Jazz in the Key of Ellison

Audible and Don hosted “Jazz in the Key of Ellison,” a jazz and spoken words tribute to the great novelist whose ability to hear the music in words inspired Don’s writing career and informed the founding of Audible. It was held at the New Jersey Performing Arts Center on Nov. 1, 2016 and featured Wynton Marsalis, Joe Morton, Catherine Russell, the Andy Farber Orchestra and others. The premiere was the first stop in a multi-city national tour of the show.

“Because of Ralph I always heard the sound of what I read and what I wrote,” Don told the audience at NJPAC. “Well-composed words sound like music to me, and after being a writer for 20 years, this led directly to an idea that became Audible.com and our 20 years of applying new technologies to the celebration and elevation of the unbridled power of the well-spoken word.”

Watch a video created about the evening above, and read Don’s full speech below:

During the winter of 1971 I was a freshman at NYU, and I read two books that changed me.

The first was Faulkner’s The Sound and the Fury—a book I read in a single afternoon-to-dawn sitting.

The second was Invisible Man, an astonishingly artful and complex work of literature written by a man I heard was actually teaching a course at NYU the next semester.

Over the next three years, after Ralph Ellison allowed me into a small seminar focused on the American vernacular, and a year after that, when he took me on as a tutee every Wednesday afternoon until I graduated, one of the greatest of all American writers taught me how to read.

Ralph also helped me gain the courage and occasional insight to write, and I went on to make a living as a writer for 20 years after that. Ralph encouraged me and spoke up for me publicly until he died in 1994.

I learned from Ralph Ellison that Americans worked to create an identity from a synthesis of divergent cultures. We created a distinctive way of talking and telling stories, which led to the distinctive voice in the way we wrote.

We built American vernacular buildings and invented American techniques and technologies. We spawned singularly American musical art forms … jazz and the blues.

I understood from Ralph that the American experience derived from the process of a nation constantly making and remaking itself, a place that needed to create its own myths and art and even its own sounds because we had to.

I think it is fitting that we are celebrating Ralph Ellison in Audible’s hometown of Newark, a city essential to the history of jazz and to the African-American cultural, historical, and political experience.

While Ralph Ellison taught me that Americans needed to create our own archetypes and myths, he also conveyed that in a nation creating itself without kings, a new order was created based on the color of people’s skin.

It is also fitting that we are here to celebrate Ralph and jazz. On those long afternoons when he taught me, he would talk about Duke and Louis as if they were in the room, and he would help me understand what he called an “outlaw art” that was tethered directly to the sounds of African-American stories and prayer and protest.

Because of Ralph I always heard the sound of what I read and what I wrote. Well-composed words sound like music to me, and after being a writer for 20 years, this led directly to an idea that became Audible.com and our 20-years of applying new technologies to the celebration and elevation of the unbridled power of the well-spoken word.

If you come to our headquarters down the street, where nearly a thousand Audible employees work, you will see dozens of conference rooms named for illustrious people who came from or made an impact on Newark. There’s the Philip Roth room. Stephen Crane, Allen Ginsburg, Shaquille O’Neal, Wayne Shorter, and Gloria Gaynor all have rooms… as do the city’s illustrious inventors and Newark’s Alma Flagg, who in 1964 became the city’s first African-American principal of an integrated school.

There is museum-like copy on the doors about each person for whom these rooms are named.

A few feet from my cube is the Ralph Ellison room, and I want to read what I wrote about Ralph for the glass wall I see every day: Ralph Ellison’s understanding of the power of the oral tradition and his ability to hear the music in well-wrought arrangements of spoken words informed the vision and mission of Audible from the beginning. Ellison was the teacher and mentor of Audible’s founder. According to Ellison, the way the early American vernacular embraced storytelling around campfires, the braggadocio of our salesmanship, and the sound of our lamenting in the fields became the distinctive voice that defined American novels and our singularly “conscious and conscientious” culture, a culture that created itself “out of whatever it found useful.” Ellison loved the melodies in language and he told stories in a voice that sounded like a coal car coming out of a mine. He loved enormous cigars, jazz, and ideas. In many ways Audible exists to honor his legacy.

Don’t let anyone ever tell you that great teachers can’t direct the course and meaning of a life.

A review of the evening, published in Downbeat and written by Eugene Holley, Jr., noted that “The star-studded tribute to the late author on Nov. 1—featuring saxophonist/bandleader Andy Farber and his orchestra, with vocalists Patti Austin, Catherine Russell and Angélique Kidjo, with special guest Wynton Marsalis—was indeed a joyful noise, alive with the sound of Ellison’s favorite musicians, including Duke Ellington, Thelonious Monk, Count Basie and Jimmy Rushing. Emmy-winning actor Joe Morton, hip-hop legend Talib Kweli and Ellison scholar Robert G. O’Meally were also on hand to recite selections from Ellison’s oeuvre of fiction and nonfiction. … But Ellison’s brilliant prose was the night’s true star. In their reading of Ellison’s work, Morton, Kweli and O’Meally brought the house down with impassioned readings. Ellison’s brilliant essay on Minton’s Playhouse in Harlem, where bartenders are said to ‘come fresh off of the ships and planes … to buy drinks and stand looking about for the source of the mystery,’ was the highlight of the evening.”

Read the full review here.