ARTIST SONIC/VISUAL COEUR POEMS RHYTHM RAPTURES MOMENTS GENESIS SEAS SENSUOUS EXODUS ACTIVIST TRUE BLUE TRUTH LOTUS HEART GOSPEL VOICES AUTHENTICITY INTEGRITY TOUCH ANAM CARA INFINITE AMAZING GRACE ENERGY RISING
The composer and trumpeter Terence Blanchard at Clove Lakes Park on Staten Island on Friday.
Credit Ian Douglas for The New York Times
X
X
The emotional climax of Terence Blanchard’s SummerStage concert on Friday night, at Clove Lakes Park on Staten Island, arrived precisely one hour in, like a timed detonation. It was the title track of his most recent album, “Breathless”— an elegy for Eric Garner, who died at the hands of police officers on Staten Island just over two years ago. Mr. Blanchard, in his trumpet solo over the plaintive theme, struck a careful tonal balance, sounding haunted but unflinching.
X
X
Mr. Garner’s last words, “I can’t breathe,” became a rallying cry soon after his death, which was caught on video and viewed by millions. The phrase served a blunt, potent role at protests and on social media, bolstering the rise of the Black Lives Matter movement. It has been printed on T-shirts, signs and buttons, like the one worn on Friday by Mr. Garner’s 2-year-old daughter, Legacy, as she distractedly took in Mr. Blanchard’s performance near the foot of the stage.
X
X
The saying also surfaced, pluralized, in “Breathless,” via a recorded spoken-word recitation by Mr. Blanchard’s son, who goes by JRei Oliver. “Am I wrong for believing that one day black and blue would not equal pain?” he said. Then, a moment later:
These black roses grow from cracked pavements Freshly watered with the tears of the voiceless As we’ll emit a muted scream to the heavens: We. Can’t. Breathe.
X
X
During a long, hard season of activist urgency in black popular music — among artists like Kendrick Lamar, D’Angelo and now Beyoncé — jazz has by no means lagged behind. Mr. Blanchard’s album, released on Blue Note last year, is just one recent statement of many, driven by indignation, the push for justice and the urge to bear witness.
X
X
Of course, there’s deep lineage for this in jazz, stretching even further than Louis Armstrong’s 1929 recording of “(What Did I Do to Be So) Black and Blue,” which inspired a crucial early passage in Ralph Ellison’s “Invisible Man.” Any discussion of this topic would have to include Billie Holiday’s bloodcurdling lynching anthem, “Strange Fruit” (1939); Charles Mingus’s “Fables of Faubus” (1959), about the fight for school integration; Max Roach and Abbey Lincoln’s “We Insist! Freedom Now Suite” (1960), a civil rights cri de coeur; and John Coltrane’s “Alabama” (1963), a lament made in response to the notorious church bombing in Birmingham.
X
X
The current upswell has been built on this granite foundation: Jazz musicians are nothing if not self-conscious about their forebears. But the dimensions of today’s moment have also shaped the music. When the pianist Vijay Iyer began a 2014 performance in Brooklyn with a “die-in,” dancers lying on the stage, he was bringing Black Lives Matter into the concert hall. When the keyboardist Kris Bowers performed his song “#TheProtestor” in Harlem two years ago, it featured a bracing topical digression by the vocalist Chris Turner.
X
X
The drummer Max Roach and the singer Abbey Lincoln
collaborated on “We Insist! Freedom Now Suite” (1960), a civil rights cri de coeur.
Credit Michael Ochs Archives, via Getty Images
X
X
Last year another singer, José James, released an album in centennial tribute to Holiday, inevitably closing with “Strange Fruit.” He sings it as an a cappella dirge, with a looping, multitracked moan. It flew mostly under the radar, but Mr. James also collaborated around the same time with the artist Talia Billig for “Peace Power Change,” a video set to his acoustic cover of Sam Cooke’s “A Change Is Gonna Come.”
X
X
The pianist Vijay Iyer began a 2014 performance with a “die-in,” in which dancers lay on the stage,
thus bringing Black Lives Matter into the concert hall.
Credit Ruth Fremson/The New York Times
X
X
Part of the power of that song, in its original context, was a yearning faith in the great sweep of history. “Peace Power Change” embraces a more intimate premise: A succession of musicians look into the camera, serious or smiling, and hold up handwritten signs bearing the names of victims of police violence, or “#blacklivesmatter,” or simply “Justice.”
X
X
X
X
One of the artists in the video is Keyon Harrold, a trumpeter born and raised in Ferguson, Mo., where the most wrenching confrontations between protesters and the police have taken place. Mr. Harrold tells his story in brief on one track of “Nihil Novi,” a new album by the multireedist Marcus Strickland; he begins by stating his name, as in a testimony.
X
X
The singer José James has covered Billie Holiday’s haunting anti-lynching song, “Strange Fruit,”
and Sam Cooke’s “A Change Is Gonna Come.”
Credit Damon Winter/The New York Times
X
X
Names are central to this era of jazz protest, partly because of the influence of social media: When another African-American falls victim to violence by the state, his or her name becomes a hashtag, a trending topic, a tragic new meme. It’s a bulwark against the dehumanizing mode of the opposition, and a way of keeping injustice from glazing into an abstraction. The trumpeter Ambrose Akinmusire grasped this idea when he put “My Name Is Oscar” on his major-label debut five years ago. The track features a spoken-word poem read by Mr. Akinmusire in the voice of Oscar Grant III, who was shot and killed by a transit officer in Oakland, Calif. (and later inspired the film “Fruitvale Station”). In 2014, Mr. Akinmusire released a more chilling and expansive follow-up, “Roll Call for Those Absent,” consisting of the names of casualties sounded out by a child, over a darkly unsettled synthesizer hum. https://youtu.be/wGFaNHrvY7ohttps://youtu.be/Zw6H-7VZgcE
X
X
Ambrose Akinmusire paid tribute to Oscar Grant III on his major-label debut album, “My Name Is Oscar.”
Credit Eva Hambach/Agence France-Press — Getty Images
X
X
You can find more outright fury elsewhere, as in “K.K.P.D.” (for “Ku Klux Police Department”), a 2010 track by the trumpeter Christian Scott aTunde Adjuah, which he performed recently the Newport Jazz Festival. Mr. James could be seen at the same festival covering the outspoken hip-hop group Dead Prez, segueing from “Police State” into “Behind Enemy Lines.”
X
X
Mr. Blanchard, who has long been the composer of Spike Lee’s film scores (including “Chi-Raq” and “Malcolm X”), has a more mournful disposition. Even when he has mobilized behind his social statement, his natural mode is reflection: The most telling word in his 2007 album “A Tale of God’s Will (A Requiem for Katrina),” inspired by events that literally hit home, is “requiem.”
On Staten Island he led his fusionesque young band, the E-Collective, in a set that often bounded toward turbocharged dynamism, with tragedy seemingly far from the picture. But near the concert’s close, after he delivered his most pugilistic trumpet solo on a tune called “Cosmic Warrior,” to cheers and applause from a crowd with an obvious stake in the moment,
Mr. Blanchard leaned into the microphone with a message.
Rarely mentioned in the criticisms of this speech was the aspect that I found most disturbing. It’s that he claimed the entire crowd as among his supporters. “You made it possible,” he crows about his winning the election, as though he was speaking to a hand-picked crowd of supporters. And he was rewarded by loud cheers. He certainly wouldn’t have done this in front of a crowd that wasn’t made up either of handpicked supporters or, as it was, in front of a crowd of mostly white men and boys. We know there were people out there who didn’t vote for him, voted for his opposition, but he makes it plain that’s not who he’s speaking to. People are criticized for saying “He’s not MY president.” But the fact is, he agrees with them.
The blatant divisiveness of this, where he makes it plain that he’s only the president of those who support him, is becoming accepted by an increasingly cynical population. But if this becomes our reality, this nation really won’t last all that much longer in any worthwhile way.
Please also refer to President Obama’s election night speech in 2008 when he starts out by talking to the people who didn’t vote for him and promising try his best to be their president too.
MOON : Aerial MINES #1 Catherine L. Johnson 2012
MOON : Aerial MINES #5 Catherine L. Johnson 2012
MOON : Aerial MINES #6 Catherine L. Johnson 2012
YELLOW: Night RISE VIII Catherine L. Johnson 2012
