How Far We Have Come
Pharoah Sanders’ record, Black Unity, plays from the speakers. I have it on vinyl and have been playing it constantly since he passed away just a little over two weeks ago.
My mother introduced me to the sound of Pharoah’s jazz. She was in love with it. The more radical and experimental the playing, the more excited it made her.
Music was the true language of my mother’s soul. It ran in her blood, handed down by her mother, and her grandmother before that.
My own involvement with music, whether through producing, DJing, or just simply listening, comes from that matriarchal lineage.
My mom’s name was Doris, which means of the sea, in Greek. She ended up working in Detroit’s auto-factories, but really, she was a singer. Her voice was a deep, resonant baritone that got her noticed at a young age. She was offered a full scholarship to an east coast music conservatory after a professor heard her singing gospel hymns in with her school choir in West Virginia. Unfortunately, her father wouldn’t allow it. He was a strict, working class coal miner who believed it to be sinful for his daughter to become anything other than a school teacher, nurse, or secretary.
Of the three vocations, she picked teaching. She saw it as a way to slip around her father’s barrier and covertly connect with art in the form of literature. She found the embodied, mystical poetry of Shelly, Whitman, and Blake. Somehow, a connection was made between these writers and jazz music - Thelonius Monk, Dizzy Gilespi, Nina Simone, Billy Holiday.
Black music.
After college she moved to Detroit. Her mother - also a musician, lived there and could provide a place to land. Detroit was an epicenter for the jazz Mom loved. She was a regular at a grand ballroom on Michigan Avenue called, The Graystone. There she occupied space with great performers, was courted. She fell in love with a piano player. They moved to Montreal together. She was enchanted by the city’s art, culture, and new love. The two got married, had babies. Then things went really sour. There was infidelity and the inevitable divorce. She became a single parent and fell into poverty.
The story I grew up hearing was that Mom would only eat the remains of what her children left on the plate: bits of leftover gristle; scraping the meat from discarded chicken bones. It was so bad she was suffering from malnutrition.
People find ways to cope with the difficulties of life. In my outreach work, most of my clients attenuate their trauma through drugs like meth and fentanyl. My mother didn’t drink or do drugs other than tobacco. Her coping mechanism was simple: when she couldn’t see a way out, she would sing. And she would sing LOUD.
Her voice was low and resonant - bass frequencies you could almost feel in your chest. She released these frequencies whenever and wherever she felt like it. She would sing while waiting in line at the unemployment office, or while walking down the aisle of the grocery store, hunting for sale items so that she could stretch her food stamps a little further. Even though she was often complimented by those within earshot, I was embarrassed by her public singing (believe me when I say, this is one of my life’s biggest regrets).
One night I got angry with Mom for singing. We were living in our car in Los Angeles (we meaning Mom, myself, and my 16 year old brother, Daniel). She was singing again, and to me it was at a time that seemed so inappropriate.
The decision had just been made to go back to Detroit. California wasn’t working out. The city was too big, too unfamiliar, too unfriendly, too expensive. The in your face opulence was shattering my mother’s dignity. We didn’t count for anything in that city. Live, die, get pimped out on skid row - it didn’t matter.
No one would notice.
That’s how LA felt in 1982. At least back in Detroit we were in the company of so many others enduring the poverty and fallout of the collapsed auto industry. And we had some family - my aunt had a house and agreed to take us in so Mom could stabilize and get back on her feet.
We had been given free tickets from Traveler’s Aid to ride the Greyhound back to the Motor City, and we were leaving in the morning. Daniel wasn’t coming with us. He said he would rather stay on the streets of Hollywood than return, defeated, to Detroit.
It was our last night in LA and it was heavy. I was only 12, but had become acquainted with how mean it could be on the street. The thought of my brother trying to make it on his own in Hollywood terrified me. I saw other boys his age and even younger prostituting themselves on the Sunset Strip. I cried and I begged, pleading with him to come back to Detroit with us. When that didn’t work, I begged Mom to stay in LA.
Neither of them would change their mind.
It was night-time and we were near Venice Beach, sitting in our parked Chevy Caprice Classic. Mom was in the passenger seat, cigarette in hand, her window rolled down. Outside was the sound of the Pacific Ocean and its successive waves crashing. None of us were saying a thing…and then Mom started singing, Love is Everywhere. It’s one of Pharaoh’s old songs. The line is repeated over and over again, with varying levels of intensity, while retaining this energy which is happy, joyful, and exhalted. It made no sense to me why she would be singing this one, especially at a time like that.
I was incredulous.
When she finished, there was silence except for the sound of crashing waves intermingling with the sounds of the city. I broke that silence, demanding to know how could she sing that song during such a sad time.
“Oh Sugar Plumb,” she answered while still gazing at the black undulations of the ocean across the beach. “Singing is how your mother figures her way out of messes like this.”
Eventually she did figure her way out of poverty and homelessness.
And, in many ways, the life I live now is also a testament to the possibility of rising above extreme hardship. I’m reflecting on this as I lay on the floor beside my wood stove, pulling out vinyl records from 1960s jazz to early Detroit techno. I am remembering a few years back when I flew to Los Angeles to DJ at a warehouse party. It was just a few months after my mom had passed away. As I looked out from the airplane window down on that city at night, I thought of our family trying to find our way on those streets so many years before. I could feel my mom’s spirit beside me as we began our final approach to Los Angeles International Airport.
In a voice just louder than a whisper I spoke to her, saying, “Look at us now Mom…look how far we have come.”