Latest news with #StrangeFruit
Yahoo
6 days ago
- Politics
- Yahoo
'Impossible dream' of death row inmate and Catalan jazz artist collab
A US prisoner on death row and a Catalan jazz star who formed an unusual musical collaboration have released a second album together that rallies against capital punishment. Catalan musician Albert Marques and Keith LaMar, who performs over the phone from a maximum security prison in Ohio, debuted their new work "Live from Death Row" at a gathering in New York last Friday. On death row since 1995 after he was convicted of a crime he insists he did not commit, LaMar's execution is scheduled for January 13, 2027. The album, which coincides with LaMar's 56th birthday, chronicles the civil rights struggle of Black people like himself. It features compositions by Marques with lyrics by LaMar, alongside classics such as Billie Holiday's "Strange Fruit" and "Alabama" by John Coltrane. LaMar said that music "saved his life" during solitary confinement, particularly jazz tracks like those on Coltrane's 1964 album "A Love Supreme." "Music is the vehicle through which I've been able to resurrect my bid for freedom," he told AFP. "I love it when a plan comes together, when the stars align to bring to fruition a dream that didn't seem possible. That's what this live album is -- an impossible dream." It follows 2022's "Freedom First," which turned into a clarion call for a fair retrial that could ultimately lead to LaMar's release. "This music is about trust and faith (and) about stepping out even when you can't see the stairs and believing that your foot will find something solid to stand on," LaMar told AFP by email. - 'This crazy thing' - Marques, who is convinced of LaMar's innocence, said "we have done this crazy thing at the highest possible level." After staging concerts worldwide in recent years and "showcasing that we have done everything we could, we need help" to take the fight "to another level," said Marques, a Brooklyn high school music teacher. "We may be tired, exhausted, but we cannot throw in the towel." In 1995, an all-white jury found LaMar guilty of the deaths of five out of nine inmates and one guard killed during one of the worst prison riots in US history. During the incident, which happened in 1993, LaMar was already serving a sentence for the murder of a former friend during a drug dispute in his native Cleveland. LaMar, as well as recent journalistic investigations, claimed that exculpatory evidence was hidden at trial and destroyed, and other prisoners were rewarded with sentence reductions for implicating him. Ohio's governor had postponed LaMar's execution, originally scheduled for November 2023, due to the refusal of pharmaceutical companies to supply the components needed for lethal injection. However, the situation could change following President Donald Trump's January 20 executive order directing the US attorney general to ensure states can access the necessary ingredients. Nineteen inmates have been executed so far this year, compared to 25 in all of 2024. af-gw/jgc
France 24
6 days ago
- Entertainment
- France 24
'Impossible dream' of death row inmate and Catalan jazz artist collab
Catalan musician Albert Marques and Keith LaMar, who performs over the phone from a maximum security prison in Ohio, debuted their new work "Live from Death Row" at a gathering in New York last Friday. On death row since 1995 after he was convicted of a crime he insists he did not commit, LaMar's execution is scheduled for January 13, 2027. The album, which coincides with LaMar's 56th birthday, chronicles the civil rights struggle of Black people like himself. It features compositions by Marques with lyrics by LaMar, alongside classics such as Billie Holiday's "Strange Fruit" and "Alabama" by John Coltrane. LaMar said that music "saved his life" during solitary confinement, particularly jazz tracks like those on Coltrane's 1964 album "A Love Supreme." "Music is the vehicle through which I've been able to resurrect my bid for freedom," he told AFP. "I love it when a plan comes together, when the stars align to bring to fruition a dream that didn't seem possible. That's what this live album is -- an impossible dream." It follows 2022's "Freedom First," which turned into a clarion call for a fair retrial that could ultimately lead to LaMar's release. "This music is about trust and faith (and) about stepping out even when you can't see the stairs and believing that your foot will find something solid to stand on," LaMar told AFP by email. 'This crazy thing' Marques, who is convinced of LaMar's innocence, said "we have done this crazy thing at the highest possible level." After staging concerts worldwide in recent years and "showcasing that we have done everything we could, we need help" to take the fight "to another level," said Marques, a Brooklyn high school music teacher. "We may be tired, exhausted, but we cannot throw in the towel." In 1995, an all-white jury found LaMar guilty of the deaths of five out of nine inmates and one guard killed during one of the worst prison riots in US history. During the incident, which happened in 1993, LaMar was already serving a sentence for the murder of a former friend during a drug dispute in his native Cleveland. LaMar, as well as recent journalistic investigations, claimed that exculpatory evidence was hidden at trial and destroyed, and other prisoners were rewarded with sentence reductions for implicating him. Ohio's governor had postponed LaMar's execution, originally scheduled for November 2023, due to the refusal of pharmaceutical companies to supply the components needed for lethal injection. However, the situation could change following President Donald Trump's January 20 executive order directing the US attorney general to ensure states can access the necessary ingredients. Nineteen inmates have been executed so far this year, compared to 25 in all of 2024. © 2025 AFP
Irish Examiner
16-05-2025
- Entertainment
- Irish Examiner
Book review: The New York neighbourhood that changed the music world
How does an artistic 'scene' come about? What factors need to coalesce? What turns a spark into a long-lasting flame? When it came to the legendary Greenwich Village music scene in 1960s New York, a lot seemed to hinge on a singular, magnetising place and event: the outdoor jams held every Sunday in summer in Washington Square Park. These happenings drew towards them, from far and wide, from the various crannies where they had been hiding, all those with a secret and unusual passion for folk music. The sessions formed what someone called 'the incubation ground for the revival of folk singing'. It was a case of come one, come all: Arlo Guthrie, who would have been around 10 years old, was dropped off by his mother Marjorie to wander around with his guitar until he found a group he could join in with. From here sprang friendships, encouragement, collaborations, and perhaps the most precious commodity of all: momentum. All would be tested — though ultimately strengthened — by run-ins with the police and the city authorities about timings, crowd size, and the proper filling out of permit applications. Indeed, the freedom to make music in the park would become the subject of a famously chaotic riot in 1961. David Browne thoroughly examines those early outdoor sessions as well all that happened indoors in countless coffee houses, music stores, apartments and sundry dives over the course of close to five decades — from 1957 to 2004 — with a heavy focus on the tumultuous '60s. As a result, Talkin' Greenwich Village is the kind of book you hope to walk away from with illuminating anecdotes and factoids to entertain and illuminate your friends. It doesn't disappoint. For instance, I hadn't known that Strange Fruit, which was debuted by Billie Holiday in a Greenwich Village club in 1939, was written by a Jewish teacher from the Bronx called Abel Meeropel. (A whole book could be written about the enormous Jewish contribution to the Village scene, whether in the form of artists, enthusiasts, or impresarios.) Later, we read about a duo called Kane and Carr, opening for Tom Ashley and the Irish Ramblers at Folk City in 1963. They had previously had a hit called Hey, Schoolgirl, using the moniker Tom and Jerry, but eventually found fame under their true names: Simon and Garfunkel. In a book like this, one also hopes to meet some memorable characters. They turn up in their droves. There is Israel Young, for example, a pre-med student who ended up ditching that career after he was introduced to square dancing by a friend at his college astronomy club. 'Izzy' went on to set up the Folklore Center, an eccentric Village institution selling books and sheet music. About square dancing, he once said: 'It would be like, you know, masturbation. After you do it, you say you'll never do it again, and then another'. David Browne, a senior writer at 'Rolling Stone' and the author of several music biographies. The Clancy brothers and Tommy Makem, meanwhile, make an entrance on page 42. And, again, I learn things I should have known but didn't; that Paddy and Tom both served in the RAF during the Second World War, for instance, or that music was originally intended as a means of raising money to pursue their first passion, acting. Hearing them sing became a rite of passage for American 'folkniks' who occupied the Village alongside the beatniks (and the 'stareniks' who came to gawp at the beatniks). Jazz, though, was still the dominant Village musical genre in the late '50s and remained a big part of the delights on offer. In the summer of 1965 alone, Charlie Mingus, John Coltrane, Thelonius Monk, Sonny Rollins, and many others were all to be heard live somewhere in the area between, roughly speaking, Fourth Avenue and the Hudson (going east to west) and between Fourteenth Street and Houston (going north to south). Bob Dylan edges his way into the story at the beginning of chapter three and Judy Collins' reaction to hearing him for the first time is priceless: 'He was singing old Woody songs, and I thought, 'Badly chosen and badly sung'. I was so bored.' Tom Paxton said: 'We were very friendly, but we didn't get to know him. He was not to be known.' From the outset, some of Dylan's songs didn't quite fit the established, beloved paradigms, whether hillbilly laments, or noble protest songs, or something bluesy. Bob Dylan performs at The Bitter End folk club in Greenwich Village in 1961 in New York City. File picture: Sigmund Goode/MichaelIndeed, the early covers of Blowin' in the Wind seem to show other Village musicians trying to drag Dylan's classic back into more familiar shapes. And whereas experiments when they came — the transition to electric instruments, for instance — were usually the production of conscious deliberation under the influence of external pressures — 'The Beatles scuttled all of us,' said Sylvia Tyson — Dylan was perhaps always running off internal, invisible, idiosyncratic forces, entirely his own. It was a scene riven with contradictions. The folkies themselves were swarming over someone else's neighbourhood: in the case of Greenwich Village, Italian Americans. 'It was an Italian neighbourhood,' said Terri Thal. 'People lived there. And we came in, and we destroyed it, and they hated us.' By the mid-60s, when folk was taking its strong pop and rock turn, there were crowds, crime, drugs, knives, guns. No wonder the locals were upset. The people's music didn't always turn out good for, well, the people. Paradoxes multiplied. Rootless urban drifters singing roots music. Artists who couldn't hold down a job, sticking up for the working man. Sizeable egos singing about self-sacrifice and humility. Experimenters messing with tradition, decrying capitalism while chasing record contracts, singing of austerity, penury, and starvation and hard times, but with cash to blow on drugs and booze. These tensions largely remain between the lines of Talkin' Greenwich Village, with the author preferring to tell a fascinating story in a fairly celebratory fashion, rather than detour too far into analysis. By 1967, the original Village folk scene was running out of steam and talent with many of the best-known names heading for other parts of Manhattan — 'loft jazz' in The Bowery, anyone? — bigger venues, the West coast, or even Europe — as well as heading, musically speaking, for the more lucrative and fashionable fields of rock and pop. As a larger-than-life Village legend who stayed at his post right to the end — he died in 2002 — Dave Van Ronk, the Mayor of McDougall Street himself, acts as a kind of fulcrum for the whole story Browne is attempting to tell. Van Ronk's durability meant that, though not homosexual himself, he was around to get caught up in, and arrested during, the 1969 Stonewall Riots. On the story wends, from the likes of Loudon Wainwright III (Van Ronk tells him Plane Too was either the best song he'd ever heard or the worst) through to Suzanne Vega. By the end, the Village is more of a 'musical ghost town', its spirits fled to a thousand different places and the same number of different fates. David Browne is a genial storyteller who wears his immense knowledge lightly. If he were a folk singer, he'd be the type who performs in the service of the song, not himself, which helps to make Talkin' Greenwich Village a very fine read indeed.
Belfast Telegraph
30-04-2025
- Entertainment
- Belfast Telegraph
Unlike Kneecap, Green Day used their music to deliver Palestine message at Coachella - and won't have gigs cancelled
Make your protest, sing your songs, rap your words… but maybe it's wiser to allow music to speak for itself In 1939 a young black singer called Billie Holiday took to a New York stage and performed a song called Strange Fruit for the first time. It set the music industry off on a new tangent, as a vehicle for protest. Widely regarded as the first 'protest song', it pricked the consciousness of a nation. The 'strange fruit' she sang about were the bodies of two young black Americans hanging from a tree.
Belfast Telegraph
30-04-2025
- Entertainment
- Belfast Telegraph
Kneecap need to grow up if they're to make impact on global stage… their whining complaint won't happen
In 1939 a young black singer called Billie Holiday took to a New York stage and performed a song called Strange Fruit for the first time. It set the music industry off on a new tangent, as a vehicle for protest.
