On July 17, 2014, the New York police arrested Eric Gardner, a 43-year-old African-American citizen. His crime was selling loose cigarettes. Despite not resisting, four officers threw him to the ground and immobilized him while he screamed that he could not breathe: “I can’t breathe.” Gardner died of suffocation by the police. The Black Lives Matter movement, represented by the hashtag #BlackLivesMatter, began to gain strength in the wake of that murder when a citizen filmed everything and the images reached the entire country. Ten years later, Jason Fulford, Gardner’s cousin, published a song titled Taking our breath back’ with Catalan pianist Albert Marquès, in an attempt to gauge how much or how little things have changed for African-American citizens.
In May 2020, a Minneapolis police officer killed George Floyd by suffocating him with his knee pressed against his throat. Floyd also shouted the same phrase numerous times: “I can’t breathe.” Following that event, Jason Fulford already lamented in an interview with ‘The New Yorker’ that the protests that followed the death of his cousin Eric Gardner had not had any effect. Today he confirms the same feeling: “Things have hardly changed. We are not moving forward in any way.” From this frustration shared by millions of people comes a jazz-rap recording that aspires to fuel the civil battle against racism, police violence and injustice towards the African-American community in the US. “There are media trends and the Black Lives Matter movement has passed. A decade later, everything has disappeared,” Marquès notes.
Marquès is a music teacher at a public high school in New York where Fulford was a student. They never met in class, but political activism brought them together. In November 2020, Fulford took part in a charity run in protest of the murder of George Floyd. That sporting event organised by the Run For Justice collective ended in the Fort Greene neighbourhood, the setting for several Spike Lee films, where a musical performance was to take place. Albert Marquès played the piano at that concert, although he had also attended the demonstrations that took place in New York years before after the death of Eric Gardner. It was only a matter of time before they joined forces.
The Lamar Connection
James Fulford learned about the case of Keith Lamar, an African-American who had been on death row for more than three decades, through Albert Marquès. Shortly afterwards, the pianist invited the activist to explain his experience at the Freedom First concerts, where Lamar recited verses from his prison. It would be a way of reinforcing the discourse on the use of institutional violence against innocent people, mainly African-Americans, beyond the Lamar case. On stage, Fulford recalled the murder of his cousin Eric, but not only that. At the age of 13, he lived through another traumatic experience: the murder of his friend Nicholas Naquan Heyward Jr. at the hands of the police. A shot to the stomach killed him. The motive? The police suspected him when they saw that he was holding a gun. The gun was a toy.
“In the neighborhood where I grew up, police brutality was normalized. Especially in the 90s and 2000s,” he recalls today by phone. Even so, at 13 years old, Fulford did not understand the dimension of what had just happened. “I was more innocent and I simply interpreted it as an accident,” he admits. He only began to put two and two together “by hearing and seeing how similar situations were repeated. When what happened to my cousin Eric happened, I started going to demonstrations and I became aware of the situation,” he explains. This is how he explains it in Taking our breath back“This song sheds light on where I have been since that moment,” he sums up, referring to the murder of Eric Gardner and his process of politicization and connection with other people affected by institutional violence.
“When Jason reveals at concerts that he is Eric Gardner’s cousin, you can feel the oxygen disappear from the room,” Marquès describes. “That case is still very much remembered in the US, especially because of the type of audience we play for: mainly African Americans.” When Fulford’s story began to take musical form, he himself perceived how his words acquired greater power. “When I speak, sometimes I notice that the audience gets a little distracted. Singing brings out another kind of emotion. Keith explains that listening to John Coltrane’s music changed his life. I notice that the music we have created is changing mine. I am understanding how much music can heal me and others. I notice that my words are more healing,” he senses.
Hoy Taking our breath back It is a composition full of rage and hope that avoids the tear-jerker factor. In fact, the video clip does not use the images that went viral. Nobody wanted to risk retraumatising Gardner’s family. Marquès describes Taking our breath back as “something halfway between a sound document and a song.” “In cinema, there is a lot of work with non-actors and in the visual arts there was the art brut movement, but I don’t think it is so common to work with non-musicians. But the fact that Keith Lamar or now Jason present their cases gives the pieces a purity and a very effective authenticity that the public perceives. They are not performing. They are just narrating their life,” the pianist explains. “We decided to record it after realizing how well it worked live.” It was later that they decided to delay the release to coincide with the anniversary of Gardner’s murder.
For years I hadn’t thought about how suffocated I felt within the system. Even though I’m technically breathing, I feel a little suffocated by what’s going on in the world.
Jason Fulford
— Musician
Growing up in Brooklyn to the likes of LL Cool J, Run DMC and Gang Starr, rap is a part of Jason Fulford’s culture. “Biggie was one of my biggest inspirations. His words shaped everything in front of me. And Nas, even though he was from Queens, gave the most accurate portrait of what was going on in neighborhoods like mine,” he says. Still, he considers himself an “accidental rapper,” having never recorded anything before. Paradoxically, the patience of a jazz pianist and the advice of an African-American sentenced to death for three decades have been crucial to finding his voice as a rapper. “Jay-Z has a song where he says: ‘You can lock up my body, but you can’t catch my soul’“Keith Lamar is the best living example of this. His body is imprisoned, but his soul is connecting many people, giving them strength and confidence,” he explains.
The echo of three words
If one phrase could sum up the future of humanity in the 21st century, it would be ‘I can’t breathe’. The difficulty of breathing in the exhausting migratory transits, the difficulty of breathing in oversaturated cities, the difficulty of breathing economically despite having a job and a salary, the difficulty of breathing in precarious work contexts, the difficulty of breathing in the midst of a climate emergency, the difficulty of breathing due to police harassment… For Fulford, those three words (I can’t breathe) mean much more. “They are very uncomfortable words for me,” she answers after a very long silence on the other end of the phone. “When I hear them, I relive my cousin’s last moments. I wish he didn’t have to be remembered for that, because we all deserve the right to breathe.”
Record the song Taking our breath back has made him relive those events. Fulford was about to attend a wedding in Puerto Rico when he saw the images on the Internet. That’s how he knew what had happened to his cousin. He didn’t want to believe it, but minutes later he started receiving messages and calls. Ten years later, the phrase reminds him of the suffering his family has endured and the pain he still feels despite the time that has passed. “For years I hadn’t thought about how suffocated I have felt within this system. And although technically I am breathing, I still feel a little suffocated by what is happening in the world,” he says. Despite everything, Fulford also describes those three words as “a motivation.” “Hopefully future generations won’t have to deal with everything that my cousin and so many other people went through. Every person deserves to have the resources to grow, just as a tree needs water.”
Jason’s mother worked for more than three decades in the New York City Department of Education. He himself, after growing up in a neighborhood with few services, also worked for fifteen years as a social worker. Currently living in North Carolina, Fulford promotes educational projects that keep young people active through sports. In fact, Jason became interested in sports thanks to a neighbor who organized basketball tournaments in a park in his neighborhood. That neighbor was called Nicholas Heyward Sr. He was the father of that friend who was shot down by the police at the age of 13.
Amplifying voiceless cases
Months ago Marquès contacted the rapper Pablo Hasél to record a song that would internationalize his case. Without intending to, Albert Marquès is becoming a magnet for dozens of people who consider themselves victims of the injustices of the police, judicial or penitentiary system. For months, he has received an average of two emails or Instagram messages a week from people asking him to report on criminal cases of all kinds. They are almost always African-American men or a family member. He also knows the experiences of people who have spent half their lives in prison due to an imprecise trial and have managed to get out after studying law and directing their own defense. Or of convicts who face the final stretch of their very long sentence with a photocopy of the article published by the New York Times on the Keith Lamar case hanging on a wall in their cell as a reminder. People whose first wish, upon leaving prison, is to attend a concert of the ‘Freedom first’ project.
The ‘Amplify Voices’ project was born precisely after seeing the impact of the album ‘Freedom first’ with Keith Lamar. “We have found a very powerful format: working with non-musicians to amplify their voice,” he celebrates. “And that is precisely my job as a teacher at the institute!” he exclaims, seeing how his work as a teacher connects with his role as a musical activist. “I can train these people because my usual job at the institute is to teach children and adolescents, sometimes with difficult social situations, to express themselves without necessarily having artistic or musical tools. The problem is that I don’t have the capacity to say yes to all the proposals and I have to select which cases I want to work with. But, who am I to choose them?” he asks himself, anguished and overwhelmed. His dream is that other musicians adopt this way of working and join the project, amplifying more voices and more causes.
Source: www.eldiario.es
