Yes to the Mess. Frank J. Barrett

Чтение книги онлайн.

      “Everybody smile!” he ordered his troops, as an embedded CBS News camera caught the scene. “Don’t point your weapons at them. Take a knee! Relax!” The “take a knee” order seemed to buy time, so Hughes followed up by ordering his men to withdraw, and just as suddenly, the situation pivoted once more, and goodwill was restored.

      Reporter Dan Baum later interviewed Hughes for a New Yorker account of the incident.¹⁴ Where had he learned this strategy? Baum asked. How did he know that pointing his own rifle down and ordering his men to take a knee would tame the crowd? Nowhere, Hughes said in essence. He was making it up on the spot, as he went along.

      At first glance, Hughes’s answer would seem to align with the popular understanding of jazz musicians as free-spirited, free-form performers. But in reality his answer goes to the deeper nature of the art form. U.S. military training manuals generally teach two standard responses to situations such as Hughes and the 101st Battalion faced: use helicopter blades to push away angry crowds or fire warning shots. The last step in the training is the final solution: shoot to kill. So when Hughes ordered his men to “get down on one knee and smile,” he was in fact improvising. But his solution was also the result of relentless learning and a disciplined imagination that, in an instant, took into account the complex tribal dynamics that all foreign troops faced in Iraq. Hughes threw out the rules, to be sure, but he didn’t throw out his deeper engagement and his deeper desire to express respect toward the Iraqis. Even under the intense pressure of the moment, he managed to stay fully engaged in the details and in the aggregate. That’s what made the difference, and that’s great jazz in a nutshell.