1) Jazz and the Contradictions of American Democracy

Thank you for this wonderful rendition of "Oh Happy Day."

As you know, jazz is America's music, and we cannot talk about jazz without talking about the paradoxes of American democracy.

I would like to share with you two anecdotes.

First let us go back to the "not so happy days" of the lines.

This group was called the "Wolf Pack Band" led by Dave Brubeck, a white pianist who always insisted on his musicians being both blacks and whites, on having an "integrated" band. They played for General Patton's troops from the summer of 1944 until the end of the war on May 8, 1945.

They all went to the dining room to eat, but nobody wanted to serve the black musicians. hey could not receive food because they were blacks. One of them turned to his white riends and said: "What I've been through and the first day I am back in the United States, I can't even eat with you guys." He said: " I wonder why I went through all this."

To me, this episode embodies one of the greatest and most perplexing paradoxes of American society. The U.S. Government sends troops all over the world in order to defend democracy and justice, but at the same time,racism and discrimination were practiced at home.

It is impossible to analyze this very complex aspect Billie Holiday.

At some point she joined the all white band of the famous clarinetist Artie Shaw. They were playing at the Hotel Lincoln in New York, and Billie Holiday was performing with the band and staying in the hotel.

We have to imagine her feelings when she was ordered to use the freight elevator, to make sure the white customers would not assume that blacks were staying in the hotel! She spent most of the engagement locked up in her room.

Billie Holiday had to go through many such episodes, being humiliated and discriminated against because of racism. This gives profound meaning to the fact that "Strange Fruit" became her signature song. It is a protest song written by Lewis Allen in 1938 about lynching in the American South.

Let us look at the lyrics of "Strange Fruit": imagine a tree standing in this room, a poplar tree, with one large fruit hanging from it. When we take a closer look, we realize that it is not a fruit, but a human being which is hanging from the tree.

Southern trees bear

a 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.

We are all familiar with the movie "Gone with theWind" which shows an ideal image of the elegant aristocratic South, with the naive depiction of black slaves warmly supporting the whole thing in the background. Here is a more brutal, and unfortunately more realistic, representation:

Pastoral scene of the gallant South,

The bulging eyes and twisted mouth,

The scent of magnolias, sweet and fresh,

Then the sudden smell of burning flesh

It is said that Billie Holiday would cry every time she sung this song. It touched the heart of many Americans, blacks and whites, and it reached number 16 on the record charts in April 1939. It is a major milestone in the history of protest songs and music for civil rights, indeed in the history of "jazz and social justice", our theme today:

Here is a strange 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.

Lewis Allen (Abel Meeropol) 1938