[lively jazz music]
Hi, good evening.
Welcome, thank you so much for joining us here online today.
My name is Allison Hussey,
I am a staff writer at Pitchfork
and I’m here to talk about the future of jazz
with some really wonderful artists.
We’re doing this in conjunction
with the Doris Duke Charitable Foundation.
Gonna start off by introducing our panelists.
We’re gonna start off with Cécile McLorin Salvant,
Jen Shyu and Samora Pinderhughes.
And we’re just going to talk about
what they’ve been working on.
What’s been going on in the world
and how they’ve brought that into their work.
And we’re just gonna jump right in here.
So if we could first start by talking about Cécile,
you know, how did you first get interested in jazz
or, you know, how did it come to you?
And if each of you could like work through those?
I’ll start with Cécile.
I think my mom is really the first person
to introduce me to jazz.
She listened to a lot of music from all over the world,
including jazz.
She was, I mean, she is a huge fan
of folkloric music and I consider jazz a part of that.
And so it was mostly thanks to her.
[Allison] Mm-hmm, and Jen, how about you?
I would say it’s because of my parents
that I started studying music,
but they were not definitely not musicians.
They love music though.
My dad, somehow in Taiwan,
fell in love with Western classical music
and brought that passion over with him to the US.
And then my mom loved folk music
and Judy Collins, Simon and Garfunkel.
And so growing up with that
learning classical piano and violin was something I think
second generation Asian Americans often did.
Mm-hmm. And then that grew
into musical theater and singing.
And then through musical theater,
I kind of found the songs of Cole Porter and Cy Coleman
and kind of entered into jazz in that, in that way.
So, yeah.
Okay. Yeah.
And Samora how about for you?
Yeah, I mean,
I definitely like was introduced to music first
through the family home
and basically every type of music was on in the house.
And I think the first jazz musician or person, I don’t,
it’s perfect for me actually,
because the first musician that might be considered
in that space that I listened to was Nina Simone,
who was like, you know,
one of my greatest inspirations because I mean,
among many other things,
she just speaks to the times in her work.
And also she can’t really be categorized as anything?
Mm-hmm. And so I think I,
I got that early.
And then as far as studying the music more,
that came when I went to this program
called the Young Musicians Core Orchestra,
which at the time was called Young Musicians Program.
And that’s it was a free program
for young people where you got all this different training.
And I had a teacher named Geechi Taylor who basically
turned me onto Miles, turned me onto Herbie.
Once I heard Herbie, I was like, Oh, piano, okay.
This is what we’re doing. [group chuckling]
Cool.
And yeah, kind of springing from there.
I’m interested in hearing
about like what each of your experiences
were like with formal music education.
You know, obviously there’s a lot
of positive aspects to this,
but sometimes these structures are not necessarily set up
in a way that favors or rewards,
like people who want to think kind of like
beyond the bounds of genre or anything else really.
So yeah, like for better or for worse,
like what was your musical education experience like?
And Samora, since you were just kind of there,
we’ll start with you.
Yeah. I mean, I think,
I think the Young Musicians Core Orchestra,
that time was the part in my life where the conception
of formal music education really worked the best for me,
but I don’t necessarily think it was because it was formal,
but more because it was consistent
and it was still community based.
Mm-hmm. And that’s I think the thing
that was maybe lacking in other situations I’ve been in
that have to do with that
is that sometimes they feel very cold to me personally.
And so that space was really more of a welcoming space.
It was basically like a home,
like for a bunch of kids that like wouldn’t be able
to study music otherwise and all just super passionate.
And I think also just all super grateful
because it’s like, we want this so bad
and this place is giving us, you know,
all of this to be able to do it for real.
Mm-hmm.
And so I think that was the best yeah,
the best version of that.
And I think it also was lucky for me because
even though I was really there just to play piano,
they let me be a composer. Mm-hmm.
And that really made me think that I could do it
and we’d have all these older elders, you know,
Frank Foster and like just old, you know, cats
like come out and just be like, Yes, you can do this,
just study this and da-da-da.
And so I think that was the best version of it for me,
for me, like later in my life, you know,
going to higher education spaces and things.
I think the biggest criticism I had of it was just that they
never asked me why. Mm-hmm.
You know?
It was almost like it was
like a trade school thing or something.
Which I don’t knock at all and I think I got,
I’m really grateful for the training that was present,
but I think the training is necessary,
but it has to come with the why.
Mm-hmm. Because I think,
if it doesn’t come with the why then number one,
it can feel like you’re very divorced from, you know,
yourself and your soulfulness and even the ability
to take risks and do things like that.
[Allison] Mm-hmm.
And I also think that it kind of makes you feel
like you need to fit in. Mm-hmm.
You know?
And that was the biggest issue for me
at different points in my life
was that I often didn’t feel like I fit in.
And so as a result for a long time, I kind of hid myself.
And it’s only recently that I’ve been like,
no, you shouldn’t,
you shouldn’t have that reaction to being yourself.
Mm-hmm, okay.
Beautiful. Yeah.
Yeah.
Jen, how about you?
It’s interesting, the word assimilation came in to my head
because I think when I was thrown into studying ballet
and classical piano and violin?
You know, ballet, I really loved.
Piano, it became more cause the competitions
and it became like the rigor of the training, and I don’t,
it’s kind of amazing that I went through that?
[Jen chuckling]
But kind of, I mean I loved, you know,
I’d watch the Van Cliburn piano competition
and we’d tape it and then I would watch it
to get inspired and go practice.
And then, but I think the one thing, you know,
that I was absolutely terrified of was improvising.
Which is so, you know, kind of funny
looking back on that time,
but, but yeah, that training did not allow it.
And especially if you’re competing?
I kind of encountered my teacher later,
who was amazing pianist named Roger Shields,
who took from Soulima Stravinsky, who is Igor’s son.
So that training he gave me and my brother,
he kind of told me later that, you know,
Jen, the students I train, you know,
their parents just want me to get them winning competition.
So there just wasn’t room to teach improvisation
or even to listen to the, you know,
the great, you know, jazz musicians.
And so that was fascinating.
I never went through a school for that.
That was just like private lessons.
I found my way there, but,
so with vocal training, you know,
with musical theater, that was more self taught.
I definitely, you know,
at that time I still had no identity,
awareness of my identity, so it was still like,
I wanna sing like Sarah Vaughn and I wanna sing like,
you know, all the, you know, the stars of those musicals,
back in the The Phantom of the Opera, Les Mis,
Miss Saigon, especially. [Jen chuckling]
I wanted to be miss Saigon for, yeah,
I just really wanted to be on Broadway and be Miss Saigon.
[group laughing]
It’s like, that’s the only role, right?
For Asian Americans, right?
That’s crazy. For a woman.
So that was kind of the dream.
Mm-hmm. And at that time,
but the singing, the training,
I didn’t do training even when I first started singing,
but then because of the piano and violin, I guess, you know,
my parents said, Oh, maybe you can take voice lessons.
So that was like art song and opera.
And it took a while to kind of understand
what I was going to do.
Because at Stanford, I studied opera
and it really was through
meeting Asian American jazz musicians after graduating,
who kind of guided me toward looking to my own ancestry,
which never occurred to me before.
Never. [Jen chuckling]
And so that was, I feel like my real education began.
Just like, oh, being aware of even being Asian American
and then becoming interested in,
well, what does the music of Taiwan sound like?
And what about East Timor, where mom is from?
And through the path, through kind of the models of,
you know, Monk being himself and then, you know,
Bird being himself.
I was like, oh, I wanna try to be myself, too.
You know? [Jen chuckling]
And so that was how I found my roots.
It’s through this circuitous kind of path, so I’m yeah.
Okay. Yeah.
[Jen laughing]
Cool, yeah.
We’ll certainly come back to, you know,
talking about the directions that each of you have taken
with your projects, but Cécile I’m also interested
in hearing about like your experience too,
because you went to school in France, is that right?
I did.
But this is so fascinating what you’re saying about sort of
coming back to your family and to your ancestry
as an adult. Yeah.
Because I feel like as I’m getting older,
that’s totally the case.
I was not looking at where my parents were from
or what their music was.
I was listening to the music that they listened
to growing up, but I just feel like I’m starting
to go down a path of discovery of my own ancestry,
which is so strange because I mean, I think I,
so I studied jazz vocals in France
and as like a black American woman,
it felt like people just expected me to sing that
cause they were like,
Well, that’s you, that’s your music of your people?
And I was like, Well, no, my mom is French
and my dad is Haitian.
They’re not, that’s not their music.
Yeah. You know?
But yeah, I studied, I was really, really lucky
with the jazz program that I was in
because it was in a tiny, no offense,
[Cécile chuckling]
in a small conservatory in the Southeast of France.
I had always listened to Sarah Vaughn
and really great jazz singers growing up, thanks to my mom.
But I thought it was a dead music that nobody played.
And I only ever heard on the radio around Miami,
like Latin jazz?
I didn’t hear many jazz singers that were alive.
I didn’t really know it was something that people did.
Mm-hmm. Until I moved to France.
And then I met all of these musicians that were my age
and I started getting into it and I had one teacher
and he is a reed player.
He plays clarinet and saxophone.
He’s not a singer by any measure.
And he taught me and he would force me to play the piano,
which I did begrudgingly.
And he would have lunch with me every Wednesday
and tell me that I needed to practice.
And it was really a one-on-one like intensive thing.
He had no curriculum, he had no assignments.
He gave me no pointers.
He would just come every week with a tote bag full of CDs.
And he’d say, do you know, Bessie Smith?
And I’d be like, I don’t know what?
[group chuckling]
And just like, Listen to this, put it on your computer
and listen to it.
And we’d come to class and it was insane.
It was like ensemble classes.
So it was, you know, several instruments,
maybe four of us and we’d come to class
and he wouldn’t say a word.
He would just sit in his chair in the corner.
And sometimes it was like a staring contest.
Sometimes he would just look at us
and after like five minutes of silence, we’d be like,
So what do you want us to do?
And he’d be like, I don’t know, what do you wanna do?
Like, I don’t need to spoonfeed you.
Like, what do you have to ask me?
And so I was really lucky in that my first experience
with this music was teach yourself,
discover things yourself, ask questions,
and don’t wait for someone
to give you all the techniques
and all the ideas and all the, you know,
really, really be an autodidact.
And I feel really grateful for that.
Mm-hmm. It was scary though.
It was. [group laughing]
Yeah, that sounds really intense, but also a lot of fun.
Just the ideas- It was fun.
I mean, and he would, he would do stuff like,
if a student had issues
with like the rhythm of something?
He’d be like, Well just play the drums.
And like they’d not play their instrument for a class
and just play the drums.
Or, you know, I did a competition that I won for vocals.
And he basically, when I went back to the school was like,
Well, you won this competition for vocals,
so you’re not singing anymore
for the rest of your time here.
I was behind the piano for the rest for the next year.
Terrible.
But you know, it was, it was kind of a funky,
funky, fun way to learn. Mm-hmm.
That I think can only happen if you’re not
in a big school.
That’s like, no offense Aix-en-Provence, I love you guys.
[group chuckling]
But you know, it’s one teacher with
four students. And also like the way
you talked about in the classroom, for some reason,
it just make me think of therapy, you know?
It’s like- Yeah.
You gotta, like, I’m here to give you the tools,
but you have to give something of yourself first to like,
for us to get into it for real, you know?
Exactly. Yeah.
That’s exactly right.
And I feel like so many times when we take private lessons
or we take music lessons,
I don’t know if this was the case for you,
but you kind of come in waiting for the teacher
to tell you like, Okay, well open to page four.
Yeah. He would be like, Well?
Yeah. [group chuckling]
Yeah.
That’s wild. Wow.
So kind of going back to something
that we’ve already gotten close to,
I wanna hear about how like a sense of history
has influenced how you approach your work.
I know, you know, Jen and Cécile,
you’ve both talked about like your family relationship
with this and yeah, some more I’m interested
in hearing too, just like,
and maybe Jen, you could start by talking a little bit
about your Zero Grasses project
and like how history came into that
and you know, what each of you are doing that’s kind of,
that brings us in and you know, why take this approach?
Yeah, well, it’s, it’s so powerful to hear you talk about,
you, you know, discovering this, the path
that your parents took, you know?
You know, when I went to Taiwan for the first time
embarking on that journey, it was really emotional
and kind of music was just this kind of excuse
to go over there.
And, you know, it’s like,
Oh yeah, I’m really interested
in the folk music of Taiwan
and the indigenous music of Taiwan.
Of course I was.
But kind of the real stuff was sitting with my aunties
speaking Mandarin, like consistently
for the first time, you know?
And it’s funny cause our parents,
I’m curious to hear your stories, but like,
they might not have known.
Like my parents never,
they really wanted me to do Western classical music.
They thought was great, you know?
And when I was getting interested in, you know,
dad’s homeland’s music, he’s like,
Hmm like, is that popular?
Is anyone gonna understand it?
And even my aunties, you know, I’d go out and do field work.
I’d learn from Taiwanese moon lute teachers, elders,
and you know, this kind of really nasally singing
and you know, no training, you know,
and my teachers would always say like,
I can’t read, I can’t read, you know?
Cause they weren’t, you know,
they couldn’t read Chinese characters, but,
so I played my aunties what I learned
and they like,
[Jen chuckling]
and they would say things like,
[speaking in Mandarin]
Like, it sounds good, but I don’t like it.
[group laughing]
Cause it would remind them of the farmers
and the poor folks who would ask money,
like knock on their door and ask for money
and they’d play a song and ask for money.
And so like,
I will never forget my fourth grand auntie said that,
like I played her, this song,
it took so long to learn the pronunciation
cause I don’t speak Taiwanese.
I speak Mandarin.
Taiwanese is much more difficult
and I was so proud and she’s like,
It sounds good, but I don’t like it, you know?
It’s too close. Yeah.
It really, it brought up these kind of
not great memories for her.
Yeah. Interesting.
And you know, brought up war time.
Right, right. Colonization.
You know, Japan invading Taiwan.
And then yeah, I mean it brought up war memories.
And so that is so interesting to like,
I always kind of blame my parents.
Like why didn’t you make me speak Chinese?
Or why didn’t you teach me Taiwanese and Hakka?
You know, I could have been like quadruple lingual
by the time I was, you know, 12.
[Jen chuckling]
And, they’re like, Well, we just wanted you
to speak really perfect English
cause we didn’t get that chance, you know?
When we came here and now you speak perfect English,
no obstacles for you, you know?
That kind of thing.
So it’s so powerful.
I feel so?
I totally feel what you’re saying.
I mean, I don’t speak Creole,
which I am now really sad that I don’t.
And I wanna learn.
My grandmother’s brother who passed away taught Occitan,
which is an old language from the Southwest of France,
which is where my grandmother’s from.
Right. Never was interested
in asking him like, what are the songs?
And he would sing me some of those songs
and like, how do you pronounce it?
And now I’m calling my mom,
like how do you pronounce this like 1300 year old poem
in Occitan that I wanna set to music?
And she’s like, Well, everyone died.
Like you’re too late, you know?
Wow, yeah. And I feel,
I feel a lot, like I feel strange about that.
I’m just like, wow.
I feel like I’m coming to this too late.
[Cécile chuckles]
I mean, it’s never too late, you know?
It’s like- Yeah.
And I think there’s a weird diaspora thing where you feel,
I don’t know if you feel this way,
but where you kind of go back to these places and you feel
like the American and you’re like-
Totally. You’re like, you know,
for lack of a better term,
you’re like the white person, you know?
Yeah. In Africa they say that,
and you’re just like coming in with, you know,
your questions and your accent.
Maybe not even speaking the language and wanting to connect
with it, but you’re foreign. [Cécile chuckling]
Yeah.
And you’re foreign here too in a way.
So it’s just, it’s such a trip.
Yeah. I’m talking too much.
No, no, no, absolutely. No it’s great.
That’s great. Yeah.
I mean, I feel, you know, my dad passed 2019
and the album I created- I’m sorry.
It’s okay, thank you. [Jen chuckling lightly]
But I created Zero Grasses kind of out of,
it was supposed to be this other piece.
And then I was doing research in Japan for this piece.
It was supposed to be really just about climate change
and how humanities still cannot solve this issue,
despite all our technological advances, you know?
That was supposed to be that show.
And when my dad passed, I was just doing research in Japan,
learning biwa, learning Japanese and on my trip, you know,
and then he passed suddenly and it’s like,
oh, okay, gotta go take care of mom, gotta stop my research.
And you know, so I,
but I still had the premier in the fall
and it just became an homage to dad and yeah.
And there’s so many questions,
like I wish I could have asked him, you know?
And so I told the make-up lady I would cry.
But. [Jen laughing]
That’s real.
But yeah, I think and it’s called Ritual for the Losses.
I kind of, I was supposed to release it before, you know,
but the pandemic happened,
but it allowed me to add songs
that I wrote during the pandemic.
So there was a piece of,
I worked with a choir, a middle school choir,
and I had them write about, you know,
quarantine, what did that mean to them?
And they wrote, and then I compiled, I told them,
Well, I’m gonna write music with your lyrics
and we’re gonna write this, you know,
create this poem together.
And so that spoke about this middle school angst
in the most important, you know,
kind of formative years where they’re just, you know,
cooped up in this small cage, you know?
That’s one of the lyrics that they,
one of the poetic lines that they gave me
and just like, yeah, politicians telling us,
they’d rather keep their economy intact
than keep us alive, you know?
And like, just like, ah, 12 years old.
Strife. Strife, yeah,
they know what’s going on.
And I also wrote a song, Lament for Breonna Taylor
kind of reading, just from interviews of her mother,
speaking about how she was afraid of Brianna
getting COVID because she was a medical worker.
And just that, that article was,
it was People Magazine ‘article.
And just how tragic, you know, that reading that was
and reading Tamika Palmer’s words about her daughter.
So the album became as Ritual for the Losses
confronting grief,
but talking about it
which could segue into your project.
[Jen chuckling]
It’s on the mind. So, yeah.
And that’s something that, you know,
grief is not something
that we typically make a good job for,
or that we do a good job of making room for.
Kind of, I think,
on like culturally and kind of on an individual basis.
I think a lot of people just, it’s a difficult,
it’s a lot Yeah.
And it’s difficult to process it,
but I’d like to hear from you about just like
what your relationship with that is,
bringing that into your work.
And you just spoke about it a little bit, but you know,
why channel grief this way?
Yeah.
Me?
Yeah, Samora, I think we’ll start with you
since Jen just spoke.
Yeah.
Tell us about your most recent project
and how it reckons with grief.
Yeah, I mean, well, first of all,
I just wanna say thank you for sharing that.
And just in general, I mean, I think
what I always appreciate, among many things,
about both of you
is just that you’re just always honest, you know?
And that’s part of the grieving thing, too.
To me, I think that’s where it started for me
is that you’re being honest.
Grieving is just such a complicated process.
It looks obviously different for everybody,
but I think the one commonality,
at least how I’ve observed it
is that it pretty much looks like everything.
And so, yeah, I mean, the project
that you’re referring to,
I made an album called Grief that, you know,
just got released this year.
It was part of this larger project
called The Healing Project.
And I mean, it definitely does feel like,
obviously it’s in the air, you know,
from the last couple years of just everyone, you know,
it just touching everybody.
And I see so many artists, you know, responding to that
and being real about that.
But obviously in general,
I think we all, you know, deal with it all the time.
But I think that one of the things that made me want
to write a lot about it was that it feels
like the source of a lot of the,
or the epicenter, of a lot of the things
that we say are wrong with people,
but really they’re grieving, you know?
Yeah. And particularly
for black people and brown people,
you know, and it’s like,
particularly because we centralize people in certain ways
we demonize, we criminalize them in certain ways.
Right.
When really they’re grieving.
Yeah.
That’s what they’re going through, you know?
Yeah. And so I think, you know,
a big part of the healing project,
which was based in all these, you know,
this five year process of doing interviews
around the country, you know,
with different folks of all different ages
that were moving through experiences
with structural violence was just that
so many people were grieving,
but they just didn’t, they weren’t given,
on the one hand,
the society and the structure didn’t give them
neither the tools nor the options to grieve,
which is part of what you’re talking about.
It’s like, you don’t, this isn’t,
it’s not on your timetable.
It’s like, get over it.
You got three days, you got whatever you got,
you got the funeral and it’s a wrap, you know?
And it’s like, that’s not how it’s gonna work, you know?
And when you force somebody to do that,
they sublimated it in different ways.
And then it comes out, however, it comes out.
But the other part, which was really beautiful
and I think came to the personal
for me was that when I started doing the interviews,
I also realized that there were so many people
that had those tools and were using them in the community,
you know, because like they were needed.
And it was like, oh, this is where the information
is for how, what all of us need to be able
to grieve properly.
And in so many like little details, like I’ll try to,
I don’t wanna make it too long, but
a quick story is that there’s a woman named Sharon Huit
who has since passed away,
who I interviewed for the project.
She was like the mother of San Francisco.
Like everybody knew her in San Francisco.
And she told me a story as part of the interviews
about like one of the days
that basically one of the things she would do
is that she would be a person
that when somebody lost their child to violence,
she would show up and they didn’t know her or anything.
And she described to me the process
that she would go through when she shows up,
like, cause they don’t know her.
And she’s like, I do this, this and this.
And she tells this honestly hilarious story
about how she’s basically like I’m giving you this.
Like she gives them, you know, goes through a process
with them.
Are you getting this?
What you need, what you need, what you need?
And then also like,
I’m gonna give you this money so you can buy toilet paper
because everyone’s gonna come to your house
and they’re gonna like bring all this stuff
and they’re gonna use up all your toilet paper
and you’ll have nothing left and you’re gonna be like,
you know, grieving.
And you’re not gonna have wanna go to the store.
And then call them like a week later.
And they’re like, Don’t, you know,
I didn’t have no toilet paper, like da, da, da.
And she’s like, Now they trust me.
And that’s like, they know I’m gonna show up.
And it was just like the most practical, simple things,
you know? Yeah.
And I just know when people have passed in my life,
like those are the things that I appreciated the most.
When people were, were present with it.
And I think there’s a big culture around
like being present for somebody that’s grieving,
but also kind of sidestepping it and just like,
not really, not because people don’t wanna be there for you,
because they really don’t know how.
Yeah, yeah. So that’s kind of where,
where the album started and where the project got into that.
And my hope is just that people will,
people who are grieving will be able to feel seen and heard
in their grieving process
and know that it’s okay for it to be messy.
And also that hopefully they’ll have some tools.
Mm-hmm, yeah.
Wow, yeah.
The woman you mentioned who just like shows up
and just helps people out?
People like that are just like special.
I don’t know, like I that feels
like such a simplistic way to put it but it’s just like-
It’s simple though.
Yeah it is, it’s simple. Yeah, just to be able
to like show up for people
and to like actually be able
to like make meaningful differences is like, it’s huge.
And not to, to continue too long,
but that does go to the historical thing you were asking me
about because to me that’s also the importance
of the archive is because a lot of those people
are not the people that are archived, you know?
Those are not the people
that like are written articles about,
or you know, that anybody knows.
I mean, everybody knows them in the community.
Like everybody knows them where they’re from,
and that should be the most important thing.
But also I do find it, that is a beautiful thing
to archive that and archive our stories, you know?
All these things that wouldn’t necessarily normally be
in the historical record.
Definitely.
Yeah, did either of you have like other grief thoughts
you wanted to share before we keep moving?
[group chuckling]
I don’t know.
I don’t know if that I have many other grief thoughts.
I just think it’s interesting that like,
I’m wondering now, did you call us,
is it jazz that connects us or is this this like-
Whole set of things?
Yeah, yeah. [group laughing]
Like, should we be like in a funeral home?
[group laughing]
It’s kinda an interesting thread among us, but you know,
all of our albums recently are dealing somehow or another
with ghosts and grieving and loss and it’s kind of crazy,
right? Yeah.
Something in the air. Yeah, yeah.
Yeah. It’s funny.
Yeah. It’s funny to hear you say that too, but also like
to think about that sense of like grieving and loss,
but also not having it have the singular tone
of being like super sad. Yeah.
That like, yeah, that grief can,
that it does kind of have a lot of different colors to it?
I don’t know if that’s like quite the right way to put it,
but that there, that like,
it is a different experience for a lot of people
and it’s just, yeah.
Each of you has a different approach to it as well.
[Jen] Yeah.
And kind of building on,
we were just talking about a little bit,
I’d like to hear from y’all about the ways that community
informs your work.
And Samora you’ve talked about it in a bit more
of like a direct and concrete sense,
but Cécile, the way that you were talking about
like the jazz classes or the like classes
that you were in and the way
that like being in a smaller school
changed like your relationship with learning.
And so, yeah, and Jen,
the way that you were also speaking about like your aunties
and, you know, how does a sense of community shape,
like what each of you do?
That’s a, that’s a tough question.
Cause it certainly does, but
I for one, I’m extremely,
I would say socially hesitant.
I’m not anxious, but I’m very much an introvert.
So I often shy away from community.
If that makes any sense.
Like I’m often like hiding from community,
even though I know that’s what I need.
And I think these last few years have taught me
how essential it is and how my soul needs it
and how I often deny the things that my soul need.
And so I don’t know if, I mean, that’s all,
that’s all I can say about it.
For me. Yeah.
Yeah, community is such a big word.
I mean, I also, I feel the introvert, that is my core,
but then, I feel like it’s,
it also brings so much richness
and informs me and inspires me as well.
If I think about community in my recent days,
I know I mentioned this before, but,
with my wonderful co-founder Sara Serpa,
we co-founded a Mutual Mentorship for Musicians Initiative
and realizing that when we were in our twenties,
we really didn’t have any, many, maybe one?
[Jen chuckling]
Woman mentor to guide us
and to kind of help us navigate power dynamics.
You know, whether be it harassment or just microaggressions.
And so we, we thought, well, as a community,
like what did we want?
Like, what did we wish we had?
So this was kind of a way that we could generate that?
That we had the ability to do.
So just getting together 12 artists, some who I didn’t know,
and some Sara I didn’t know.
And just, we wanted to see how we could make it work.
Like, you know, one-on-one mentorship
as well as group kind of support and
okay, let’s do two meetings a month.
Let’s do three months?
No, but then everyone wanted more, so, okay.
We’ll change it to six months.
And it was just like constantly amorphous thing.
And, wow.
I mean, just to have so much like kind of voices
that I’ve never heard,
perspectives that I never considered, you know?
In one room, Zoom room. [Jen chuckling]
In one Zoom room.
You know, it was just, and all talking about our work,
talking about our struggles and, and you know,
what it was like to be, you know,
one of our court members starting out
as a woman saxophone player at Oberlin
and experiencing all the, you know,
kind of terrible traumatic stuff?
And then later transitioning into a man
and now being a saxophonist and how,
what that is like for him.
And so I’m not being very articulate, but,
but just realizing, you know,
I think as we step back and I kind of, and I think about,
wow, the number of amazing artists that just are not
on the marques or not on the headlines
or not headlining festivals.
Yes. As they should be.
And, we’re talking women in their seventies,
you know, Shanta Nurullah is sitar player from Chicago,
who is a storyteller, never performed in New York.
And we’re honoring her with a lifetime achievement award,
this festival.
So we’re producing a festival in June.
[Jen chuckling]
And so we have 19 women and non-binary, queer artists,
like it’s just 19 artists doing four nights in a row,
you know, five sets per night,
one of the nights is four,
and then a gala evening.
You know, so we’re producing all this and we’re just like,
we’re creating it.
We’re making this, we’re forming this community,
we’re growing the community and kind of,
we’re bringing people into the community.
So, and giving voice to,
and this is like something I wanted to share too,
[Jen chuckling]
is it’s an anthology of writings
from our first and second cohorts of each cohort member.
You know, we’ve commissioned them,
not only to create a music piece with a duo partner
who they never worked with before,
but also to write, you know, an essay.
So here we go, Sara’s is
Motherhood in Music in 10 Steps:
the Invisible Work of Mother Musicians.
It’s an amazing essay.
And Sumi Tonooka is in here.
Erica Lindsay, Michele Rosewoman.
I mean, you know, like? Greats, yeah.
[Jen reveling] [Jen chuckling]
It’s like more people should know about Monnette Sudler,
you know, so our elder women musicians,
like where are they in the kind of the narrative
of, oh, the genius or the greats.
They are.
And they’re there.
And so, yeah, so it’s just kind of thinking about community,
which, you know, definitely at 20?
I was not, I was just like, how do I survive here?
How do I find my voice?
You know, it was kind of,
that’s kind of, yeah, it was just like,
ah, survival, not drowning.
And, you know, very fortunately, yeah,
I would say Doris Duke is an institution
that I feel so supported by
that has allowed me to think more broadly and think bigger.
And what did I tell you about the pizza analogy?
Yeah.
So instead of like, I want a bigger piece of pizza,
it’s like, oh, let’s make the pizza bigger, you know?
It’s actually a skater told me that analogy.
[Jen laughing]
Skater wisdom, but yeah.
So that’s kind of, what’s on my mind
when you say the word community.
Yeah. Yeah, I mean, I definitely,
I definitely resonate with,
I like how you said it,
cause I definitely say socially anxious.
I’m trying to not define myself as anxious anymore,
although I definitely deal with anxiety.
Yes. But I think for me,
part of what I realized that was behind that
and I’m, this is a little bit of departure,
but I do try to be honest about this,
sometimes now is that like, I really,
I think I had a running narrative and I still am trying
to work out of having a running narrative
that like I’m the worst.
And like, no one likes me and no one is, you know?
Like it’s really it’s a thing.
And I don’t know where it came from, but it’s like,
you know, I think that, I’m realizing,
that’s part of what brought me to that, you know,
fear of building that community
when really I did like desperately want it.
Mostly selfishly, cause I wanna be accepted, but you know,
so I’m working through that but I think as a result,
like community, for me,
the way I came to it in the work was really politically.
Mm-hmm. Mostly just because
I felt like I had to represent, not had to,
but I wanted to represent a community ethic in everything
that I did so that it would not just
like be that artistically, but that it would,
that I wouldn’t be reproducing things
that I didn’t believe in, in capitalism.
And like, but you know, that I didn’t believe
in that solitary genius idea.
And I didn’t believe in this like, you know,
cult of celebrity and all these different things.
And also like even in the minute details of, you know,
crediting and publishing, you know?
These things that like you don’t think about
when you’re a young artist and then like a lot of, you know,
my friends and different people that, you know,
you get taken advantage of. Yeah.
And I just never, I just so desperately did not wanna
be on the other side of that.
Mm-hmm. You know?
I was just like, oh, like I don’t want
to give another person this feeling, you know?
Mm-hmm. And that was really
like my greatest fear. Mm-hmm.
And then on top of that, I think, you know,
I really didn’t feel like I could do anything alone.
I think if I like knew how to do some things alone,
maybe I would’ve done them more.
Because I am also simultaneously a control freak,
but? [group laughing]
You know, I also like really desperately need people
and it’s become the most beautiful thing
because that has become, you know, my greatest friends
and has become all these different things.
And I think this project has allowed me
to then take it the next step to really feel it
as a lifeline for myself and for others.
And you know, being in correspondence
with brothers of mine who are incarcerated,
who like, you know,
that’s the only way we communicate, you know?
But through that process, not only are we,
am I able, you know, we’re sharing our ideas,
but also we, you know, support each other
and that’s kind of like the biggest part for me.
Okay. Yeah.
So all of you are kind of,
this feels like not the best word to use for it,
but all of you, I guess, are like multi hyphenates
where all of you just have like many talents and do,
you know, do more than one thing.
How do you, in terms of like creative practices,
how do you kind of figure out like
which threads you want to follow
with whatever kind of art you’re making?
Whether that’s like a visual piece
or like composing or performance?
I can go for this, I’ll go. [group laughing]
I mean, yeah.
I mean, yeah, like it’s just the best, I don’t know.
I just love having no boundaries.
I just love having no boundaries.
Yeah. Yeah.
And it took me a long time
to get to that point where I felt like
I could have no boundaries with what I create
and not think about what format it would take.
And that was a big part of community too,
because part of the way that I was able to realize that was
that I didn’t need to have all the skills to make my ideas
come to life. That’s a good point.
Just had to good point deeply respect.
Yeah. All the other people
that I was doing it with.
And I wanted, it had to come from them
as much that had come from me.
And if we was doing that, then we’re good, you know?
And so there were so many ideas I had
that they weren’t music, but I’m like,
I don’t know anything, first thing about a camera, you know?
Right. I don’t know
the first thing about wood work, you know?
But now I have wood pieces and now I got films,
but it’s also, it’s because of these collaborators,
you know, the Christian Padrons
and the Yon Yosegas and all these different,
amazing collaborators, Sebastian Corn.
So like making things with people allowed me to do anything
that I want and them to do the same,
because then I found out that a lot of them love music
and they were like, But I don’t play instrument.
Yeah, yeah. So that was like
that opened up the whole thing.
And then once it became that, it was just like,
there’s so many ways that I want to reach people, you know?
And not all of them are possible
just through sonics, you know?
Some of them are really powerful in that way
and they don’t work as well in other things,
which I’ve also learned a lot about,
I think particularly with like,
I think it’s given me a greater appreciation
of music as well. Mm-hmm.
Because it makes me really understand what sound does
that sometimes visuality has a problem with,
because we’re so attuned to certain visual languages
and we are just seeing it all the time
and we come become very desensitized to certain things.
Yes, yes. Mm.
And so it’s like, actually I don’t really wanna see that,
but I can hear about it and really actually be moved
in a different way. Right.
And so that actually made me like go back into the music,
but there’s still certain things where
if I want to tell a story
or I wanna just like, you know, represent an idea,
it’s not gonna come off the same way
with the music, you know?
So I need that visual language.
Yeah.
I love that.
I think,
we were talking about this before we got on camera.
I’m like getting back into music now.
[group laughing]
Like I know that’s probably sounds weird,
but like I’ve really over the last couple months and years
have discovered,
it feels like I’ve discovered it for the first time
that it actually is real
and it does stuff and it moves things and it’s,
there’s nothing that can move a body
and can animate a brain and a body the way music can
and can animate memory the way music can.
Like, it’s just, unequaled. Yeah.
But I do feel very much like I’m a visual person first.
And I will say my visual art practice comes
from seeing my mom and my sister and my grandma
make art all the time at home.
I just found out about this term called Sunday painters,
which is just people who paint on Sundays.
I love it. And they don’t show the work
and it’s just for them.
And they’re weekly, they’re not Sunday.
They’re like every day, but they don’t,
my sister has never shown her work.
She’s an incredible visual artist.
My mom has never shown her work.
My grandma’s, like it’s in the house.
Oh, wow.
I remember growing up and weekends where my mom
would be either painting or making a chair
or doing lace work, learning how to do lace work,
like traditional lace work from the Northwest of France
with like the two last ladies who know how to do it.
That’s so French.
It’s so French. Just constantly going
into like learning a craft or,
and, you know, we say craft, I think it’s art.
But learning an art that they don’t know
and just going for it and trying it
and not having that pressure or even the desire
for other people to see it, it’s totally personal.
And so I think I took a little bit of that.
And so I, it’s funny, It’s like, it’s multi hyphenate,
but I don’t even consider myself that.
I’m just sort of doing what all these ladies
in my family do.
Speaking of which can we also just like
shout out your mom? Yeah.
[Jen cheering]
Shout out to the jacket my mom made.
Aww, it’s so beautiful.
Hi mom. Wow.
I love it. Amazing.
I’m gonna be a Sunday painter.
Like that’s just, that’s my,
when I, you know, in my next life,
definitely chef and painter are what I want to be.
No, in this life. Yes. Yes.
So now I think now I have a term that I can use,
Sunday painter. Yeah, Sunday painter.
But it’s also like, I kinda like using that idea
even for music too. Yeah.
And just not being like, you know, just?
I admire people so much who, who just do not,
they just do it- Do it to do it.
Humbly to do it.
Yeah. To spend the day
and it’s, I think it’s really beautiful and inspiring.
And I know we all have people in our lives
that do that, right?
Yeah. Totally.
We all have that.
I’m sure in our process, we? Yes.
I definitely feel like in, even on stage,
I’ve gotten to the point where it’s some moments
during the performance, or maybe the whole whole time,
I’ll just be in the most like raw or uncomfortable-
You’ll be Sunday painter. And I kind of need that.
Like, if it, I can’t, even if I have a show
that there’s a script and there’s lighting cues?
Like there has to be something that goes wrong.
Yes. Cause then it’s,
then that’s, you know, I’m not happy.
I’m not satisfied if everything goes right.
[Jen chuckling]
But like it’s funny cause when I,
I think my first love is dance
and that was my first,
actually I didn’t improvise as a musician,
but as a dancer, that’s all I did.
So it was like- Wow.
Ballet in the house.
I took ballet lessons of course,
and was in our local Peoria, Illinois ballet school
speaking small, you know?
And you know, I did all the roles in The Nutcracker.
So dance, I felt totally free with movement.
And then I remember like singing?
Well, when I began to connect those things,
actually through musical theater.
But my instruments were still kind of off in the distance.
Like that’s that thing.
That’s where I sit at the piano bench and play that
or that’s the violin thing.
And it wasn’t until living in the bay area. bay area.
Bay area. Yeah, bay area.
We really do that multi hyphen thing.
Everybody does 10 things.
Everybody does. No one does one thing.
Exactly and that’s when, you know, cause,
even my piano teacher was like,
Jen, you can’t be a Jack of all trades.
No, you go to somebody in the bay.
They’re like, what are you?
I’m a poet, I’m a painter. Yeah, everything.
It’s like, you’re just a musician?
No, no, what else do you do?
You know it’s, so that was the first time,
like I was given permission
and was called upon to like play violin and dances and sing.
And I will never forget the first gig I did that.
It was Doug Yokoyama saxophonist in the bay area.
And he asked me to do that, you know, for his music.
And after the performance, one my mentors,
John Jane, a wonderful pianist in the bay area,
he, after the show, he said at a restaurant,
cause we all hung out after like,
Jen, I had a vision, like I had a vision
that you’re just gonna bring it all together.
Like wherever you go next.
Like, and I ended up moving to New York from there,
but he’s like,
You’re gonna just bring it all together.
[Jen laughing]
And like that, that was like,
I didn’t know what he was talking about really.
But that was so exciting and so liberating, like-
Was it scary at all? It was terrifying,
cause I didn’t know what form that was.
Yeah, right. Yeah. But cause I didn’t know
what I was doing on the stage.
I was like dancing and then like playing some violin part
and singing, I had no idea whether it was good
or what it looked like.
Very insecure feeling, you know, and scary.
And, but then to have him just give me
that little ounce of confidence and
like seeing the future like that?
That- You can consolidate.
You can. Yeah and so integration
is always like, after moving to New York,
like that’s what I, and especially when you travel,
and like spending so much time in Indonesia
and like all the Gamelan musicians,
they play every instrument,
they also sing and they dance, you know,
and the dhalang, who are the puppeteers,
they sing and they know all the in instruments,
they can play everything.
You know, it’s like, of course it’s not a big deal
and it’s, they couldn’t.
And they say like, oh, you can’t just know this part.
You have to learn that and these other parts for sure.
You know, or else you’re not gonna understand the music.
So that really shifted my mindset and changed.
Yeah, kind of letting go of those like kind of
perfectionist, precious? The categories, right?
Yeah. The boundaries.
And just like the concern of not getting
this one thing right. Mm-hmm.
You know, it’s actually the whole, and so anyway.
Yeah. That’s real.
I think we’re kind of getting close
to the end of our time,
but as we kind of approach that
I want to hear from each of you about, you know,
we started out this conversation talking about
what your relationship with jazz is at the start.
And so I’m curious to hear about what your relationship
is with it now?
Especially this idea of like the jazz label
or genre being applied to your work and you know,
how do you feel like you fit in with that?
And, you know, what’s your relationship
with like what jazz is and how you feel
like you’re pulling it forward?
Or do you feel like that’s even the right way to put it?
Oh, we need like another two hours.
[group laughing]
Yeah, definitely.
Definitely.
How many minutes we got left?
[group laughing]
Part two. Yeah.
I’ll just say for me, I think the term jazz is,
it’s extremely fascinating to me.
I have yo-yoed with it.
I’ve gone in and out of, of like I’ve,
I’ve been really attracted to it really proud of it,
felt completely like disdainful of that term.
And now I feel like it I’m just so fascinated.
I’m just, I think,
the fact that it eats everything
and refuses to be defined? Mm-hmm.
And the fact that people want to define it
and fight over what it means?
And the fact that it’s so maligned by the industry
and nobody cares about it
and people think it’s not cool
and people think it’s traditional
and they think it’s cocktail music
or they think it’s, you know, too complicated.
Like all of those things make me so?
Just, I just wanna read more about it
and know more about it
and listen to it more and not know what it is.
And I don’t know.
I think it’s, it’s fantastic.
Yeah. [group laughing]
Like it’s a mess, it’s a total mess.
Yeah. And you know,
it’s weird because it’s like, when someone says,
Oh, you’re a jazz musician.
I think most people that I know,
well actually a lot of people that I know will go,
[Cécile grimacing]
Really?
I don’t know if you could say, if you could qualify it,
so I just think even just that reaction is so interesting,
so fascinating. Yeah, yeah.
Yeah. I have, yeah,
so many thoughts, but I think the, I mean,
there’s many reasons for people
having that reaction and I’m realizing that one of it
is the word itself because many of us are starting
to learn its origins and its origins
was white people making fun of black people
for playing the music, you know,
like literally it’s a bad word that they shorten to jazz.
So I think like the conception-
But even that is like, you kind of-
It’s silly.
I mean, it’s dumb, like it’s so dumb.
It’s like so part of our culture.
Yeah and it’s, we flipped it.
Like we flip everything else, you know, that’s what we do.
We flip it. Yeah, yeah.
Make it work for you, you know?
But so yeah. It’s like, you know,
it’s a little bit, it’s a little bit silly
and that is the push pull, I think.
And it’s not, I don’t think it’s, I think it’s like,
especially heightened in our lineage,
but it really is present in every format,
particularly of, you know,
music that exists like from indigenous
or black or brown people in a white continent
or like a, you know, white supremacist continent.
Right.
Rather than a white continent,
cause we here but like- Yeah.
Is that there’s always a push pull
between making the thing
and then them trying to define you
and like, yeah, grab it and like, hold it
and like make sense of the thing you’re doing.
And you’re like, well,
like you want people to understand it,
but also you don’t really want it
to be that controlled, you know?
So you wanna be able to define it.
You want to be able to change if you,
and that’s the other history of it too, right?
Is like, it’s just art is changing all the time.
Exactly. Any of your favorite artists
is like, they just change 70 times.
Some of those changes, I don’t really like them records,
but I’m glad they changed, you know?
And that’s, for me what it means, it’s like,
that’s the Wayne Shorter, right?
I dare you, that’s what he says it is,
which I like it’s like- I love that.
But speaking to that, even, I would venture to say
that I think a lot of people would categorize
what we do as jazz,
but there are groups of people, many probably who-
Yes. Definitely not.
Three people are not jazz musicians.
[group laughing]
Right? 100%.
They’re not playing jazz. Right.
So it’s, it’s a funky little thing, right?
Yeah. Yeah.
And I think if we focus more on like,
well, I don’t know, like you have such a sound
and creative mind and Cécile has such a,
like, I really feel like it’s this force,
like the force of Cécile and the force of Samora
and the force of all these artists that we have, you know,
learned from whether it’s from the recordings or, you know,
just conversations like,
it’s so profound, you know?
And I couldn’t possibly categorize, have one word to,
you know, although creative music is interesting.
What do you think of that term?
Huh?
The only reason I have trouble is because I’m like
what isn’t creative music?
But, you know, that’s, I think,
the problem with all the terms, cause like,
but I think what I do hear you saying,
which I do really connect to is that I think
I really connect to the lineage that people also name that.
Yeah. And I don’t ever want
to let go of that. Right.
Cause I really like, those are my people.
Yeah. And then I also,
and this is something I don’t know
that I always would’ve said,
but I’m also deeply excited about being in community
with other people that people would define as that now.
Mm-hmm. And obviously, y’all are,
you know, that’s like, it’s like those,
I definitely I’m like, that’s what I want.
I wanna be a part of like that conversation
and that community. Yeah.
That’s, when you talk about community.
I think that’s what it is for me.
The only other thing too, that I’ll say too,
is it became a lot easier for me to accept,
well, it became a lot easier for me
when I decided to start making different,
like working in different artistic disciplines?
That weren’t just music. Right.
Because then I was like,
now I’m not just like making hell of different genres
that no one like knows what my music is.
Cause that’s mostly the reaction I get is like,
Where does this?
I don’t really know where to put this.
But now I’m like,
now you really don’t, now you really don’t know.
[Samora laughing]
Yeah. And I kind of like that.
Yeah.
Like I just wanted to give a shout out to Sumi Tonooka,
who’s my partner in crime,
for the project that brought us together.
I mean, Creative Reflections supported by Doris Duke.
You know, Sumi, her first gig was at 19
with Philly Joe Jones.
Like that was her first professional gig
and going on the road with him
and all the stories and you know,
and we talk about this a lot,
like what is jazz and how are we collaborating
and why is it so easy for us to improvise together?
And, you know, just talking about her,
also her explorations into her ancestry,
as both, you know, her father was African American,
her mother was Japanese.
And, just like, you know,
how the stories that she’s telling through her playing.
You know, I just it’s, I just really see such complete art,
like these individuals,
and now I’m rereading Robin Kelly’s Monk book.
Mm, the greatest. The greatest.
The best book. And just seeing, you know,
how he was battling with? Same stuff.
Same stuff and like people getting more play than him
and him feeling like frustrated
that he wasn’t, you know, being regarded
as as influential as he was.
And it’s like, wow.
And, and just how he, I mean,
I feel like most of the book is him struggling, like to,
you know, it it’s really crazy,
to know how much he struggled and just like,
that’s why history’s so important, you know?
For us not to forget that journey
and for Robin to have written that,
done the research, you know? Yes.
Yeah, so it’s?
I don’t know how to wrap that up, but.
[group laughing]
We out here. Yeah.
To that point,
yeah, do any of you like have like an album
or any shows coming up that you would like to mention
before we, before we wrap up, like tour?
Anything like that?
I would just like to shout out the project
that Doris Duke is supporting that I’m doing,
which is Ogresse, which is a murder ballad
about a woman living in the woods who eats people
when they come to attack her.
We’re making it into future length film,
and we’re gonna perform a live version of it
at the Walker in Minneapolis. Okay.
So, I’m really excited about that.
Yay.
Such a great museum and place.
I’m excited. [Jen laughing]
Well, the M³, we have our big festival in June.
Definitely wanna give a shout out.
June 16th, 17th, 18th, 21st, and then the gals,
the 22nd at Greenwich House Music School.
And of course Sumi, our project.
We’re still in the research phase.
We’ve interviewed Jenny Lim and Toshiko Akiyoshi
and Amenia Claudia Myers is next on our list,
[Jen chuckling]
the amazing Amenia.
So, yeah, and the piece we’re creating
is called In the Green Room, layering legacies
of black and Asian American women jazz musicians,
and kind of alongside that I should be finishing this year,
a piece for 20 orchestral members
who will serve as choir also.
We’ll be moving and acting
in a piece called Fertile Land, Fertile Body
about fertility, it’s connection to the land
and climate crisis.
And it’ll be an orchestra of, yeah,
20 women and non-binary artists
whom I haven’t selected yet, but will.
[Jen laughing]
But yeah, so that’s kind of happening.
Probably will be the next album.
Cool. As well, so.
Yeah. Yeah.
What do you got? So exciting.
No, I just wanna experience all those things.
That’s really, but yeah, I’m the project
that Doris Duke, among others,
helped me to create is called The Healing Project.
And that is it basically isn’t comes in three parts.
So the first part is an exhibition,
which is currently on view in San Francisco
at the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts until September 4th.
And it is free and open to the public,
which I am like so excited about.
And then hopefully after that,
it will travel to other cities.
Then there’s also a digital archive,
which we just launched last week,
which anybody can find at healingprojectarchive.com.
Mm-hmm. And then the last piece
is my album, which is called Grief,
which people can find anywhere that you find music.
[Samora chuckling]
Yeah and they should buy that album,
instead of streaming it. Please buy it.
Thank you for that. Exactly, yes.
Or yeah. Support the musicians.
Yes, exactly.
Well, thank you all so much
for being so generous with your time
and taking the time to speak with me today.
This was really wonderful.
Thanks everyone out in the rest of the world
for joining us today.
Like I said, please buy these artists music.
Don’t just stream it.
If they are coming through your town by,
buy a ticket, buy your friend to ticket.
Thank you so much to the Doris Duke Charitable Foundation
for having us and helping us put this on.
We’ve got- And also,
Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, right?
Who is part of your, and Walker Arts Center
and Asia Society.
I just wanna make sure I got that in there.
[Jen chuckling]
Great, thank you.
Yeah, we’ve got sat Cécile McLorin Salvant, Jen Shyu,
and Samora Pinderhughes.
I’m Allison Hussey with Pitchfork
and see ya down the road.
[lively jazz music]
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