SWING OF CHANGE: THE POWER OF MUSIC

Sometimes, the way to achieve great things is simpler than we think.

There were harder times behind American society’s back, times when people used to have a serious problem with the way they looked at any person who had different skin color, different thoughts, or just different manners. During those hard times, black people were treated as animals, and it was a long time after when they got their freedom, however, they were not free.

We can make a good picture of this situation if we take a look at this short clip: http://vimeo.com/30272990

We take place in an American street, where we can find Harry’s Cut, a little barber shop owned by a white guy named Harry. This guy is an elegant barber, who only works with white people (that’s what I meant with “they were not free”, because that society separated white people from black people, and even if white people were not allowed to treat black people as slaves, they were indirectly allowed to exclude them from their own stuff: is that being free and equal?) and he loves his phonograph, and he puts some military music on it. The phonograph stopped working, and he was lucky that day, because his white customer was able to fix it, but the machine had to leave the place: Harry would be without any music for the next few days.

Then, music came back to Harry’s Cut, but it came in the form of an unsynchronized and joyful sound of a trumpet. Harry was really surprised when he noticed who was playing that trumpet: a black man standing on the sidewalk. The context which surrounded Harry was a racist society, as I already showed, so he found unacceptable for his beliefs to let him play there, and he went after the black musician. As he grabbed the trumpet, the black guy disappeared, and he was left there all alone, with that shiny instrument.

Harry goes back to his barber shop, and he feels nostalgic, because he is missing his military music, as he looks at his past as a sergeant playing a trumpet, with a really structured music, which made him happy. He cleaned up the trumpet, and he started to play a squared melody, with a defined structure which never walked away the organized tempo. That trumpet belonged to a black guy, a joyful man who had been discriminated in every aspect, and that trumpet got used to a different kind of melody: that melody that comes from our heart, with no structure, with no tempo or pre-defined hierarchy. This trumpet started to syncopate, and Harry didn't like the swing, so he tried to force his trumpet to play structured music, with no messy rhythm or similar.

Music is powerful, and it’s the only capable of making people change their minds, manners or positions against any topic. This is not the exception, and the Jazz penetrated Harry’s heart, and this strange swing filled his racist mind. Harry was a different man, and after enjoying a rhythm which was invented by black people, he understood that racism is not correct, and he changed his mind about the way he used to serve people, so he decided to allow everybody to access his barber shop and get a treat.