Author: Stella Nebois (Stella Nebois)

For so long, universities have been considered to be the real producers of knowledge, monolithic institutions with access to the ‘meaning’ of life. In pursuing meaning, we have learnt to question everything around us. Nowadays, we can, too, question what we know about the knowledge that we consume on a daily basis; what do we know about the products that we consume? In many cases, we will have to face the fact that we do not know. In others, we will have to face the fact that not everybody is willing to know.

On March 26th, CREA hosted Classic Meets Jazz, a concert by the Amsterdam Student Big Band (ASBB). What makes a classic a classic? What makes music classical? When did jazz unmeet classical music? And most importantly, who decided what is considered a classic? These are not just questions that have shaped history, but rather, sentences lurking in the silence of music culture. In the case of a jazz big band, rarely there is space for silence. However, the silence in Classic meets Jazz was the lack of representation of the very unrooted roots of this genre: the convergence of plenty of different cultures with the desire to speak up against racial discrimination.