Last night I had the distinct pleasure of attending an Amos Lee concert.  I don’t go to many concerts.  They tend not to be worth the time, money or effort for me at this point.  I’ve had my share of screaming moments over the years for everyone from the Supremes and Temptations to Barry White to Luther, Earth Wind and Fire, Janet Jackson, Diana Ross, Stevie Wonder, Tina Turner, Cher, Yanni, Johnny Mathis, and many others (the excitement of Michael Jackson will never be topped).  But now, I’m pretty much like, I’ll download it to my iPhone, thank you, or I’ll watch it on YouTube.  At this point, if you want to get me there, give me somebody like Luther Vandross.  Not only will I be there, but I’ll totally embarrass you by acting a fool. Since Luther isn’t with us anymore, that’s unlikely.  But, when my BFF told me Lee, whose concert she had just attended (she’ll go see anyone…)  was really good and he was headed to Athens, I booked it even though I’d never even heard of him.  When I asked her what sort of music he played, she was about as vague as when she said she didn’t know his ethnicity.  How does that happen?

Turns out, attending was a good move.  Thank heaven our Civic Center makes the logistics such as parking easy.

Not only was the music good, but what I really loved was how she was absolutely correct about both ethnicity and music genre.  It was such a lesson for me.  Listening to Lee, I could not quite place his music genre.  If there were any other black folk there, I didn’t see them, so I could not clearly use attendees as a clue. Amos’s appearance was not a clue, as I couldn’t really tell his ethnicity by looking at him.  I finally Googled him and saw that he looked mixed.  And because his music was such a mixed bag of rock, country, R&B, reggae, hiphop, Irish/Scottish dirge, blues and 30s and 40s songs, I could not even figure out what his genre was.   It will tell you all you need to know about his music if I tell you that his cover of Beyonce’s “Single Ladies” emanated seamlessly from an Irish/Scottish ditty.  My BFF was right.  It was unbelievable.

Then came the best part.  I finally wondered why it mattered that I couldn’t classify him.  What difference would it make if I knew?  I had to really think about that.  That was sort of new for me because when teaching about such things, as I do, I say that it shouldn’t matter what people’s ethnicities or other labels are, yet here I was doing it.  I was doing it even though fusion music that mashes up cultures and sounds is one of my favorite kinds.  I love Native American music mixed with jazz, for instance.  In fact, one of the biggest posters I have in my office is one I begged off the owner of a music store in Maui.  It shows two guys standing next to each other:  One is in native Hawaiian dress and the other in a Scottish kilt, each with their instruments.  I love the audacity of it and I love that it demonstrates how we can meet across cultures.  As polar opposites as they are, who would have ever thought to put those two together? Yet, there they stand.

I realized that so much of how we accept things presented to us is based on labeling.  I’m sure there are complex reasons why, but we shouldn’t let it get in the way of enjoying it.  I wanted to classify his music so I could understand what it was so I could better appreciate it.  But, did I really need to do so in oder to enjoy it?  Did it matter if it was a country song and if he was black?  Or an Irish/Scottish jam and he was black?  Or that it was hiphop and he was white?  Or that it was Zydego and he was not from Louisiana? Why couldn’t I just let my ears determine what I liked or didn’t?  Why did I need to place it in a box and interpret and process it in order to decide if I liked it?

I wanted to know what his race/ethnicity was, so I would know what to expect or how to interpret what he did.  But, did I really need to know?  Wouldn’t doing what I wanted to do put him in a box that only allowed him to engage in certain acts in order to be judged “authentically” whatever I thought he was?  He had smooth, totally cool swagger that I attribute to my tribe, black folks.  Yet, he did not let that define who he was.  It didn’t matter when he was in the midst of sweating it out in a Irish/Scottish jam session, or a sad-story country song, or an upbeat hiphop selection.

What a great vehicle for getting me to examine these issues.  I loved that experience!  What a great reality check for me.

So, today, as it happens,  I was reading an assignment submitted by a white student about being out of his comfort zone at a campus-wide Greek sorority/fraternity event because he was one of only a few whites in the audience and he realized that he had never seen blacks in their own environment totally enjoying and interacting with each other.  He’d only experienced them as one of a very few in a class of many. Because he did not understand the environment and culture and music that everyone else there totally understood, he felt so left out that he almost left. All they were doing was jamming to the music and enjoying each other.  But since it was so different than what happened in his culture, he didn’t know what to do with it.

I think he was doing what I had done, but he did not process it enough to be able to truly enjoy the event.  He got stuck in feeling like since he and his culture were not the center from which he generally viewed things, he could not enjoy it.

I am glad I checked myself in plenty of time to just relax and go with the flow and determine that regardless of what his race, regardless of what his musical genre, whether either could be determined by me or not, it was just a great opportunity to hear great music.

And, at the same time, to learn a great set of lessons.  It may seem to make things easier in our heads to be able to categorize,  classify and label,  and it is human nature to do so, but it is a double-edged sword.  Once we do that, we confine, relegate to certain space, and thereby limit the possibilities.  Not good.

So, you GO Amos Lee!  Do your thing, whatever it is; whoever you are! Don’t let people label you and thereby confine you!  Keep mixing’ it up and teaching us that great music need not be labeled and racial and ethnic labels do not dictate musical genres.

Love it!