Dark day. Just got word that Ronald Shannon Jackson passed this morning. I was 19 when I first heard his music. No one had ever told me that music could do that. Clarity. Revelation. Passion. Rage. All at one time. I was so beguiled that I… I ran off and joined the circus. I started following Shannon and his Band of Merry Men from town to town. When he called me in my dorm room one day to tell me that I was now his manager and we were going to Europe on Tuesday, did I drop everything and go? Yes, I did. Of course I did. I didn’t even think about it.
His musical innovations were immeasurable. Much ink has been spilled about his work but very little of it has gotten at what it was that he did as a bandleader and as a composer. He didn’t really start leading a band until he was nearly 40 which is entirely unheard of in any field of music. Most of his band members were around 20 years his junior but each had an entirely distinct musical voice, often not even drawn from the same genres of music. Shannon managed to bring these voices together in an extraordinarily sophisticated musical conversation that somehow sounded only like him.
Maybe you can say that each of us has his or her own way of seeing the world but no one I have met comes close to Shannon in that way. Such dark wisdom in a fried egg sandwich. He could look at a desk clerk or a man driving his car (or even me) and break them down in a sentence or two (whether he did or did not at any given time was a whole other question).
An example: the whole band is sitting in a restaurant in Germany, eating a lovely meal after a gig that was, by any measure, a great success. I notice Shannon looking over at me, shaking his head and laughing. I felt challenged by this (and Shannon was often nothing if not challenging, in many different ways).
Me: “What? What is it? What do you want?!”
Shannon (in his inimitable Texas drawl): “Does your mama know that you’re in Deutschland eating pork? BWAH HAH HAH HAH!” I had never discussed that topic with Shannon but he could not have been more spot-on. My Jewish mother, who had watched her husband go off to fight in WWII, not knowing if she would see him again, would never have imagined her boy frolicking in the land of lederhosen, beer steins and swastikas. Let’s just say that it would not have gone down well.
And that characteristic is inseparable from his music because he could pull music together with history, culture, politics and make you see it in a new way. I don’t just mean that you would understand his point of view; I mean he could change yours. Insight.
I hadn’t seen him in ten years when I got word a couple of weeks ago that he was at Presbyterian Hospital, fighting for his life. I spent as much time with him as I could. He was joyous and incisive as ever but all he wanted to do was escape that “corporate-manufactured suffering” and get back to his drums and the flowers in his yard and his chopper in Ft. Worth, Texas.
“I didn’t know you rode motorcycles.”
“I didn’t but I saw a guy riding one and I thought I’d like to try that. I asked around and found out that that kind of bike is called a chopper. I just went and bought one.”
“So what did you do? Take lessons?”
“Nah, I just pulled my computer out into the driveway and punched in, ‘How do you ride a motorcycle?’ I started riding in my driveway. I didn’t know that a chopper is the hardest kind of bike to ride. Eventually, I could ride around the block. And then, pretty soon, I was riding all over town.”
He went back just last week and today he is gone.
My whole way of engaging with the world– my friendships, what I do with my days, what I value– is different because of this man. Shannon, you will be in my life until the end of my days.
Here’s a video that I directed quite a few years after we met. Along with Shannon, my great friends Vernon Reid and Melvin Gibbs were the core of that band that I first heard.