How the Slave Trade and the Shoah Gave Rise to a Musical Marvel. An Interview with Jacques Schwarz-Bart

Abstract

Four centuries of the trans-Atlantic slave trade bequeathed enduring legacies of pain and suffering from Africa to the Antilles, not to mention the Americas. Four years of the Holocaust (Shoah, in Hebrew) compressed millennia of persecutions of the Jewish people, with repercussions from Europe to the Middle East. The shockwaves of those two heinous epochs have fused in a most unexpected and artistically creative way, giving rise to the incomparable jazz composer and saxophonist Jacques Schwarz-Bart. In this interview with William Miles, the son of the 1959 Prix Goncourt laureate André Schwarz-Bart and the award-winning Guadeloupean novelist and playwright Simone Schwarz-Bart reflects on his life, inspirations and career.