Joe Clark Big Band - Black and Cardinal (2024) [Hi-Res]

In 1969, Fred Hampton, the twenty-one-year-old Chairman of the Illinois Black Panther Party, gave a speech called “It’s a Class Struggle, Goddammit!” Less than a month later, he was murdered by Chicago police. Reading that speech nearly 50 years later, I was inspired
by Hampton’s clarity and passion describing the relationship of race, class, and revolutionary struggle. I was also surprised to learn the speech was delivered in DeKalb, IL.

By chance, I had just visited DeKalb to produce a recording session. The town had already surprised me; while wandering on a break, I found myself in the room where jazz legend Duke Ellington gave his last concert. The coincidence of two great thinkers and leaders passing through the same town, days before their deaths, struck me as meaningful. Yet another coincidence came weeks later in an email from my friend, John Floeter. Northern Illinois University, in DeKalb, was looking for proposals to commission a new composition.

Years later, the NIU Jazz Orchestra, under the direction of Prof. Reggie Thomas, premiered Black and Cardinal.

Imagine Black and Cardinal as a triptych. The first wing of two movements sets our scene, beginning with Highway, based on the car trip from my home in Chicago to DeKalb.

DeKalb’s first industrial innovations gained it the nickname “The City of Barbed Wire.” Agricultural applications aside, barbed wire divides: prisoners, classes, races, and nations. An untraditional minor blues, Barbed Wire broadly reflects on the things that divide us.

The center of the triptych is two portraits: The Duke and Mr. Ellington and Fred Hampton. Ellington is surrounded by fragments, paraphrases, and pastiches of his compositions. Hampton is presented in unresolved phrases: a life cut short too soon and a revolution yet to come. You might hear the calls of the red-winged blackbird and the cardinal.

The final wing of the triptych imagines the future. Ellington and Hampton had different, compelling views of positive change: Ellington through exceptionalism and art, Hampton through organization and direct action. Diametrically opposed to both of those views is an
apathy (or antipathy) to fixing the world’s problems which often hides behind the phrase “Thoughts and Prayers.” If our thoughts and prayers don’t lead to action, they are empty and meaningless.

Our ability to make a better world is only limited by our imagination of what that world can be. The World to Come, a phrase borrowed from the Nicene Creed, is a challenge for us to to go beyond those limits. The suite ends with material from the first movement, an invitation to keep our eyes open for the tools to build the new world, wherever we may find them, and bring them home with us.

- Joe Clark, 2024