JAZZ IS MY RELIGION

            I think I can honestly say that learning to play jazz piano saved my life.  In my deepest depressions, Jazz gave me something bigger than myself to hold onto. One of the positive things I think religion gives some people is a feeling of humble gratitude that helps them keep going when everything else in life turns to shit. This is how I feel about Jazz after many years of being more to less deeply involved in studying it and playing it. But I suppose the way in which jazz is most like a religion for me is in the certainty and sense of purpose it gives. I am certain that it is a good thing to learn another Ellington or Monk composition, as I imagine some Christians seem certain about praying or reading the Bible. When in doubt about what to do, I know that studying jazz and practicing to play it are things worth doing.

    While one could claim that deity-oriented religions are obviously doing a lot better than Jazz at surviving, it seems obvious to me that all music can make a greater contribution to human survival and well-being than the accumulative effect of most religions, which survive partly through psychic intimidation, such as the threat of eternal damnation. This brings me to a major difference between religion and devotion to Jazz. While religious dogma is often harmful to both believers and persecuted non-believers, Jazz dogma is only harmful to jazz musicians. The music can’t hurt you, but struggling to play it can. If you don’t know the blues when you start, you know them soon enough.

    While it has brought great joy into my life, Jazz also asks for sacrifice. Like being a monk or a missionary, being a jazz musician is not very lucrative, and even those musicians who make a living at it spent many years not making a living at it. Even very good jazz musicians become so frustrated that they “lose faith” get day jobs and at least temporarily become bitter about the struggle. But jazz has always drawn me back, much to the dismay of certain people who thought my career as a writer or scholar was sacrificed to almighty Jazz.

     Now for some testifying. In 1976 I was 19 and going through my “beat” period, writing poetry, reading William S. Burroughs and Kerouac novels, hanging out with jazz musicians and trying to learn to play piano.  Sensing that I needed a journey of some kind on which to contemplate my future, I took a Greyhound bus across the country. Looking back on it now I realize the idea and the energy to do such a thing coincided with a hypomanic episode I didn’t know I was having.  It was ostensibly a pilgrimage to Walden Pond but it included my first trip to New York City and Boston.            

    One of my most vivid memories from that journey took place somewhere in the Harvard/Cambridge area on a Sunday afternoon.  I must have come down hard from the hypomania and was falling into another un-comprehended depression. I was down and almost broke abut still social enough to feel lonely so I went to a place where a local jazz group was playing.  As soon as I heard them joyously launch into Ellington’s “In a Mellow Tone” I was lifted up, out of my loneliness, out of my anxiety and depression. They were not overtly technical musicians, but they meant what they played, and they were swinging mightily. The 50-something black man playing tenor saxophone winked at my 19 year old white suburban self as if he knew that I knew what he had been “talking about” in his solo. Musicians can always spot other musicians in the audience. They listen closer when you play the good stuff.

    Sitting there in historic Boston, in our bicentennial year, contemplating how the music I most loved had the stain of slavery on it, I had an epiphany. Jazz came from the very people America enslaved. The least I could do was learn how to play this music, this gift freely given by the most wronged Americans. This was not a conversion experience. I had already been converted to Jazz and was still in that sophomoric phase of jazz snobbery in which I actively made fun of pop music. But that Sunday at the jam session when I was far from home,  I was developing a kind of faith, a faith that learning to play Jazz was worth living for. It didn’t matter if I became famous or at the top of the field or successful financially at it, I just wanted to get good enough someday to sit in with those guys in that bar in Boston. I was in church that Sunday, not because a great jazz musician was playing, but precisely because it was just an afternoon jam session of local players. 

     In all the jazz writing I have read, both criticism and history, there is little mention of the fact that the majority of jazz activity that goes on is not professional. Though we can only put rough numbers to this local jazz scene, we can be sure that in bulk it vastly outweighs the big-time arena in any terms: number of players, number of gigs played, and even number of audience members if we count school programs and the total number of local fans attending across the country. Ultimately, jazz is alive because of this local scene and not only in the U.S. but worldwide. This is my church, and it is a much more diverse community than most congregations.

From the musicians I met early on in my own local jazz community I somehow got the idea that not only should a player strive for technique and knowledge, but to develop a voice, to play “like yourself,” which really means that improvising within this paradoxical “tradition of innovation” is a way of finding yourself. Playing like yourself means being musically honest, a transcendent Mecca that you face toward every time you play.  In this sense, it is like prayer. It becomes like meditation when you are free of intruding thoughts and are playing and listening to everyone else’s playing in present time. Those “being in the flow” moments don’t happen that often to most players. It is a kind of ecstatic state that you want to return to, and you can’t find it by playing the same thing you played when you experienced it before. Most musicians will tell you that after a good improvisation they don’t really remember what they played. It is not what they played that leads back to that transcendent state; the only way back is forward, trying to have ideas and be musical in present time with as little conscious deliberation as one has when carrying on a conversation with a close friend, or testifying in your own church.

I am not sure that my appreciation and devotion to jazz was anything more than a series of historical coincidences that led to me getting positive reinforcement, a release of good neurotransmitters and invaluable friendships. In giving me what it did, though, Jazz was always there for me when nothing else made sense, and I think the discipline of trying to play it helped me tremendously in navigating the extreme emotional landscape I had to travel as an undiagnosed Bipolar II person. As such, jazz saved my life. Broke and lonely at the end of a hypomanic trip across the country with almost no sleep for days, I might have fallen into an abyss of depression that I could not crawl out of. Instead, I had something larger than myself to live for, and while my faith in Jazz has wavered over the decades since, I have never forgotten where my church is and I have always returned.

And I got better than “good enough” to play with those guys in that bar in Boston on a Sunday afternoon in 1976. I even play like myself at times.

 

New Play: Euripides' Iphigenia in Tauris!

Iphigenia in Tauris abounds in irony and deception and at the same time depicts characters seriously invested in the well‐being of their families. The play, in which Euripides dramatizes the intersection and resolution of the Orestes and Iphigenia myths, takes place in Tauris, where the goddess Artemis has transported Iphigenia, having rescued her from sacrifice on the altar at Aulis by substituting a deer in her place.

The currently fashionable questions about this play include: What elements in the myth are newly constructed by Euripides? What is the relationship between the cults mentioned in the play and cults practiced historically in both Attica and Tauris? Why is Athena the ex machina resolution rather than Artemis? 

The eminent classicist Greg Nagy  has called Euripides “the anthropologist of the tragedians” because of his apparently broad knowledge of mythological variants and his innovative use of origin myths for cults in his plays. Iphigenia in Tauris is not only about the establishment of Artemis’ cult in Brauron (just outside Athens) but the play provides an origin story for the cessation of human sacrifice. Who better to stop it than Iphigenia? She gets over her desire for revenge against the Greeks and during the play starts to think the locals rather than Artemis are bloodthirsty. At the end of her deliberations about sacrifice she says οὐδένα γὰρ οἶμαι δαιμόνων εἶναι κακόν. “I believe no god can be evil” (391.

 Aristotle's famous analysis of Iphigenia in Tauris underscores another issue: the importance of the theme of salvation. The salvation at the end of the play thus concerns the salvation of Apollo's words and Artemis’ cult; the salvation of the humans is a by‐product of these needs and does not necessarily match their own desires. Yet neither god appears in the play. When Artemis is expected, it is Athena. She appears ex machina in the last scene of the drama, just in time to save Agamemnon’s daughter Iphigenia, her brother Orestes, and his friend Pylades from being captured as they try to escape from Tauris, a barbarian country located in modern Crimea.

Orestes had come to Tauris because he had been instructed by the oracle of Delphi to take a sacred statue of Artemis to the land of the Athenians. This statue was believed to have fallen from the sky into the temple of Artemis in Tauris, where years earlier, Iphigenia had been taken by Artemis at the start of the Trojan War. The goddess had rescued her just before her father Agamemnon was about to sacrifice her in order to ensure favorable winds so the Greeks could sail to Troy. In Tauris Iphigenia served as priestess at the temple, presiding over human sacrifices. Fortunately, she recognizes Orestes, and instead of sacrificing him, she decides to trick Thoas, the king of the Taurians, into letting her take the statue of the goddess out to sea in order to purify it along with the Greek captives (Orestes and Pylades) before she sacrifices them. She prays to Artemis, who rescued her at Aulis to help her in the present crisis, assuring the goddess that it is not right for her to live in Tauris when she could dwell in Athens, “a city favored by the gods” (1082–8, 1230–3).

For a while, the plot works perfectly; the Greek ship that had brought Orestes and Pylades to Tauris comes to get them, while they are in a boat taking the statue to be washed. But before they can leave the harbor, a wave drives their ship back towards land. Iphigenia prays to Artemis and the Greek sailors pray to Apollo. Nonetheless, the ship is driven close to the shore and the Taurians are able to surround it. But before Thoas can leave the palace and capture them, the gods intervene to calm the sea and see that Iphigenia and Orestes are able to escape.

Athena orders Thoas to stop his pursuit of Iphigenia and the cult statue. She explains that Apollo had ordered Orestes to come to Tauris, and to bring the statue back to her country. She tells Thoas that he could not capture Orestes even if he tried, since Poseidon will make the sea smooth for Orestes’ passage back to Greece. Athena also orders Thoas to send home the Greek women who accompanied Iphigenia to Tauris and promises Orestes that he will be acquitted in his trial on the Areopagus at Athens. Thoas agrees to obey the goddess’ commands. Athena commends him, commands the winds to send the ship on its way, and leaves to join them in accompanying Iphigenia and Orestes to Athens.

Athena does not say explicitly why it is she, rather than Artemis, who has intervened to rescue Iphigenia and Orestes. Perhaps, like Apollo in the Ion, Artemis did not wish to be reproached by the mortals for the suffering she had caused them. Earlier in the drama Iphigenia despairingly criticizes Artemis for her “faulty reasoning” (sophismata, 380) and the ignorance (amathia, 386) that led her to demand human sacrifices. Iphigenia had believed that her father was going to cut her throat with his sword as he held her over the altar, until the goddess suddenly rescued her; but then the goddess made her preside over the slaughter of other human victims.

            But the reason why Artemis does not appear probably has more to do with Athena than it does with Artemis. Athena needs to instruct the mortal characters about the future because she is the goddess of Athens, where both Iphigenia and Orestes are now heading. Athena presides over the religious affairs of her country and will oversee the trial of Orestes on the Areopagus. As soon as Athena has stopped Thoas from pursuing the fugitives, she addresses her remarks to Orestes and Iphigenia in their ship, heading for Athens: “you can hear a goddess’ voice although you are not here” (1447). Her directives to them, like her instructions to Theseus in the Suppliants, concern religious ritual. She tells Orestes to bring the statue of Artemis to Halae, a town on the east coast of Attica, and build a temple there to house it. Artemis will be worshiped there with the title Tauropolos in a ritual named for the country of Tauris and his experiences there. At the cult festival a sword will be held at a man’s throat and blood will be spilt, in recollection of the sacrifice Orestes might have undergone at Tauris, had he and Iphigenia not recognized each other and planned their escape. Iphigenia will serve as priestess at Artemis’ temple in Brauron. She will be buried there, and robes will be dedicated to her by women who have died in childbirth. In this drama, as in the Erechtheus, the goddess’ speech creates a mythic connection between cults that were originally unrelated. Athena tells Orestes to bring the cult statue of Artemis that he has taken from Tauris to Halae and “to build a temple and set up the statue in it, named for the Tauric land and your sufferings” (1453–4). She adds that “in the future people will celebrate Artemis in song as Artemis Tauropolos” (1456–7). The similarity in sound suggests that the two words had a common origin. But in reality, the epithet tauropolos had nothing to do with the country Tauris in the Crimea. The temple at Halae and other cults of Artemis in Greece required the sacrifice of bulls (tauroi).Euripides and other dramatists frequently make such associations between sound-alike names, because puns were thought to reveal the true meaning of words.

By connecting the cults at Tauris and in Attica, Euripides brings out an important contrast between Athenian culture and that of their counterparts in Scythian Crimea, where humans rather than bulls were sacrificed to the goddess. Athena states that it will be the custom at Halae to go through the motions of a human sacrifice, by placing a sword at a man’s throat and drawing blood. The ritual allows the goddess to receive blood in recompense for the blood she did not receive because Orestes was not sacrificed. The unusual ritual also demonstrates that the Athenians are ethically superior to barbarians like Thoas.

Euripides also emphasizes the humane values of Athenian culture by having Athena proclaim that Iphigenia will become the chief priestess (kleidouchos) of Artemis at Brauron, where she will no longer be required to preside at a ceremony involving the sacrifice of human beings. In addition, she will be honored by the Athenians after her death, and thus no longer be isolated, “without marriage, children, city, and family,” as she was when she was living in Tauris (IT 220). Athena’s speech ends with a further prediction that brings credit to the Athenian polis. In the future the Athenians will honor Iphigenia as if she were the representative of the goddess whom she served as a priestess. Iphigenia will be buried at Brauron, and robes will be offered to her that had belonged to women who died in childbirth.

            At Brauron and in cults elsewhere in Greece, including the Athenian Acropolis, inscriptions recorded that women dedicated robes to Artemis in gratitude for their recovery from childbirth and women’s diseases.

Perhaps Euripides thought it appropriate to create a connection between Iphigenia (who in some myths was sacrificed to Artemis) and women who died in childbirth, because women who died untimely deaths were sacred to Artemis. It would not have mattered to Euripides’ audience if the rituals Athena describes did not exist in their day, since they believed that cult practices could change over time and vary from polis to polis. Here, as in the Suppliants, the Erechtheus, and the Ion, it was the goddess’ declared intention that mattered, and the celebration of piety and ethical values of Athens.