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Why MLK Believed Jazz Was the Perfect Soundtrack for Civil Rights

Jazz, King declared, was the ability to take the “hardest realities of life and put them into music, only to come out with some new hope or sense of triumph.”

By: Ashawnta Jackson
October 16, 2019

“God has wrought many things out of oppression,” begins Martin Luther King, Jr.’s essay occasioned by the 1964 Berlin Jazz Festival. “He has endowed his creatures with the capacity to create—and from this capacity has flowed the sweet songs of sorrow and joy.”

There were names like Miles Davis, Sonny Stitt, and Roland Kirk on the bill. The 1964 festival was the first of the series, and it stood as a celebration of the genre, a recognition of the global impact of jazz. And now a big name was lending his support to the music: civil rights leader Martin Luther King, Jr.

In a 1962 essay about the birth of bop, Amiri Baraka wrote that “the musicians who played it were loudly outspoken about who they thought they were. ‘If you don’t like it, don’t listen’ was the attitude.” This was exactly the kind of self-assertion that earned them a range of reactions—from distaste to outright violence—in so many aspects of American life. But there on stage there was freedom. Without a doubt, it was a powerful image: Black artists commanding the attention of a roomfull of active listeners.

The U.S. needed a makeover, to present the nation on a world stage as open and accepting, and who better than jazz musicians? The music was popular, the players even more so. With a push from New York Congressman Adam Clayton Powell, in 1956, President Eisenhower launched the Jazz Ambassadors program through the State Department, with the trumpeter Dizzy Gillespie as its first Ambassador.

But this move exposed the exact attitudes the program was designed to cover. Louisiana senator Allen J. Ellender said: “To send such jazz as Mr. Gillespie, I can assure you that instead of doing good it will do harm, and the people will really believe we are barbarians.” The White Citizens Council of Alabama, which was, unsurprisingly, the same group behind the attack on Cole, agreed, calling the music a “plot to mongrelize America.”

Before he was to leave on his tour of several Middle Eastern and Eastern European countries, Washington officials asked Gillespie to come in to be briefed, to make sure he knew what to say when asked about American racism. He refused, saying , “I’ve got three hundred years of briefing. I know what they’ve done to us. If they ask me any questions, I’m gonna answer them as honestly as I can.” This wasn’t about making excuses for America, he said, or about letting himself be used as a prop in an America-produced stage play for race relations. This was about the music for him, and, yes, in some ways, about the image.

Den ganzen Artikel (inkl. weiterführende Links) gibt es hier:
https://daily.jstor.org/why-mlk-believed-jazz-was-the-perfect-soundtrack-for-civil-rights/

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"Don't play what the public want. You play what you want and let the public pick up on what you doin' -- even if it take them fifteen, twenty years." (Thelonious Monk) | Meine Sendungen auf Radio StoneFM: gypsy goes jazz, #150: Neuheiten 2023/24 – 12.3., 22:00; #151: Neuheiten aus dem Archiv – 09.04., 22:00 | Slow Drive to South Africa, #8: tba | No Problem Saloon, #30: tba