(powerful musical notes) (people speaking indistinctly in background) (upbeat jazz music) - Welcome to Music for Social Justice.

I'm your host, Damien Sneed.

When trying to right wrongs of the past, sometimes we have to face a difficult history.

We have to have the courage to learn about and accept things that would be easier to avoid.

Both of our performers in this episode tackle this issue we're calling Hard History.

Like many of us, pianist Derek Polischuk was fortunate to enjoy a close relationship with his grandmother who forged a successful music career of her own in California in the 1950s and 1960s.

And while she inspired him to become a musician as well, she also opened his eyes to the history of the Hawaiian Islands and the sad and tragic parts of the story surrounding this slice of paradise becoming the 50th United State.

(peaceful music) - My first musical influence of any kind was my grandmother, Pauline Lei Momi Wise.

She was a legendary Hawaiian singer in Southern California.

Neither of my parents are musicians, but I remember every time that I would spend time with my grandmother... By the way, in Hawaiian, we call our grandmother Tutu.

So every time I'd spend time with Tutu, she'd be singing, she'd be playing the ukulele.

So the first sounds that I have in my head of music are Hawaiian sounds.

Even though I'm a classical pianist, somehow there's this immediate connection that I feel deep in my soul when I hear Hawaiian music.

And there's this innate care and love that I have to knowing about my grandmother, knowing about my Tutu, who was someone who preserved Hawaiian-ness in a very beautiful way during a time in the mid 20th century when it was essentially vanishing in the Islands.

We live in this incredible country where people have been lifted up to great wealth in many different ways.

And opportunities abound in this country.

There are also dark pieces of history in this country that I think a lot of us don't know about.

And fortunately, I think from an educational standpoint, people are beginning to know about some of these stories.

I think one of the stories that is still yet to be untold to most people in this country is this story of the illegal annexation of Hawaii.

(peaceful piano music) Hawaii was a thriving kingdom in the late 19th century with foreign treaties, an extraordinary amount of trade, burgeoning social system, and a monarchy.

Queen Liliuokalani was part of a line of monarchs in Hawaii that essentially stemmed from King Kamehameha who was the first king to unify the Hawaiian Islands.

Queen Liliuokalani was a beloved figure in Hawaii.

She was a musician and a poet.

And she composed "Aloha Oe" which is a very famous Hawaiian song that everybody knows.

There's also a very famous protest song called "Kaulana Na Pua" which means famous are the flowers.

And it essentially is a protest song protesting the annexation of the Islands and the Hawaiian nationals' unwillingness to be subjugated to annexation by the United States.

(melancholy musical notes) Queen Liliuokalani, she was placed on house arrest by a committee of American businessmen and the United States Marines because she attempted to introduce a new constitution in Hawaii which essentially tried to preserve voting rights for people who were Hawaiian, people from the Islands versus people who had come as sugar cane plantation owners.

It was sort of a very political attempt to maintain Hawaiian sovereignty and sort of cultural preservation.

And that landed her in house arrest.

And eventually, that house arrest resulted in the United States annexing Hawaii as a territory.

In August 1898, the Hawaiian flag was lowered from the palace and the American flag was raised in its place.

In addition to this symbolic takeover of the Hawaiian Islands, I think a lot of people view it as a cultural genocide of Hawaiian culture, a systematic suppression of Hawaiian culture starting at that time.

In the late 19th century, it became law that all education in Hawaii had to be done in English.

And there wasn't an outright outlawing of the Hawaiian language.

But where kids would go to school previously and interact with one another in Hawaiian and learn in Hawaiian, that was now illegal.

And that led to a precipitous decline in the 20th century of people who are able to speak the Hawaiian language.

Now, Hawaiian is not necessarily a conversational language.

But it is experiencing a Renaissance in various guises through various movements, of language movements.

Tourists come to Hawaii and they have a nice vacation and they don't learn a lot about this history and they don't learn a lot about the culture.

And I would love to see Americans learn about it, not just Americans of Hawaiian descent like myself but Americans who are simply interested in this diverse country that we live in with very distinct and beautiful cultures.

(peaceful music) I'm going to play one movement from a four-movement set by a composer named Thomas Osborne.

The set is called "Tara Incognita."

And the fourth movement is called "Tara Nullius" which means no man's land.

And it refers to the legal concept of a country being able to lay claim to another country despite native cultures that might be there already if it hadn't been discovered by Western people.

(bold musical notes) I think this piece shows really what the piano is capable of in a lot of ways and through those ways paints a picture about the pain of the history of Hawaii, the pain of the the lack of history in Hawaii, and also, I think, challenges the listener to see the historical story of Hawaii through a very unique sonic landscape.

(peaceful piano music) I think music is a distinctly unique art form that every single human connects with.

You don't have to be a musician to be touched by music.

You don't have to be a musician to understand music.

We all get it.

We all get it.

So I simply think that using this distinctly powerful thing that music is, to speak about important and painful historical contexts can be much more powerful in my opinion than reading about it or even seeing a play about it.

There's something more elemental and human about what music brings to the table when it comes to an issue like social justice.

My hope is that people may hear this piece, people may learn about the program of this piece, people may hear this discussion, and it may shine a light on a painful part of American history that might prompt people to learn more about what happened and will hopefully urge us as a country to reconcile with these painful parts of our past.

♪ (The Ends of the Earth: Four Impromptus) ♪ ♪ (IV.

"Terra Nullius") ♪ (melancholy music) - Rodney Whitaker is an internationally renowned recording artist, arranger, composer, and purveyor of the double bass.

He has one of the most undeniably distinctive, bear-sized bass tones.

And he is considered one of the leading bass performers and teachers of bass in the nation.

Detroit born and raised, he remains well connected to his hometown, and it's reflected in his jazz compositions.

And for his first contribution to this series, he's written a piece that stems directly from childhood experiences with policing in Detroit.

And his story is a powerful one.

(melancholy music) - Growing up in the early 70s in Detroit, we had a police force which was called S.T.R.E.S.S.

but formally known on the street as The Big Four.

There was so much crime and unemployment and things, poverty that happened in Detroit that some people saw this as some sort of savior.

But others saw it as a negative because I think on a lot of levels, there was over-policing.

And we were as children made to fear The Big Four.

When we saw them driving through our community, we would run as if they were the boogeyman.

And then I had a family member who also suffered from police abuse as well.

My cousin was originally from Albany, Georgia, and moved up to Detroit, lived there for about three years and had some issues with the police: constant, continual sort of harassment.

And, you know, he didn't choose sort of the best lifestyle.

And by the end of it, he got beat by the police and put on a bus back to Georgia.

It's one of those stories that you heard in the family throughout the family and one of those experiences that, fortunately, not every community of people will live or experience.

But that's sort of like where we are today too when we talk about over-policing.

And the thing I also think about, Marvin Gaye wrote a piece 50 years ago, "What's Going On," that talks about the same issues.

And we're still dealing with the same issues 50 years later.

(melancholy music) The song "Big Four," I wrote this song originally in 2010 when I received a grant to compose a piece called "Jazz Up South."

And I wanted to talk about the Great Migration, particularly from the Deep South to Detroit where I grew up.

(melancholy music) This piece starts with a lullaby.

As I talked to friends of mine who were law enforcement officers, friends that I have around the country, I would ask them, "What would you notice, "consistencies that you would notice "when you would arrest people "in those kind of circumstances?"

And they said, "People would always cry for their mother."

And I asked my cousin who suffered the police abuse, I said, "What did you think about when this was happening?"

And he said, "I wanted my mother."

(melancholy music) When I hear stories like what had happened to my cousin and things that my family members experienced, I try not to lose hope.

Because I ultimately believe that people can work things out.

But it is discouraging on a lot of levels just because I'm reluctant...

Although, you know, I believe that it's necessary to have a police force, but I'm reluctant to call the police.

I'm reluctant to...

I personally have never had a bad experience with the police.

I've been stopped by the police and sometimes unnecessarily.

But my parents gave me the talk, you know, that we talk about a lot these days.

And the other thing to think about is for us, African Americans, the police always was a barrier.

What happens is, some things have a psychological effect that last a whole lifetime.

And the thing I think about, I was told this story when I was a kid by one of my uncles that he asked a question of how do you control a elephant?

And what they do to elephants in the circus is they tie them to a stake as a pup.

And every time they move, they hit them.

And over time, they equate the pain of tugging at the stake.

And so the police for the Black community really represents that to us.

And I would like to see us get to a time where that's not our experience, that we have community policing, and that there's a positive relationship.

You know, we need to deal with crime.

But we also need to deal with humanity and poverty.

There's a lot of things on the list.

(melancholy music) ♪ ("The Big Four") ♪ (peaceful music) - Thank you for joining us.

I'm Damien Sneed.

Until next time.

(peaceful music) (upbeat music) I'm Damien Sneed.

It's my honor to have the title of host of this special series, Music for Social Justice.

We'll hear some moving performances from excellent musicians.

Most importantly, we're going to hear from the musicians themselves as they put into words what social justice means to them and how the power of music transcends all.

(upbeat music) (upbeat musical notes)