Can Dave Brubeck’s Cantata Bring Black and Jewish Communities Together?
In late February at Holman United Methodist Church in Los Angeles, Remy Ohara, a UCLA music student, sounded a shofar, the ram’s horn usually used for High Holiday services at Jewish temples—first in short blasts, then longer sustained tones. Surrounded by a brass and percussion orchestra and flanked by two sections of a large choir, she held the shofar aloft. I was struck by the image of her instrument, directly beneath the large cross affixed to the front wall of Holman church, where, just three weeks before his assassination in 1968, the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. delivered a sermon about the meaning of hope.
Thus began a performance of The Gates of Justice, a 12-movement cantata composed by Dave Brubeck in 1969. The work was originally commissioned by a rabbi, Charles Mintz, to premiere at the dedication of the Rockdale Temple in Cincinnati, Ohio. Yet it had a deeper, broader intent: to help heal the wound opened during a period of pronounced violence and unrest following King’s death and, specifically, to repair a growing rift between American Black and Jewish communities—rooted in racism, antisemitism, class privilege and historically unequal partnerships, among other factors—where there had previously been common cause in fighting social injustice.
“The essential message of The Gates of Justice is the brotherhood of man,” Brubeck wrote in his note to the 1970 Decca LP of the piece. (That recording is now out of print; in 2001, the Milken Archive of Jewish Music, founded by the businessman Lowell Milken, recorded the work for Naxos.) “Concentrating on the historic and spiritual parallels of the Jew and the American Negro, I hoped through the juxtaposition and amalgamation of a variety of musical styles to construct a bridge upon which the universal theme of brotherhood could be communicated.”