Transcript:
Hi, I am Mark Rapp and this is Rapp on Jazz.
“God has wrought many things out of oppression,” begins Martin Luther King, Jr.’s famous essay occasioned by the first Berlin Jazz Festival in 1964. “He has endowed his creatures with the capacity to create—and from this capacity has flowed the sweet songs of sorrow and joy.”
To King, Jazz was the perfect expression of the burgeoning Civil Rights movement in the US. The inaugural Berlin Jazz Festival put jazz and everything it stood for on the world stage.
King concluded …
“Everybody needs to love and be loved. Everybody needs to clap their hands and be happy. Everybody longs for faith. There is a stepping stone towards all of these in music, especially this broad category called Jazz.”
This has been Rapp On Jazz, a co-production of ColaJazz and SC Public Radio, made possible in part by Layman Poupard Publishers, producers of the Literary Criticism Series and the Dictionary of Literary Biography.