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. 

What Ernest J. Gaines' Work Has Shown Me

I could sit here all day and list off all of Ernest J. Gaines’ accomplishments and awards; however, that would not tell the full story of Gaines’ influence. I could stand here and talk about the importance of celebrating the 50^th anniversary of Catherine Carmier, but again that would not tell the full story. What follows is my brief attempt to tell part of that story. Gaines’ work provides a voice to those in rural South Louisiana that did not have a voice. He writes so that those who do not have a mark and are buried beneath the soil here along False River will be heard, not just today, but for eternity. He writes so that “the white kids [will] understand what the black kid is, and [that] the black kid [will] understand who he is.” He writes to illuminate the universal nature of human existence. He writes because he wanted to show “the Bull Connors and the Faubeses, and the Wallaces and the Thurmans that I could do anything with those twenty six letters that they could, and I could do it better than any of them could.” He writes because he must.   

With that in mind, Gaines has influenced many people, me included. When I think about Gaines and his work, I cannot help but think about the way he introduced me to so much more than just his own writing. In high school, my musical tastes began to take shape. This was during the nineties when Nirvana and bands of that ilk reigned on the charts, or at least in my head. Nirvana, with 1993’s In Utero, opened my eyes to a style of music that I never imagined could’ve existed. Right now, you may be wondering what in the world Nirvana has to do with Ernest J. Gaines. Trust me, I have a point. During November of 1993, Nirvana performed on MTV’s Unplugged. Typically, bands that did unplugged performances on MTV played their own music, never really deviating from what they, themselves, had created. Nirvana, on the other hand, bucked this trend. Instead of playing all of their hits acoustically they decided to mix it up with cover songs from other bands. Concluding the show, the band performed Leadbelly’s arrangement of “Where Did You Sleep Last Night.” Knowing the tragic end of Nirvana singer Kurt Cobain’s life, I cannot help but listen to that recording and get chills. (A video of that performance is below. Leadbelly's version is above.)

After hearing Nirvana’s rendition of “Where Did You Sleep Last Night,” I decided to check out Leadbelly. However, upon first hearing the older recording and Leadbelly’s voice, I am ashamed to say, I laughed. I never thought I would listen to Leadbelly again. Ever. As I evolved, though, I began to grow more accustomed to Leadbelly, his voice, his story, and his phenomenal guitar playing. A band from Washington not only introduced me to Leadbelly, a blues musician from my own state who has a statue in Shreveport where I grew up, but they also introduced me to other bands and musicians who have had a major influence on my musical tastes and life.  What Nirvana did is what all good artists do. They spoke to me, giving me an outlet for those adolescent years where I did not know exactly who I was or where I was going. They did more than that though. They also pointed me towards artists that influenced them: Sonic Youth, The Pixies, Dinosaur Jr., The Melvins, Mudhoney, etc. In essence, they were the center and everything else radiated away from that center.

In many ways, Gaines did the same exact thing. Even though I did not read him as an adolescent, I have taken from him and his work a wealth of paths that lead in so many directions I cannot begin to list them all. I don’t remember when I first read a work by Gaines. I do remember, however, that it was A Gathering of Old Men. After reading that, and A Lesson before Dying, I remember thinking to myself that Gaines’ work is very accessible. At first, I saw only the 10% of the iceberg that resides above the surface of the water. Beneath the surface, the other 90% was waiting patiently for me to discover it. Gaines’ work grabs you with its readability, but it entangles you with its ability to show you more than what you initially expected.  His focused attention to detail, structure, story, and characters allow him to create such accessible yet considerably dense works of literature.  As time progressed and I continued to evolve some more, I began to realize that my initial introduction to Gaines and his writing opened the door to deeper understanding of the world around me, Gaines’ work, and his influences.

When I began to reread Gaines’ works and delve into his other novels, I began to see that his writing contains much more than I initially suspected. For example, The Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman has become, for me, something akin to Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man. Each time I read Ellison’s tour de force, I find and experience something new. This partly occurs because of my sensibilities, but also because of the nature of art. Rereading about Miss Jane has the same effect. I always find something new or something different. That is what true art should do. It should make you want to return, time and time again, to a familiar space where you find something new every time you decide to make a return trip.

Along with introducing me to something new on my return trips to St. Raphael Parish, Gaines has pulled me away from Louisiana to Russia, Ireland, Michigan, and elsewhere. Gaines has taken me to Russia and showed me the importance of authors like Turgenev, Tolstoy, and Chekhov in regards to form and subject. He has shown me the beauty and importance of composers like Modest Mussorgsky and his Pictures at an Exhibition. He has transported me to Ireland and shown me how James Joyce constructs stories and focuses on his own particular stamp-sized piece of Earth. Gaines has sparked my interest in Hemingway as well. I used to despise Hemingway for his apparent “simplicity” and repetition. However, after reading Gaines and listening to him speak about Hemingway and his work, I now see the nuance and beauty of Hemingway. Not just is his style and form but also in his subject matter.

Gaines has given me much more than just his writing. Along with giving me a larger appreciation for my home state of Louisiana, he has opened up avenues for me that I had either closed before or had never noticed. He has taken me down paths that have allowed me to better understand the interrelatedness between literature, music, visual art, and life. To me, that is what good art should do. It should expand our horizons beyond what the artist has produced. Gaines has done just that. He has expanded my perspectives in more ways than I can mention. For that, I am forever grateful.