STATEMENT ON RECEIVING THE DEUTSCHER JAZZPREIS FOR ENSEMBLE OF THE YEAR INTERNATIONAL 2024
KEIR NEURINGER, SPRING 2024
(Earlier this year, Irreversible Entanglements was awarded the “Deutscher Jazzpreis,” the German Jazz Prize, in the category of Ensemble of the Year International 2024. What follows is a personal response; our band agreed to receive & respond to the prize individually to honor our various needs, capacities, commitments, & modes of expression.)
As I have said & written often, I am filled with a combination of humility & pride by the acknowledgement, recognition, & reach our band has achieved since we began releasing music and travelling to perform in 2017. We have worked hard & we have risked much. Making new work in the beautiful sacred lineage of Black liberation music with my four bandmates is among the most deep & meaningful endeavors of my professional, creative, & spiritual life. Germany is one of the countries where we have been invited to perform most frequently, & every time it has been to committed & appreciative audiences of listeners, curators, promoters, & peers there, for whose support I feel only the utmost gratitude.
At the same time, Germany is a state, like the United States where I live, with a genocidal past that has actively & bitingly carried historic hurt into the present era. The German Federal Government’s response to Israel’s acute genocidal campaign against the Palestinian people has been unconscionable in every way. It is among the top providers of military & financial assistance to the zionist entity & one of its most vocal defenders in the political & diplomatic arenas. And the hounding of Jewish, Muslim, & other solidarity activists on the federal, municipal, cultural, & academic levels has in many cases been worse even than in the United States. German police brutality targeting semitic peoples is a horrifying if now & once again common sight.
As an individual artist I have signed onto solidarity & resistance statements condemning Israeli apartheid & critical of Germany’s complicity & support of Israel’s cruelty toward Palestinians. That is relevant here for two reasons. The first is that the German Jazz Prize is made possible by the German Federal Government. In my view, to criticize a political entity only & up to where it does not conflict with my career aspirations is to say my values have a price. They do not.
The second reason is that in November 2023, a previous winner of the German Jazz Prize (in the journalism category) took to social media to publicly call me (& as a member of our band at that) an anti-semite whose professional & creative opportunities should be curtailed in Germany. This spurious & absurd accusation was made after I signed onto the Artists Against Aprtheid statement in October. Many other first-rate & principled creative musician signatories were also named in this fascist attempt at silencing solidarity with the cause of Palestinian liberation. It cuts deep not only because I am someone who always & only ever punches up, but also because of my own family history.
My great-grandmother was shot—murdered—in the street by nazis in her village, now part of western Ukraine, in 1943. Aunts, uncles, & cousins were exterminated en masse by nazis in death camps installed in Poland (using “gasoline bath” technology first developed in the United States for use against Mexican migrant workers). They & all my ancestors who survived European white-supremacist fascism came from tightly-knit communities violently displaced into a disconnected diaspora. And my daily bitter thoughts about all this are involuntary; I believe genetic memory is an actual thing, & I do not doubt that my lifelong & often debilitating depression comes in part from my ancestors’ familiarity with genocidal trauma—to say nothing of the trauma it continues to cause me & all of my relations generations later.
It is for this reason among others that I have devoted myself to emancipatory & liberatory values in my endeavors as an artist, activist, & parent. It is hopefully lost on no one paying attention that among the tracks on the most recent Irreversible Entanglements album—our first on a major label—is a Palestinian solidarity anthem entitled ‘Our Land Back’. I composed it more than a decade ago & reworked it for the new album; however we first performed a version of it to open our set at the storied Moers Festival in Germany in 2019. As the horrors facing the Palestinian people predate October 7, so too does my commitment to Palestinian liberation from settler-colonial oppression. Indeed it is a dream of all land back everywhere in order for our children to survive on this planet. The acute nature of the open genocide taking place now demands the greatest urgency in our response.
So. And at a time like this. What to do about this prestigious yet unlooked-for prize other than say thank you for the acknowledgement? I play for the people. I have all the revolutionary love in the world for the people. Thank you, good people, for hearing us, in all the ways you have.
But this prize is not only a matter of prestigious acknowledgement; It also has a financial component. Ten thousand euros, in fact, of which my equal share is not an insignificant amount of money for me & my child. I’m an independent musician & a single father living in a country where the cost of living is used as a cudgel to enforce worker obedience. And like many people in the U.S., I am always only one very likely medical diagnosis away from total financial insolvency. In so many more ways than I can relate here, I live in a country that prioritizes doing harm over ameliorating it; it is a culture that will be remembered for its main feature of financially incentivizing systemic cruelty.
No, the prize is money I did not plan for, and my child & I will have shelter & food with or without it. We can still get what we need, in relative safety, at shops with full shelves & the lights on, operated by people whose sleep at night is, for the time being, undisturbed by the drones of war. We’ll be alright for now. (Meanwhile, one reads that in Gaza a single onion costs eleven dollars if you can even find one. There is of course no work, municipal & personal treasuries have been plundered by the invading zionist force, & whole families are cut to shreds whether they are out searching for food & water or seeking out safe shelter.)
All for which reason, & in solidarity with the cause of a liberated & free Palestine, from the River Jordan to the Mediterranean Sea, for its indigenous population & peace-loving people of any faith & ethnicity who honor justice & accountability, I am distributing the entirety of my portion of the Deutscher Jazzpreis between the Palestinian Children’s Relief Fund & UNRWA.
May liberation soon come.