After witnessing the recent surge of UKIP billboards and their racism promoting slogans in and around Leeds today, I thought sharing the great jazz trumpeter, Christian Scott's 'Klu Klux Police Department' and its back story would be fitting.
'K.K.P.D was a song that was composed from an experience that I had in New Orleans with a group of police officers. They pulled me over one night for no reason and attempted to emasculate me. I remember looking into the rear view mirror, and this officer had his gun pointed to the back of my head. He told me to get out of my vehicle, pull my pants down around my ankles, and to lay down on the ground. Now, I hadn't done anything wrong, so my reply to him was that I was not going to do those things because I had not done anything wrong...he told me that he was the authority and that I was supposed to do as I was told, to which I replied that I had paid my taxes that year and as far as I was concerned he worked for me. This is something that also greatly incensed the man and I remember him then becoming enraged and telling me that if I didn't comply with what it was that he was telling me to do, that my mother was going to have to pick me from the morgue. At that point the conversation took a turn, and we began to scream really belittling and pejorative things back and forth, it eventually got the point where they called me the N. word and a number of other racial epithets and continued to threaten my life. Eventually, a captain, an older officer, showed up and realised what was going on and told me that I was allowed to go home and to not worry about this situation. I remember getting home that night and thinking about going back there and doing something that would've been disastrous to my life and my career and disastrous to those officers. After thinking on it for a few hours, I realised that the best way to deal with that dynamic was to write a composition as a means of illuminating to the world the fact that these type of things still happen all over the world'.
(Christian Scott)
Check out the groove at 0.50.