“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.” Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.
Tuesday night, for the Martin Luther King Days of Dialogue events, UW Jazz combo number one headlined for Jazz musician Galen Abdur-Razzaq. Their performance featured three student soloists: Jeff Worrall on the trumpet, Ryan Bell on the drums, and Mike Richards on the alto Saxophone. The guest musician, Galen Abdur-Razzaq is an exceptional flutist from Monclair New Jersey. Razzaq has performed both domestically and internationally for over 30 years, he is a former student of Berkley College of music and Rutgers University in New Brunswick. As a successful Black flutiest, Razzaq is an example how through music, African Americans have been able to accomplish incredible things. Click here to see more photos from the event!
Razzaq said that the reason why he started playing jazz music is because, “There was a message in the music- it was more than just a monotonous 2/4 count.” In regards to the civil rights movement which he lived through, he says that jazz music was “everything back then because it represented the entire movement, and that jazz music today is not as influential because there is no point of reference for young people.” He compared jazz music to classical music, and described it as “African American classical music.”
Jazz has always been symbolically linked to the civil right movement and many believe that of all the art forms, it was the greatest predictor of the civil rights movement. In its early days Jazz was about the music and the people who played it, even before it appealed to the popular masses. Jazz music appealed to blacks and whites alike, and created a culture where the collective and the individual were interchangeable.
Jazz musicians, who were predominantly black, took up the civil rights cause and many of them used their celebrity to promote racial equality and speak against social injustices. For example, one of Billie Holidays songs, entitled Strange Fruit, was inspired by the 1930 lynching of two black men named Thomas Shipp and Abram Smith. The lyrics of the song juxtapose the horrid image of bodies hanging from trees with a description of the idyllic South. Holiday performed the song night after night and was often overwhelmed by emotion during her performances. This song became the theme of the early civil rights movements.
The lyrics were:
Southern trees bear strange fruit,
Blood on the leaves and blood at the root,
Black bodies swinging in the southern breeze,
Strange fruit hanging from the poplar trees.
Pastoral scene of the gallant south,
The bulging eyes and the twisted mouth,
Scent of magnolias, sweet and fresh,
Then the sudden smell of burning flesh.
Here is fruit for the crows to pluck,
For the rain to gather, for the wind to suck,
For the sun to rot, for the trees to drop,
Here is a strange and bitter crop.
Through Jazz music, black people were able to break through barriers that they otherwise would not have been able to simply because of their skin color. They were able to encourage young people to pursue their dreams and show them that anything is possible.
