featuring…

♫ Eric Bibb, Migration Blues

🍺 Tyskie Gronie

Words & photos: Vincent Abbate

I’m finding it hard to carry on with business as usual. Life goes on, as it must. As it should. Yet when war, destruction, mass flight and the murder of innocents are happening just a single time zone away – the Ukrainian border is roughly 800 miles from where I sit – most everything else seems trivial. I didn’t post a Listening Party last week because it didn’t feel right.

This week I’ve decided to feature an album released some five years ago in response to Europe’s last great refugee crisis. Though let’s face it: The “crisis” has never actually taken a day off. Between the mass exodus of families from war-torn Syria and the ongoing evacuation of women and children from Ukraine, countless desperate thousands have risked their lives trying to cross the Mediterranean from northern Africa to southern Europe.

That is exactly the point of the 15-song Migration Blues. Eric Bibb, like me a native New Yorker who has settled on the European continent, went from thinking about the humanitarian crisis of 2015 (when some 1.3 million sought asylum in Europe) to considering the Great Migration that saw millions of African Americans flee oppressive conditions in the rural South for the promise of greater freedom in northern American cities. Ultimately, Bibb concluded that, “We all come from people who, at some time or another, had to move.”

We’ll focus on his music with little commentary from me.

Because the traditional format of this feature also includes beer, we’ll raise a glass of Polish piwo in salute to a country that has already welcomed almost half a million refugees in the past week.

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