidence that others, who do other things, remember them as well. Liberal arts matter. College should, as Frank Bruni says in "College's Priceless Value: Higher Education, liberal Arts and Shakespeare," work to make us better citizens. Literature, and all art, opens our eyes to those around us, that we may see, but more often than not, that we don't see. It relates the human condition to us, and as I have had students tell me, in Bruni's words, "It informed all my reading from then on.

Part of studying literature, art, history, music, etc, is to learn how to see through the noise and make up your own mind about issues and ideas instead of listening to the same old rhetorical bombast and idiocy that spews from the mouths of those that want to either hold on to their power or to grab a piece for themselves. It forces you, sometimes reluctantly, to take the red pill, opening you up to realities that either eluded you or you ignored. Your stomach will wrench, your eyes will cry, your mouth will laugh, and your ears will hear. Most importantly, your heart will expand by studying the liberal arts. 

As I am fond of quoting James Baldwin on this topic, "You think your pain and your heartbreak are unprecedented in the history of the world, but then you read. It was books that taught me that the things that tormented me were the very things that connected me with all the people who were alive, or who had ever been alive."

Irvin Mayfield Quintet Honors Ernest J. Gaines February 24

Ernest Gaines is fond of quoting Friedrich Nietzsche's famous line about music: "Without music, life would be a mistake." Music, as I have spoken about on this blog before is important to Gaines. He sees music as a soother and as a narrative form. Speaking about his admiration for Mozart and Haydn and how he listens to them to help him write, Gaines continues by saying, "And though Mozart and Haydn soothe my brain while I write, neither can tell me about the Great Flood of '27 as Bessie Smith or Big Bill Broonzy can. And neither can describe Louisiana State Prison at Angola as Leadbelly can" (27). It takes both forms of music to make the whole.

Jazz trumpeter and composer Irvin Mayfield will bring his quintet from New Orleans to perform selections from Dirt, Dust and Trees – A Tribute to Literary Legend Ernest Gaines, at UL Lafayette on February 24, 2015. When Mayfield premiered this multi-movement work in 2012 with his New Orleans Jazz Orchestra, he commented on Gaines’s work saying, “His art is words and mine is music. This is the work that binds two artists together.”

The concert will take place on the UL Lafayette campus in Angelle Hall, Ducrest-Gilfry Auditorium, located at 601 East Saint Mary Boulevard in Lafayette, on Tuesday, February 24, 2015 at 7:30 pm. Doors will open at 7:00 pm. The concert is free and open to the public. To open the concert, Mr. Mayfield will perform with UL Lafayette’s Jazz Combo I, a group of students under the direction of Dr. Paul Morton. Mr. Mayfield and his quintet will then perform selections from Dirt, Dust and Trees, along with other pieces.

In addition to the concert, Mr. Mayfield will spend three days on the UL Lafayette campus, listening to and playing with jazz students, speaking to music majors about the music business, meeting with an English class to talk about the use of literature in composing music, and familiarizing himself with the resources housed within the Ernest J. Gaines Center. The performance and residency are co-sponsored by three UL Lafayette offices: the Dr. Tommy Comeaux Endowed Chair in Traditional Music, the Concert Committee, and the Ernest J. Gaines Center.

Irvin Mayfield, 37, is a Grammy and Billboard Award-winning artist with 15 albums to his credit. Mr. Mayfield is the founding Artistic Director of the New Orleans Jazz Orchestra and currently serves as Artistic Director of Jazz at the Minnesota Orchestra. He is a professor at the University of New Orleans, where he also serves as Director of the New Orleans Jazz Institute. In 2009, Mayfield entered into a historic partnership with the Royal Sonesta Hotel and created Irvin Mayfield’s Jazz Playhouse, which brought "Jazz back to Bourbon Street" in the historic French Quarter. President George W. Bush nominated Mr. Mayfield to the National Council on the Arts and President Barack Obama subsequently appointed him to the same post in 2010. That same year, Mr. Mayfield received The Chancellor’s Award from the University of New Orleans (the highest ranking award given to a professor) and was awarded an Honorary Doctorate from Dillard University in 2011.

Novelist Ernest Gaines is Writer-In-Residence Emeritus at UL Lafayette, a MacArthur Fellow, and writer of several celebrated books including A Lesson Before Dying, The Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman, and A Gathering of Old Men. In 2008, UL Lafayette established the Ernest Gaines Center as an archive for Mr. Gaines’s papers and manuscripts and as a center for Gaines scholarship. The center formally opened on October 31, 2010, and since that time, it has hosted readings and lectures by Mr. Gaines, the Poet Laureate of South Africa Keorapetse Kgositsile, Ernest J. Gaines Literary Award winner Jeffery Renard Allen, Barbara Methvin Professor Dr. John Lowe from the University of Georgia, and many others. Along with these speakers, the center has served the community by hosting creative writing workshops for area students and teaching institutes for area teachers.  

Started in the fall of 2010, the mission of the Dr. Tommy Comeaux Endowed Chair in Traditional Music at the University of Louisiana at Lafayette is to stimulate interdisciplinary research on the foundations and diversity of traditional music worldwide and to advance the preservation, instruction, and performance of traditional music with an emphasis on traditions that have developed in Acadiana. Students now have the opportunity to earn a B.A. in Music with a concentration in Traditional Music as well as a Music Minor with a Traditional Music emphasis. New classes and programs continue to be developed with involvement from musicians in the community.

Gaines, Ernest J. "Mozart and Leadbelly." Mozart and Leadbelly. New York: Vintage Books, 2005. 24-31. Print. 

Irvin Mayfield and Ernest Gaines

On this blog, I have posted about how one artistic form of expression inspires another. I've talked about it with the influence of Modest Mussorgsky on Gaines's The Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman; I've spoken about it with the influence of painters like Vincent van Gogh and Francisco Goya on Gaines and Ernest Hemingway respectively. Along with writing about these influence, I have taken the opportunity to discuss the atrocious act of lynching both as a visual representation and in literature in a couple of posts, most notably in "The Specter of Lynching." In that post, I explore the NAACP's 1935 exhibition entitled An Art Commentary on Lynching. I bring all of this up because today I want to talk about Irvin Mayfield and his upcoming visit to UL Lafayette on February 24.

In 2012, Mayfield debuted a jazz composition dedicated to Ernest Gaines and his work. The composition, entitled Dirt, Dust, and Trees: A Jazz Tribute to Ernest J. Gaines, draws from Gaines' work and life. A couple of weeks ago, I finally had the opportunity to hear two pieces from Dirt, Dust and Trees: "Angola" and "Dianne." Earlier, in 2003, Mayfield debuted Strange Fruit at Dillard University in New Orleans. The composition tackles the history of lynching, presenting a story set in South during the 1920s. The narrative involves Mary Ann, a white woman who is engaged to a banker's son, Charles. LeRoi, an African American gardener, works for Mary Ann's father. Mary Ann and LeRoi both knew one another since childhood; however, she never talked with him until he started working at her father's house. There, she noticed him, they began to speak to another, and after a while, they consummated their relationship. When Charles finds out about this, he beats Mary Ann and then runs to the sheriff to say that LeRoi raped and beat her. The law arrests LeRoi, and a mob begins to gather at the jail, talking about the last lynching and laughing about it. Even when Charles tries to call of the mob, the lynching proceeds. The mob allows LeRoi's father, a preacher, to speak to his son while LeRoi stands awaiting the noose to fall around his neck. After LeRoi's death, we learn that Mary Ann is pregnant with LeRoi's son, and she eventually allows herself to accept this and to live.

The inspiration for Mayfield's opus came from a visit to an Atlanta museum in 2002. There, he saw an exhibit entitled Without Sanctuary: Lynching Photography in America. From there, Mayfield undertook the task to express the horrific history of lynching in a musical manner, much the same way that Billie Holiday did with the song "Strange fruit." The point is that Mayfield's opus arose out of a reaction to an exhibit in much the same way that say Gaines' work arises partly out of his experiences and interactions with music. The symbiotic relationship between the two serves to show that art, no matter the form, can find inspiration anywhere. Gaines has said that while he writes he listens to music in the background, whether it be jazz, blues, classical, or something else because it relaxes him and gives him a sense of rhythm. Speaking about jazz, he says,

Another thing especially in jazz music is repetition--repeating and repeating to get the point over--which I try to do in dialogue. I learned from music something that Hemingway also does and this is understatement. Certain musicians, like Lester Young, one of the greatest jazz saxophonists, could play around a note. For example, he didn't have to go through the old beat after "Stardust." He could give you a feeling of "Stardust" by playing around the note. (209)

Gaines does this, as he himself points out, in his work, specifically "The Sky is Gray." In that story, Octavia and James experience racism and oppression in a subtler manner than having it overtly expressed through continual contact with whites.

With all of this said, make sure you join us on Tuesday February 24, 2015 at 7:30 at Angelle Hall on the campus of the University of Louisiana at Lafayette for a free performance by the Irvin Mayfield Quintet as they pay tribute to the life and work of Ernest J. Gaines. For more information, email us at gainescenter@louisiana.edu or call at (337)-482-1848.

Gaudet, Marcia and Carol Wooton. "An Interview with Ernest J. Gaines." Conversations with Ernest Gaines. Ed. John Lowe. Jackson: University of Mississippi Press, 1995. 200-216. Print.