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REAL LIVES - the music room

Good music is hard work.
but - from jazz to rap - it's also a citizen thing

making things happen

In September 1931, brightly coloured posters began appearing on walls all over Austin, Texas. They portrayed a beaming young black man holding a golden trumpet and were startling for that place and time in their neutral candour... 'Louis Armstrong, King of the Trumpet, and his Orchestra' the posters said, were to play four dances at the downtown Hotel Driskill beginning on the evening of October 12.

Among those who paid seventy-five cents to get in that night was a freshman at the University of Texas named Charlie Black. The posters had drawn him in. He knew little about jazz music, and had never heard of Armstrong. He just knew there were likely to be lots of girls to dance with. Everyone on the dance floor was white; only Armstrong, his musicians, and the waiters were African-American.

Then, Black remembered, Armstrong began to play, ‘mostly with his eyes closed letting flow from that inner space of music things that had never before existed... steamwhistle power, lyric grace, alternated at will, event blended.‘

'He was the first genius I had ever seen... It is impossible to overstate the significance of a sixteen-year-old southern boy seeing genius, for the first time, in a black. Then in any but a servant’s capacity. There were of course black professionals and intellectuals in Austin, as one later learned, but they kept themselves, out back of town, no doubt shunning humiliation. I like most of the blacks I knew - loved a few of them - like old Buck Green, born and raised a slave, who still plays the harmonica through my mouth, having taught me when he was seventy-five and I was ten. Some were honoured and venerated, in the paradoxical white southern way. Buck Green again comes to mind. But genius - fine controlled over total power, all height and depth, forever and ever? It has simply never entered my mind... that I would see this for the first time in a black man. You don’t get over that... The lies reel, and contradict one another, and simper in silliness and fade into shadow. But the seen truth remains.'

Standing next to Black was a boy from Austin High School. 'We listened together for a long time’ Black remembered. 'Then he turned to me, shook his head as if clearing it - as I’m sure he was - of an unacceptable though vague thought, and pronounced the judgement of the time and place: "After all, he’s nothing but a goddam nigger!".' The boy moved away. But nothing was ever the same for Charlie again. 'Louis opened my eyes wide and put to me a choice. Blacks, the saying went, were "all right in their place". But what was the "place" of such a man, and the people from which he sprung?'

Charlie Black went on to become Professor Charles L Black Jr, a distinguished teacher of constitutional law. In 1954 he would help provide the answer to the question Louis Armstrong’s music has first posed for him: he volunteered for the team of lawyers, black and white, who finally persuaded the US Supreme Court in the Case of Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka that segregating schoolchildren on the basis of race was unconstitutional, that 'separate but equal' no longer could be tolerated under American law.

Geoffrey C Ward and Ken Burns (2001)
Jazz - A History of America’s Music.
London: Pimlico, pp. 1-2

These things can't happen

Swing had been America's favourite music all through the thirties and no location had been too remote for the radio to reach. The future pianist Dave Brubeck, born In 1920 - at 15 a California rancher's son. His mother wanted him to play classical piano but his rancher father hoped that he would follow in his footsteps, and as a boy Brubeck spent hours on horseback, mending fences and driving cattle. But even as he rode, he had reveries of playing in a swing band.

'My dream was that the Benny Goodman Band Bus would want to get through the cattle and I wouldn't let him through unless they let me get on the bus and play with them. In my mind, someday I'd be heard with some band going through there. Benny Goodman never turned up, but Brubeck's father eventually relented, and he was studying music in college when America entered the war.

Graduated in 1942, he joined the army as a rifleman, married a fellow student on a three-day pass, and shipped out to Europe In the summer of 1944, fully expecting to go right into combat with General George Patton's Third Army. Instead, he was picked to lead a band entertaining the men In the field. The United States Army may have been segregated, but Dave Brubeck's Wolf Pack Band was not. The master of ceremonies-named Gil White-was African-American; so was the trombonist, Jonathan Richard Flowers. The men ate, slept, and lived together, and shared adventures they would never forget...

The Wolf Pack Band stayed with Patton's Third Army until the war, in Europe finally ended on May 8, 1945. Through it all, the band had remained integrated. But when the men eventually got home the following year, nothing in America seemed to have changed. 'When we landed in Texas we all went to the dining room to eat, and they wouldn't serve the black guys,' Brubeck remembered. 'They had to go around and stand at the kitchen door, and this one guy said he wouldn't eat any of their food and he started to cry and he said, "What I've been through and the first day I'm back in the United States, I can't even eat with you guys". He said, "I wonder why I went through all of this?".'

As the leader of his own quartet, Brubeck would eventually become one of the best-known musicians in
jazz. He refused ever to play anywhere audiences were segregated and once walked off a network television show when he saw that the director planned to shoot his group so that his bassist Gene Wright, who happened to be black, would never appear on screen. To him, jazz would always represent 'the music of freedom!'. His wartime experiences had something to do with that. So did an experience from his boyhood: 'The first black man that I saw,' he remembered, 'my dad took me to see a friend of his and asked him to "Open your shirt for Dave".' More than half a century later, Brubeck's eyes filled with tears at the memory. 'There was a brand on his chest. And my dad said,"These things can't happen!" That's why I fought for what I fought for?'

Geoffrey C Ward and Ken Burns (2001)
Jazz - A History of America’s Music
London: Pimlico, p.303

Punk hero

Necks craned, lungs bursting, voices shredded, sweat-drenched, ears ringing, wired on adrenaline, we came together to charge our souls on the kinetic energy generated by 'The Clash'. The next day we woke up different, intent on working out how to change the world.

Joe Strummer gave us a new language... Joe Strummer took a stand... In the local-government elections in I976, the National Front took 44% of the vote in Deptford. Three months later, the Notting Hill Carnival was subject to an eight-fold increase in policing. The constant stopping and searching of black youth led to confrontation. What followed was the biggest race riot since the 1950s. Among those caught in the first police charge on that Bank Holiday Monday was Joe Strummer. It is a reflection of the heightened tensions of the times that the song he subsequently wrote with Mick Jones about the incident, 'White Riot'... the lyric was a call to arms. Having seen that black youth were prepared to confront the authorities, the song urged disaffected white youth to do the same.

At this critical moment, 'The Clash' pointed to where the barricades were for my generation. The first political thing I ever did was to take part in an Anti-Nazi League march through the streets of East London to see 'The Clash' headline a massive free gig in Victoria Park, Hackney. And if anyone was in any doubt about whose idea it was to mix pop and politics in such an explicit way, there was Joe Strummer singing his heart out, wearing a Red Brigade T-shirt.

That day, I witnessed for the first time gay men kissing openly - a sight which forced me to rethink what we were marching for. It wasn't just the immigrants that the National Front was after. The fascists felt threatened by anyone who was different. From that day on, that's what I vowed to do: be different, challenge authority, express an opinion, make a stand. For me, it was that attitude that punk was really all about.

Joe Strummer taught me that. 'The Clash' were a wake-up call, a kind of boot camp that prepared us for Thatcherism. When the confrontational politics of the I980s kicked off, we were ready with our bullshit detectors...

They always were a mass of contradictions. They wanted to be rock stars but also men of the people. They rejected commercialism yet they let Levi's use one of their songs in an ad. And, yes, Joe did go to a fee-paying boarding school. But so what? That’s why they called themselves 'The Clash'.

The Clash offered positivism with attitude. Joe Strummer embodied that attitude, and he was still living true to his punk principles right up until the day he died. That’s why we wept. He was still our hero.

Billy Bragg (2003)
' Joe Strummer 1952-2002'
Red Pepper
February, p.32

Musical dynamite

Niomi left home at 15 to live in a hostel and, for a while, she was thoroughly miserable. She went to school, but otherwise stayed in, with curtains drawn, drinking and smoking by herself.

It was MC-ing that saved her... One night, drunk at a West End club, Niomi grabbed the mike and had a go: the crowd went wild. From there, it took just a few short months for Niomi to morph into Ms Dynamite...

This 22-year-old mixed-race girl from Camden blows away all the ghetto stereotypes that dog today's urban music. She says she is 'an extremely positive and ambitious young woman, who thrives on the need for a change to society, to discrimination and injustice... For me, this is so much more than just music. It's about putting myself into a position to help my people.' She walks it like she talks it, too: she split her £15,000 Mercury Prize winnings between the NSPCC and a charity that supports sufferers of sickle cell anaemia.

Niomi understands the power of the microphone, the potency of being centre stage. 'I'm not here to be a stereotypical feisty young, girl who just wants to get up on-stage and chat," she says. "I'm trying to provoke thought ... I just want people to think more.'

'But', she says, 'the UK media don't understand black culture, and people in general don't either. All they get to see is that stupid black family on East-Enders.'

What about? Women in abusive relationships - sympathising with their predicament, but insisting that they should get rid of men who mistreat them, if only for their daughters' sakes... and about the familiar 'gangstas, pimps and whores' attitudes of young black men. 'You're talkin' like you a G, but you're a killer killing your own, you're just a racist man's fossey... Now who gives a damn about the ice on your hand?'.

But, she says, 'I feel, in some cases, that I'm being patronised by the British media. They come out with condescending stuff like "wow, you're so intelligent", or "you speak so well"... They've said stupid stuff about me wanting to go to university". She turned down a place to study social anthropology at Sussex to continue with her music. 'The worst thing is that they're putting me on a pedestal when there are so many young black women out there who are just as talented, intelligent and expressive as I believe I am.'

[top]

Abstracted from Miranda Sawyer (2003)
'Put Her on the Cover'.
New Statesman
10 March 2003, pp. 40-41

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