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In retrospect, romanticism about the 1960s is overstated. Alongside George Harrison's sermons on Sergeant Pepper about being "all one and life flows on" and Timothy Leary's League of Spiritual Discovery (lsd) we must set the addictions, the deaths, and the wasted lives from Haight Ashbury to suburban New York. Alongside the anti-establishment flower power of the hippy movement, the confused lives in the communes. Alongside the Pax Americana, the brutal Realpolitik of American engagement in Vietnam. Alongside the social programs and the war on poverty, the political assassinations in America and student barricades in Paris.
Although things would eventually return to some kind of normalcy, the 1960s represented a sea change, from the relative social conformity of the years after World War II to a multi-layered, conflicted culture, an unprecedented polarization between Left and Right, new and old, rebellion and conformity. Earlier voices in the 1950s had pushed the envelope, from the Juvenile Delinquents saluted in The Blackboard Jungle to Elvis' risqué gyrations and Chuck Berry's celebration of teenage identity, but the full flood of defiance came in the next decade. Elvis joined the army, and rock became profligate. Hopeful Abstract Expressionism gave way to cynical Pop, Op, Neo-Dada, and Happenings. Cary Grant and Doris Day were replaced by Meryl Streep and Dustin Hoffman. Ozzie and Harriet were no longer everyone's pop and mom. Things were at best confusing. At worst they were dangerous. The arts were both descriptive weathervanes and prescriptive prophesies.
At the center of those times, a rather lost young man, a jazz pianist by night, a sophomore music student at Harvard by day, made his way up the mountain toward Villars, Switzerland, stopping in a tiny village called Huémoz, where his life would be forever changed. After a long journey I became a follower of Christ. The people I met there, and their message, became the network undergirding my new-found countercultural faith in evangelical Christianity. The year was 1964, not long after John F. Kennedy's assassination. The first student to don a Beatles haircut had just walked across Harvard Yard to everyone's amusement. Less amusing was the spread of hallucinogenic drugs around the community. We lived under the threat of the bomb, and of the draft, a conscription which would send us to Asian jungles to fight a war we did not endorse. The Cold War was seething.
Here at l'Abri I had found a place, completely off the beaten path, where enlightened instructors could make some sense out of our disturbed times, based on biblical Christian faith. The major voice in the community was Francis A. Schaeffer. I had not known such exuberance in my college classes as I did under his teaching. It was wide-ranging, imprecise, passionately delivered, and always related to a unifying worldview. But another voice, at first more muted, but which became for me the more significant influence, was that of an idiosyncratic Dutch art historian. I first knew about him from a chart hanging on the wall of Farel House, the name given to a section of Chalet Beausite, where we studied tapes every day. It was a history of African American music, beginning with spirituals and blues, and moving to the jazz era. It was signed Hans Rookmaaker. I had come to expect connections of all kinds at l'Abri, a place dedicated to exploring the relation of Christian faith to just about everything. But jazz music? Could I have arrived at paradise before my time? And who was this man?
I eagerly found my way through the large tape collection to a series on jazz, full of musical illustrations from rare recordings, delivered in beautiful English with a Dutch accent. More careful, less overtly emotional than Francis Schaeffer's, the voice was clear, compelling, and utterly fascinating. Hans Rookmaaker spoke of the great artistry and authenticity of Victoria Spivey, Texas Alexander, Bumble Bee Slim, Blind Willie Johnson, and a host of other founders of classic black music. Not only was Rookmaaker the European editor of Fontana Record's series, Treasures of North American Negro Music, but he had been to America and met Thomas A. Dorsey, Mahalia Jackson, and Langston Hughes. What was the attraction of jazz to this Dutch art historian? For that is what he was during his professional career.
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