q on arts secretary petition in wash post
The petition asking President-elect Barack Obama to create a secretary of arts post is now up to more than 98,000 signees, as of this writing, and continues to gain momentum at an incredible rate.
Today’s Washington Post features an article on the movement, including Quincy’s first public comments on the matter since the petition began gaining notice. “It tells me that we are on the right path,” Q tells Post staff writer Jacqueline Trescott.
In the piece, Quincy reveals that he’s been promoting the concept for at least a decade and he has specific ideas about the responsibilities that would come with the post. First and foremost, Q wants an educational system that teaches our youth about the history and famous figures in the arts, including music.
“I have traveled all over the world all the time for 54 years. The people abroad know more about our culture than we do,” Quincy told the Post. “A month ago at my high school in Seattle, I asked a student if he knew who Louis Armstrong was. He said he had heard his name. I asked him about Duke Ellington and John Coltrane. He didn’t even know their names. That hurts me a lot,” Quincy said.
Q goes on to note that his quest for a secretary of the arts post should not be seen as a criticism of arts leaders in Washington. “They are doing a fantastic job,” he told the Post. He also added that given the current state of the world, he realizes it might be difficult for Obama to address the arts, since he “is facing too many crises. I am not an unrealistic person. He has got his hands full.”
One other interesting note is the Post’s reporting on the arts platform issued by Obama-Biden during their campaign: “Looking back to the era of Cold War arts ambassadors, when Louis Armstrong and Dizzy Gillespie traveled around the world for the government, the platform said, ‘Artists can be utilized again to help us win the war of ideas against Islamic extremism.’”
Quincy fans may know that one of his first big breaks came in 1955 when Gillespie asked young Q to play trumpet, arrange and serve as the musical director of his big band, hired by the U.S. State Department to play abroad. Quincy took the gig, turning down an offer from Columbia Records’ George Avakian to arrange for a then-unknown young jazz singer named Johnny Mathis.
Quincy recounts that experience in his recently published, acclaimed coffee table book, The Complete Quincy Jones: My Journeys & Passions, noting that taking bebop to Beirut, “was a shock.” He added, “There was civil unrest going on, and no one could really guarantee our safety. We were a long way from home, a world away from what we knew, with folks fighting over matters we knew nothing about. When it came time to play the concert there was no one who could outright say we’d be safe onstage, but Dizzy wouldn’t hear of canceling it. He said, ‘Fuck it, we’re here to play,’ and we did. Everywhere we went, there was tremendous love. The foreigners treated us better than our own.”
You can read the full Washington Post piece here and view the petition here.
The arts help grow healthy brains in children. I hope we can put the arts back in all public schools. Thank you for your petition and desire to work on this for our country.
oh so “eloquent” in true Quincy Jones “fashion”,
i “love” it!
Blessings,
Damara Lynn Greene