From the community:
Dear James Baldwin relatives Dan Baldwin and Carole Weinstein.
Author James Baldwin was the subject of Renee Baker's brilliant neo-opera "The Baldwin Chronicles: Midnight Ramble" at CSO this weekend.
Community Contributor Stan West
You asked me to send you copies of the program from Renee Baker's "The Baldwin Chronicles: Midnight Ramble" that opened last night at the Chicago Symphony Orchestra. It was powerfully poignant illustrating his poems and prose utilizing her video, music, and lyrics. I'm sending you the programs, as promised. I just felt I needed to send you so much more.
We all miss him so very much, especially family members like you as well as his longtime friends who affectionately called him "Jimmy." I only met him once, in '86, a year before he died. To me, he was "Mr. Baldwin." My writing teacher, Ishmael Reed who was giving him a well-deserved award for being North America's best essayist, invited me to "Come meet Jimmy."
Pardon my French, but this is how it went down.
Je lui ai dit que comme un adolescent , je l'ai lu deux de ses livres de la bibliothèque de mes parents. Pendant ce temps, les Black Panthers , qui étaient un jeune groupe militant que je savais , renvoyé à lui comme " un révolutionnaire de café " qui n'a pas été assez en colère . Il m'a regardé dans les yeux et m'a dit: " Montrez-moi un nigga dont pas en colère et Je vais vous montrer un imbécile . " Je me suis assis en pensant que peut-être je venais d'être appelé un imbécile par Baldwin .
I told him that as a teen, I read a couple of his books from my parent's bookcase. During that time, Black Panthers, who were a young militant group I knew, referred to him as a "café revolutionary who was not angry enough." He looked me in the eye and told me, "Show me a nigga who's not angry and I'll show you a fool." I sat thinking that maybe I had just been called a fool by Baldwin.
I believe you both heard me share this story in French and English at the 2016 James Baldwin Conference at the University of Paris, Dan Baldwin and Carole Weinstein. I recalled Carole smiled when I mused, "Since I had been called a fool by lesser individuals, I took Mr. Baldwin's words as a compliment." As we all know, he died the very next year, angry I suspect.
Renee Baker's brilliant "neo-opera" (which is how she describes her oft-abstract musical mosaic) showcased how some Whites felt he was "too angry" and some Blacks felt he was "not angry enough" - themes that emerged in his own writing that powered the Academy Award-nominated 2016 Raoul Peck-directed documentary, "I Am Not Your Negro."
Maestra Baker invited me to open the night reading Baldwin's poem, "The Giver" that begins, "If the hope of giving/is to love the living/the giving gives madness/in the act of giving"… and ends quite angrily, "And he turns in his guilty bed to stare/at the starving multitudes standing there/and rises from bed to curse the heavens/he must understand that to whom much is given/much will be taken, and rightly so/I cannot tell how much I owe." I did my very best.
The standing-room-only opera with Chicago's cultural elite packed rather closely in Symphony Center's Buntrock Hall featured baritone singer Robert Sims who bellowed, "I am Black and I'm Gay and that's why you can't stand me" to a crowd stunned by the ferocity of the truthful lyrics. I sat next to music educator Barbara Wright Pryor. Pryor smiled as this extraordinary operatic movement addressed the values and aspirations of ordinary people in AAN's 3rd Annual Black History Month Celebration that was co-sponsored by Phumzile Pride Mazibuko, Chicago's South African Consulate General.
As the brilliant Maestra waved her arms and rocked her shoulders to the liberation anthems of singers Cornelius Johnson, Dee Alexander, Sheila Anne Dawson Jones (founder-director of CSO's African American Network that sponsored the night's event) & Taalib Din Ziyad (whose singer-son, Saalik Ahmad Ziyad, died a few days prior and was unable to perform). Baker put her head done as Ziyad sang in deference to his son's recent demise, she later said.
Freedom songs were the night's bread and butter. Speaking of freedom, in the post-concert Q&A where this reporter was recruited to moderate, a prominent South African intellectual raised a provocative question that perhaps the opera did not adequately answer whether or not Baldwin's prophetic call for freedom would be answered. I responded in Zulu that translates, "Freedom is what freedom does." I added that "Dan Baldwin and Carole Weinstein, who could not leave New York City to be present at tonight's historic event, send Renee Baker praise for trying to keep Jimmy's freedom dreams alive."
Dear Dan Baldwin and Carole Weinstein, I believe your famous relative smiled on the night's magnificent effort. It accessed Baldwin's tears and fears in music and rhyme. Humanist attacks against gentrification were heard in lyrics and language though Baker argued: "My work is apolitical." Working-class woes amid a White supremacy backdrop were poetically tender. Moral capitalism meets compassionate humanism that cynics simplistically label socialism were among the tense quandaries underneath the sublime sounds.
Consider this: lines expertly sung by soloists languishing a "wall" instead of a bridge to understanding, inspired the audience to hold hands with performers who belted out several verses of "Lift Every Voice and Sing" and "We Shall Overcome." What a finale!
Dear Dan Baldwin and Carole Weinstein. As you know, I just sent a U.K. literary agent as well as a U.K. publisher the rough draft of my "James Baldwin's Black Lives Blues" that I promised to soon share with you. If you think I got the public story right about his views on police brutality now called euphemistically police misconduct, and the private story about how several generations of Black straights and gays in my family including my Black-Mexican-Italian-
In sum, as I reflect on last night's musical tribute I believe that your famous relative would beam witnessing the blues, gospel, jazz, classical, zydeco gumbo tour de force called "The Baldwin Chronicles: Midnight Ramble" to which I think if he were alive he'd take a knee.
Maestra Renee Baker said there are two other musical movements yet to come. She hinted she'll invite all of us to the party.-Stan West
