The Jazz Estate - Born on this day in 1935, multi-instrumentalist Rahsaan Roland Kirk was among the

Born on this day in 1935, multi-instrumentalist Rahsaan Roland Kirk was among the first to argue that jazz should be called Black Classical Music. For Rahsaan, a lack of respect for jazz equated with a lack of respect for the achievements of black people and the erasure of black genius. His recordings are also peppered with political commentary – snippets of spoken word from Paul Robeson: news items on Nixon’s involvement in the Watergate scandal, even a warning about the rise of the influence of computers, with Rahsaan threatening to pull the plug on any machine that tried to tell him what to do.Perhaps his greatest political undertaking was the initiation of The Jazz and People’s Movement. This was a coalition of activists brought together in 1970 to challenge what they saw as the racist exclusion of jazz from television programming. They hatched a plan to infiltrate the audiences of TV talk shows armed with whistles.
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