At the memorial service on Saturday morning for Floyd A. LeFlore Jr., the jazz trumpeter and poet from St. Louis, the Rev. Lee Goodman invoked “pastoral privilege” to skip his scheduled eulogy.
“We’ll instead go to a selection,” Rev. Goodman said, “and then on to family reflections – where I think you’ll find the eulogy.”
The crowd of family, friends, fellow artists and fans found a number of eulogies in the reflections of LeFlore’s immensely gifted and accomplished family.
His wife Shirley LeFlore, a poet and performing artist who counts many of the nation’s greatest writers as her peers, delivered what became a free jazz eulogy. She started off, as many people did, talking very plain, even a little salty. “Floyd had his secret self,” she said. “His … idiosyncrasies.”
Musician and poet David A.N. Jackson backed her on kalimba as Shirley reflected on the early days of the Black Artists Group (B.A.G.). “During that time,” she said, “many of us were seeking personal, social, political and spiritual freedom. So many of us grew together.”
She spoke from the experience of falling in love – and never quite completely out of love – despite everything. “It was a promise we made: we never got divorced,” she said. “We lived together. We lived apart.” They discovered something greater than both of them that had the power to make their differences meaningless. That, she said, is “when you can move yourself out of the way and live in the power of truth.”
When Dwayne Bosman of the Bosman Twins joined Jackson’s kalimba pattern on flute, Shirley’s memoir of Floyd turned into a free jazz eulogy. The LeFlores, and the rest of B.A.G., were pioneers in the performance of poetry with improvised music. So, inevitably, Shirley performed a poem for her lover, husband, co-parent and friend Floyd.
She admitted she had not been able to write the Floyd poem yet, so she performed a poem she wrote for Lester Bowie, another St. Louis jazz trumpet great and friend of the family, previously deceased. Her poem opens with a name that Oliver Lake – jazz composer, artist in multiple media and B.A.G. alumnus – gave to Floyd, “Florio.” Backed by flute and kalimba, Shirley alternated between chanting “Florio” and “Floyd” in what became a performance poetry eulogy for both trumpet legends.
Shirley’s poem about Lester Bowie quotes from Arthur Ray Brown’s poem “Trumpet in the Morning,” which poet Michael Castro had previously performed. Since Arthur Brown is also gone, it became an elegy for all departed brothers. This funerary rite was enacted around an altar consecrated to Floyd at McClendon Mortuary in Florissant, perhaps three miles from Canfield Drive, where another man named Brown, Michael Brown Jr., lost his life a month ago. The LeFlores and Floyd’s mourners came up in a protest generation, and the Ferguson protest movement was an unstated reality very present at this service.
“Up above my head,” Shirley chanted to Floyd and Florio, to Arthur Brown and Michael Brown, “I can hear your music in the air.”
Oliver Lake himself contributed to the eulogy, channeled by poet and performer Marsha Cann, who read letters from B.A.G. artists who could not attend. Talking about his friend Florio, Lake said, “From the first time I picked up the horn, he was there encouraging me. From when we were kids growing up together to doing gigs in the B.A.G. building and in Paris.”
Floyd’s gift for encouraging and directing others was often the first thing any family member or friend remembered about him.
“In terms of my life direction and the music,” said jazz composer and pianist David Parker, “I don’t know what I would have done without Floyd.”
Floyd’s daughter – no one in this family would accept “step-daughter,” when all were so close for so long – Hope “Tammy” Price-Lindsay, remembered a father who was supportive in a uniquely styled way. “Daddy Floyd had a cool about him,” she said. “I could always depend on him to be encouraging, non-judgmental, totally cool.”
Floyd’s coolness was an abiding memory and presided over a memorial service that was both a performance poetry open mic and a jam session. The music was led by the Bosman Twins, with David A.N. Jackson on percussion, Alerica “Al” Anderson on piano, a duet set by David Parker (piano) and George Sams (flugelhorn), and a parade of female vocalists who could command any stage, anywhere: Suzanne Palmer, Leah Stewart, Rochelle “Coco Soul” Walker, Olivia Neal, “Fantasy” Tracy Mitchell, Jhaere and Mekhi Mitchell.
Al Anderson also accompanied himself on a version of “A Song for You” by Donny Hathaway that added Hathaway to the chorus of lost black St. Louis brother angels in the room.
Floyd’s granddaughter Noelle Price Lindsay wrote, in a letter addressed to Floyd, about “your heaven.” It sounded like a very cool heaven: “a smoky, fragrant jazz club during some version of an open jam.” The mourners at McClendon Mortuary were transported to some version of Floyd’s heaven on Saturday.
Floyd and Shirley’s daughter Lyah LeFlore-Ituen, the acclaimed author, moved home to St. Louis for the last phase of her father’s life. She spoke of losing him gradually, as he succumbed and lost the power to walk, then speak. “He held onto music until the very end,” Lyah said.
Lyah read a memoir, “Sunflowers for My Father,” where she remembers Floyd encouraging her writing career and being the first to read the completed draft of her first novel. But, mostly, she remembered the power of love.
“He was the first man who ever loved me,” Lyah said, “and my daughter will be able to say the same of her father.”
That is the circle of love that defined Floyd LeFlore and his memorial service.
“One thing I think all of us taught our children,” Shirley said, “was the power of love. Don’t leave here holding nothing against nobody.”
