Author: Robert LeHeup

Many of you are here to mourn the loss of Marilyn Simon, but I never met her. I’ve heard great things, but I’ve never been in a room with her. I did, however, have the privilege to be graced by Eboni Ramm.

There’s a quote attributed to TS Eliot that is as follows: “We don’t have souls. We are souls. We have bodies.” No one I’ve known knew this better than she did.

When I first met her several years ago, it was through the Communal Pen writing workshop created through the SC Arts Commission. Eboni was kind, patient, enthusiastic about the voice of others, and she never paid heed to anything but our souls. No definers. No judgment except to be honest. And she lived that style of life. She held a love for each and every one of us that expressed itself through charming wit and the gratification to know and be known. Her loss could give us all the blues if we let it.

But Eboni wasn’t blues. Eboni was jazz. Hear me out.

Though my understanding is limited, I feel blues deals with the starkness of life. Often a single performer prostrating their despair of lost hope. Of the gamble and sacrifice that comes with love. Of the dull, aching tragedy of the absence of forgiveness. It’s what happens when we squander the flame that’s inside each of us. A flame that, if not acknowledged, could envelop and destroy us. We must know one another.

Join with me if you know this.

“Born under a bad sign, been down since I began to crawl.

If it wasn’t for bad luck, I wouldn’t have no luck at all.”

You hear that? That wasn’t Albert King singing. That was us. Because songs are meant to be performed. They are meant to connect us with one another, regardless of how we see ourselves. In spite of how our mortal bodies can betray the true material of our souls.

Jazz, to me, feels like a reckoning. It’s what happens after the mourning of blues, where we’ve looked at one another in an exhausted catharsis and said “Life is hard alone, but together… together we can turn “Goddamnit” into hallelujah.

Eboni wasn’t forlorn without a resolution. She wasn’t defeated at the start. She gave space for collaboration and forgiveness. She found the peculiar style of strength that gives rise to a resilient, resounding joy. The style of joy… the style of strength… that can only bloom from a deep, aching catharsis. Eboni, who gave as good as got. Who was true to her foundation. Who always wore the coolest dresses.

She was improvisation and harmony, wielding intention through the notes she chose and those that were waiting for their turn. At any point, she carried in her the autumn of disappointment, the winter of cold fury… but always, always, always focused on the verdant spring of a justified hope. Jazz is a rebellion that mocks the idea that we must define ourselves only by our pain or that we must suffer it alone. It is a pure manifestation of justified hope. And it. Is. Eboni Ramm.

Hallelujah.

The immensity of love and hope she carried inside her, like a controlled explosion of what it is to be human, must have hurt terribly. Casually, day to day. But from the time I first spoke with her up to when I held her frail, precious form in my arms, she was more than a justified hope. She was jazz.

Though Columbia… though the world… is lesser for her loss, we are far, far greater because she was here.

With this in mind, it is my fervent wish for all here to honor Eboni by looking at the shadows we cast by her brilliance and find strength. We listen to the aching silence where her wild melody once was and fill that silence with jazz of our own.

Location: Lexington, SC