The Dark Heart of Jazz

Café Society, New York, 1939: Billie Holiday is on edge tonight; the song she has been asked to sing both unsettles and captivates her. The audience at the Greenwich Village club is mixed, comprising both white and black people – one of the rare exceptions in the city. She begins in a whisper, almost as if in pain.

“The trees of the South bear a strange fruit / Blood on the leaves and blood at the roots / Black bodies swaying in the southern breeze / Strange fruits hang from the poplars”.

When it ends, there isn’t even a hint of applause. Then a timid clap, and suddenly everyone is applauding. Billie bursts into tears. It is the first time that a song with such a captivating melody has spoken directly about racial hatred and the lynching of African Americans hung from a tree in a Southern state. The protest song would come many years later. Rosa Parks would refuse to sit in the seats reserved for black people on a bus in Alabama just fifteen years later, and Martin Luther King would march on Washington twenty-five years later. Yet that applause would accompany ‘Strange Fruit’ with ever-increasing fervour over time, until it became a ritual at Billie Holiday’s concerts and the anthem of black music. That surging river of polyrhythm, melody and cries of protest that crossed continents and oceans, mingling with peoples and histories, eventually reached a five-year-old boy in Bari in the 1960s, to whom his dandyish grandfather gave an unexpected surprise: “Today I’ve decided to give you the gift of jazz,” the man tells him, leaving his grandson bewildered in front of a whole set of drums. It’s the classic grandad blunder, as he listens to Neapolitan songs laced with underworld rhetoric – nothing to do with jazz. It’s a musician uncle who explains that fatal mistake to him: at the end of the Second World War in Naples, the drummer in the army band had stamped ‘hot jazz’ in huge letters on his bass drum. This story, therefore, begins with a misunderstanding and a misappropriation dating back well before the 1960s, and thanks to a book and an exhibition, it sheds light not only on the misunderstanding between grandfather and grandson but, above all, on something much bigger – something to do with the African diaspora and slavery in the United States, as well as the Caribbean diaspora to the United Kingdom. Nicola Gaeta’s book "Black Beauty: Stories of Black Music" (Low Editore, 2026), which has just been published in Italy, and the exhibition "The Music is Black: A British Story", curated by Jacqueline Springer at the brand-new Victoria & Albert East Museum in London (open until 10 January 2027) offer a wonderful opportunity to embark on an extraordinary journey back in time and press one’s ear to the desert sand to hear the primordial beat born in the heart of Africa – Mali – and that collective breath which, from a religious ritual, has transformed into music, at times sorrowful, at times joyful. The most beautiful music in the world.

“I don’t know what ever became of that drum kit,” the boy tells “Il Foglio” today; he grew up without ever learning to play an instrument but went on to become a respected doctor, “yet it was my first encounter with music, with swing and with the groove that have stayed with me for seventy years”. Over the years, Gaeta has given free rein to his passion, first as a disc jockey in the 1970s and then as a music critic. Drawing on these two experiences, in "Black Beauty" – a book of almost 800 pages – Gaeta takes the reader on a narrative journey through over a century of African-American music, following a timeline that is not merely chronological, but deeply cultural, social and existential. From the work songs on the plantations of the American South to the cosmic beats of Afro-diasporic electronic music and contemporary hip hop, the book traces, decade by decade, the aesthetic, political and spiritual turning points in Black music. Starting with that misunderstanding: the appropriation by white people of a sound, a beat, a cry of rebellion that was unique to the African-American population. First they learnt to appreciate its groove, its infectious rhythm, and then they commercialised it to the point of becoming its illegitimate owners. When asked directly what jazz is today, Gaeta replies candidly: “Today it has become a global phenomenon, so defining it is extremely difficult. Louis Armstrong used to say that if you ask what jazz is, you’ll never know. It’s a form of expressive freedom which, however, has now taken on a global dimension, manifesting itself all over the world. And for me, in any case, it’s the only music I still enjoy listening to. Rock, even the most rebellious kind, has now become the music of the establishment, and this is something that’s also happening to a certain type of hip hop.”

“R-E-S-P-E-C-T, you know, respect / You’re out of your mind, lad, trying to play the big shot / You’ve only thought of yourself, of easy money, but you know what’s funny? Have a look at yourself / Have a good look at yourself”, sings rapper Guru over Roy Ayers’ vibraphone in 1993, one of the finest examples of hip-hop and jazz.

British black music is also a global phenomenon, and its worldwide impact is the focus of this excellent London exhibition, which marks the opening of the new cultural centre in the East Bank district – one of the UK’s most multi-ethnic and cosmopolitan areas, with a significant population of residents of African and Caribbean origin.

“Music is the soundtrack to our lives and one of the most powerful tools for unification,” said curator Jacqueline Springer, “in this exhibition we celebrate the richness and versatility of Black British music as a tool for protest, self-affirmation and creativity, and we reveal the untold stories behind some of the most popular music of all time.” The exhibition’s multi-sensory journey features music, videos, texts and, above all, objects representing the many musical genres born out of Black culture, from 2 Tone to ska, from trip hop to jungle, from the piano of the revolutionary Caribbean musician Winifred Atwell to the iconic waistcoat designed by Banksy and worn by Stormzy at the Glastonbury Festival in 2019.

“This town’s turning into a ghost town / All the pubs have closed down / This place is turning into a ghost town / The bands won’t play here no more / Too many fights on the dance floor,” sang The Specials in “Ghost Town” in 1981, which became a chart-topping hit in the UK within a few weeks.

Despite its length, Gaeta’s book has become something of a publishing sensation in just a few months and is already in its second printing, supported by the small Piacenza-based publisher born out of the editorial project of Officine Gutenberg, the social cooperative set up to integrate disadvantaged people into the publishing and communications sectors. Gaeta begins his long and fascinating literary journey with the old map “L’arbre du jazz”, which depicts black music as a living organism in constant regeneration: “A great tree whose main trunk is jazz, whose roots are represented by the blues and religious music, and whose branches are everything that revolves around it,” says the author with great passion and a touch of irony, “Eight hundred pages are actually very few indeed. A few friends have turned up their noses because Cannonball Adderley is missing, or the legendary J Dilla, or Wilson Pickett,” he quips. I point out that he hasn’t mentioned John Lee Hooker or Howlin’ Wolf, and he replies, amused: “You’d need eight thousand pages to be exhaustive. It was extremely difficult to choose the most representative figures and make painful, surgical cuts in terms of what to leave out, but of course, arguing over ‘who’s in and who’s out’ is absurd because the book would lose its purpose.” This horizontal journey – spanning from the deportation of African slaves to the birth of jazz and funk, right through to hip hop and Detroit techno – is complemented by vertical mini-narratives on the biographies of the most significant figures: from Bessie Smith, the Empress, to Billie Holiday, the voice that knew where it hurt; from Miles Davis, the great chameleon, to his counterpart, John Coltrane, the mystic who sought the absolute. But Gaeta, a musical omnivore, also skilfully sketches the incredible and lesser-known stories of Sun Ra, the prophet of Afrofuturism, and Gil Scott-Heron, the spiritual father of hip hop; of Erykah Badu, the good witch of neo-soul, and DJ Kool Herc, the inventor of hip hop in the Bronx of the 1970s. And then there is the story of Nina Simone, the high priestess of soul, and of the artistic and musical rivalry that claimed the lives of 2Pac and Notorious B.I.G.; the purple star of Prince and that of the street genius Kendrick Lamar, who won the Pulitzer Prize in 2017 for his hip-hop album “DAMN” – something that had never happened before.

“They not like us, they not like us”, “They’re not like us”, Kendrick Lamar repeats obsessively in his 2024 single of the same name, sampling various fragments of Ray Charles’s “I Believe to My Soul” and winning five Grammy Awards.

“Spirituals and gospel harmonies lifted voices towards a liberation that the world did not offer. Black music rediscovered its freedom in the collective breath, pushing itself to innovate through ritual, religious service and emotional architecture,” writes Logan Richardson – the Kansas City-based saxophonist, born in 1980, and one of the most interesting voices in contemporary black music – in the book’s foreword. “Its most explosive laboratory, however, was not a concert hall or a record label: it was the square. Congo Square (the famous square in New Orleans, ed.) was America’s first open-air multidisciplinary incubator. Here, rhythm collided with movement, sound met history, bodies became archives, and culture displayed itself in fractal reinvention.”

That rhythm, that song of sorrow celebrated in Congo Square, was picked up by white people and literally plundered by none other than a Sicilian, the famous Dominic James La Rocca, known as Nick: the cornet player, born in New Orleans in 1889 to parents from the province of Trapani, recorded the track "Tiger Rag" in 1917 with his Original Dixieland Jass Band; it went down in history as the first jazz track ever recorded. “Nick La Rocca was a proper bastard,” says Gaeta with a laugh, “one of the many clever white men – and I emphasise, like all Sicilians – who claimed the title of inventor of jazz. He is regarded by scholars of BAM – the acronym for Black American Music – as the first true usurper of their music, and I must say, to be honest, I agree.”

The book also devotes considerable space to the trumpeter Nicholas Payton, born in New Orleans in 1973, a champion of the cultural reappropriation of the origins of Black music. For years, in fact, he has been proposing to replace the word ‘jazz’ – considered by many African-American musicians to be reductive and colonialist (neither Duke Ellington nor Miles Davis liked it) – with BAM, Black American Music. “Jazz is a nigger word,” Miles declared with his usual sarcasm in 1969, “They should stop using it to make money off us.”

In an interview with Gaeta Payton, he highlights the centrality of the issue of the origins of the blues as a need for communication “because Black people brought to America and kept as slaves were not allowed to speak their mother tongue; their masters did not want them to communicate with one another; enslaving them also meant stripping them of any kind of cultural heritage. Many decades before any civil rights movement emerged, long before Martin Luther King or Malcolm X began to play a role in the Black community, this music – Black music – began to define the concept of ‘freedom’ for my people”.

“You won’t be able to stay at home, brother / You won’t be able to log on, switch on the telly and back out of it / You won’t be able to lose yourself in drugs and sneak out for a beer during the adverts, because / The revolution won’t be televised,” sang Gil Scott-Heron in 1971 in one of the most sampled soul tracks in hip-hop.

Payton’s words are echoed by those of Springer, who, speaking about the London exhibition, emphasised the value of music as a means of social integration: “Conveying this message through a curatorial journey that analyses political and social history and allows people to see music not only through their own memories, but also how it intertwines with responses to oppression, crimes against humanity, global conflicts, social disintegration and cohesion, is a truly wonderful way to highlight the importance of music”. England and America, then, united for once to celebrate the Black voice and pride that colonialism has never managed to subdue.

“I’m organising a trip abroad too / I’m planning to go to America once I’ve got a Visa card / But these days, getting a Visa card isn’t difficult”, sing Massive Attack in “Five Man Army” from their 1991 debut album “Blue Lines”, sampling the drums from Al Green’s 1972 track “I’m Glad You’re Mine”.

Gaeta concludes the book with some touching personal memories that make it all the more precious, such as when he recounts how his Nigerian friend Dynka – who died of an overdose – taught him to play two records at the same time: “Black music taught me not to be afraid of silence. To stay in time with the beat even when the rhythm is missing. Writing about black music has been a long-standing debt for me: to those who have transformed pain into art, hardship into grace, and solitude into a chorus.”