Jazz Lessons in Human Rights
Extract from our new publication ‘Silence’.
It was the poet and music critic Stanley Crouch who said “Jazz predicted the civil rights movement more than any other art in America.” But it was the famous trumpeter and composer Miles Davis who said, “Don’t call it jazz. Call it social music”.
With these words we understand that jazz not only embodied the ideals of equal rights and treatment from which the civil rights movement emerged. The music also went beyond being a form of entertainment or art or cultural activity, as jazz musicians wore their politics on their sleeves and left a legacy that teaches us a vital lesson about how we fight for the causes we believe in.
— Ode to jazz
Jazz isn’t bound by one form or style or classical reins. It doesn’t play in the background awaiting listeners or praise. It doesn’t give ear to what it’s told to do or cater to what people want or expect. It isn’t what is already done and said. But more importantly, jazz isn’t jazz.
Jazz is a freedom song that emerged from oppression. It’s a social force at work: resistance by nature and art through expression. It’s a chronicle of wrongs, laying down the losses of having spoken out. It’s a doctrine-breaker that rumbles and makes people sit up and hear history out. But more importantly, jazz is a lesson.
Jazz teaches us we can be vocal in many ways. We can raise our voice beyond speech and writing, refusing to be fazed. We can improvise, distort, bend and play past the usual rules. We can try just because—trying by default wipes out the virtue of fools.
But most importantly, remember you can speak out in more ways than one; music or art, too, or just play it out in whichever way you can.
Wearing their politics on their sleeves
As racism and segregation imposed limits on the potential to recruit the most creative people, jazz promoted equality in that musicians were judged on their skill and abilities alone, not by the colour of their skin. Interracial ensembles in jazz were therefore not uncommon. For example, Miles Davis famously hired the classically trained white pianist Bill Evans for his seminal album Kind of Blue.
Lyrics became a symbolic means of protest for jazz musicians, with one anthem of the early civil rights movement being Billie Holiday’s song Strange Fruit, which tells of the lynching of two black men. She sings: “Black bodies swinging in the southern breeze / Strange fruit hanging from the poplar trees”. The lyrics then juxtapose this violent image with the idyllic South filled with “Scent of magnolias, sweet and fresh / Then the sudden smell of burning flesh”.
Thelonious Monk was an all-rounder, taking his music to rallies, raising money for civil rights groups by performing benefit concerts, and he might have even scared the establishment with the artwork of his provocative, politically charged 1968 album sleeve for Underground, which depicts him as a machine gun-wielding, piano-playing resistance fighter, with the background alluding to a racist US state as a Nazi state.
Through her achievements, Melba Liston became a gender equality icon in the male-dominated jazz world, becoming the only female trombonist in the industry to bear comparison with the best of her male counterparts. Despite suffering abuse, discrimination and sexual assault as a woman in the jazz tour circuit, she went on to forge her reputation as one of the most respected jazz composers and arrangers, and formed her own all-women quintet in 1958.
This content originally featured in the magazine Silence, which is free to download here.
To write the magazine, we listened to, discovered, and were inspired by jazz music and beyond. Here is our working playlist:
- Nina Simone, Mississippi Goddam (song, 1964)
- Billie Holiday, Strange Fruit (song, 1939)
- Thelonious Monk, Underground (album, 1968)
- GoGo Penguin, Hopopono (song, 2014)
- John Cage, 4’33’’ (song, 1952)
- James Rhodes, Bullets and Lullabies (album, 2010)
- Dino Saluzzi Trio, Coral para mi pequeño y lejano pueblo (song, 1997)
- Max Roach, We insist! Freedom Now Suite (album, 1960)
- Miles Davis, Milestones (album, 1958)
- Melba Liston, Melba and Her ‘Bones (album, 1958)
- Charles Mingus, Original Faubus Fables (song, 1959)
- Evelyn Glennie, A little prayer (song, 1990)
- Lhasa de Sela, The Lonely Spider (song, 2009)