January 20, 2014 by Jan Herman
Spike Wilner writes the electronic newsletter for Smalls Jazz Club, where he’s the congenial manager and one of the owners. The newsletter is always informative. Never sinks to mere PR. Which makes it one of the best around.
(Wilner doesn’t just write the newsletter. He’s a first-class jazz pianist. Click the photo or this link to hear him play. I’m particularly fond of Wilner’s solo piano playing.)
Anyway, it’s fitting that on Martin Luther King Day, today’s newsletter showed up in my email box with a recollection of what King had to say about jazz.
This was the speech he gave at the opening of the Berlin Jazz Festival, in 1964:
God has wrought many things out of oppression. He has endowed his creatures with the capacity to create — and from this capacity has flowed the sweet songs of sorrow and joy that have allowed man to cope with his environment and many different situations.
Jazz speaks for life. The Blues tell the story of life’s difficulties, and if you think for a moment, you will realize that they take the hardest realities of life and put them into music, only to come out with some new hope or sense of triumph.
This is triumphant music.
Modern jazz has continued in this tradition, singing the songs of a more complicated urban existence. When life itself offers no order and meaning, the musician creates an order and meaning from the sounds of the earth which flow through his instrument.
It is no wonder that so much of the search for identity among American Negroes was championed by Jazz musicians. Long before the modern essayists and scholars wrote of racial identity as a problem for a multiracial world, musicians were returning to their roots to affirm that which was stirring within their souls.
Read more: http://www.artsjournal.com/herman/2014/01/what-martin-luther-king-jr-said-about-jazz.html
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