Red Rodney was an American bebop and hard bop trumpet player who made came up with mentors like Charlie Parker and Dizzy Gillespie. In his lifetime he saw much hardship, including the loss of his wife and daughter in a car accident, and the loss of many of his contemporaries in the jazz world.
In this edition of Liner Notes, Rabbi and jazz historian Neil Blumofe talks about what it means to be a “survivor”, and how jazz, and specifically bebop, allows us to confront oppression through resistance, revolution, and reckoning.