Two or three things I don't know about them

Recently I invited a young black artist, the assistant of a successful painter, to use my apartment in New York while I was away. This guy is very talented. He makes hiphop-influenced videos of artists, himself and others, black and white, painting graffiti all over the city, and films the process so magically that he turns the city into one big canvas. A few weeks into his stay, he wrote me an email: “The plants are doing fine. Everything quiet in the building. The rug that I’m sleeping on your floor is very comfortable.’ That was when I realized that I didn’t know a thing about him. Because I grew up thinking of jazz musicians as the neglected geniuses of 20^th music, a lot of my personal heroes were black. But I didn’t know very much about them either. In me dwelled a myth that my heroes were brilliant but inarticulate, a breed of idiots savants. In the ‘60’s, after college, I traveled around Europe interviewing expatriate jazz musicians. Their reasons for leaving the States—and they themselves—were very diverse. The white Jewish clarinetist Mezz Mezzrow complained in a thick black accent that I thought at first was a parody about how the “real’ American jazz—New Orleans jazz—had been replaced by “foreign’ influences. The saxophonist Lucky Thompson was angry at the white-controlled nightclub scene and racist police force that made it impossible for him to support himself. The swing trumpeter Bill Coleman was the epitome of elegance and grace. My college roommate and I listened to legendary ‘78’s that Coleman had made with Fats Waller in the 1930’s while the man himself stood next to us in a prosperous apartment on rue Monsieur-le-Prince, his French wife beaming. At the Blue Note we sat down one afternoon with Kenny Clarke. One of the pioneers of modern jazz, Clarke had given up the drummer’s seat in the Modern Jazz Quartet, moved to Paris and never looked back; for years he was the co-leader of a successful European big band. Did he leave the U.S. because of racial prejudice? No, he said it was because since 1955, when Charlie Parker died, jazz had been in a state of confusion: “Bird was a yardstick, someone all of us measured ourselves against, and after he passed we lost our sense of direction.’ We talked about a bassist whom Clarke particularly favored. My roommate asked a question that later made him blush: “Do you like him because he has a good beat?’ Clarke looked at us down the bridge of his nose, more in amusement than disdain: “Oh no, it’s more because of his harmonics, his choice of notes.’ Hardly anyone believes the cliché about the U.S. being a melting pot anymore. It’s closer to the truth to regard it as a country in which different groups live more or less side by side, tolerating each other-- but sometimes just barely. Though the data are contradictory, it appears as if since the 1960’s, African-Americans have gone in two opposite directions. While a percentage has advanced economically and educationally-- to heads of major corporations as well as to the Presidency of the United States-- a large group feels alienated, bitter, marginal. This isn’t exactly news. Culturally, African-American influence has grown—not only in popular music but in TV, theater, fashion, film—to the point that one would be hard-pressed to name areas of American culture that aren’t influenced by African-Americans. Is there a white singer who doesn’t affect a black accent even more exaggerated than the one Mezz Mezzrow used decades ago? Yet white Americans don’t know much …