“Silence”

This song and message is so important that we wanted to make sure you could easily find and share the link to our video on YouTube, Spotify, Apple Music, and Amazon.

From Susan: I knew a day or two after the murder of George Floyd that I would write a song with the title, “Silence.” I knew that we all needed do our part to find a voice, not silence, in the wake of this horrible deed.

I just knew it, but was not ready to do so until I had better processed the happenings in Minneapolis and the additional video footage of unjust actions toward African Americans that began to surface in the months afterward. Everyone knew that George Floyd was not the first, but because passersby had recorded those 9 minutes, 29 seconds on their cell phones and began to share it on Social Media, this murder was captured and captured us.

At that point, we started to see videos surface of previous murders of innocent African Americans, some of which were more than a year old, where no one had been held accountable. The wrongness of this was so obvious, we can only hope that a true wave of accountability has been started; at least, the public has phones in hand to record and publish what they see.

We need a voice not silence.

The video footage at the George Floyd Memorial site at 38th and Chicago in Minneapolis, captured by Susan in December of 2020 as she walked to the site and filmed everything she saw there, shows chalk drawings and sayings, mementos and memorials from adults, families, and children. Much of what was found there that day was ephemeral, due to the elements of weather and time. The footage in this video is an unrepeatable moment in time, expressing the shock and grief of the neighborhood and world. But the video captured goes so beautifully with the song. 

We want to continue to reach others with this song. We have posted it on our streaming platforms (see links above), submitted it to the Tiny Desk Contest, and shared it on our Social Media sites and to our email list, the Just a Touch of Jazz Insiders.

Would you click through, watch, and listen to “Silence”?

Would you share it with your friends on Social media? https://youtu.be/X7wagwJGHmc?t=1868

We truly need a voice and not silence.