Curated by North Star Sounds co-host Jon Greenbaum
Nate Chinen (NY Times jazz columnist and author) posted an article recently, reflecting on Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King’s short essay on jazz, written in 1964 for the first Berliner Jazz Festival (60 years later, it’s called Jazzfest Berlin).
King’s reflections on jazz are a concise marvel:
It is no wonder that so much of the search for identity among American Negroes was championed by jazz musicians. Long before the modern essayists and scholars wrote of racial identity as a problem for a multiracial world, musicians were returning to their roots to affirm that which was stirring within their souls.
You can read Dr. King’s essay here.