February 19, 2007
Harlem
It was on an August morning in 1958 on 126th Street in Harlem, that a historic crowd of famous jazz musicians gathered in front of a brownstone between Madison & Fifth avenues. They were there — together with an impressive row of awestruck neighborhood kids on the curb — for what photographer Art Kane rightly, if immodestly, calls “the greatest picture of that era of musicians ever taken.”
Collectively, these fifty-seven artists spanned a large part of the entire history of jazz. They assembled at ten am, an absurd hour for musicians who work all night, to have their picture taken for a jazz issue of Esquire magazine. The gathering has come to be known as A Great Day in Harlem.
As in any group photo, you’ll not notice everybody saying “cheese” at the camera at the same time. Some are chatting together, some smoking, some posing, some wearing white coats so they won’t be missed. The famous Count Basie, himself, sat on the curb with all the kids.
All in all, the picture vibrates with a palpable collegiality one might not expect at that hour from that many who for the most part are stars of the first order in their own right. It was truly a great day in Harlem and a great day for relishing our collective human being.
You can also find currently at any number of websites a collection of pictures of thirty-eight or so primates of the Anglican Communion and their lesser satraps. They’ve just now ended a kind of summit meeting in Tanzania where in spite of their common membership and claims to vocation in Christ, some not only won’t talk to one another, but, as well, even refuse our Lord’s invitation to share the bread and wine together at his Table. You might could call it a Not So Great Day in Tanzania and something of an insult to God’s imagining of our collective human being.
When Scott Peck was searching in his book “The Road Less Traveled” for a meaningful analogy for Christian community, he suggested two — a basketball team and a jazz band. For it is there that the players know and accept each others skills and limits and styles and how these can be complemented for the greater good of the whole. It is something of a model to which we churchers may well attend. May the prelates find in that picture of that gathering on that great day in Harlem, a symbol of a way back into the Way to which we all are called.
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