Connectedness

I just got an email from an old musician friend named Arkady. 

My connection to him goes back almost 20 years when we used to play together in some of the fanciest halls and hotels in NY, as well as some of the, um, least fancy ones. 

I wasn't really in his league... he had been a big time classical star on clarinet in the Soviet Union, and had lived, eaten and breathed almost every other woodwind instrument and genre of music since coming to the US.  But he and I got along just fine, and I learned a lot playing in the horn section with him.

Considering all the Broadway, recording, and TV work he has been doing lately, I found it odd that his email was all about an award he had won way back when he was a student at the Manhattan School of Music.  The Award, which had been created by his clarinet teacher, Leon Russianoff, in memory of a former student, consisted of a simple certificate and $200 which was given to an outstanding clarinetist each year. 

It turns out that when Arkady had been studying music at Manhattan, he was largely innocent of any detailed information about recent American history.  He would later take a much greater interest in the story of his adopted homeland, but back then he was focused 24/7 on "playing perfectly, faster, louder, nice tone, ... ".

It wasn't until years later that someone explained to Arkady that the award he had hung on his wall next to his piano had been named in memory of a promising clarinetist who had been murdered during 'Freedom Summer' in the struggle over civil rights.  This was an interesting piece of information, but he still didn't make any particular connection to the name.

Then Arkady saw 'Mississippi Burning' and suddenly the name on his wall was thrust into a context that was impossible to ignore.  The award he had won was the Andrew Goodman Prize, and had been named in memory of one of the three civil rights activists (James Chaney, Andrew Goodman and Michael Schwerner), who's murders and murderers were depicted so movingly in the film.

In the years since seeing that film my friend has become a voracious student of American history and a fiercely proud US citizen.  I remember him telling me that the evening after he got his citizenship he proudly marched to the center of the Brooklyn Bridge with his saxophone and serenaded the passing motorists and pedestrians with a jazz rendition of the Star Spangled Banner!

It turns out that the reason Arkady emailed me was that an 80 year old former Ku Klux Klansman named Edger Ray Killen was finally convicted of manslaughter today in the deaths of Andrew Goodman and his two friends.  The three were ambushed and killed on June 21st, 1964 (although it would be 44 days before their bodies were discovered by the FBI)... and 41 years later, to the day, a jury handed down a long-overdue verdict.

As my friend Arkady said so eloquently about this verdict, "[It] won't be talked about as much as Michael Jackson's... but, as I see life connecting the dots, for me at least, what remains in my mind today is more about a young man, who, like me, tried to play perfect scales, looked for a good reed for his clarinet, prepared his weekly clarinet etudes, concertos or whatever he was working on with Leon Russianoff... ". 

With his email, my friend Arkady connected me to people and events that I had only experienced from books and movies.  For some reason, knowing a personal detail about one of them... that before he started off on his one-way journey to Mississippi, he had been a musician... like Arkady; and like me, made him more real... and more tragic.   I hope by reading about these things you will also take a bit of connectedness with you as you follow the predictably brief news coverage.

May the families of James Chaney, Andrew Goodman and Michael Schwerner take some small comfort from this bit of belated justice.