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Excerpt from X-Country: Touring the Nation with Jazz and Poetry

27 Oct/Black Like She: Roz Cron, Los Angeles, California

All right, so I have issues. Sue me or skip the paragraph, I’m only telling you what I saw on the tour. The exploitation of the nation’s fear of the other---blacks, browns, Jews, women, gays, musicians, artists, intellectuals & poets---was making a mockery of democracy everywhere we went. In his 1881 preface to Leaves of Grass, Whitman wrote, “The United States themselves are essentially the greatest poem.” I would add, after Pops & Bix, Jelly Roll & Bessie, Duke & Count, Gerswhin & Porter, Tito & Mongo, that the music forged by these associations, combinations & permutations of talent is the best expression of who we are in our hybrid vigor. Our composers & touring bands have proven better ambassadors for the American way than AID or CIA, Coke or Pepsi. Pardon the paraphrase, but it don’t mean diddly if it don’t get Uncle Wiggly to let his backbone slip in a jitterbug dip in Connecticut.

Skip this paragraph, too, or throw your drink across the lawn, but our music, born of woe & field holler, Appalachian outback & that New Orleans’ swinging second line that follows the band back from the graveyard, is also witness to slavery, genocide & dispossession. Why would jazz play where the oldest profession in the world plies its trade? Because whatever impulse the Puritan rejects---dance, sex, death, romance---jazz faces squarely or hiply. Jazz is Emerson’s solo on Transcendentalism realized, where the high life meets the low life, where non-attachment to the fruits of one’s actions is the only game in town. It’s the Taoist’s knowledge that the world song is the blues, something you stop having the minute you acknowledge with enough soul how bad you got it. But some ‘melicans resent acknowledging anything, let alone the chitlins, cuchifritos, matzohs & pepperoni in the national music gumbo.

Was I looking to tell anyone’s story? Not til I met Roz Cron! She greeted us at the entrance to her apartment complex & invited us into her home. There she was on the wall of photos: a nice Jewish girl on lead alto sax from Newton, Mass (& a fellow student with Serge Chaloff in her high school music class) with curly hair & a winning smile, “passing” so she could tour with The International Sweethearts of Rhythm, an all-black, all-female band during World War II.

Can such a biography compete with crash diets, surgical enlargements, the seven corporate steps to heaven, memoirs of the misguided in misery, lunacy, abuse & psychobabble that glut the Best Seller List? I was riveted. What a life! Forget the election. This was real news. As a petite, pretty & talented nineteen-year-old Roz hadn’t slummed but crossed completely over! Twenty years before the Village saw mixed couples in the Sixties, she lived black, thought black, spoke black, loved black, traveled black in the Jim Crow South! She had the tales that challenge our entitlement, the accounts we’re too squeamish for but that are better told than silenced: of cracker jihad, strange fruit & police harassment, of being denied food & lodging & socializing, of leaving town in the middle of the night to avoid arrest in your own country for the crime of being yourself.

She was thrilled to join the Sweethearts, to date Count Basie, to learn what a little moonlight/make-up can do. When the band was hired to go to Europe, she played for the Jewish GIs (who had helped liberate Hitler’s concentration camps) & the Jewish survivors at a camp Passover. Did she know she was making history? Most certainly. Did she know how important her story could be for women, for music & for race relations?

We didn’t want to leave. We had spent the whole day with Roz, eating & yakking, filming & remembering. But we needed time we didn’t have. She fixed us snacks for the road & off into the Los Angles night we embarked, heading east on I-10.