The Power of Music – Resistance in Jazz: A Music History with Tradition – Culture

Slavery, lynching, segregation: A book shows the political aesthetics of jazz greats like Billie Holiday and Charles Mingus.

“The trees in the south bear strange fruit (…) black bodies move gently in the southern breeze” it says in “Strange Fruit”. This description of strung up POC (people of color) gets under your skin. Every time Billie Holiday sings the song.

No wonder the racist drug investigator Harry Anslinger not only wanted to hunt down the drug-addicted jazz musician Billie Holiday, but also wanted to wipe out “Strange Fruit” with her.

Billie Holiday hauntingly complains about lynching in the song. When she dies at the age of 44, chained to the hospital bed by the drug squad, “Strange Fruit” lives on.

Better than lamentation? The outcry!

The song “Strange Fruit” is at the beginning of a whole playlist of pieces that still represents the most powerful jazz to this day: the jazz of resistance.

The singer Abbey Lincoln’s lament turns into a scream. In the summer of 1960, she played the album “We Insist!” with her then-husband Max Roach. a.

Abbey Lincoln tells the story of African Americans in the USA – from slavery to the present. In the piece “Tryptich” there is a real scream of rage that must have disturbed many people.

Jazz journalist Peter Kemper knows the album well: “I maintain that it is still one of the most radical jazz pieces there is. So to speak, the naked soul that makes itself heard.”

Yelling at – or laughing at

At a similar time there was a short-tempered but brilliant contemporary: the bassist Charles Mingus. Mingus didn’t scream in anger – he exposed his enemies to ridicule.

In his number “Fables of Faubus” he laughs at the governor Orval E. Faubus: “Name me someone who is totally sick and ridiculous!” it says. And the answer follows promptly: “Governor Faubus!”

The text is aimed at the scandal in Little Rock: At that time, Faubus, then governor of Arkansas, did not want to let nine African-American children go to a formerly white school.

Ultimately, the National Guard has to bring the unruly governor to reason and escort the school children. Although the situation is clear and Faubus is obviously in the wrong, the piece initially appears only as an instrumental version, without text.

Yesterday’s story in today’s texts

Peter Kemper’s book, “Sound of Rebellion,” tells the story of the political aesthetics of jazz up to the present day. A current example: Matana Roberts plays the saxophone, is nonbinary and deals with the upheavals in US history since slavery in the here and now.

She knows that she no longer has to be afraid of “finding her father hanging from a tree on the way home.” And yet the present seems even more threatening to her: “What is happening here is diabolical.”