'A tool for systemic change': jazz comes to Channel 4 for Black History Month
‘Jazz was born out of oppression,” the pianist Ashley Henry says, from a velvet booth at Ronnie Scott’s jazz club in London. “Music was all slaves had to hang on to after they were stripped of their languages and ripped from their cultures and families – it is the universal language and it has always reflected the now.”
After six months with nearly no live music and the fraught uncertainty of the coronavirus pandemic leading arts venues across the country to grasp desperately for survival, setting foot in Ronnie Scott’s is a surreal experience. Yet, this is no usual programme of events at the historic jazz club – gone are the tables in the darkened live room, replaced instead by a throng of cameras and golden lamps ready to film a series of performances. Over the next two days, UK jazz-scene luminaries such as Henry, singers Zara McFarlane and Poppy Ajudha, pianist Reuben James and cellist Ayanna Witter-Johnson will be playing civil rights and protest jazz standards for a Channel 4 Black History Month special, Sing It Loud: Black and Proud, presented by Maya Jama.
Hurriedly scribbling down a chord sheet before his band’s performance, Henry towers over the table as he speaks. “So much jazz music has expressed the struggles of those who have played it and it is a beautiful tradition of the genre that we all then reinterpret these songs throughout the years,” he says. “Today, I’ll be playing Nina Simone’s Mississippi Goddam, a song she performed on this exact stage 35 years ago.”
Written in 1964, in response to the murder of civil rights campaigner Medgar Evers and the bombing of a church in Alabama that killed four black children, Mississippi Goddam is a powerfully confrontational anthem to rage and hopelessness in the face of brutal racism, performed inimitably in Simone’s unwavering tenor.
Singing it himself today, Henry is well aware of the charged nature of his performance in the context of continuing global Black Lives Matter protests. “Musicians like Nina Simone really paved the way for performers like me because she was unapologetic about the message she conveyed with her music,” he says. “She wasn’t just another black entertainer to be smiled at and forgotten. And with UK jazz right now, we Afro-Caribbeans have our own story to tell compared to the black Americans – from the British Commonwealth and empire to Windrush. We have to use this music to reflect the now and continue our own social and political consciousness.”
McFarlane – whose most recent album, Songs of an Unknown Tongue, explicitly tackles this question of the black British experience and the legacies of empire – is taking on another formidable female vocal for her performance: Billie Holiday’s Strange Fruit.
“I don’t sing Strange Fruit too much because it’s so poignant and emotional,” she says after her tender and charged performance, bending her vocals around the song’s euphemistic imagery to hammer home its intent. “The song is intensely visual, using the ‘strange fruit’ as a metaphor for a lynching, and placing the listener right in the middle of that atrocity. As a human being listening to those lyrics, you cannot help but feel something.”
Composed in 1937 by the songwriter Abel Meeropol, Strange Fruit was immortalised in the jazz canon by Billie Holiday’s 1939 recording, which has since been regarded as a spark that ignited the civil rights movement. “Songs are labelled protest music in hindsight but really they are just expressions of what is happening at that time,” McFarlane says. “Sadly, the same thing is still happening now. There is different imagery for what you’re seeing, but black people are still being killed in racist attacks. So from my perspective, we’re singing the same song almost 100 years later and that has to change.”
For Sunil Patel, head of Whisper, the production company behind the show, this has been a passion project eight months in the making. “We’re very aware of the narrative of trauma that often surrounds Black History Month programming and we wanted to use our platform to promote diversity as well as celebrate black culture, especially in Britain,” he says. “Most of these musicians haven’t had the chance to play at all in 2020 so, hopefully, this will be a fantastic showcase of their work, as well as bringing a wider audience to jazz.”
Henry put on one of the first socially distanced jazz gigs in London with his band at the end of August. “When I was growing up and playing, I realised that in certain spaces people like me weren’t welcome,” he says, “and that makes you very aware that you have to create those platforms for yourself to spread your message. Right now, with Covid and what feels like the most noticeable Black History Month of my lifetime in the context of the BLM protests, people are looking to music to see them through and also as a tool to keep that impetus for real, systemic change going. This performance feels very important for that reason. It’s a start but we have plenty more work to do.”
Downstairs, moments later, Henry is in full swing with his band, perspiring lightly under the studio lights as his fingers feel through the keys on his grand piano. With a rasp in his voice he sings Nina Simone’s lines: “You don’t have to live next to me, just give me my equality.” The crew waits silently in anticipation.
Sing It Loud: Black and Proud is on Channel 4 on 28 October at 11.10pm
