{"id":77,"date":"2016-05-05T02:35:35","date_gmt":"2016-05-05T02:35:35","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/blogs.harvard.edu\/wwnjameson\/?p=77"},"modified":"2016-05-05T02:49:00","modified_gmt":"2016-05-05T02:49:00","slug":"jazz-race-in-the-us","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/wwnjameson\/2016\/05\/05\/jazz-race-in-the-us\/","title":{"rendered":"Jazz & Race in the US"},"content":{"rendered":"

Week 13: Islam in the West:\u00a0 Islamic Hip-Hop, Jazz, & Race in the US<\/p>\n

This audio project is composed of selections from two versions of the Ballot or the Bullet speech as delivered by Malcolm X (public domain) in 1964 in Ohio played over the jazz piece “Part I: Acknowledgement” from John Coltrane’s “A Love Supreme” album released in 1965.\u00a0 This piece responds to Aidi’s Rebel Music reading from this week.\u00a0 In particular, Aidi cites the mass conversion of\u00a0American black\u00a0jazz musicians in post-WWII to Islam and the notion that conversion was a response to racial segregation to help escape discrimination.<\/p>\n

The Ballot or the Bullet speech is one of the most famous speeches in US history in part because of the nature of the message – blacks should assert their political right to vote or their right to take up arms in political revolution.\u00a0 Malcom X starts out the speech by addressing his Muslim identity.\u00a0 I chose selections of audio in which he explains the importance of separating his racial identity from his religious identity.\u00a0 He\u00a0avoids addressing\u00a0the role of his faith and instead rallies the crowd to unite under “black nationalism.”\u00a0 However much he avoids bringing religion into the conversation, we cannot escape the fact that such an influential and famous figure in the history of black civil rights in the US was Muslim and he often credited his own conversion to Islam as the catalyst for his social justice consciousness.<\/p>\n

Combining selections from the Ballot or the Bullet speech with the music of John Coltrane highlights their mutual influences.\u00a0 Aidi mentions the academic study of “how Malcolm X’s speaking style was influenced by the big band sounds of the 1940s, and how, in turn, this fiery Muslim leader’s rhetorical cadences would influence jazz artists like Coltrane… dubbed ‘Malcolm in the New Super Bop Fire.'”\u00a0 The connection between these two through Islam is made real in audio interplay expressed in this track.\u00a0 Finally, Malcolm’s voice fades out into the apparently ambiguous “a love supreme” (or “Allah supreme” depending on who you ask) repeated over the piece’s rising, swaying\u00a0baseline.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Week 13: Islam in the West:\u00a0 Islamic Hip-Hop, Jazz, & Race in the US This audio project is composed of selections from two versions of the Ballot or the Bullet speech as delivered by Malcolm X (public domain) in 1964 in Ohio played over the jazz piece “Part I: Acknowledgement” from John Coltrane’s “A Love […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":8005,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-77","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/wwnjameson\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/77","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/wwnjameson\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/wwnjameson\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/wwnjameson\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/8005"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/wwnjameson\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=77"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/wwnjameson\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/77\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":87,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/wwnjameson\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/77\/revisions\/87"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/wwnjameson\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=77"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/wwnjameson\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=77"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/wwnjameson\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=77"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}