Celebrating Wendell Berry (1924-2026) with Jazz

by Fritz Byers

Wendell Berry’s The Unsettling of America: Culture and Agriculture was published in 1977, coming along as I was finishing college and wondering what to do next. One of the options was to return to the family’s cattle ranch in the Flint Hills of Kansas and resume working and learning the trade. That impulse already aligned with the prevailing values of the back-to-nature, country-and-western branch of the hippie ethos. Wendell’s book, and his sustainable-farmer persona, which suffused the book, made that appealing option all the more resonant, and for a while I thought it would happen. The book meant so much to me that I gave copies of it as holiday presents that year – more of them than I could afford in that scuffling time.

As it turned out, I did something else, but I kept Wendell and his values close, and they remained there for the half-century since. His books – essays, novels, and, not least, the poems – piled up and they lighted some of the highways and byways along the way. His insistence that ecological responsibility was inseparable from the daily, practical, unglamorous work of farming was never an abstraction to me.  He wasn’t describing nature, its demands and delights, from the outside, as scenery or muse. He was describing a life – his own, on his family’s land in Henry County, Kentucky – in which care for the soil, the water, the neighbors, and the work were a moral obligation. That’s a sterner and more honorable position than you found in a lot of nature writing of the time, and I think it’s the reason that his death this past Monday, at 92, felt like the loss of an actual mentor more than that of merely a treasured writer.

I shared my sense of loss with my daughter Eleanor, and she right away said, “You should dedicate this week’s Jazz Spectrums to him.” She was, as usual, several steps ahead of me, and, as usual, she was right.

So this weekend, in Wendell’s honor, both nights of Jazz Spectrum are given over to music that in some way evokes the natural world. I’ve written here and there about the perils of a listener’s ascribing ideological meaning to music.  But when the artist is explicit in the intention to create tone poems that honor the environment, you can rely on that, and celebrate it accordingly.

Friday night, the featured album, which we’ll begin exploring at 10 p.m. Eastern, is the second disc of Data Lords, the sprawling work of the composer, arranger, and bandleader Maria Schneider.  The first disc is a meditation on digital life, and disc two, titled “The Natural World,” is her explicit turn toward the world she actually inhabits on her farm in upstate New York.

I don’t know that without Maria’s labeling I would have intuited that the disc is an homage to nature.  But, if you accept it on those terms, the music comes to feel rustic, remote from the clatter and clutter of cities and the unsettling hums of cyberspace. And to my ears, the extended pieces that close the disc – “Bluebird” and “The Sun Waited for Me” – are marvelous evocations of the serenity and wonders of nature.

Friday’s show opens with “Yellowstone: The First National Park and the Spirit of America,” from Wadada Leo Smith’s America’s National Parks (2016), one movement of a six-part suite Wadada wrote for his Golden Quintet, sparked by his research into the park system and his reaction to Ken Burns’s documentary, The National Parks: America’s Best Idea.

Jazz Spectrum Saturday features, in its entirety, Renee Rosnes’s “Galapagos Suite,” from her 2016 album, Written in the Rocks, a nature-focused composition suggested by friend-of-the-show and contributing writer, Kim Kleinman, after I told him the weekend’s shows would honor Wendell.  You can read his thoughts on Renee’s work in his post, which is posted immediately below this one. The suite comprises seven movements for quintet, telling, in Renee’s own compositional terms, the story of evolution. It’s as fully realized a conceptual jazz suite about the natural world as I know of.
In addition to these explicitly environmentally inspired works, songs with titles that nod to nature fill the rest of both weekend shows; for example, Dave Holland’s “Conference of the Birds,” a tune inspired, he says, by mornings outside his London flat, where he heard the birds’ independence and “singing together” as a model for the band’s freedom. 

And, in keeping with the theme of the weekend, Kim, flashing the quicksilver intelligence I’ve enjoyed witnessing throughout the sixty-five years of our friendship, suggested “Skylark” for the Song of the Week.  (His darker alternative was “Smoke Gets in Your Eyes.”  No, Kim; here at Jazz Spectrum Central, we’re optimists, come hell or high water.) “Skylark” is apt on two counts: it’s an ode to nature in the form of a bird, taken up as a symbol of love’s muse; and it delivers that symbol inside a brief lyric that uses the natural world – the meadow, the night, the ordinary elements of landscape – as the setting for the pursuit of love. (It is also some of the most beautiful lyric writing in the history of popular song.)

The weekend’s shows are a hymn of thanks for Wendell Berry, who insisted that care for land and care for community are one commitment, one calling. I hear that credo in the music we’ll share this weekend, and I hope some of it comes through to you.