World music matters - Klezmer, funk and hip hop unite against racism and intolerance in Trump’s America

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A decade after their acclaimed album Tweet Tweet, Abraham Inc. return with Together We Stand, using their eclectic mix of klezmer, funk and hip hop to show that different religions, ages, sexes and races get along. David Krakauer, Fred Wesley and Socalled talk to RFI about how the U.S. president’s “Muslim” ban got them back in the studio making great music.

 

“The band is kind of crazy mix of just about anybody you can imagine,” says Socalled, a Canadian beatmaker who’s been working with Krakauer on reinventing klezmer for over a decade. 

“Men, women, black, white, brown, Latino, Africans … we have basically Jewish culture and Yiddish culture meeting African American culture. And on the song Together We Stand we invited an Arabic percussionist Mohammed Raky, so there’s Arabic percussion.”

The title track was written by Fred Wesley, master funk trombonist and James Brown's former musical director.

"Together WE stand is also the peoples of the world," Wesley says, “all races and all nationalities and all religions of the world standing together in the name of peace.

"If we all could stand together, could listen to each other we would find out we have more in common than we have differences.”

“I’m a black man and you’re a white farmer, let me just tell you what I go through and you tell me what you go through.. and it’ll be the same thing you know,” he continues, in reference to some of the hate speech that's come out of the woodwork since Trump's election in 2016.

Lullaby for Charlottesville

Socalled wrote the song Lullaby for Charlottesville in tribute to Heather Hever, killed at a white supremacist rally in 2017. 

“It’s an ode to the memory of Heather Hayer, the young woman who was murdered by someone from the white supremacist movement that Donald Trump said “there’s good people on both sides”.  It sort of paints a story in music of voices coming together to pay homage to that tragic moment in American history.” 

The Hippies were right, weren't they? 

Krakauer wrote the song The Hippies Were Right. Though he was only a teenager at the time of Woodstock, he “marched against the war in Vietnam" and hung out in East Village, an old Jewish quarter of NY popular with hippies. He was inspired by the fact they believed they could change things.

“They were protesting the Vietnam war, they were talking about defending the environment, about love among people and I thought this makes sense.

"Politically ...
22 Nov 2019 English France TV & Film

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