On the occasion of Barack Obama’s inauguration as the 44th president of the United States of America, Pizaazz presents additional excerpts from Nat Hentoff’s article on the interplay between jazz and the civil rights movement:

“In his touring all-star tournament, Jazz at the Philharmonic, Norman Granz by the 1950s was conducting a war against segregated seating. Capitalizing on the large audiences JATP attracted, Granz insisted on a guarantee from promoters that there would be no “Colored” signs in the auditoriums.

After renting an auditorium in Houston in the 1950s…Granz personally, before the concert, removed the signs that said WHITE TOILETS and NEGRO TOILETS. When the musicians — Dizzy Gillespie, Ella Fitzgerald, Buddy Rich, Lester Young — arrived, Granz watched as some white Texans objected to sitting alongside black Texans.

Said the impresario: “You sit where I sit you. You don’t want to sit next to a black, here’s your money back.”

As this music reached deeply into more white Americans, their sensitivity to segregation, affecting not only jazz musicians, increased.

A dramatic illustration is the story told by Charles Black, a valuable member of Thurgood Marshall’s team of lawyers during the long journey to Brown v. Board of Education.

In 1931, growing up white in racist Austin, Texas, Black at age 16 heard Louis Armstrong in a hotel there.

“He was the first genius I had ever seen,” Black wrote long after in the Yale Law Journal. “It is impossible,” he added, “to overstate the significance of a sixteen-year-old southern boy’s seeing genius, for the first time, in a black. We literally never saw a black then in any but a servant’s capacity. It was just then that I started toward the Brown case where I belonged.”

Armstrong himself, in a September 1941 letter to jazz critic Leonard Feather, wrote: “I’d like to recall one of my most inspiring moments. I was playing a concert date in a Miami auditorium. I walked on stage and there I saw something I’d never seen. I saw thousands of people, colored and white, on the main floor. Not segregated in one row of whites and another row of Negroes. Just all together — naturally…when you see things like that, you know you’re going forward.”

As Stanley Crouch, a keenly perceptive jazz historian and critic, wrote recently in the New York Daily News: “Once the whites who played it and the listeners who loved it began to balk at the limitations imposed by segregation, jazz became a futuristic social force in which one was finally judged purely on the basis of one’s individual ability. Jazz predicted the civil rights movement more than any other art in America.”

During the 1950s and early ’60s…I wrote of the civil-rights surge among jazz creators: Sonny Rollins’s “Freedom Suite”; “Alabama” recorded by John Coltrane; and an album I produced for Candid Records that was soon banned in South Africa — Max Roach’s “Freedom Now Suite.”

If I’d been asked about the music to be played (on the occasion of Barack Obama’s inauguration), I’d have suggested…that the orchestra swing into a song I often heard during an Ellington set, “Things Ain’t What They Used to Be.”

Clark Terry, long an Ellington sideman, told me: “Duke wants life and music to be always in a state of becoming. He doesn’t even like to write definitive endings of a piece. He always likes to make the end of a song sound like it’s still going somewhere.”

So we will be on Martin Luther King’s Birthday and Inauguration Day.”

It’s a big, beautiful, bittersweet coincidence that Barack Obama’s inauguration takes place the day after Martin Luther King Day.

To honor Dr. King and acknowledge the extraordinary day to follow, Pizaazz will reprint excerpts today and tomorrow from a brilliant article in the Wall Street Journal by American historian, novelist and jazz critic Nat Hentoff. Enjoy!

“On…Martin Luther King’s Birthday, Jazz at Lincoln Center and the Rockefeller Foundation, also focusing on the next day’s presidential inauguration, will present at Kennedy Center “A Celebration of America.”

This focus on jazz as well as President-elect Barack Obama (who, I’m told, has John Coltrane on his iPod) should help make Americans aware of the largely untold story of the key role of jazz in helping to shape and quicken the arrival of the civil-rights movement.

For a long time, black and white jazz musicians were not allowed to perform together publicly. It was only at after-hours sessions that they jammed together, as Louis Armstrong and Bix Beiderbecke did in Chicago in the 1920s.

In the early 1940s, before I could vote, I often lied my way into Boston’s Savoy Café, where I first came to know jazz musicians. It was the only place in town where blacks and whites were regularly on the stand and in the audience. This led police occasionally to go into the men’s room, confiscate the soap, and hand the manager a ticket for unsanitary conditions.

There was no law in Boston against mixing the races, but it was frowned on in official circles.

Jim Crow was so accepted in the land that when Benny Goodman, during the 1930s, brought Teddy Wilson, and then Lionel Hampton, into his trio and quartets, it was briefly national news. And Artie Shaw later hired Billie Holiday and Roy Eldridge, both of whom often met Mr. Crow when having to find accommodations separate from the white musicians when on the road.

In a 1944 New Yorker profile of Duke Ellington, Richard Boyer told of a white St. Louis policeman enthusiastically greeting Ellington after a performance, saying: “If you’d been a white man, Duke, you’d have been a great musician.”

Gilbert Kaplan is obsessed with Mahler’s Symphony No. 2 (Resurrection), and that’s becoming a problem for some.

The business tycoon has studied the piece his whole life and is recognized as a leading authority on it. He owns the original manuscript and co-edited a recent edition that Vienna’s International Gustav Mahler Society points to as the official score.

Kaplan has also conducted the symphony with at least 50 orchestras around the world and recorded the work with the Vienna Philharmonic and the London Symphony Orchestra. The latter is the all-time best-selling recording of the Resurrection.

But people have a problem with the conducting part because Kaplan is an amateur who essentially willed his way onto the stage, and musicians who play for him don’t think he’s very good.

That disdain rose to a boil last month when Kaplan led the Second at the New York Philharmonic. Before the show, musicians demanded a special meeting with orchestra president Zarin Mehta and railed the whole time about Kaplan’s shortcomings.

But the matter remained more or less private until trombonist David Finlayson decided to lace into Kaplan on his blog.

“My colleagues and I gave what we could to this rudderless performance but the evening proved to be nothing more than a simplistic reading of a very wonderful piece of music,” he lamented.

Then he really got into it, belittling Kaplan’s obsession and career-odyssey as a “woefully sad farce,” subtily accusing orchestra governing bodies of supporting the folly, and hinting that an extra donation here or there might have greased the skids.

This sort of thing would seem a bit off-putting to many who exist in the genteel world of the New York Philharmonic, but Kaplan took it in stride.  “I don’t think anyone will confuse me with (music director) Lorin Maazel when it comes to technique…but I do get the results I want,” he told the New York Times.

“If some people are displeased, I can’t help it.”

Meanwhile, Times critic Steve Smith praised the Philharmonic’s performance. Smith wrote that the amateur conductor beat time and rendered cues adequately and that “his efforts were evident throughout a performance of sharp definition and shattering power.”

And the audience gave it a standing ovation.

People have suspected for at least 2000 years that mental illness is disproportionately common among artists. Aristotle for one believed that great philosophers and artists alike had to endure some form of melancholy. Irving Stone’s Lust for Life, a 1934 tome about Vincent van Gogh’s lifelong struggles with psychosis (and the 1956 film adaptation starring Kirk Douglas and Anthony Quinn) helped popularize the presumed association.

Writing in this month’s Harvard Medical Alumni Bulletin, psychiatrist Richard Kogan explores the link for classical music composers such as Mozart, Beethoven, Schumann and others.

Kogan has particularly interesting anecdotes about the Russian composer, Pyotr Tchaikovsky. Among other things, Tchaikovsky was convinced that his head was about to fall off his neck. He was chronically depressed and expressed suicidal ideation many times in his diary. He self-medicated with alcohol and once confessed, “I’m drunk every evening, and I cannot live otherwise.” (aha! Pizaazz now understands why the man felt his head was about to fall off his neck)

Kogan tells us that composing music did alleviate Tchaikovsky’s suffering. Tchaikovsky’s ballet masterpieces such as Swan Lake, The Nutcracker and Sleeping Beauty are musical fantasylands where, it is said, Tchaikovsky could escape his own despair.

Tchaikovsky also lived in constant fear of being outed as a homosexual, and with good reason. In czarist Russia, this behavior was punishable by banishment to Siberia.

India’s $64 billion outsourcing industry has given rise to a host of new sub-cultures and lifestyles that have proven to be a rich source of subject matter for authors and moviemakers alike.

“Hello,” for example, is a recent Bollywood release about the bizarrely comic lives of 6 call center employees whose world gets turned upside down during a night’s work. The movie is based on the 2005 best-selling novel, One Night @ the Call Center by Chetan Bhagat. Both have clearly hit a nerve, and the Washington Post reports that “Hello” opened to laughs and cheers across India.

Indian call centers employ more than 2 million people, most of them well-educated, upwardly mobile young adults. “Hello” would have us believe their lives truly are a world apart. Workers sleep during the day and work all night. They adopt rust-belt sounding names and southern drawls, and track American holidays, football scores and hurricane forecasts as closely as events in their own country. All-night food delivery services spring up to meet their needs, while bars and movie theaters open at 7am to capture workers coming off the job.

We can only imagine the eye-rolling tales these call center reps must accumulate as they help exasperated American callers with jammed computers, insurance gobbledygook and so forth.

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