The pianist and composer Albert Marquès, accompanied by an Steinway piano, will talk with the journalist and social activist David Fernàndez about his latest book El jazz suena en el corredor de la muerte (Sweet Jazz in the Runner of Death) (Crítica, 2025).
In El jazz suena en el corredor de la muerte (Crítica, 2025) Marquès shows us the reality of the American prison system through the story of Keith LaMar, an African American on the death row.
Over more than thirty years isolated in a tiny cell of the death row of an Ohio prison, Keith LaMar has managed to keep his mind by listening to jazz and trying to understand why the American justice chose him. Indicted without material evidence and after prosecutors hid witnesses exonerating him, a court consisting exclusively of whites sentenced him to capital punishment for five murders occurred during a prison riot in Lucasville in 1993. Since then he has struggled to prove that he is innocent and to remember that he is a human being.
In the midst of the Covid-19 pandemic and the Black Lives Matter movement, Albert Marquès, a jazz pianist from Granollers living in New York, learned about its history and, after months of friendship and collaboration, they created together the album Freedom first, followed by a series of concerts in America and Europe in which LaMar intervenes by telephone.
Based on the case of LaMar, the book analyzes the racism inherent in American justice, the billionaire business of privatization of prisons and the struggle to remain mentally healthy within a prison system designed for punishment. But, above all, this book talks about clinging to truth and life in extreme conditions, the strength of jazz to unite human beings and the power of music to overcome adversity.
Albert Marquès is a Catalan pianist, composer and activist. He moved to New York, where he has been residing in Brooklyn for over a decade. He has collaborated with universities such as NYU, Oxford or New School. Marquès toured with his various formations throughout the United States, Europe and Latin America.
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