Jazz calendar #290

LET'S TALK ABOUT JAZZ . ..AND RACISM
While the prosecco-swilling ladies enjoy their light buzz and sigh mischievously at the rude charm of Don Shirley's swashbuckling chauffeur Tony Lip, we wonder whether a two-hour road movie like "Green Book" - which invites us to feel good and ends in the comfortable, expected harbor of friendship - doesn't mystify rather than awaken. Theimpression is given that racism is now a thing of the past and can be overcome, should things turn out differently, by eating deep-fried chicken breasts together.
Of course, it is cynical to judge Peter Farrelly's film (theatrical release Jan. 31 at Passage Kino and elsewhere), which shows the beginning of the friendship between pianist Don Shirley (Mahershala Ali) and his chauffeur (Viggo Mortensen) on a concert tour through the southern United States in 1962, in such a way. "The Negro Motorist Green Book" serves as a guidebook for the perpetually hungry and, thanks to chicken breasts, always fat-fingered Tony to locate those places where, as a person of color, one can at least count on a bed for the night. For as the light fades, the unspeakable "daylight rule" takes hold and forbids all those who are not white to stay outdoors. Although we do not recommend "Green Book - A Special Friendship" without reservations, we are grateful for the food for thought: is jazz still a synonym for freedom and rebellion for the same, an expression of cosmopolitanism, a music that does not have to convey explicitly political content in order to be nonetheless immanently political? In 1960, "Max Roach's Freedom Now Suite" was released. Nina Simone angrily sang "Mississippi Goddam" and also commemorated the African-American activist Medger Evers, who had been murdered in 1963, in Jackson Mississippi. Absolutely worth seeing and freely available online on the homepage of the Federal Agency for Civic Education, the documentary "I am not your Negro". Based on a text fragment by James Baldwin, it spans the spectrum from the African-American civil rights movement of the 1950s and 1960s to the Black Lives Matter movement of the present day. Also hot off the press and worth listening to: a podcast by Christian Eichler, who talks about the questions raised above with Wolfram Knauer, director of the Jazzinstitut Darmstadt, among others. In the awareness that freedom and equality always require the courage to stand up for them!
Your Jazzkalender editorial staff
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