Jazz can help a person sentenced to death. This is how the Spanish musician Albert Marquès and Keith LaMar, sentenced to capital punishment in the United States, think. And on Tuesday they proclaimed the prisoner’s innocence at a concert in London.
LaMar, who denies the charges against him and has spent 36 of his 55 years behind bars, read his rhymes over the phone from his cell in Youngstown, Ohio, while Marquès played his piano at a concert at the Old Bailey. the Central Criminal Court of England and Wales.
“Concerts create an empathy that sometimes prompts certain people to get involved. “And that is the power of music, which is not greater than that of a judge, but it creates paths,” Marquis told AFP.
The Catalan jazz musician, 38, who has lived in New York since 2011, learned about the story thanks to a book that LaMar himself wrote in 2014, “Condemned.”
“Everything was born in 2020, in the middle of the pandemic. Chatting with a neighbor, he mentioned the book to me. And it struck me that Keith said that John Coltrane, a jazz musician, kept him sane. And I came up with the idea of doing concerts-demonstrations,” Marquès explains.
From that moment, Marquès joined his efforts with an organization called “Justice for Keith LaMar” who fights for his liberation.
LaMar has been on death row since 1995accused of playing a leading role in the death of other prisoners in a riot in 1993.
“I am sure he is innocent. I believe that everything we are doing will lead to his release, which will also clarify similar cases. That’s why they resist so much. “It’s a house of cards and if he gets it, everything falls,” says the pianist.
Deferred execution
On November 16, 2023, LaMar was to be executed, but the death penalty was postponed until January 2027 due to lack of lethal injections, according to Ohio authorities.
“If you lose control of a prison, you have failed. Someone has to pay. Ten people died, nine prisoners and a white guard and that had a great impact on the media. “The State says Keith organized the riot and killed five people,” says the musician.
“There is no material evidence. “Only accusations from other prisoners against him in exchange for sentence reductions,” duck.
LaMar had been in prison since he was 19 for the murder of an old friend in a drug dispute in the 1980s in his native Cleveland.
“They say any decent lawyer could have said he had fought in self-defense.”says the musician.
In August 2020, in Grand Army Plaza, in the middle of the street, in the New York neighborhood of Brooklyn, where the pianist lives, the first concert of both took place, one with music and the other reciting texts from his prison in Ohio.
“Reading his book, I see a poem and I say, why don’t you recite it with me playing the piano? “We rehearsed it, and we did it in a street concert,” Marquès explains.
These street concerts were followed by others in closed places, starting in 2021, especially in universities, in the United States, Latin America and Europe.
“Of my best friends”
“All this wouldn’t work if Keith and I weren’t very close. My children have known him. My wife talks to him often. “He is one of my best friends.” says Marquès, who has visited it several times despite the 630 km that separate New York and Youngstown (Ohio).
Marquès and LaMar called the concerts ‘Freedom first’also the name of their first album, which came out in 2022.
Another 80 musicians have participated in their concerts.
In London on Tuesday, they were accompanied by Jean Toussaint, a Grammy Award-winning American saxophonist who lives in London, after the British organization Amicus, which fights against the death penalty in the United States, appealed to them and invited them to play at a ceremony.
Marquès and LaMar’s project has earned them two awards, one from the Berlin City Council and another from Time Out magazine.
Additionally, the musician has written a book about the experience, called “Jazz plays on death row”and in May 2025 a second album from both will be released.
AFP
