When Melancholy Met Hope

When the author, jazz critic and poet Stanley Crouch died last week, some folks in Greater New Haven must have recalled, as I did, what happened on the first day of autumn in 2016.

Crouch, seated with cane in hand in a room at the Whitney Humanities Center, lured a crowd of about 50 that day into a meditation on a lyrical masterpiece.

It seemed an unusual idea for a free program, stemming from Yale’s annual Windham-Campbell Awards for literary achievement, one of which was given to Crouch that year (an honor that included a check for $150,000).

For 60 minutes, students, professors and curious visitors from the community at large listened, responded, and contributed to meaningful silence. The centerpiece of it all was just one song, one plea from Duke Ellington and his collaborators titled ​“Come Sunday,” performed in 1958 on a recording by Mahalia Jackson, The Queen of Gospel.

I was drawn to the session, open to the public (one of the great advantages, in non-pandemic times, of living near Yale), for many reasons. Some of them stemmed from memory.

Even as a young fellow, I played Ellington’s melodies on the piano. There was a quality that resonated though I was not of, and probably did not understand, the society from which they were inspired.

As Stanley Crouch pointed out in his introductory remarks, Ellington had managed through his elegance and talent to enhance an idea born in New Orleans by creating a whole new form of sophistication that transcended racial boundaries.

What I knew as a kid was something else: that in trying to master ​“Mood Indigo” and ​“In My Solitude,” I was prying into a music box that would forever haunt me.

As Crouch often pointed out in reviewing the history of jazz, Ellington wrote the blues even if his blues didn’t fit within the classic 12-bar format, because ​“sooner or later,” Crouch said, ​“everyone gets them.”

Back then, I didn’t know about the blues or their universality, but could feel them in the change in tone in the middle of ​“Mood Indigo,” composed by the Duke and Barney Bigard, with lyrics by Irving Mills.

I always met that mood indigo,
since my baby said goodbye.

Back then, and for many years afterwards, I didn’t suffer that particular torment.

Nor did I in my college years, in the early 1960s, when I invited a classmate to a concert by Duke Ellington and his orchestra. Looking back on that night, I recall that my date, a lovely freshman, said little throughout, and wasn’t as awed by the moment as I was, but looked very much like a satin doll.

She must have scratched her long red hair when I paid no attention to her and instead was transfixed by Duke, his elegant checked black and white suit, the deep pockets of skin under his eyes, the long fingers that he slapped the keys with, and then his nods to cue his players for ​“Take the A Train” and ​“Sophisticated Lady,” and ​“It Don’t Mean a Thing if It Ain’t Got That Swing.”

I remember the 15-minute intermission when the band members stood off to the side, chatting with each other, some smoking, while drummer Sam Woodyard played a solo through the entire break. Then, one by one, the musicians went to their seats and started to join in. And in the second half there it was, deep into the night, ​“Mood Indigo,” and by then I think my satin doll, who must have seen the tears in my eyes, had given up entirely on the idea of a second date.

I didn’t actually feel mood indigo until years later. But when I did –- on the occasion of the unexpected death of my first wife and mother of our only child at 27 from a brain aneurysm — this dark tune had had become my theme song, and would stay my song until the pharmaceutical industry could train my fingers and heart to play something in a major key.

Even though I had plunked my way into Dukeland, I didn’t yet know the miracle of ​“Come Sunday,” not until Stanley Crouch, rocking slowly in his seat and occasionally lifting his cane as if it was a conductor’s baton, asked us at the Whitney Center to pause from our frayed and busy days to stay awhile, to close our eyes, to really hear genius at work. He said that the blues, though often reflective of pain, could also uplift, could reach places in the heart that may otherwise be remote.

Mahalia, he said, would show this.

The contralto, whom Harry Belafonte said at the time was ​“the most powerful Black woman in America,” sells every syllable in a song written long ago but speaks to elements of faith and the fight for freedom today. In part:

He’ll give peace and comfort
To every troubled mind
Come Sunday, oh come Sunday
That’s the day

Often we feel weary
But he knows our every care
Go to him in secret
He will hear your every prayer

But in these days of high technology, short attention spans, and the news that sanctuary is in more in demand than ever, when the gains in understanding and mutual respect we have made in our country are in jeopardy, you should hear for yourself what Stanley Crouch wanted the 50 of us assembled to listen to that spiritual noontime four years ago, with no less than the Duke as accompanist to Ms. Jackson:

When Ruth Bader Ginsburg died just two days after Crouch, an obituary recalled that whenever the associate Supreme Court justice felt angry, she sat down at the piano and practiced. The keys, black and white together, gave her comfort.

In the end, though Stanley Crouch was known, perhaps, more for his feistiness and activism than for his reverence, those of us who took advantage of that free program (with a free buffet lunch included) will recall an everlasting introduction to the intersection of melancholy and hope.

Editor’s Note: Lary Bloom’s biography, ​“Sol LeWitt: A Life of Ideas,” is a finalist in the upcoming Connecticut Book Awards.