The Festival of Friendship as a Courtyard of the Gentiles

Road to the Temple, by Victor Zaretsky

In 2009, Pope Benedict XVI announced a new project, very dear to his heart, called the “Courtyard of the Gentiles.” His desire was to open a space for dialogue among peoples of different faiths or no faith. He described the modern world as "a windowless building of cement, in which man controls the temperature and the light; and yet, even in a self-constructed world, we draw upon the 'resources' of God, which we then transform into our own products. What can we say then? It is necessary to reopen the windows, to see again the vastness of the world, of heaven and earth, and to learn to use all things in a good way." This statement expresses our own vision at Revolution of Tenderness. Taking St. Paul's motto, "Test everything; keep what is good" as our own, we seek to reopen the windows Pope Benedict spoke of. Now, more than ever before, this is an urgent undertaking.

Pope Benedict XVI took, as his inspiration for the initiative, the name for the open air atrium at the Temple of Jerusalem, “a space in which everyone could enter, Jews and non-Jews, …[to engage] in a respectful and compassionate exchange. This was the Court of the Gentiles… a space that everyone could traverse and could remain in, regardless of culture, language or religious profession. It was a place of meeting and of diversity.” Our various initiatives, especially the Festival of Friendship, seek to provide similar spaces where “respectful and compassionate exchange” can happen.

Pope Benedict reminded us that Jesus said, “The Temple must be a house of prayer for all the nations (Mk 11: 17). Jesus was thinking of the ‘Court of the Gentiles,’ which he cleared of extraneous affairs so that it could be a free space for the Gentiles who wished to pray there to the one God... A place of prayer for all the peoples...”

In fact, Jesus would teach along the Eastern border of the Courtyard of the Gentiles, in a space called, “Solomon’s Portico,” where faithful Jews and nonbelievers alike could listen to his teaching and ask him questions. After his Ascension into heaven, St. Peter and the other Christians continued the tradition of meeting in this sacred space of public dialogue: “Many signs and wonders were done among the people at the hands of the apostles. They were all together in Solomon’s portico” (Acts 5:12).

In explaining the problem contemporary men and women face today, Pope Benedict XVI wrote, “The limit is no longer between those who believe and those who do not believe in God, but between those who want to defend humanity and life, the humanity of each person, and those who want to suffocate humanity through utilitarianism, which could be material or spiritual. Is the border perhaps not between those who recognize the gift of culture and history, of grace and gratuity, and those who found everything on the cult of efficiency, be it scientific or spiritual?” (The Courtyard of the Gentiles, 2013).

The Pope emeritus concluded his remarks on the significance of opening a new Courtyard of the Gentiles with these insights: “The Courtyard of the Gentiles calls for the sharing of a common thirst in a universal, comprehensive, catholic perspective: the opening to each other as [what gives] dynamism to human life.” He called for, “respectful encounters, in sincere dialogue and in a passionate search.”

Come visit the Courtyard of the Gentiles that we have set up online this year. We want to welcome you to our own Solomon’s Portico so you can meet our friends and become one of them.  

St. Jude Novena: A Proposed Revision

“St Jude Thaddeus,” by Georges de la Tour, 1650

How are novenas effective? What does a novena actually do?

“I used to pray that God would feed the hungry, or do this or that, but now I pray that he will guide me to do whatever I'm supposed to do, what I can do. I used to pray for answers, but now I'm praying for strength. I used to believe that prayer changes things, but now I know that prayer changes us and we change things.” St. Teresa of Kolkata

We could think of a novena as a nine-day preparation to celebrate a liturgical feast. Like a “little Advent,” the novena could help to purify and convert our hearts so that we can find ourselves in the strongest possible position to receive the graces that Christ wants to offer us through the intercession of a particular saint. The Eucharist, as the source and summit of our faith life, provides the richest, most effective food for prayer life.

If we look at novenas in this way, perhaps the best texts for us to meditate on in the days leading up to the celebration of a particular liturgical Memorial or Solemnity would be those ancient prayers that the Church herself gives us through the Roman Missal and the Breviary. To compose a novena from these rich sources could offer us a powerful method for growing in love and holiness. Following this logic, we’d like to offer an alternative to the “traditional” Novena to St. Jude, one that is paradoxically more deeply rooted in Tradition because it is based on the Rites and liturgical prayers that the Church has ordained for the celebration of the saint’s feast day.

Day One (Beginning today): “Our Lord Jesus Christ has appointed certain men, including the holy apostle, St. Jude Thaddeus, to be guides and teachers of the world and stewards of his divine mysteries” (From a commentary on the gospel of John by St Cyril of Alexandria, bishop).

O God, who by the blessed Apostles
have brought us to acknowledge your name,
graciously grant,
through the intercession of Saint Jude,
a holy man whom you chose in your own perfect love,
that the Church may constantly grow
by increase of the peoples who believe in you.
For you, eternal Shepherd,
do not desert your flock,
but through the blessed Apostles
watch over it and protect it always,
so that it may be governed
by those you have appointed shepherds,
like St. Jude Thaddeus, to lead it.
We glorify your name, through our Lord Jesus Christ, your Son,
who lives and reigns with you in the unity of the Holy Spirit,
one God, for ever and ever.

Our Father, Hail Mary, Glory Be

Day Two:  “Now the Lord bids his holy apostles, like St. Jude, to shine out like lamps and to cast out their light not only over the land of the Jews but over every country under the sun and over people scattered in all directions and settled in distant lands” (From a commentary on the gospel of John by St Cyril of Alexandria, bishop).

O God, who by the blessed Apostles
have brought us to acknowledge your name,
graciously grant,
through the intercession of Saint Jude,
a holy man whom you chose in your own perfect love,
that the Church may constantly grow
by increase of the peoples who believe in you.
For you have built your Church
to stand firm on apostolic foundations,
to be a lasting sign of your holiness on earth,
and, like St. Jude, offer all humanity your heavenly teaching.
Through our Lord Jesus Christ, your Son,
who lives and reigns with you in the unity of the Holy Spirit,
one God, for ever and ever.

Our Father, Hail Mary, Glory Be

Day Three: “That man has spoken truly who said: ‘No one takes honor upon himself, except the one who is called by God,’ for it was our Lord Jesus Christ who called his own disciples, including St. Jude, before all others to a most glorious apostolate” (From a commentary on the gospel of John by St Cyril of Alexandria, bishop).

O God, who by the blessed Apostles
have brought us to acknowledge your name,
graciously grant,
through the intercession of Saint Jude,
a holy man whom you chose in your own perfect love,
that the Church may constantly grow
by increase of the peoples who believe in you.
We humbly implore you in the Holy Spirit,
that what we do to honor the glorious passion
of the Apostle Jude
may keep us ever in your love.
Through our Lord Jesus Christ, your Son,
who lives and reigns with you in the unity of the Holy Spirit,
one God, for ever and ever.

Our Father, Hail Mary, Glory Be

Day Four: “St Jude Thaddeus, along with Christ’s other disciples, became the pillar and mainstay of the truth” (From a commentary on the gospel of John by St Cyril of Alexandria, bishop).

O God, who by the blessed Apostles
have brought us to acknowledge your name,
graciously grant,
through the intercession of Saint Jude,
a holy man whom you chose in your own perfect love,
that the Church may constantly grow
by increase of the peoples who believe in you.
And may he who has endowed us
with the teaching and example of the Apostle Jude Thaddeus,
make us, under his protection,
witnesses to the truth before all.
Through our Lord Jesus Christ, your Son,
who lives and reigns with you in the unity of the Holy Spirit,
one God, for ever and ever.

Our Father, Hail Mary, Glory Be

Day Five: “Jesus said that he was sending his apostles, just as the Father had sent him. By these words he is making clear the dignity of the apostolate and the incomparable glory of the power given to them, but he is also giving them a hint about the methods they are to adopt in their apostolic mission” (From a commentary on the gospel of John by St Cyril of Alexandria, bishop).

O God, who by the blessed Apostles
have brought us to acknowledge your name,
graciously grant,
through the intercession of Saint Jude,
a holy man whom you chose in your own perfect love,
that the Church may constantly grow
by increase of the peoples who believe in you.
Through the intercession of the Apostle Jude Thaddeus,
may we inherit the eternal homeland,
for by his teaching we possess firmness of faith.
Through our Lord Jesus Christ, your Son,
who lives and reigns with you in the unity of the Holy Spirit,
one God, for ever and ever.

Our Father, Hail Mary, Glory Be

Day Six: “Christ interpreted the character of his mission to us in a variety of ways. Once he said: ‘I have come to call not the righteous but sinners to repentance.’ And then at another time he said: ‘I have come down from heaven, not to do my own will, but the will of him who sent me. For God sent his Son into the world, not to condemn the world, but that the world might be saved through him’” (From a commentary on the gospel of John by St Cyril of Alexandria, bishop).

O God, who by the blessed Apostles
have brought us to acknowledge your name,
graciously grant,
through the intercession of Saint Jude,
a holy man whom you chose in your own perfect love,
that the Church may constantly grow
by increase of the peoples who believe in you.
Christ says: ‘Whoever loves me will keep my word;
and my Father will love him, and we will come to him,
and make our home with him.’
We ask for this grace, just as St. Jude received it,
through our Lord Jesus Christ, your Son,
who lives and reigns with you in the unity of the Holy Spirit,
one God, for ever and ever.

Our Father, Hail Mary, Glory Be

Day Seven: “For if Christ thought it necessary to send out St. Jude, along with his other intimate disciples in this fashion, just as the Father had sent him, then surely it was necessary that they whose mission was to be patterned on that of Jesus should see exactly why the Father had sent the Son” (From a commentary on the gospel of John by St Cyril of Alexandria, bishop).

O God, who by the blessed Apostles
have brought us to acknowledge your name,
graciously grant,
through the intercession of Saint Jude,
a holy man whom you chose in your own perfect love,
that the Church may constantly grow
by increase of the peoples who believe in you.
Father, you wanted your Son to be seen first by the apostles
after the resurrection from the dead;
we ask you to make us, just as you did for St. Jude,
his witnesses to the farthest corners of the world.
Through our Lord Jesus Christ, your Son,
who lives and reigns with you in the unity of the Holy Spirit,
one God, for ever and ever.

Our Father, Hail Mary, Glory Be

Day Eight: “Accordingly, in affirming that St Jude and the other apostles are sent by him just as he was sent by the Father, Christ sums up in a few words the approach they themselves should take to their ministry” (From a commentary on the gospel of John by St Cyril of Alexandria, bishop).

O God, who by the blessed Apostles
have brought us to acknowledge your name,
graciously grant,
through the intercession of Saint Jude,
a holy man whom you chose in your own perfect love,
that the Church may constantly grow
by increase of the peoples who believe in you.
You sent your Son to preach your good news to the poor.
Just as St. Jude did,
help us to preach this Gospel to every creature.
Through our Lord Jesus Christ, your Son,
who lives and reigns with you in the unity of the Holy Spirit,
one God, for ever and ever.

Our Father, Hail Mary, Glory Be

Day Nine: “From what Christ proclaimed, St Jude and the other disciples would gather that it was their vocation to call sinners to repentance, to heal those who were sick whether in body or spirit, to seek in all their dealings never to do their own will but the will of him who sent them, and as far as possible to save the world by their teaching” (From a commentary on the gospel of John by St Cyril of Alexandria, bishop).

O God, who by the blessed Apostles
have brought us to acknowledge your name,
graciously grant,
through the intercession of Saint Jude,
a holy man whom you chose in your own perfect love,
that the Church may constantly grow
by increase of the peoples who believe in you.
You sent your Son to sow the seed of unending life:
grant that we, following St. Jude’s example,
work at sowing the seed, may share the joy of the harvest.
You sent your Son to reconcile all to you through his blood:
help us all to work toward achieving this reconciliation.

Through our Lord Jesus Christ, your Son,
who lives and reigns with you in the unity of the Holy Spirit,
one God, for ever and ever.

Our Father, Hail Mary, Glory Be

Loyalty to a Fact

by Suzanne M. Lewis

When I was 17, I had an internship at the Justice Department and would have to get a connecting train at Foggy Bottom as part of my commute. One afternoon, I was standing on the platform about 5 steps behind a man in a suit. We were the only ones on the platform. I saw him lift his sleeve to check his watch, so I called out to him, "Excuse me, sir, can you please tell me the time?" He didn't answer, so I raised my voice, "Excuse me, what time is it, sir?!" Still no response! So I shouted in exasperation, "HEY MISTER WHAT TIME IS IT?!!!!!" Can you believe he still didn't answer?! I thought some pretty rotten things about him and his suit and his watch (which I did not say out loud). Then another man approached the first one, tapped him on the shoulder, and the two began a very animated conversation... with their HANDS… in American Sign Language. Man, did I feel stupid and ashamed.

My laptop recently crashed; despite all my best efforts, I could not revive it. I drove an hour and then waited 3 hours for help at the Apple store. Finally Mike from tech support came out to examine my machine. He asked me what was wrong, listened with compassion, then plugged in the computer and pushed start... and it started. Evidently it hadn't been plugged in all the way. I said, "Was that the easiest fix of your whole evening?" And he lied: "No.” Then he ran diagnostics on the laptop and shared useful information so that I didn't feel I'd gone all the way out there and waited so long for nothing.

Mike saw more that evening than I had been able to see back at age 17 in Foggy Bottom. While Mike could have no idea of my current circumstances or what may or may not be preoccupying me, he treated me like a person who could have perfectly valid reasons to make the mistake I made. Rather than judging me to be stupid, he suspended that judgment. Mike is today’s Revolutionary of Tenderness.

Faith isn't "believing" that the other person could be coming from an entirely different circumstance in which there are good reasons not to recognize that one's computer needs to be plugged back in. Faith is loyalty to a fact: the knowledge that the other person is a mystery, who might be struggling or disabled, and who therefore needs to be approached with respect, compassion, and tenderness. Faith is the capacity to see all the factors at play - including those that are invisible and yet true. 

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“A Woman’s Life” Program Note from Richard Danielpour

Soprano Angela Brown and composer Richard Danielpour at a Nashville dress rehearsal for “A Woman’s Life,” a song cycle composed by Danielpour on the poems of Dr. Maya Angelou. Register for “A Woman’s Life,” an online performance by soprano, Angel Riley, on October 17 at 7:30pm Eastern. Richard Danielpour will be available for a live Q&A session immediately following the concert. Tickets are free, but preregistration is required. Photo by Mitzi Matlock

Full program note from Richard Danielpour:

A WOMAN’S LIFE was composed in the summer of 2008, roughly 2 years after a meeting with Maya Angelou, at her town house in Harlem. I had mentioned to her that the Philadelphia Orchestra and the Pittsburgh Symphony were commissioning me to write a work for Angela Brown. Angela had sung the role of Cilla in the Premiere run and in subsequent performances of my opera Margaret Garner. I had an idea of approaching Dr. Angelou, who had been a friend for many years, of a song cycle for a voice and orchestra that would show the trajectory of a woman’s life from childhood, to old age. She mentioned that this already existed, hidden, in her book of collected poems and promptly asked her assistant to furnish her a copy of her book. I was with my wife that afternoon, and she read seven poems to us, sometimes clapping in rhythm with the poems, sometimes repeating lines of the poem that were not actually repeated in the text. By the time she finished, I was in tears. It was one of the greatest performances in my life that I had ever witnessed.

Writing the work was relatively straightforward after having memorized the way she read these poems so eloquently and so beautifully. It was not until I finished the score that I realized that I was writing about her life, about the life of Maya Angelou. Now many years later, I understand that it is not only about Dr. Angelou’s life but also about the lives of many women who in their struggles and suffering have managed to prevail.

The Pittsburgh Symphony premiered this 24-minute cycle in October 2009. Subsequent performances by the Philadelphia Orchestra and many other American orchestras have occurred since that time.

Richard Danielpour, October, 2020

An Interview with Angel Riley

In the Particular, We Discover the Universal

Angel Riley is an emerging American soprano embarking on a promising career. Angel’s exciting stage presence and rich vocal color distinguish her performances, resulting in her winning a coveted position as a 2020 Gerdine Young Artist with the Opera Theatre of St. Louis. Register to attend Angel Riley’s October 17 (7:30pm curtain) performance of A Woman’s Life: A Song Cycle by Richard Danielpour on the Poems of Maya Angelou. This concert is free, but requires preregistration.

by Meghan Isaacs

On October 17, the Festival of Friendship will present a song cycle by prominent American composer Richard Danielpour, entitled A Woman’s Life, to be performed by soprano Angel Riley, accompanied by Lucy Tucker Yates on piano. The seven-movement work draws on the poetry of Dr. Maya Angelou, and like so much of Dr. Angelou’s oeuvre, presents a very particular experience that manages to resonate universally.

Danielpour set out to compose a song cycle for soprano Angela Brown, and already had Dr. Angelou’s poetry in mind as the libretto when he met with the poet at her townhouse in Harlem. When he asked Angelou if she could provide the text, she immediately knew which poems to select. “I was with my wife that afternoon, and [Dr. Angelou] read seven poems to us, sometimes clapping in rhythm with the poems, sometimes repeating lines of the poem that were not actually repeated in the text. By the time she finished, I was in tears. It was one of the greatest performances in my life that I had ever witnessed,” said Danielpour.

Several years after the premiere of A Woman’s Life, emerging young soprano Angel Riley, then a vocal performance student at UCLA, first encountered Danielpour’s music through a performance of his oratorio The Passion of Yeshua, in which she participated with the UCLA chorus. Provoked by his musical language, Riley reached out to Danielpour, who suggested she explore A Woman’s Life. Riley went on to engage in an independent study with Danielpour, during which she (along with Yates as pianist) worked through much of the song cycle under the composer’s guidance. Riley (who recently completed her Master’s degree with aims to begin an artist’s diploma program in fall of 2021) took time to reflect on the music and what it has to say to audiences today. 

Tell us about your relationship to A Woman’s Life?

I’ve been with this work for a while now, and I guess the most important thing about this set is that it follows the life of an everyday Black woman in America, and it sheds a positive light on her experience. Richard Danielpour wrote this set for Angela Brown as a thank you gift for performing in his opera Margaret Garner. They both thought it was important to present a work strictly relating to Black women due to the lack of positive portrayals in art and media. This set is so important and unique in that each of the songs comes from a Black woman’s perspective. Dr. Angelou was specifically committed to uplifting Black women in her life. Because of her poetry you see this uplifting of Black women, and Danielpour’s setting of the text really highlights that.

 Do you have a favorite song in the cycle, or one you feel you most relate to?

 My favorite is the second of the set: “Life Doesn’t Frighten Me.” It’s my favorite, but it’s so difficult for the pianist. I try to capture a young Josephine Baker-type feeling. It talks about all these things — “I’m not afraid of anything; I’m confident; I’m young; There’s nothing you can do to me.”

 My other favorite is the very last piece “Many And More.” Specifically, this piece signifies a woman in old age who, although her life did not turn out the way she thought it would, manages to find joy and peace in knowing that there are many men who she’s deserving of but who are not deserving of her. In the fourth movement, she’s confident in her womanhood and sexuality, but feels like she doesn’t need to be bogged down—she can have many men. But by the final piece, she’s gone through love and she’s lost. In the end she found comfort in knowing that she doesn’t necessarily need a man and she can find peace in God. To me, it’s significant: how you can go through life, and your ideas and thoughts about what you want can change. It really signifies wisdom to me.

What was your relationship to the writing of Maya Angelou prior to this performance?

 I have always read through her collected poems. I would literally just watch videos of her reciting her poems on YouTube. I’ve often watched her lectures too because she just imparts so much wisdom.

What does this song cycle have to say to our society today?

Just in the way our society is organized, the Black woman is at the bottom. This is a set that intentionally uplifts the Black woman and sheds a positive light on Black women in America. These are beautiful images of a Black woman who has lived, loved, learned, and lost. It is spiritually refreshing and culturally uplifting to Black women in America. 

The theme of this festival is “You Will Be Found.” Was does that mean for you? How does this song cycle speak to that?

Although this piece represents Black women, I think the text is so vivid and colorful that everybody can find something in the set that they can relate to. It’s going to make the audience feel something and learn something.

“Do Not Cast Me Off in Time of Old Age”

Register for Do Not Cast Me Off inTime of Old Age, a panel discussion on 6pm, Sunday, October 11, 2020.

By Stephen G. Adubato

“‘Do not cast me off in the time of old age; forsake me not when my strength is spent’ (Ps 71:9). This is the plea of the elderly, who fear being forgotten and rejected. Just as God asks us to be his means of hearing the cry of the poor, so too he wants us to hear the cry of the elderly” (Amoris Laetitia 191).

The COVID-19 pandemic has shed light on and exacerbated the effects of our indifference toward senior citizens, and, in the words of the Pope, have exposed “our vulnerability and uncovered those false and superfluous certainties around which we have constructed our daily schedules, our projects, our habits and priorities...it lays bare all our prepackaged ideas and forgetfulness of what nourishes our people’s souls; all those attempts that anesthetize us with ways of thinking and acting that supposedly ‘save’ us, but instead prove incapable of putting us in touch with our roots and keeping alive the memory of those who have gone before us.”

I myself must admit that I’ve fallen temptation to the cult of “superfluous certainties” and self-affirmation. Especially during my  college years, I felt the need to do and acquire “glamorous” things in order to feel like I had value. This anxiety became increasingly sharp around the time I finished college. I was confronted with my waning youth and the dawn of my adulthood. 

Around the same time, my grandparents were becoming increasingly sick. They needed me to spend more time taking care of them, and this competed directly with my aspirations of living it up on the weekends. 

I remember one weekend I had to give up going to a birthday party so I could stay with them, and while they were napping I started reading the Pope’s latest encyclical, Amoris Laetitia. In it, Francis challenged the postmodern cult of youth and condemned the “throwaway culture” that discards the least productive and most vulnerable in our society, especially the poor, the unborn, and the elderly. 

I was challenged by his words. The Pope was proposing that human life has value not just when it’s “useful” or glamorous, but just because it exists. He was also proposing that the fulfillment of our time is not the ideal of efficiency, pleasure, or personal gain, but charity, the gift of self to the point of sacrifice. This flew in the face of the cult of ephemeral pleasure that I had gotten trapped into. I decided to test out the Pope’s proposal through the time I was spending with my grandparents. 

I soon started to discover that, although I often got impatient, the time I was spending with them brought out a tenderness and gentleness in me that I didn’t know myself to be capable of. And while it indeed required a sacrifice, I slowly started to find myself more fulfilled by spending my time making a gift of myself than by “living it up.” On top of that, I was learning from my grandparents’ wisdom about my family roots, my culture, and life in general. 

Soon after, I decided it would be worthwhile to add more senior day cares to my school’s community service program, which I coordinate. I wanted more students to be able to interact with the elderly. I started searching on Google for centers in Newark, only to find out that many of them had negative reviews complaining of maltreatment and unprofessionalism. 

Eventually, I found one center that had very few reviews and a website that hadn’t been updated in quite some time. I took the risk of reaching out, hesitantly, to the owner. She responded enthusiastically, claiming that my email was an answered prayer. She had been looking for opportunities to have young people volunteer with the seniors. After the first week of sending my students there, I was amazed by what I saw happened to them. 

Thumbelina Newsome, the director, walks into the center and greets everyone with an overflowing gaze of joy (hence the center’s name. Joy Cometh in the Morning). She approaches each of the seniors, even the grumpiest and most handicapped, as if they were a gift sent to her from above. How does she see such beauty in people who our society tends to write off as useless burdens? Not only this, but she imparted this joy to my students, who initially thought they were going to be stuck working at a “boring community service site with old people.”

I invited Thumbelina to speak about the topic of elder care at an event last year along with Regina Kasun NP, the sister of a dear friend, who works for a geriatric house calls program in Virginia. I invited them to speak once again at this year’s Festival of Friendship, along with my former professor Dr. Charles Camosy, a moral theologian and bioethicist who has written about the Consistent Life Ethic (CLE) and the throwaway culture. During the COVID-19 pandemic, he has written extensively about the dire situations that many senior citizens are facing in nursing homes, challenging the throwaway mentality which allows them to be tossed to the margins of society.

Join us at 6 pm EST on Sunday, October 11th to hear them share their thoughts and experiences. The panel will be followed by a live Q+A session on Hopin.

The City Where Jazz is Love

Guest post by Deanna Witkowski

The Deanna Witkowski Trio will perform songs by jazz great, Mary Lou Williams during an exclusive free online concert at the Festival of Friendship, on Sunday, October 4, 2020 at 7:30pm. The concert will be offered at no cost, but registration is required. To sign up, please see the Revolution of Tenderness homepage.

The following essay first appeared on Deanna Witkowski’s website. View the original article: “The City Where Jazz is Love.”

A community mural project along the east busway portrays Mary Lou Williams.

There is something about “place” that can only be experienced and then, to a lesser extent, written about. Place seeps into our bodies, minds, spirits; affects our breath, our gait, our sense of how much space is available for us to take up on the sidewalk, in the grocery store, in a jazz club. New York and Pittsburgh are two very different places. Mary lived in both of them and now I’m following her history in parallel by spending time in her hometown.

Mary’s niece Bobbie Ferguson, who currently lives in Pittsburgh, once told me that Mary would come back here to relax, to be with family. While she occasionally performed here- and, indeed, co-founded the first Pittsburgh Jazz Festival in 1964- she visited to be with and to care for her loved ones. Occasionally Mary would bring clothes that she couldn’t sell at her thrift shop, stuffing them into her Cadillac and trying to sell them in the ‘Burgh. Sometimes she left Pittsburgh with family in tow, absconding with her sister Grace and her six children, taking them back to Manhattan to live in her Harlem apartment when they were in need.

It was in Pittsburgh where Mary learned in the fall of 1965 that her beloved spiritual director, Fr. Anthony Woods, SJ, had died of a heart attack at the age of 53. Mary got back in her Cadillac to return to New York in time for the funeral. It was also in Pittsburgh where Mary worked with Cardinal John J. Wright and Father Michael Williams of the Catholic Youth Organization. It was here where she taught at Seton High School and led thirteen girls from Seton in singing her first Mass in 1967 at the mammoth Saint Paul Cathedral in Oakland.

From the Pittsburgh Courier, April 18, 1964

Many of these historical tidbits used to be bullet points that I tried to keep straight in my mind. But over the course of four trips to Pittsburgh since last December, and now during this extended stay, I am aware that these histories are part of the fabric that I walk in and among each day. I’ve attended Mass at Saint Paul and visualized Mary in that space; seen the old Crawford Grill- a place where, to my knowledge, Mary did not play, but knew of its centrality in the jazz community and the Hill District; fleetingly seen Mary’s face on a roadside mural while on a bus after worshiping at the welcoming Saint Benedict the Moor parish, where I stood up and introduced myself during the “welcome new visitors,” and where an older woman came up to me after Mass and said that she knew Mary. Others came up, saying that they saw me play Mary’s music with the Pittsburgh Symphony back in the spring; one man asked for advice for his twelve-year-old son who is writing songs. When I left, they said, “see you next week.”

With Pittsburgh Jazz Legends, Dr. James Johnson, Jr and George C. Jones.

It’s this welcoming, embracing aspect of Pittsburgh that I hear in Mary’s music. This city has produced so many titans of the jazz world, and its current jazz community is rightfully proud of its history. Last week I attended an event at Manchester Craftsmen’s Guild where five musicians were inducted into the MCG Pittsburgh Jazz Legend Hall of Fame which now includes twenty-nine stalwarts of the music. A few days later I saw my friend Dr. Harry Clark at an event sponsored by the African-American Jazz Preservation Society of Pittsburgh of which Dr. Clark is the president. Last December, Dr. Clark drove me through the Hill District, showing me the Crawford Grill and explaining the history of the formerly segregated musicians’ unions in this city.

At both of these events- where I am a visitor here to learn- I was invited to sit in and play. And both times, immediately after playing, older musicians came up to me wanting to talk, giving me hugs, offering heartfelt praise with the soul inflected acronyms that I won’t publish here. Essentially, the vibe is, “damn, girl, you can play that piano.”

From my first short visit to Pittsburgh two years ago for a conference- and the first and only time I visited (and sat in at) the now defunct James Street pub where drummer Roger Humphries held court on Thursday nights, I felt the warm vibe of this place and knew that I had to come back. It was a vibe that said, “you are making us feel something with your music and we are right there with you. We want you to keep playing and you are welcome here anytime.” This emotional directness- both in the music itself and in the response to it- is what I hear in Mary’s drenched-in-the-blues-and-damn-girl-you-can-swing playing and in what I feel in the response to my own work. It’s what I hear when one of the elder statesmen in the MCG Jazz Hall of Fame comments, “You’re here for two months? We have to find you an apartment so that you can stay here longer!” It’s what I feel when I walk into Con Alma, the city’s newest Pittsburgh-centric jazz club, and hear in owner and guitarist John Shannon’s playing and in conversation between listening to vinyl supplied by equally swinging drummer Thomas Wendt. It’s guitarist Mark Strickland melting me with his chord voicing and telling me that I am a bad MF (yes, I said it).

Next to the Teenie Harris photo of Mary Lou at Con Alma.

Mary Lou Williams often said “jazz is love.” She allowed music to flow through her mind to her heart to her fingertips and then out to everyone who listened. Her music healed people and created community. When I sit down at the piano bench or the Rhodes at Con Alma underneath her Teenie Harris photo, I send a quick prayer to Mary, thanking her that she is with me, and then I start pressing down the keys, letting the sound, the space, the history, the everything-it-has-taken-me-to-get-to-this-moment all come out. And I hope that Mary is smiling with me.

Deanna spoke with WZUM host Scott Hanley about Mary Lou Williams and her Pittsburgh stay. Hear the interview here.

Conviviality and Duende at the Festival of Friendship Last Night

Camille Zamora, Lucy Tucker Yates, and Suzanne Lewis: a miraculous convidad at the Festival of Friendship

by Suzanne M. Lewis

Last night, we could not stop exclaiming at the wonder of being together, despite everything.

And now I am a bowling pin, who would give all nine companions in exchange for the chance to remain in this state of having been knocked over, floored, absolutely pinned under the weight of the overmastering JOY I experienced at the Festival of Friendship last evening.

I wrote to Camille and Lucy, once Camille’s musical offering, If the Night Grows Dark had ended, “Where are the words to thank you adequately for ... being YOU?? Because this is what you did for us all last night: you showed us what it means to be out in the world pursuing our passions, living out loud, expressing all our affections – and all without any disguises.”

Isn't it interesting how some, who howl loudest about the need to wear face coverings to stop the spread of contagion, are often the same ones who spend most of their lives masking who they are, tamping down (or screaming over) their duende, hiding their true faces behind a crust of postures, ideologies, and psychological props?

Last night I learned anew that when I experience the gift of a person who is unambiguously and vitally herself, I become more myself:

it's

so damn sweet when Anybody-
yes;no

matter who, […]

or simply Is
what makes
you feel you
aren't

6 or 6
teen or sixty
000,000
anybodyelses-

but for once

(imag
-ine)

You

– E. E. Cummings

Where are the words to express the gratitude we feel when this experience finds us? It’s so damn sweet… In this moment, I feel that “thank you” is the most impoverished, meager phrase I know.

Spanish Soul: The Legacy of Graciano Tarragó

Soprano Camille Zamora

By Camille Zamora

Camille Zamora's performance of these Spanish art songs, from her album, If the Night Grows Dark, will be presented on Saturday, October 3, 2020 at 7:30pm. This online presentation will be offered at no cost, but registration is required. To sign up, please see the Revolution of Tenderness homepage at www.revolutionoftenderness.net

Music informs identity. The little tune that floats into an open window from the street below, the lullaby that vibrates in a low hum from a nearby room, the half-remembered refrain of a long-ago love song — these souvenirs in sound tell us where we’re from and where we’re going. And in sharing our songs of joy, sorrow, passion, and peace, we reconnect with ourselves and each other, and rediscover who we really are.

Composers have long taken inspiration from homegrown tunes. Classical standard-bearers from Haydn to Beethoven crafted countless arrangements of folksongs, and the Romantics who followed — Brahms, Bruckner, Tchaikovsky, Mahler, Franck, Saint-Saëns — breathed new life into symphonic forms through their use of regional song. In folksong, they discovered the sinuous, singable melodies and bracing rhythms that refreshed their concert halls like so many country breezes.

During the first decades of the 20th century, composers intensified what Australian composer/arranger Percy Grainger called their “folk-fishing trips.” (Grainger himself had traveled the back roads of the British isles in 1905, early phonograph in hand, recording elderly villagers in nearly forgotten ballads, shanties, and lullabies.) As industrialization and urban migration continued to erode rural identity, more composers began to tap their musical roots and notate what previously had been a purely oral tradition of cradle, campfire, and countryside.

Composers including Dvořák, Holst, Vaughan Williams, Britten, Bartók, and Kodály ushered in a nationalist music movement that sought to preserve what totalitarian regimes were threatening. Later, the use of regional song in the work of Hindemith, Lutoslawski, Górecki, and others became a deeply personal way to assert identity and register protest. These local musical expressions would blossom in the “Singing Revolutions” of Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania, contributing to the end of Soviet rule.

Graciano Tarragó (1892–1973) was among the 20th century composers who mined their countries’ musical gold, in his case against the backdrop of Franco’s Spain. A teacher, composer, arranger, and performer, Tarragó was part of the lineage of Catalonian guitar maestros — from Fernando Sor to Francisco Tárrega to his own teacher, Miguel Llobet — whose contributions elevated the guitar from humble “tavern accompanist” to serious solo instrument deserving of dedicated study and nuanced composition.

Tarragó’s studio at Barcelona’s Conservatori del Liceu nurtured a generation of Spanish musicians that included his daughter, the virtuosa Renata Tarragó, and the young soprano Victoria de los Angeles. Working within the Late Romantic aesthetic of his youth, he delved into Spain’s two particular motherlodes: its early music treasury and its rich folk tradition. From these complementary veins, he forged an inimitable Spanish voice.

For Tarragó, who played Renaissance vihuela in addition to guitar, early music was an artistic touchstone. The musicologist Felip Pedrell had recently recovered the compositions of Renaissance master Tomás Luis de Victoria (“the Spanish Palestrina”) and his contemporaries, offering new clues to the origins of Spanish musical identity. The perfectly balanced contrapuntal and harmonic elements of this early repertoire spoke to Tarragó’s direct style and honed technique. In arranging these works, he found a purity of musical structure that demanded utmost tonal clarity and focus. Like Bach’s arias, Tarragó’s arrangements of these pieces locate their magic, as well as their difficulty, in their deceptive simplicity.

By contrast, Tarragó’s folksong arrangements offer the fiery, extroverted elements typically associated with Spanish sound: driving dance rhythms, exotic flamenco scales reminiscent of their Arab origins, and impassioned, quasi-improvisatory flourishes. Many of these songs are colored by flamenco cante jondo (literally “deep singing”), with arching melismatic phrases that soar and plunge to express tenderness, longing, and desire. In these works, we hear what the composer Isaac Albéniz referred to as the essence “of the people, our Spanish people… color, sunlight, flavor of olives… like the carvings in the Alhambra, those peculiar arabesques that say nothing with their turns and shapes, but which are like the air, like the sun, like the blackbirds, like the nightingales in the gardens…”

My own journey with Tarragó began on a hot afternoon in Madrid when, taking refuge from the midday sun in a dusty music shop on a side street, I stumbled across some out-of-print folios. My Texan-Spanish-New-Yorker self recognized in the yellowed pages certain essential parts of my own musical makeup: the canciones my father sang to me as a child, the stories of my grandfather serenading my grandmother, and my very first classical album featuring Victoria de los Angeles singing zarzuela in her crystalline soprano. (The fact that her family hailed from the town of Zamora allowed me to imagine her as my angelic distant cousin.)

Flipping through those old scores that afternoon and humming under my breath, I fell in love with the songs. I could hear the light-dark Spanish sensibility built into the melodies as into the chiaroscuro of my voice — the quicksilver vacillations between major and minor, the deep shadows even in the brightest noon, the cocina counterpoint of comfort and spice, the awareness of sorrow in joy and joy in sorrow.

I bought all the collections I could get my hands on that day, and in the weeks that followed, I read through song after song, noticing one arranger’s name in particular: Graciano Tarragó. It was not a name I had heard before. Tarragó was virtually unmentioned in music history books, but I was struck by his gentle genius. Each song seemed an opera in miniature, a tiny window on a vast world of emotion, identity, and story-telling. These were songs infused with duende, the heightened emotional/spiritual connection that exists in a realm beyond technique — what could be loosely translated as “soul.”

In Tarragó’s setting of the 16th century song “Si la noche se hace oscura” (“If the night grows dark”), we hear a woman’s soul. In her exposed opening phrases, she calls out to her love. The night is dark and the road is short, so why does he not come to her? She pours all of her vulnerability, tenderness, and desire into a melodic arc that rises and falls as inexorably as nightfall itself. It is a song of heartache and withdrawal. It is also a song of the quiet joy of choosing to love completely, with abandon, even in the face of separation and uncertainty. Delivered by Tarragó across centuries to this moment, to a world suddenly defined by lockdown and distancing, it feels like a gift.

Music can be a delivery system for shared hope, for individual passion, for ancestral coding, for peace. A simple song can allow us to send our voice, our breath, out across the night air, over hills and highways, to curl around our beloved in the darkness. Through song, Tarragó seems to say, we honor our teachers, our heritage, our hearts. Through song, we are restored to the people and places we love; we are restored, ultimately, to ourselves. Aun si la noche se hace oscura. Even if the night grows dark.

An Urgent Need to Learn How to Listen

by Suzanne M. Lewis

It's natural that this facebook post should kick up some irritation and dissent. My friend, David Mills, shared the post with this comment: “By the Catholic poet Clare McCallan. A good example of the way 1) the world is too much with us, so much so that we have no idea how much it's with us; and 2) we have images of the normal and normative that we've gotten entirely from our culture that we never think to question unless someone gets right in our face with it.”

Many people who commented on his post seemed offended by McCallan’s point of view. They claimed not to know what she was speaking about (which to their mind means it must be untrue). Many of the people who reacted to David’s post were older men, who do not inhabit her particular “zone” of the Church, nor her particular region of the internet; nonetheless, they reacted as though they were better authorities on her subject of critique than she herself. Some women felt that just because they themselves did not imagine a thin blonde when they did the thought experiment, the entire premise of the post was in error. Some dismissed McCallan on the grounds that proposing a thought experiment is offensive.

This defensive reaction is interesting. I don't belong to the subculture that McCallan refers to, and thus I did not think that I was being invited to see my own attitudes expressed by her characterization. This didn't lead me to believe that she is wrong or that I am somehow "in the clear" when it comes to the charge of entertaining stereotypes and other attitudes that could stand in the way of living out my faith in the most catholic way possible. Maybe I am much more used to being an outsider (having grown up an ex-pat for so long that being "ex" has actually become my "pat"), and thus I am able to "listen in" on other people's conversations without feeling personally implicated by every claim I overhear.

Isn't it interesting that this is how this young woman experiences being young, female, and Christian in this particular era? My first reaction when I read her critique was to want to invite her to a corner of the Church that I inhabit, a place that feels much freer, more open, and much more diverse than what she has experienced. I certainly don't doubt the veracity of her claim, though. Why should I? I haven't lived her experience.

But I also want to take her seriously and follow wherever her provocation leads, for me. So even if I don't see what she sees when I imagine what she asks, I do see something – and this can be instructive to me in the same ways that the stereotypes she has encountered have revealed to her a flaw in the collective faith life of the Church.

Whatever it is we "see" when we are invited to conjure up a representative image, is necessarily partial and will reflect something of the limitations of our own experience. There is only one method for overcoming these limitations and it is: listening. Paying attention. Granting respect and reverence to another's perspective. Always being poised to be able to learn from those with a different point of view.

The Festival of Friendship has become, for myself and my friends, a “School of Listening.” We don’t think of it as a “platform” where we can amplify voices we agree with. In fact, we often invite speakers and presenters from very different traditions and experiences. We want to step beyond the narrow confines of the comfort zones and categories into which the contemporary American expression of Catholicism can seem to be riven. In fact, we long to enter into and engage with the entire, catholic cosmos so we can encounter any and every good and loving aspect that can be found in creative human expression. We join our voices to St. Paul’s and urge one another to “test everything, keep what is good.” We invite you to embark on an adventure of discovery with us. You’ll thank us later ;)

Revolutionary of Tenderness: Padre Pio

Padre Pio of Pietrelcina

By guest writer, Ian Richard Shaefer

Growing up, when we’d visit my Italian-American mother’s relatives, a photo of Padre Pio was like a refrigerator to me: every house had one, but I never gave it much thought. At the same time, my very German paternal grandmother has kept a Padre Pio prayer book under her well-used rosary for as long as I remember. I never was particularly drawn to the charming smile of the sweet old Capuchin. His famous quote, “Pray, hope, and don’t worry,” seemed to me more like an inspirational bumper sticker than the deeply powerful truth I now understand it to be.

            Frankly, I was too comfortable. Fourteen-year-old me had his struggles and moments of suffering but was never really forced to face them as much as I would ten years later. Returning from one of the most beautiful years of my life as a student in Milan, Italy, and about to start a career in the United Nations in Rome, my life hit a hard brick wall when my doctors found a rare sort of tumor in my heart. My heart, the most vulnerable part of me that there is!

            From this devastating low, something – rather, someone – helped me up, put my nervously shaking hand in his bloody one, pointed to an empty tomb, and smiled at me with his charming smile. I don’t mean that Padre Pio visited in some mystical apparition, though. Rather, he kept visiting in the reality around me, and I simply began to pay attention. Little things prompted me to learn more about him: a painting at my parish by one of Padre Pio’s cousins; a chapel established in a nearby town; cards mailed from friends and family.

            All of these things increasingly felt like calls from a friend that I had been ignoring. Finally, in my need, I did answer; over time, I began to build a relationship with Padre Pio. Watching movies, reading about him online and in books, and going to pray at his chapel inspired my parents and I to make a pilgrimage to San Giovanni Rotondo after my chemotherapy treatments finished. There, I met the physical Padre Pio – not only in his relics, but also in the community that to this day carries on his simple, hopeful, and concrete works of love.

            I am now in the midst of a second battle with cancer, and while I’m grateful that things seem less threatening than the first time, my same fears remain. I’m consoled by the novena I’ve been praying, in anticipation of Padre Pio’s feast day, because I know he won’t withhold his help. I keep close to Padre Pio, who in his suffering with the stigmata has helped me see that God sometimes chooses to show His love with wounds. I remember that quote, “Pray, hope, and don’t worry,” and I try my best to live it. And I’d definitely put it on a bumper sticker on my car.

Revolutionary of Tenderness: St Matthew

By Joshua Stancil

The Calling of St Matthew by Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio, 1600

September 21: Feast of St Matthew

“When the Son of Man comes in his glory, and all the angels with him, then he will sit on the throne of his glory. All the nations will be gathered before him, and he will separate people one from another as a shepherd separates the sheep from the goats, and he will put the sheep at his right hand and the goats at the left. Then the king will say to those at his right hand, ‘Come, you that are blessed by my Father, inherit the kingdom prepared for you from the foundation of the world; for I was hungry and you gave me food, I was thirsty and you gave me something to drink, I was a stranger and you welcomed me, I was naked and you gave me clothing, I was sick and you took care of me, I was in prison and you visited me.’ Then the righteous will answer him, ‘Lord, when was it that we saw you hungry and gave you food, or thirsty and gave you something to drink? And when was it that we saw you a stranger and welcomed you, or naked and gave you clothing? And when was it that we saw you sick or in prison and visited you?’ And the king will answer them, ‘Truly I tell you, just as you did it to one of the least of these who are members of my family, you did it to me.’” (Mt 25:31-40, NRSVCE)

Back in early March, just days before the Covid lockdowns began, I was in Chicago for a series of talks sponsored by Kolbe House, the archdiocese’s prison ministry center. The topic of the talks was, of course, prison ministry. More specifically, it was the why of prison ministry. When asked, “Why should Catholics involve themselves in this outreach?” the answer is usually, “Well, it’s one of the Seven Corporal Works of Mercy.” Which of course it is – the Seven Corporal Works of Mercy being inspired precisely by this passage from Matthew’s Gospel.

But as I mentioned during my talk, I wonder if we appreciate the oddness that Jesus mentions prison in this discourse  recounted by Matthew. He sounds a strange note at the very end, a discordant coda. Hunger, thirst, loneliness, nakedness, illness – these are conditions that arouse our compassion because they generally afflict the innocent. Prison, however, is generally reserved for the guilty. Christ’s inclusion of the imprisoned – the guilty – can therefore seem a provocation.

Because it is a provocation.

What Christ is saying – and what strikes Matthew so acutely that he alone among the Evangelists will later recount the words – is that in this life we will always need food, we will always need water, we will always need companionship, we will always need clothing, and we will always need forgiveness, prison being the stark visual signifier of this need.

Why was Matthew the only Evangelist to remember these words? Why were they so important to him? Perhaps because Matthew, unique among the apostles, had been a tax collector for an occupying force, a sinner and traitor despised by his own people. He must have felt himself to be  a man bent crooked by the weight of his shame and the awareness of his own weakness and greed. But then Christ happened by. He visited Matthew in the prison of the man’s own limitations, a prison from which he had despaired of emerging. Jesus looked upon Matthew with a mercy that alone is the true catalyst for change. Two thousand years later St Maximilian Kolbe would describe this Christian phenomenon with a sparkling simplicity: “Only love creates.”

---

Festival of Friendship 2020

Nobody Flees From Love: The Making of Unguarded

Join us Saturday, October 10, at 6:00 p.m. for a look at the making of Unguarded, an extraordinary new documentary from Brooklyn-based filmmaker Simonetta d’Italia Wiener. Simonetta will be joined by T.J. Berden, the film’s Producer; Barbara Gagliotti, Foundations Office Director for AVSI-USA; Gisela Solymos, Coordinator for Productive Inclusion at SEBRAE SP; Esmeralda Negron, Assistant Public Defender for Florida’s 15th Judicial Circuit; and Denio Marx Menezes, Director of International Relations for FBAC.

The City Where Jazz is Love

http://deannajazz.com Deanna Witkowski Trio performs two compositions by Mary Lou Williams: What's Your Story, Morning Glory? and Ghost of Love Deanna Witkow...

Guest post by Deanna Witkowski

The Deanna Witkowski Trio will perform songs by jazz great, Mary Lou Williams during an exclusive free online concert at the Festival of Friendship, on Sunday, October 4, 2020 at 7:30pm. The concert will be offered at no cost, but registration is required. To sign up, please see the Revolution of Tenderness homepage.

The following essay first appeared on Deanna Witkowski’s website. View the original article: “The City Where Jazz is Love.”

A community mural project along the east busway portrays Mary Lou Williams.

There is something about “place” that can only be experienced and then, to a lesser extent, written about. Place seeps into our bodies, minds, spirits; affects our breath, our gait, our sense of how much space is available for us to take up on the sidewalk, in the grocery store, in a jazz club. New York and Pittsburgh are two very different places. Mary lived in both of them and now I’m following her history in parallel by spending time in her hometown.

Mary’s niece Bobbie Ferguson, who currently lives in Pittsburgh, once told me that Mary would come back here to relax, to be with family. While she occasionally performed here- and, indeed, co-founded the first Pittsburgh Jazz Festival in 1964- she visited to be with and to care for her loved ones. Occasionally Mary would bring clothes that she couldn’t sell at her thrift shop, stuffing them into her Cadillac and trying to sell them in the ‘Burgh. Sometimes she left Pittsburgh with family in tow, absconding with her sister Grace and her six children, taking them back to Manhattan to live in her Harlem apartment when they were in need.

It was in Pittsburgh where Mary learned in the fall of 1965 that her beloved spiritual director, Fr. Anthony Woods, SJ, had died of a heart attack at the age of 53. Mary got back in her Cadillac to return to New York in time for the funeral. It was also in Pittsburgh where Mary worked with Cardinal John J. Wright and Father Michael Williams of the Catholic Youth Organization. It was here where she taught at Seton High School and led thirteen girls from Seton in singing her first Mass in 1967 at the mammoth Saint Paul Cathedral in Oakland.

From the Pittsburgh Courier, April 18, 1964

Many of these historical tidbits used to be bullet points that I tried to keep straight in my mind. But over the course of four trips to Pittsburgh since last December, and now during this extended stay, I am aware that these histories are part of the fabric that I walk in and among each day. I’ve attended Mass at Saint Paul and visualized Mary in that space; seen the old Crawford Grill- a place where, to my knowledge, Mary did not play, but knew of its centrality in the jazz community and the Hill District; fleetingly seen Mary’s face on a roadside mural while on a bus after worshiping at the welcoming Saint Benedict the Moor parish, where I stood up and introduced myself during the “welcome new visitors,” and where an older woman came up to me after Mass and said that she knew Mary. Others came up, saying that they saw me play Mary’s music with the Pittsburgh Symphony back in the spring; one man asked for advice for his twelve-year-old son who is writing songs. When I left, they said, “see you next week.”

With Pittsburgh Jazz Legends, Dr. James Johnson, Jr and George C. Jones.

It’s this welcoming, embracing aspect of Pittsburgh that I hear in Mary’s music. This city has produced so many titans of the jazz world, and its current jazz community is rightfully proud of its history. Last week I attended an event at Manchester Craftsmen’s Guild where five musicians were inducted into the MCG Pittsburgh Jazz Legend Hall of Fame which now includes twenty-nine stalwarts of the music. A few days later I saw my friend Dr. Harry Clark at an event sponsored by the African-American Jazz Preservation Society of Pittsburgh of which Dr. Clark is the president. Last December, Dr. Clark drove me through the Hill District, showing me the Crawford Grill and explaining the history of the formerly segregated musicians’ unions in this city.

At both of these events- where I am a visitor here to learn- I was invited to sit in and play. And both times, immediately after playing, older musicians came up to me wanting to talk, giving me hugs, offering heartfelt praise with the soul inflected acronyms that I won’t publish here. Essentially, the vibe is, “damn, girl, you can play that piano.”

From my first short visit to Pittsburgh two years ago for a conference- and the first and only time I visited (and sat in at) the now defunct James Street pub where drummer Roger Humphries held court on Thursday nights, I felt the warm vibe of this place and knew that I had to come back. It was a vibe that said, “you are making us feel something with your music and we are right there with you. We want you to keep playing and you are welcome here anytime.” This emotional directness- both in the music itself and in the response to it- is what I hear in Mary’s drenched-in-the-blues-and-damn-girl-you-can-swing playing and in what I feel in the response to my own work. It’s what I hear when one of the elder statesmen in the MCG Jazz Hall of Fame comments, “You’re here for two months? We have to find you an apartment so that you can stay here longer!” It’s what I feel when I walk into Con Alma, the city’s newest Pittsburgh-centric jazz club, and hear in owner and guitarist John Shannon’s playing and in conversation between listening to vinyl supplied by equally swinging drummer Thomas Wendt. It’s guitarist Mark Strickland melting me with his chord voicing and telling me that I am a bad MF (yes, I said it).

Next to the Teenie Harris photo of Mary Lou at Con Alma.

Mary Lou Williams often said “jazz is love.” She allowed music to flow through her mind to her heart to her fingertips and then out to everyone who listened. Her music healed people and created community. When I sit down at the piano bench or the Rhodes at Con Alma underneath her Teenie Harris photo, I send a quick prayer to Mary, thanking her that she is with me, and then I start pressing down the keys, letting the sound, the space, the history, the everything-it-has-taken-me-to-get-to-this-moment all come out. And I hope that Mary is smiling with me.

Deanna spoke with WZUM host Scott Hanley about Mary Lou Williams and her Pittsburgh stay. Hear the interview here.

September 11 Revolutionary of Tenderness: Welles Remy Crowther

When we speak about sacrifice, we like to wrap it in reassuring words – words like “inspiration,” “courage,” “honor,” and “personal strength.” We dress it up in symbols and stirring orations. The photos of our contemporary martyrs tend to show them smiling, eternally young and strong. In reality, sacrifice can involve choking, blinding, acrid smoke – and searing temperatures that cause sweat to pour into the eyes and under a person’s clothes, which weigh down the limbs and chafe the skin. Sacrifice can demand a full-tilt sprint up flight after flight of concrete steps, while the person’s calves and thighs ache and tremble from the effort. Sacrifice allows for no coffee breaks, no hot showers, and no quick snacks to revive lost energy. In the end, sacrifice can crush the life out of a person’s body and leave the person alone, anonymous, buried so deeply under rubble that it takes six months for anyone to find the body.

Sacrifice is a terrible and ugly thing. Where can a person find the strength to lay down the comforts, the basic human needs, and the one and only precious life anyone ever receives?

The story of 24 year-old Welles Remy Crowther provokes us to ask these questions. On the morning of September 11, 2001, he was at his desk on the 104th floor of the South Tower of the World Trade Center, where he worked as a securities trader, when American Airlines flight 11 crashed into the North Tower of the World Trade Center. As the injured and frightened survivors of the initial crash waited to be evacuated from the 78th floor sky lobby, Welles appeared and told them he had found a staircase. He gave a series of instructions, including, “Follow me. Only help the ones that you can help…” He brought them down to meet up with firefighters on the 61st floor. Once he knew they were safe, he raced back up the stairs to rescue more people from the 78th floor. An eye witness, Judy Wein, told her husband that Crowther worked to put out fires and tend to the wounded. Then he said, “Everyone who can stand, stand now. If you can help others, do so.” After leading survivors to the stairway, Crowther turned and went back into the smoke and heat to try to rescue more people.

Less than an hour later, the South Tower collapsed. When Crowther’s father, Jefferson Crowther, saw the tower collapse he said that his first impulse was to immediately fall to his knees and pray, “Dear God, take me, now. Leave him here. Take me now!”

How significant that a young man who gave his life in exchange for others was raised by a father whose first instinct is to offer his own life in exchange for his son’s!

The capacity to offer a gift of self can only be born from witnessing someone else whose generosity outshines the ugliness, the toil, the pain, and the loss that always color the experience of sacrifice. Not only must we see someone else who takes on discomfort – with evident joy! – in order to ease and assist the lives of others, but if we want to learn how to live the beauty and joy of sacrifice, we must begin to try it and then practice it often. If sacrifice does not become a habitual orientation in reality, when an opportunity for heroism and the ultimate sacrifice arrives, we face it unprepared.

Crowther’s body wasn’t discovered until March of 2002. No one knew he’d given his life in order to rescue others. His parents were filled with questions and had no answers until they recognized a detail in Judy Wein’s account of her rescue: that the young man who had assisted her wore a red bandana over his face as protection against smoke inhalation. This red bandana was a kind of “signature” or transitional object that Crowther carried with him at all times. His parents dug deeper, showed the survivors a photo of their son, and received confirmation that he was, indeed, the one who had rescued twelve people on 9/11.

ESPN created a documentary, The Man in the Red Bandana, which makes much of this object, seeming almost to imply that the red bandana, like Dumbo’s “magic feather,” was the source of his strength. Perhaps the fact that his father had given him the bandana did allow Crowther to feel his dad’s presence through his gift.

But if others want to participate in the beauty of Crowther’s ability to sacrifice, tying red bandanas around their skulls won’t give them the strength needed to lay down their lives for anyone. We will only be able to perceive and to partake of the beauty that Crowther responded to if we make a habit of choosing the good of others over our own comfort or rest or pleasure. And we must begin today. Start small. Give it a try.