#Worldwide #Information #Blogger #LucSchrijvers: #Update: - #Part 2 - #anarchist #news and #information from all over the #world - 9.03.2020

Today's Topics:

   
1.  Ireland, derry anarchists: Help Build an Autonomous Social
      Centre for Derry (a-infos-en@ainfos.ca)
   
2.  A-Radio Berlin: Brazil 2020 (1): Em fevereiro tem carnaval -
      A conversation about Brazil and exile (Part 2) 
      (a-infos-en@ainfos.ca)
  
 3.  France, Union Communiste Libertaire AL #302 - History, 1959:
      Jazz, the year of the revolt (fr, it, pt)[machine translation]
      (a-infos-en@ainfos.ca)


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Message: 1





Since 2017 the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW) in Derry (North of Ireland) have been engaging in many campaigns locally: against
health budget cuts, in anti-racist solidarity, in solidarity with decriminalisation of abortion, recognising peoples' rights to bodily
autonomy as worker's rights, in solidarity with the BDS campaign, in solidarity with Rojava, as well as having organised talks around
prisoner's rights and against prison labour. ---- Over the last year there has been a steady number of activists joining the union. We now
would like to reach out to even more people by opening a social and cultural space in our city. ---- This will be a community-based space in
the heart of the community where people will be able to get first-hand information about the union, find advice on work or welfare related
matters and access literature from the IWW resource materials on the different fronts of struggle within the union, linking to other
anti-capitalist struggles worldwide for workers' rights and class emancipation.

Derry continues to be a post-conflict society in which there are still social divisions at class level, and we believe that by opening a
social and cultural space we as a union can offer an opportunity for people locally to engage in non-sectarian activism and have a common
space to build from.

If you have any questions, suggestions or would like to get further information, please contact us

http://derryanarchists.blogspot.com/2020/03/help-build-autonomous-social-centre-for.html

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Message: 2




Dear all, ---- In this Podcast we dive deep into the whole complex of the contemporary history and current situation in Brasil. We publish a
long conversation with two Brazilian immigrants recorded in Lisbon in Dezember 2019. ---- N. is a 19 year old transsexual, who left Brazil
as fast as possible because of violence and discrimination against trans people. After getting himself sorted in his new surrounding he
connected fast to the queer and anarchist movement. ---- V. is a long time militant and organized anarchist. His dream is to work as a
teacher, but this perspective is blocked for him in Brazil, because of his political past, activities and ideas. Furthermore he is facing
possible high charges for his involvement in the 2013 uprisings. ---- The podcast is split into two parts. To make it more accessible for
people not willing to listen the full length we publish some timestamps here.

You'll find the second audio (to listen online or download in different
sizes) here:
http://aradio.blogsport.de/2020/03/03/a-radio-in-english-brazil-2020-1-em-fevereiro-tem-carnaval-a-conversation-about-brazil-and-exile-part-2/

Length: 1:53 h

You can find other English and Spanish language audios here:
http://aradio.blogsport.de/englishcastellano/.

Among our last audios you can find:
* The first part of a long conversation about Brazil and exile with two
Brazilian activists living in Portugal:
http://aradio.blogsport.de/2020/02/25/a-radio-in-english-brazil-2020-1-em-fevereiro-tem-carnaval-a-conversation-about-brazil-and-exile-part-1/
* A call for a Week of Solidarity with the Political Prisoners of the
revolt in Chile: 13.-19.1.2020:
http://aradio.blogsport.de/2020/01/11/chile-13-19-1-2020-woche-der-solidaritaet-mit-den-politischen-gefangenen-semana-de-solidaridad-con-lxs-presxs-politicxs/
* A feature about the first anniversary of the Yellow Vest Movement in
France, from the perspective of Toulouse:
http://aradio.blogsport.de/2020/01/02/a-radio-in-english-one-year-yellow-vest-movement-in-france-a-feature-from-toulouse/
* A series of audios from the social revolt in Chile:
http://aradio.blogsport.de/2019/10/20/zur-situation-in-chile-deesen/
* An interview about the Brexit from an anarchist perspective and the
situation in Great Britain:
http://aradio.blogsport.de/2019/09/13/a-radio-in-english-brexit-and-anarchism/
* An interview about the Balkan Anarchist Bookfair 2018 in Novi Sad,
Serbia:
http://aradio.blogsport.de/2019/05/21/a-radio-in-english-the-balkan-anarchist-bookfair-2018-in-novi-sad-serbia/
* An interview on the International Week of Solidarity with Anarchist
Prisoners 2018:
http://aradio.blogsport.de/2018/10/05/a-radio-in-english-the-international-week-of-solidarity-with-anarchist-prisoners-2018/

Enjoy! And please feel free to share!

A-Radio Berlin

ps.: We are on Twitter! Please feel welcome to follow us at @aradio_berlin!
ps2.: Please note: We are always looking for people willing to lend us a
hand with transcriptions and translations from Spanish or German into
English as well as people able to do voice recordings - in order to
amplify our international radio work. You can contact us at
aradio-berlin/at/riseup(dot)net!

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Message: 3




Musicians, spectators, critics agree to make "1959 the year that changed jazz". For musicians, it is the affirmation of a point of no
return: music is political, cultural, as much as aesthetic, conscious echo of the speeches of Malcolm X and origin of those of Stokely
Carmichael ... For the critical - white - it is a nightmare which becomes reality: contained until there by a properly colonial, racist,
condescending discourse, jazz overflows from all sides, above all uncontrollable, irremediable. For the spectator, it will be a question of
choosing sides. Shepp, Mingus, Taylor, Leroi Jones, name the enemy: capitalism, imperialism, filthy racism in the United States. ---- In
1959, four albums came out in quick succession, four traits of genius, four musical upheavals, four social positions - Time out by Dave
Brubeck, Kind of Blue by Miles Davis, Mingus Ah Um by Charlie Mingus, The Shape of Jazz to Come by Ornette Coleman.

Brubeck pulverizes the agreed metric of jazz to invite a 5/4 waltz rhythm, he reverses the role of the drummer and puts it in the
foreground, and then: he has the bass held by a black musician in a white orchestra. Scandal.

Miles initiates a new aesthetic made of imbalance, introspection, drawn as much from Debussy for example, as from the ancient roots of jazz.
It is no longer a question of staying still and frozen in style. Davis prevents him from going around in circles.

Charlie Mingus, the angry man, digs up church music, popular blues and the format of the big band and puts them at the service of a writing
as fine as the man is out of the ordinary: earthiness, violence and insolence, a frank rage animates Mingus. In the war against American
hypocrisy, the piece Fables of Faubus directly attacks racist America through the governor of Arkansas (Orval Faubus) guilty of having used
the troop to prohibit the access of blacks to "desegregated" schools from Little Rock. If Eisenhower in turn used force to enforce the
federal decree, it was Mingus who made Faubus the laughing stock of the black community for many years.

The timid and gentle Ornette Coleman puts his feet squarely on the plate and announces "the shape of jazz to come". Armed with a plastic
alto sax, it is he who will give musicians the keys to free jazz: Free jazz. In 1959, white supremacism and Jim Crow laws were still valid.
Eleven southern states refuse to allow blacks to attend university despite the federal "desegregation" law (1954). Lynchings and murders,
riots are the counterpoint of an America in black and white, but which dreams of Cadillac pink and baby blue. Words of the time, black and
white are the terms used henceforth in this text.

The awakening of consciousness
Systematically caught up, recovered by the white world, each new style produced by jazz was an attempt to express the specificity of a voice
and a black culture, which wants to be heard and respected as a cultural form of right, artistic extension of which there was never any
question for "the blacks" to distinguish what pertained to the cry (anger, love or sadness), the social (worksong, blues, dance ...),
entertainment or the most advanced aesthetic research. For Leroi Jones: "ethics and aesthetics are one" .

But for White America, it is only a question of defusing the potentially dangerous charge of jazz. In his fantasy there is a black
"animality", drum rhythms from distressing jungles and a beastly sexuality that put white people under siege, their women at risk of rape
and a whole civilization at that of degeneration.

New Orleans Jazz is mocked by Minstrels and other Al Jolson dressed up in black, then recovered, qualified by white critics as "real jazz",
not without denying it all originality, because without the European contribution how to could former slaves have worked out such music?

The swing strikes back in the 1940s. Duke Ellington in particular, who will offer compositions of extreme sophistication and modernity,
dissonances so well integrated that only attentive listening reveals daring and denies that this is only to "make dance", already announcing
the bop.

Roosevelt and Eisenhower's America will retort with Glenn Miller or Benny. Poor ethical, wise and uninspired scores, ersatz swing for GIs
stationed in Germany, and bank employees in the suburbs of the American dream.

Be-bop and hard Bop venture into atonal, dissonance, modal, the need for theoretical and instrumental excellence, complex phrasing, and
blacks try again to sow The Man (the repressive white world) , to prohibit any possibility of recovery. Here again it is criticism that will
be the faithful watchdog of the system. "According to bourgeois aesthetics, music and the other arts are reputed to be autonomous, as if it
were done elsewhere and above social relationships[...]Art thus has a function in bourgeois societies[...]]of exploiting fantasies of purity
and perfection[...]and of censorship of everything that idealism condemns:[...]matter, disorder, social contradictions"[1]. At most, we are
willing to concede that there is a folkloric background to black American music: work song, old agricultural rites.

But how can we deny that this music is a reflection of the historical-social situations encountered since the time of slavery? From the
rural blues, to the new provincial orleans, to the swing and bebop of the big cities, it is from the peasant, working class, from that of
the urban downgrades that jazz arises, even the most sophisticated, the most apparently cerebral . These are not mistaken who dance on Miles
Davis, where The Man sits and lays an article for New York or Parisian nerds.

Only here: admit that music, and a fortiori that of a racial minority, can have a function of affirmation, of contestation, allows
identification and mobilization, in short, admit that "art is no longer at service of the ruling class"[2]is impossible.

"... in the service of the revolution"
However, this is indeed the dynamic launched in 1959. It undoes the sacrosanct yoke of the theme - impro - return to the theme. The rhythmic
structure explodes, the drummer goes from metronome to full-time musician. The harmonic research makes new marriages to the instruments, and
breaking with the eternal virtuoso solo, the collective passes in front. Suddenly, jazz escapes all definition, it does not care about the
western virtues of balance or clarity, if it favors improvisation, it is also very written, if it draws on European learned music, it does
not renounce either its popular forms. In short, we are not mistaken, if there is such a political charge it is precisely because this
movement is the crucible of multiple expressions, impossible to catalog and therefore, impossible to enclose in a peremptory and
paternalistic definition ,

So, the following year Ornette Coleman put two quartets face to face and said to them: "play". Without partition, nor preconceived idea, and
good meeting! The album will be called: Free Jazz .

A telluric movement is at work, and America perceives that it shakes more than the musical domain.

Because the new thing, another name for free jazz, speaks of politics. Speech becomes free and becomes invective, claim, denunciation,
illustration of a condition and jazz, especially free, asserts itself from now on as political, like the voice of a people. There is no
longer any question of being polite. "We are only an extension of this black nationalist movement - Black Muslims - Civil Rights. It's the
basis of music," says Archie Shepp.

Indeed: 1960, it is the creation of the Student Non Violent Coordination Committee (SNCC) and its tours in the South (the freedom rides) its
opposition to the Vietnam war, then its radicalization until joining the Black Panther Party ( BPP) by Stokely Carmichael. The same guy who
says: "Archie Shepp's music is the great black beauty of black power" , explicitly mixing jazz and revolution.

 From this moment in American history, the African-American struggles move from the field of law to the ideological field by identifying
then denouncing the "white" myths to which minorities are bound: integration, democracy, success, conformity in one word to the capitalist
categories.

Jazz marks the measure of each stage of the fight, not missing any.

1960: We insist ! by Max Roach and Abbey Lincoln wants to keep the United States to its promises of emancipation expressed a hundred years
earlier by Lincoln, never kept, and the album widens the field of the anti-colonial struggle to the whole of the black minority, United
States to Africa.

1963: KKK blows up a church in Birmingham, Alabama, killing five girls. John Coltrane reads the news on the train from New York to
Philadelphia, and immediately composes a piece of a funeral, heartbreaking, terrible simplicity, Alabama .

1965: Malcolm X is shot 15 times in Harlem. In his album Fire music Archie Shepp sings "Malcolm, Malcolm, semper Malcolm" .

August 1971: George Jackson, emblematic activist of the BPP is shot dead in the prison of San Quentin, California. The shock wave spreads to
New York State, Attica prison, where from September 9 to 11 a thousand prisoners occupy the central courtyard of the prison. Sensitized by
the political prisoners of the BPP and the Black Muslims, furious that previous requests for prison reform have remained unfulfilled, what
will sometimes be called "Municipality of Attica" is put in place and produces a manifesto, specific requests backed by a political analysis
denouncing the state of society as the origin of their presence within these walls, while preparing to undergo the assault of the troops
that the State of New York will not fail to oppose.

 From 9 to 11 September a thousand prisoners occupy the central courtyard of Attica prison, in New York State. The "Municipality of Attica"
is set up and produces a manifesto. The repression will be bloody, killing 10 guards and 29 prisoners.
"The exceptional[lies]first of all in the way[they]organized themselves to hold a long siege while outside gathered large numbers of armed
troops. The organization of daily life and the production of a common protest discourse constitute the first of the peculiarities of the
Attica revolt. There is a second that has often been overlooked: the use that mutineers made of civil society"[3]in demanding the
intercession of the tenors of the black struggle.

Its governor, a certain Nelson Rockefeller, billionaire, sends more than 500 men to put down the mutiny, which kills 10 guards and 29
prisoners, signing the biggest massacre by the State of his own fellow citizens since the Civil War.

 From Alabama to Attica
1972: Archie Shepp pays tribute to the event, its victims and their fight for dignity with the album Attica Blues , political and musical
masterpiece.

Free jazz is a militant claim displayed. And committed, he must become elusive: there is no free jazz style, but artists, approaches ...
politics changes the very nature and purpose of music, and this accompanies the black struggle, until 'nowadays. Free jazz does not close to
white musicians, but there will now be two camps: that of capital compatibility, consistent, lukewarm and clean, that, rough or simple,
sophisticated or soft, but which always escapes, always says "Free!".

Cuervo (UCL Marseille)

[1] Ph. Carles, JL Comolli, Free jazz , Black Power , Gallimard, 2000, 448 pages, 11.50 euros.

[2] Same

[3] Philippe Artières, T he mutiny of Attica in September 1971. Story of a collective action , text available on the Criminocorpus site.

https://www.unioncommunistelibertaire.org/?Jazz-l-annee-de-la-revolte

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