A DANCE TO A DIFFERENT DRUMMER

RonPrice · Posted: Sat Mar 20, 2010 9:52 pm Post subject: A DANCE TO A DIFFERENT DRUMMER

By the mid and late 1930s jazz had become the defining music of the generation, the generation that was then coming into its teens. Jazz seemed to unleash forces and energies like rock 'n roll did twenty years later. Like rock 'n roll, too, it seemed to possess a physicality; it released pent-up emotions; it was pure pleasure; it was a form of escape and it was entertainment. As jazz emerged so, too, did Baha'i Administration. In 1937 Baha'i Administration had developed sufficiently to take on a teaching Seven Year Plan. Between Benny Goodman becoming the generation's icon of popular music by playing at Times Square to a packed house of teenagers in the Paramount Theatre in March of 1937 and his band's contest with Chick Webb's band at the Savoy Ballroom in May of 1937, this Seven Year Plan began. -Ron Price with thanks to "Episode Five: Jazz: Pure Pleasure," ABC TV, 9:30-10:30 pm, 27/10/2001.

It exploded, completely unknown,
overnight, or so it seemed,
to the generation who began
that Plan in '37. In reality,
it had been slowly developing
in theory and form for nearly
a century, well, if you go back
to that magic year of 1844.

Jazz was becoming popular
the way we would have liked
to be popular, but our Plan
was a slow release model,
an experimental disposition,
a dance to a different drummer,
with the light and lyrical,
exquisite touch of an Eddy Wilson,
the often sad, slow pace
of a Billy Holliday or a Glen Miller
popular romantic-swing.

Men and women working
together, composing on-the-spot,
everyone in harmony,
moving toward elegance and joy:
that was one way of defining
what our aim was too
in those early Baha'i Groups
and Assemblies beginning
in those first-days-of-form,
days of Administrative vision,
when we started our dreaming.1

1 When Duke Ellington was asked what he was doing when he was playing azz on the piano, he said "I'm dreaming."

Ron Price