musicgallery

Over the past two decades, the bond between hip-hop and jazz has tightened again – this time in reverse. After years of DJs sampling jazz records, hip-hop artists began collaborating directly with jazz musicians. On To Pimp a Butterfly(2015), Kendrick Lamar worked with Thundercat, Kamasi Washington, and Robert Glasper. The result: a blend of rap, social poetry, and live improvisation that helped redefine the sound of modern hip-hop.

This trend predates Kendrick. Anderson .Paak, Tyler, The Creator, Common, Tom Misch, and J. Cole have all worked with jazz bands, bringing jazz players into a mainstream spotlight they rarely enjoyed. At the same time, young jazz artists – Ezra Collective, Alfa Mist, Nubya Garcia, BADBADNOTGOOD, and others – fold hip-hop rhythms into their writing. Through hip-hop, jazz is becoming ever more normalized.

Today, hip-hop is the world’s most listened-to and influential genre, with an industry topping $15 billion annually. Yet behind the commercial success sits a spirit it shares with jazz: a drive for freedom, innovation, and stories that matter. Still, jazz could never become what hip-hop is, because it resists the pressure of outcomes. Jazz is an honest expression.

The two genres don’t cancel each other out. They coexist, inspire one another, and spark new forms of expression. Jazz and hip-hop aren’t past and present – they’re two voices singing the same idea: creativity has no end.

🎷 Did you know…
When Kendrick Lamar won the Pulitzer Prize for Music in 2018, it was for a hip-hop album with strong jazz influences. His collaborators included Thundercat, Kamasi Washington, and Robert Glasper – three major names on today’s jazz scene.

In the 1930s and ’40s, Harlem became the cultural heart of Black America. It was the era of the Harlem Renaissance, when literature, art, and music spoke openly about dignity, freedom, and belonging. In this context, jazz stopped being merely dance music. It became a form of consciousness—and a way to assert one’s worth.

Duke Ellington turned jazz into the art of composition, writing orchestral works performed not only in clubs but in concert halls. Billie Holiday used her voice as an instrument of truth. In 1939, her song “Strange Fruit” brought the horrors of Southern lynchings to public attention for the first time. It was a historic moment: jazz became a form of protest.

In the same neighborhoods, young Charlie Parker and Dizzy Gillespie were experimenting with a freer, more complex musical language. Thus bebop was born – a style that demanded speed, technique, and total independence. Its message was clear: we’re no longer playing for dancing, but to express ourselves.

Jazz became a collective voice of freedom. In an age marked by segregation, it united people through sound, offering what the law could not: a felt sense of equality.

Did you know…
Billie Holiday performed “Strange Fruit” only at the end of her shows. She asked for the lights to be turned off and the room to remain silent – no applause. Her voice emerged in the dark, and the audience stayed motionless. After each performance, she left the stage without a word.

Jazz was born as an act of freedom. In early-20th-century New Orleans, African American communities, marked by poverty and segregation, turned the blues and work songs into improvisations that told a story of resistance. Trumpets, clarinets, and drums became instruments of dignity; dance and rhythm stood in for civil rights.

Challenging racism

From the start, jazz pushed back against the rules. In a society that enforced silence, musicians chose improvisation as a way to speak freely. Every note answered uniformity; every solo declared individuality. In 1929, Louis Armstrong released “Black and Blue,” among the first songs to address racism directly. Duke Ellington used the orchestra as a vehicle of cultural identity; his Black, Brown and Beige (premiered at Carnegie Hall in 1943) told the history of the African American people in a symphonic language.

The fight for humanity

In 1939, Billie Holiday sang “Strange Fruit,” a searing song about the racial lynchings of the American South. It was hard to hear and impossible to forget. Each performance was a quiet protest: the lights went down, the room fell silent. Holiday paid a price for her courage: radio bans, scrutiny from authorities, but the song shifted public perception.

Like jazz, hip-hop was born from the need for expression in African American communities. In the 1970s, in the neighborhoods of the Bronx, young people lived in a divided America marked by poverty and segregation. They didn’t have instruments or studios – but they had imagination. DJ Kool Herc, Grandmaster Flash, and Afrika Bambaataa began using turntables and vinyl records as musical instruments, looping the rhythm sections of jazz and funk tracks.

Many of those records came from their parents’ home collections – vinyl by Louis Armstrong, Herbie Hancock, or Weather Report. From them, DJs isolated drum, bass, or keyboard passages to create breaks: short, powerful moments over which MCs improvised lyrics. Around these block parties, communities formed – held together by rhythm. Bronx apartment blocks turned into impromptu dance halls where music stood in for hope.

Techniques like scratching (moving the record back and forth to create sound effects) and looping (repeating fragments) became hip-hop’s equivalent of jazz improvisation. Just as Louis Armstrong or Charlie Parker reinvented a melody with each performance, DJs transformed existing music into something new. From the start, hip-hop was an act of freedom – a blend of memory and innovation.

One of the defining moments in jazz history is the release of Strange Fruit, performed by Billie Holiday. Considered one of the first songs to use music as a form of protest, it denounced racial violence in the American South. It wasn’t a love song, but a stark image: “strange fruit” hanging from trees in a divided America. Billie Holiday performed the song in darkness, asking her audience to remain silent at the end. The song was banned on many radio stations, and she was threatened, yet she never stopped performing it. It was the voice of the voiceless. Strange Fruit became the first major musical protest of the 20th century: a piece that demanded silence and attention.

After the Second World War, jazz crossed America’s borders and became one of the most influential cultural voices of the 20th century. American soldiers carried records and instruments with them, radio stations began broadcasting jazz, and Hollywood films wove it into the collective imagination. From the big bands of the 1940s to film-noir soundtracks, jazz came to signify freedom, refinement, and the modern city.

In France, Django Reinhardt created gypsy jazz, fusing American improvisation with European sensibility. In Brazil, Antônio Carlos Jobim and João Gilberto gave birth to bossa nova, which conquered the world with its calm elegance. In South Africa, Hugh Masekela and Miriam Makeba turned jazz into a form of resistance.

As the music spread, jazz became a shared language for generations of artists seeking freedom. It inspired rock, funk, soul, and even hip-hop. In films, commercials, cafés, and festivals, jazz became a universal sound – instantly recognizable even to those who don’t know where it began.

Today, part of that story lives at Edison – House of Music. At Music Gallery, visitors can hear jazz from all over the world-from Brazilian bossa nova to Nordic and Japanese scenes. Each region has its own voice, yet all speak the same language: the freedom to create and to express yourself through music.

🌍 Did you know…
The first film to place jazz at the center was The Jazz Singer (1927)—also the first feature with synchronized dialogue and sound. Its success forever linked jazz with cinema and the idea of modernity.

Jazz was born at the beginning of the 20th century in New Orleans, a port city where cultures, languages, and rhythms from all over the world met. Around the same time, our building, Edison, was being constructed (circa 1902), in a Europe discovering electricity and an America discovering its voice.

The African American communities of the southern United States, the first free descendants of enslaved people, combined work songs, religious spirituals, and blues with instruments brought by Europeans: trumpets, clarinets, and marching band drums. Many were self-taught musicians who played in dance halls, on the streets, or in parade bands. From this mix, a new music was born: free, spontaneous, and deeply human.

Since then, jazz has spread worldwide, constantly evolving. It has influenced every musical genre that followed, been reinterpreted and adapted, yet it has retained its essence: the freedom to tell your own story through sound.

The same freedom and trust in improvisation have inspired us. Driven by a desire to create, explore, and tell stories in our own way, we built this exhibition: a form of visual jazz, born from curiosity, passion, and our own creative energy.

The building that now hosts the Music Gallery is Edison House of Music, a place with a long and colorful history.

It was originally built as a cinema and carried the name Edison, inspired by the man who brought light and sound into people’s lives. It was one of the first neighborhood cinemas in Cluj, a place where emotion was projected onto the wall and the city discovered the magic of film.

After World War II, when the communists came to power, the cinema changed its name to Red Star. It became a popular and affordable cinema, and quite a colorful one. Locals affectionately nicknamed it “the flea cinema”, a name that has lived on in the collective memory of the place.

After the fall of communism, the space went through every possible transformation: it became a bingo hall, a shop, even a church. It seemed to be constantly searching for a new identity. And then we came along.

When we arrived here, we decided to keep the name Edison out of respect for its past. Later, we learned that Thomas Edison invented the first device that could mechanically reproduce sound. That’s when we knew it was the perfect fit for what we wanted to create here: a place dedicated to music, sound, and emotion.

Today, Edison House of Music carries forward the story of this building.

And we hope that, in time, it will find its place in the heart of this city.