Transfiguring Freedom

 In 1925, the same year that the United Church was founded, a baby was born to immigrant parents in Montreal.  Not terribly unusual, it was a big family, and there were already three other children and there would soon be a fifth.  The baby’s father was a porter on the railways and would regularly travel from Montreal to Vancouver for the princely sum of $90 a month.  The mother earned $5 a month as a housemaid.  It was barely enough to make ends meet, and many times the children stayed in bed because their parents hoped they would sleep through their hunger.  They were one of the poorest families in the neighborhood.

But that poverty did not define who they were.   They were committed to two things; Union United Church, the oldest Black United Church in Canada, founded in 1907, and music.  Every Sunday they would go to church, sing the hymns and play in the community band.  The dad had taught himself to play the piano and to read music and he was determined to teach every child the same thing.  As soon as the older kids were good enough, they became the teachers of the younger ones.  Hymns and classical music were what they learned, and woe betide the child who didn’t practise their scales!  They started lessons when they were three years old and big enough to sit at the piano. The oldest daughter became so good at teaching her younger siblings that she eventually made a living as a piano teacher.  Music gave her the freedom to leave the hard work of being a maid, to the hard work of inspiring young people to make music.  But that fourth baby was very special.  He could play a song that his older brothers and sisters struggled with, just by hearing it once.  He didn’t even need to see sheet music to play it.  He loved playing trumpet in the band until he got so sick with tuberculosis that he spent more than a year in hospital.  He never played trumpet again.  But then he discovered jazz!  That not only transfigured his moods and his hopes but also set the stage for his future career.

And what a career.  When he was fifteen, his older sister took him to the CBC radio station without telling him why.  She had registered him in an audition for a contest which had performers much older than him trying out.  He passed the audition, and won the contest against not just all the Montreal performers, but all Canadian musicians as well!  By the time he was 20, he performed to a sold-out crowd in Toronto’s Massey Hall, and by the time he was 24, he performed in Carnegie Hall.

He also struggled.  Barbers in Hamilton refused to cut his hair because he was African Canadian.  A white teacher in his elementary school called him racist names.  One of the bands he played in was banned from a Montreal hotel because he was their pianist.  When he became famous after his Carnegie Hall debut, he went on tour in the United States, and discovered that in the southern states, restaurants wouldn’t serve him, hotels wouldn’t let him stay with the rest of the musicians, and once the room he slept in had no bathroom but only a bucket of sand for a toilet.  With so much hatred targeted at him, he delt with the stress as best he could, remaining the polite Canadian he had been taught to be by his family and his church.  It was while on one of those tours that he was encouraged to write a new piece of music with a bluesy feel to it.  He called it “Hymn to Freedom” and it became the unofficial anthem of the Civil Rights Movement. A Canadian Song!

Now, I don’t know about you, but freedom has become an uncomfortable word in recent days.  It has been used to promote an extreme agenda, and equates temporary measures put in place for the common good of the community with oppression and dictatorship.  It was used to shut down awkward questions, and to accuse people who have differing opinions as being pawns in a supposedly increasingly totalitarian state.  It was being used to justify an individual’s desire to do whatever they want.  But freedom is not supposed to be a weapon to shut down dialogue, nor is it supposed to be a justification of behavior that ignores peace, order and good governance, our founding constitutional principles. 

Freedom means many things to many people.  Now we are reclaiming that meaning as we watch and pray over friends, relatives and kin in the Ukraine and surrounding Slavic countries.  Slovakia, the homeland of my grandparents, aunties and uncles, is also in danger as refugees stream across its borders.  When I visited as a child, there were secret police in every village, army soldiers in every street, and art of Lenin everywhere one looked.  Freedom was not part of the constitution.  Everything was controlled by the state and those in power.

Freedom, for our musician friend was seen as the precious and transforming principle for a whole nation.  He could have been targeted for vigilante violence by drinking at the wrong public water fountain, but his music inspired folks living with systemic, widespread and brutal racism to have hope.  His music transformed them as it had transformed him.  Just as God transformed Jesus on the mountaintop, revealing him as someone who was even more powerful and inspiring than the disciples guessed. Both men, Jesus and Oscar Peterson, knew that transforming the world so more people would know true freedom, would be hard work.  Both men worked hard for it even though they knew they wouldn’t see it come true in their lifetimes.  Both were determined to make a difference in this world, no matter the sacrifice, the personal cost.  For Jesus, it cost him his life, for Oscar, his personal life was a mess, and his physical health was not great either.  But he left an amazing legacy.  I found his piano course in a music store in New York, of all places.  He started music schools and taught the next generation how to play jazz and Bach both.  He challenged racist commercials on CBC.  He encouraged musicians to join AA and give up drugs.

And yet, when the top two jazz musicians in the world worthy of being mentioned in the Alberta government’s first draft music curriculum for Grade Six were announced, one was Glen Miller of “In the Mood” fame, and the other?  Not Oscar, not even local musician Tommy Banks, but Mart Kenny who didn’t even live in Alberta, and only recorded two records to Oscar’s 200 recordings spanning over 60 years, 7 Grammy awards and the first Canadian pianist to receive the Glenn Gould prize for music, not to mention the Order of Canada.  Mart Kenny’s biggest claim to fame other than the song “When I Get Back to Calgary” was being the grandfather of our current premier.  Both musicians were white, and we all know that many of the best jazz musicians were and are people of color.  So, racism is still here in Canada, sometimes subtly as in our curriculum, sometimes blatantly as demonstrated by some of the protesters in Ottawa, or regularly as related by Albertan United Church clergy of color.  And we are called to be as determined as Jesus, and as committed as Oscar Peterson, to use our privilege to challenge racism wherever we see it.  Black History month is a call to transfigure our awareness so that one day everyone will sing a song of freedom that will be true for all in the world.