Not So Dead Black Musicians

Sometimes, when I feel depressed - and who can fail to be depressed at the current state of the world? - I remember to listen to Louis Armstrong and his Hot Fives and Hot Sevens. That music is so lively, it has to pick a person up. Of course, all the musicians who played on those early records are dead by now, though their vitality lives after them in their music.

The other night I was thinking about other dead black men while I was ironing a pile of long-sleeved shirts, in preparation for taking my summer clothing up from our cellar. (I let my shirts pile up until there are more than an hour's worth of ironing to do, to make it worthwhile to takeout the ironing board.) I set myself up in our living room and put a CD on our stereo. Ironing is a perfect task for listening to music. The music puts the ironing in the background of my mind.
This time I listened to a disk I am quite familiar with, though I haven't listened to it for a long time: "Mingus Ah Um," one of the greatest jazz albums I know of. As I listened, I started thinking about the feminist, post-colonial, etc. objection to filling the humanities curriculum with works by "dead white men," and about that disk, which, like the Louis Armstrong recordings, immortalized dead black men. I have always wondered how people as oppressed as Negroes were in the 1920s could put so much joy in their art.
As to "Mingus Ah Um," I knew that Charles Mingus himself died of ALS, and I imagined that all the other people who played on that disk were also black and dead. But when I checked, to my joy, I discovered that John Handy, who plays alto sax, clarinet, and tenor sax on the disk was born in 1933 and, unless Wikipedia is misinformed, is still alive, as is Shafi Hadi, born even earlier, who plays tenor and alto. I hope they are both lucid and in good health, with happy memories of their contribution to music.
Moreover, not all the musicians were black - so much for that stereotype.