+ Transcription

Tia Time with Artists, with guest Marti Lameti, recorded on 2/20/2021

Tia Imani Hanna: Welcome to Tia Time with Artists, the weekly podcast where we discuss the methods, challenges, and real-life experiences of living our creative dreams. What kind of creative warrior are you? Musician? Filmmaker? Painter? Choreographer? Poet? Sculptor? Fashionista? Let’s talk about it right now. I’m your host, Tia Imani Hanna.

Tia Imani Hanna: Welcome to Tia time with Artists and my guest this week is I would say fabric artist. Is that a good way to describe you? Marti Lameti.

Marti Lameti: Thank you. Yeah, fiber, textile. There are a lot of different ways of talking about the techniques, but either fiber, textile, I think work.

Tia Imani Hanna: Tell me all about what was it that drove you to fabrics, as opposed to other fine arts. Did you start with fabrics or textiles? Or did you start with painting? Or did you start with drawing? Or was it something in your household? Was it in the family tree?

Marti Lameti: Yeah, a little bit of everything. I'll flash forward to college where I was a painting, drawing and art history major. But it wasn't until the end of my time in my in my bachelor's program that I said, “I'm going to take a textile class.” And then it just brought back all these wonderful memories of working with my grandmother and my mother. I was knitting. I made all my Barbie clothes. It was something that was known to me. I started out cross stitching when I was probably five years old. And I think that whole olfactory sensation that you get from working with, especially with wools, just is so peaceful, and calming and it's almost therapeutic. And I found my passion in what I knew from my past.

Tia Imani Hanna: So, you mean, that would have been interesting to see. You made your own Barbie doll clothes.

Marti Lameti: Yeah, I did.

Tia Imani Hanna: So, you did this with knitting.

Marti Lameti: I did. I would take… my mother would let me use her needles and some leftover yarn. And I used to sit there and go, I'd hold it up to the Barbie doll and say, “Oh, I think that if I make so many stitches, this will work.” So, I actually was making my own patterns and doing my own things. And so, then my parents bought me this Barbie doll clothing designer kit, where you trace through with the Barbie and you make the clothes. Oh my gosh. I thought I'd died and gone to heaven. So, you know, that along with a little sewing machine that I had, and I would just make all these things. It wasn't until I was grown and had the time to really start working with textiles in a different way toward the end of my undergraduate degree that I discovered you could do so much more with it. And then again, it wasn't until I had the time to really discover it more, as in my time of raising my children. Then I would work on things that night and I started selling my work in galleries and just found this passion.

Tia Imani Hanna: What was that journey like even just to get from, okay, so, I went from making Barbie doll clothes to I'm going do this in school to go to art school? What was the impetus to do that? Because art school. A lot of parents were like art school. What? You're going to do that? So, how did you get there?

Marti Lameti: I heard that too. So, when I went off to Olivet College, which was my first college that I attended, I went there with the idea of probably going into psychology, but I was taking art classes and found my passion. I had a wonderful instructor by the name of Professor Whitney, who said to me one day you are an artist and I would like you to consider this your major. And, he said, because you can do great things. And it was that inspiration that made me think maybe I could do this, but how do you do that? How do you make a living as an artist? I think all of us can relate to that. And I think, gee, I don't want to be a starving artist and not be able to make a living to support myself. So, I was straddling these two majors. And when he said that to me, I declared myself an art major and decided to triple major. And then when I went to Eastern Michigan University, cause I transferred over so that I could study under an art teacher that I really had appreciated. He was a drawing instructor and a sculptor; Professor Pappas and I learned some really great things from all the professors there as well. And just kept continuing, but I was painting. And so, I come from a painting background. And so, as my use of fibers, I think of it in a painterly way. So, I actually paint with the textiles, paint with the fibers.

Tia Imani Hanna: I guess in painting you think of perspective and grids or do you think in objects or landscapes? Or do you think of ideas or what are you trying to get to when you're, when you're trying to create a piece?

Marti Lameti: My current work is really looking at fibers as a two-dimensional space and you've seen my work that I do with three-dimensional in my clothing designs. And I still go back to that. But, for a while, everything I was making became a hat, to be honest with you, because my passion for hats also go back to my early childhood. My mother and my sister and I would go to JL Hudson's in downtown Detroit. And we would always start out in the hat department. And my mother would say, it always is a good day of shopping when you start out in the hat department. And we would try on hats and it was really lovely and my mother looked fabulous in hats. And so, for a while, as I was creating, I was still creating more of a 3d thing that would… all of the textiles became hats. And I had a lot of fun with that. And then I started saying, what else can I do? So, then I started creating the fabrics and they became garments. And then I was doing garments as well as the hats. And then I said, what else can I do? And I thought, well, I'm creating the fabrics using my painterly skills. Why don't I paint with the fibers? So, then I began experimenting and laying out my fibers and tacking them down and running them through a machine that I use. And creating a felt base. And sometimes I would wet felt them if I needed them for a garment and other times, I would just let them become. My current work is mostly two-dimensional and they are fiber paintings. So, I'm painting with the fibers. I do landscapes and I do some other pieces besides landscapes. Sometimes I just throw things down and see what happens with them.

Tia Imani Hanna: Do you make the pieces? You make the felt so, or do you find a textile someplace, say, oh, here's a swatch of something. And I really like this color and I want to see this color throughout my piece. Or do you say, I like how that they cross-stitched this thing here and I'm just going to use a piece of this or I’m going to use this entire piece to set up something else? How do you even go about finding your pieces of fiber to work with?

Marti Lameti: A lot of times what I do is, most of the time, I buy my wool to begin with, and sometimes I hand-dye the wool and sometimes I buy wool that's just been sheared off a sheep and that's a whole nother process because then you have to scour the wool. And then I dye the wool, and then I take pieces of the wool and lay them down as though they're strokes of paint. I'll lay a piece of base fabric down and a lot of times I'll use industrial felt or I'll use scrap fabrics, recycled garments, piece silk scarves that people give me. I use a little bit of everything. I really liked the idea of recycling and using natural fibers because I think it's better for the environment to do that. So, even in my dying process of some of the fabrics that I use, I do coffee dying and tea dying and natural fabrics. But I do like to support the community, artist community, in another regard in that I buy a lot of my wools from local growers. So, people who are raising the sheep and they're shearing the sheep and a lot of artists, their art is in the dying. And so, I will go to fiber shows and I will buy the colors that I'm inspired by, and then bring them back. If you could see my storeroom, it's tremendous because I need to have every color at my fingertips so that I can blend them in the process.

Tia Imani Hanna: Going to a shopping mall with you, what's a trip to the store look like? What's a trip to the to the farmer's market look like? So, you go do work with the alpaca farmers and I don't know if the llamas they use their wool or not.

Marti Lameti: I can use a little bit of everything. I think my best shopping trip though, that I ever had was when I went to Japan. And I went there as one of three artists that traveled to Japan and showed our work there with some of the Japanese artists that were, it was such a wonderful experience. And so, one of my things that I wanted to do was to go to Kyoto and to shop for silk. So, I went in with my interpreter and went into this tiny… because spaces is quite an issue in Japan. But this tiny little space and it was stuffed with the most beautiful, highly saturated silks all over the place that I was almost salivating. It was just like such, such a wonderful experience. My eyes were going everywhere and of course, I'm… there is a limitation in the language, but my interpreter was really wonderful. And so, the man was just so gracious. When she explained to him why I was there and he started, I said, “Oh, I like this. I like that.” He starts pulling everything down. And then he starts gifting me with things so that I could take them back. And, of course, my luggage was so loaded at the end that I was... I had to actually have a friend in Japan ship me the things back because I was a little bit loaded down with some silks. But shopping there was quite an experience. Normally what I do is, I'll go to fiber festivals and I have certain farmers that I know that the quality of their wool is really great. And sometimes it's just that I have a connection with them and I'll feel and smell the fibers before I work with them. And then that actually, that olfactory selection and the tactile selection, is why I work in fibers to begin with. So, it's just a feast for my senses.

Tia Imani Hanna: Wow. So, I've never heard anyone talk about olfactory part of it before. So, cause we could have just gone down the linear trail… and so I went to school and then I did this and then I did this… and instead we were like, it smells good! That's definitely something I've never heard before.

Marti Lameti: So yeah, I think people who like spinners and weavers and anybody who works with natural fibers would probably tell you that as well. But I've been known to go up when I'm buying wool and actually smell it and say, “Does this bring about something in me?” And that seems really odd, but lately working with coffee dyes and stuff, I walk into my studio and it smells like coffee, and I love the smell of coffee, so it's a cool thing. But, yeah, if it doesn't smell good, I don't use it because I don't want to be having to deal with it, which is why I'm a little nervous about the wax work because it can really stink. But bee's wax, which is what I use most of the time, I like the smell of bee's wax. So, that's okay.

Tia Imani Hanna: It's a natural scent. It’s a different thing. Yeah. And then the chemical wax is different. So just like chemical oils smell funky, but essential oils are fine.

Marti Lameti: And I love the smell of oil paint. That's probably what started me to become an oil painter, to get was the smell of the oil paint. I then linseed oil, I think it's fabulous. But you don't, with watercolor, you don't get that. There's no smell to it. And so, I got bored with it and I never, until this minute, never really realized why that probably was. And probably because I like the smell of it, oil, better than I did the watercolor.

Tia Imani Hanna: And you're just more attuned to it. Cause some people, I think that's true for a lot of different things. Cause you know, sometimes you'll meet a person and you don't like them and you don't know why. And it might be because they're wearing a scent you don't like.

Marti Lameti: Right. Don't they say that's how you find your significant other. That it is really through smell.

Tia Imani Hanna: Yeah. So, we just don't realize it because our noses are so much less developed than like a dog or a cat or any other creature on the planet. We can't smell very well, but we'd be more attuned if we didn't have as many scents and we weren't inside all the time and we were living out in the wilderness, we'd be able to smell things more. So, maybe yours is just more highly developed and you use it in your art.

Marti Lameti: And that's why I like wine.

Tia Imani Hanna: [laughing] That's a good reason.

Marti Lameti: To me, I love the smell of sheep's wool, so it's, in spinning. I do spinning and I've done about everything that you can do with fibers so that I know how things are done. And I've studied over the years at Greenfield Village. I worked there for a while and I took classes and I continue to challenge myself to do new things, to add to my repertoire of design. So, like right now I'm playing around with waxes and adding paint back into what I do a little bit. But the challenge for me, it's a lot easier for me to paint what I want to do. It's actually more of a challenge to do that in fibers. And I don't think that people understand that. It's more of a challenge to make the fiber do what you want it to do than it is to paint with a brush. And I like that challenge.

Tia Imani Hanna: It sounds like you like to set new limits for yourself so you can break them.

Marti Lameti: That's a good… that's exactly. That's exactly right. You learn the rules and then you break them. And that's what I used to tell my students when I taught is that you must learn the rules first, and then you it's your job as an artist to break those rules. And so, that's what I set about doing all the time.

Tia Imani Hanna: Good. I'm glad to see it. Make art. That's what we do at Tia Time is tell folks all the time just to make art and break the rules. And make mistakes. Yes. So, what mistakes have you made that have turned into the best things that you've ever come up with? Can you think of any that have just turned for the better because you made them?

Marti Lameti: Yeah. Sometimes I don't like completely what I've done and then I'll throw it up on a mannequin. If I'm doing… if I'm thinking about it in terms of a garment, or I'll hang it up for a while and just look at it. And then I used to teach my students that too, when you come to an impasse, take another fresh look at it and in a different way. And I always taught them to say, what if. What if this were something else? What if it wasn't a piece of fabric? What else could it be? What? And then sometimes I cut things up reuse them in a different way. Sometimes I throw it on a pile. I actually have a box of unfinished things. And then every so often I just pull them out, stick them up, and see what they've become in the meantime.

Tia Imani Hanna: Okay. Yeah. That's very… it's… I've talked with different folks about being a musician. And people like Prince and people like, oh, I can't think of… Horace Silver. And some of the other writers would go every day and write a little bit in the morning. And then they would either, back in the day, they throw a cassette in a shoe box on top of the piano. Because they would just write every day. So, they had this little snippet and then maybe once a week or once every two weeks, they go back and then they'd say, “Okay.” They play it back and say, “Can I develop this? Can I develop this?” And this will be become the new song that they're working on. It's so it's that little bit of just doing something every day consistently. And even if you think you have junk, you might have something else at the end. But you have to keep doing it and throwing it into the pile. And you're doing that visually. Olfactorily, because when you throw them all together, I'm sure they smell differently too. Oh, I'll put this in here. And it had this kind of paint on it and that has a different scent and then you throw it together. And then when I put them together, it smells like this. Oh wait. I like that. So yeah. It's a different way of yes. I like that.

Marti Lameti: But you're right though. You have to work every day. And even when I was teaching and I was working on my Master of Education and I was raising my kids and I would think, “I must get into my studio because if I'm not an artist, how can I teach my students that it's important?” So, every day, at the end of the day after I'd get back from school, after the kids are in bed, I would go up to my little, tiny studio and I would do something. And even if it was just for half an hour. Although I'm a night owl, so sometimes that was a problem because I would just keep working and I would think I've got to get up in three hours to get ready for work. But you working every day is, I think, a really important key to making this your life's work.

Tia Imani Hanna: Yeah, that's the hard part, I think, for a lot of folks, especially once you do have a lot of responsibilities is to remember to make that key. That you have to put that as a priority in your own development and your own progression as an artist to keep working every day. I just had an artist on the other day. And we were speaking about that. And it's, yeah, it's a challenge. It's definitely a challenge. And then there's that thing of you don't always feel like doing it, but you have to do it anyway.

Marti Lameti: Yeah. And I've said this to my students too, when they'll say, “Oh, I haven't been working lately”. And I said, wait a minute. You really are working all the time because your brain is processing the things that you see and the things that you want to do. And even if you just jot something down or you make a note. So, I'm a great user of my iPhone, in my notes section. My mother taught me when I was a little girl, cause they used to like to write stories and draw pictures, and I would have these really vivid dreams. And so, she would say, keep a notepad by the side of your bed. And I was really young. I have pictures that I found in her stash that were from when I was maybe six years old. And I would draw out these dreams that I had and write the stories to go with it. And… but that was because I kept that by the side of my bed. Sometimes in the middle of the night, when an idea pops into my head now, it's a little difficult for me to turn on the lights, wake everybody up and go jot everything down. So, I grab my phone and I talk into it and put it into notes or I type it into notes. Just and… sometimes it'll be just an inspirational thought. What if I? Right now, I'm working on the idea of using Bojagi (Korean Bojagi) and, but making it, doing it in a different way. And so how can I, stitch…

Tia Imani Hanna: Say that again, using…

Marti Lameti: Bojagi, but it's a really interesting type of stitching where you almost doing like French seaming of the pieces and it's on sheer material. It's an interesting design concept that I'm playing with. Yeah. It could become clothes at one point and so, you never know.

Tia Imani Hanna: It could turn into something else.

Marti Lameti: It could turn into a hat! Definitely. Bojagi is Korean textile. And it's really fine stitching. And so, everything is very sheer and see-through, and I’ve been doing more research on it and I've studied with teachers that do this too. So, I follow their work, and I think but how can I make this my own and use it with the work that I do and use my drawing skills? So, I've been working, I don't know if you've noticed lately, but I've been doing some work with life drawing. So, I had a life drawing class and I had some pictures and then we had the flood, which is a whole nother story. And I lost most of my drawings in that. And a lot of my lot of my work I lost, but in going through the pictures, I snapped some pictures and then I started drawing with my felt and I found myself drawn to the female figure and in some of the work that I've been doing. So, how can I add that to the textiles and interweave some of the other types of textile creation that I know how to do? And it's exciting. Every day is just like a new discovery. And I feel like a mad scientist sometimes in my studio because I'm throwing wax on things and I'm stitching over the wax. And then what would this look like if I did this? And what would it look like if I did that? And, oops, no. It's not so great. Stick it aside. But that to me is exciting and new.

Tia Imani Hanna: Now let's talk about that flood that happened a little bit because I know you're recovering from that now and you're… there's a lot of, there's a great loss there. And the artworks, the home, how are you dealing with all of that? You're just, you're excited cause you've got new ideas that came out of this.

Marti Lameti: They did. Yeah, they did. And part… and I've been using my artist therapy to get over that as well. So, I've been creating some pieces that… I’ve been going out into… right now. And this is Sanford Lake that I was on, in Midland County, and that's where my studio is. So, my studio was flooded and the bottom part of our home was flooded and all of my fibers, all of my fabrics, all of the things that I've collected all my life were floating all over. So, in cleaning that up, my son went in and he salvaged as much as he could. We put it out on the grass to dry. And then some of my artist friends from Owosso drove up and this is Covid here. So, we're all being very careful and wearing masks and at a distance. And they grabbed up the stuff from on the grass and took it back to Owosso, spread it out amongst themselves, and cleaned my wool. And so, we were able to salvage, I would say 60 to 70% of the wools, which was good. There are some things that I keep discovering are gone. But I think it's okay. So, in the therapy of it though, is in creating pictures of what the lakebed looks like now because it's growing in trees and things are just cropping up. And there were beautiful flowers that came from somewhere and we don't even know where some of them came from, but the whole lakebed is turning into something different. So, I walk out onto the lakebed, take pictures and then bring them back to the studio. So, I have a series that I'm doing based on the lovely 2020, which we're all would really like to get over really quick. But the things that happened during that time and it's it opened up a whole new series for me.

Tia Imani Hanna: So, some good did come out of the bad there.

Marti Lameti: Good always comes out eventually if you look for it.

Tia Imani Hanna: It's gonna happen. It's gonna happen. And you’re working on these new pieces now and you're also displaying in places right now. So where is your work? Cause all these places that you're displaying, the gallery, is it open during COVID, or not?

Marti Lameti: Yeah. And a lot of them actually have online galleries that you can take a look at too. I’m represented by J. Petter Gallery in Douglas, Michigan, and they have a beautiful website where you can pull up all the different artists. And so, I'm listed on there and you can pull up my work that they have available as well. And I talked to Julie quite a bit, even though I don't get to go there so often. Shiawassee Arts Council Gallery also carries my work there, and you can find my work there periodically. But I enter competitions all over the state of Michigan and during Covid I think I was in six shows at one time. So, I was spread all over. So, it was interesting because I go to deliver my work. So, I'll be driving two hours, three hours. My husband I'll get on the road and go deliver the pieces in a safe environment, drop them off, and pick them up at the end of the show. But I didn't want Covid or the flood or anything else to deter my progression.

Tia Imani Hanna: That's good because we gotta keep on keeping on. You can't stop.

Marti Lameti: No. When somebody said why do you do why do you do this? And I said, because I can't not do it. And you know what that's like. You must create music. I must create art. It's just, and even if nobody buys it, even if nobody sees it, it doesn't mean that I stop.

Tia Imani Hanna: Yeah, because we're not making it just because. It's… we're not making it because of people seeing it necessarily. I don't know.

Marti Lameti: But it’s nice. Although it’s nice. But yeah, but you're not. You're making it because you really have to make it. It's part of who you are and it's your self-expression. And I think that those of us that are artists during this time where we're not… For musicians and for actors and, everything is dark right now. Theaters are dark and people can't express themselves, but you find a way to do it. And I think that the way that we express ourselves in art, the way that we show art in the future, whether it's musically or visually, is going to be forever changed by what we're going through right now. And I think that maybe it'll be a good thing.

Tia Imani Hanna: Oh, I hope it'll be a bit of a good thing.

Marti Lameti: I hope so too. We all hope for that. [laughter] But it's tough not going to your receptions and, for you, for seeing the live audience and the reaction that you're getting from… that's… we miss that.

Tia Imani Hanna: Yeah. And a lot of the things I do are interactive. So, if there isn't any audience or if there isn't another band member, if there's nobody to interact with, then there's no music. There's the stuff I present, but that I always tell folks all the time. It's just boring. So, you gotta have the other band members.

Marti Lameti: I've listened to you. You're never boring.

Tia Imani Hanna: That's sweet, but it's just one person talking, without the other conversation. Cause I can talk all day if I'm talking with somebody and we're like sharing something, but if it's just me, literally, me going [Tia making musical noises].

Marti Lameti: Yeah. Do you talk to yourself these days? Cause I certainly do. “Marti, what are you thinking. That red doesn't belong there?”

Tia Imani Hanna: Oh, no, I do. I do podcasts.

Marti Lameti: I know. That's good. [laughter]

Tia Imani Hanna: Where do you think this came from? The same idea. And I always wanted to be able to have a salon. Once a month was my goal, but it's so much nicer to do it, like all the time now. So, I'm doing it several times a month now, talking to different artists. And we're just saying… we go down that rabbit hole and we talk about the making of the art. And that's pretty exciting to me because, when do we get a chance to do that? We're all so isolated working alone in our studios, trying to slog out our vision. And you forget that there's other people out there doing it too. And you just go, “Oh! Great!” From me to you, keep doing what you're doing. We appreciate it. We need it.

Marti Lameti: I've gotten to the point now to where you miss that artist critique that you have, either in the classroom setting or you call an artist friend and say, “Come on over. I need to talk about something.” But what some of us have been doing is actually like taking pictures of our work in progress and sending it to one another and say, “Am I done yet? Or does this read to you the way that I think it reads?” And actually, my artist community that I have has really been a huge support to me and continues to be so, when you think of it that way. And also, during this Covid time, my whole family has been with me. And so, my son and his wife and their three little ones, and I help with them when they're on their calls. And my daughter is then here with me from Chicago as well. So, we've all been sheltered together. So, my time in the studio isn't as big, but it's really productive when I get in there. And it's been such a wonderful experience to be able to share art with my granddaughters. They just turned five. So, they come into the studio and they work. They say they're working and they have their own little studio bench and they are learning how to use needles. And so, they work with the felting and they create pictures. And yeah. We finished them up and Elizabeth, one of my granddaughters, finished a piece the other day. And so, my husband and I stretched it onto a canvas so that she could put it up. And she said, “I want you to have this Gigi.” So, she put it up with all my other artwork and she said, “If you want, you can take it to a gallery.” I said, “Yay! This is wonderful!” So, I feel like I'm back teaching again, but to the little ones, and that's been a blessing.

Tia Imani Hanna: No, that's exciting to see that and to be able to pass on some of that tradition and some of that excitement to the grandkids. That's great. It's wonderful. So that's what we need. That's you creating the next generation of artists and audience, so fantastic! Wonderful work! Now, talk about those hats.

Marti Lameti: [laughter] I know you have one.

Tia Imani Hanna: I have several.

Marti Lameti: Yes.

Tia Imani Hanna: Several. I'm waiting for the summer cause I think the ones I have are mostly the summer hats and some straw hats and stuff, but some of those are like monumental and amazing hats. Was it a few years ago when everyone was talking about the Fascinators at the British hats were made, but these are beyond… I think these are beyond that. So, anybody listening, you make great hats.

Marti Lameti: It's a passion. It's a passion.

Tia Imani Hanna: Yeah. It's some of the designs…These are very sculptural. Now, that's the other piece, is that you're doing the 3d stuff or 2d, 3d with your fabrics, but with the hats, it’s 3d.

Marti Lameti: They’re sculptural.

Tia Imani Hanna: They're definitely sculptural. I'm like, how did you come to that? Like working with the straw, especially? How did you come to learning that skill?

Marti Lameti: The technique that I use when I'm making those hats, I use hemp braid and then I hand stitch them with the needle and the thread. It's the way that they made them back in the 1920s. And so, I did a lot of research. I bought different research books on how the hats were made. And so, most of my things are made what I call “in the hand.” And then I have some antique molds that sometimes they stretch things over, but most of the time I'm really sculpting them in my hand and then use my head as a hat form. And then I have some other hat forms that I can stretch them on. But it gives me a chance to do something in three dimensional. Because I, I do work in that way. I like making baskets. I like making hats. I like making the fabric that goes into them as well. And so, some of the hemp that I buy, I will dye, and then stitch with them. But it's, yeah, I enjoy doing that too.

Tia Imani Hanna: I keep seeing you would look at something and you see these dotted lines come up in your head and you're making this architectural drawing and you're just like, “Oh, I'm gonna make this thing. It looks like a building.” But then it's a hat and you put it on somebody's head. It's like, that's, to me, that's an amazing skill to be able to see something and see it in three dimensions and then go on to make it. That to me is an amazing skill. So, I'm in awe of that. So, I want to know where can people find you online?

Marti Lameti: The best place to really find all my new work is on Facebook. Actually, I have a Martell Designs Facebook page, and I post things that I'm working on. And a lot of times I'll post pictures of works in progress and then I'll post what it looks like at the end. I will tell people where they can see them in person. If they're in a show that's coming up. That's really the best way is to follow that page. I am on Instagram as well, but I post them in both places because most of my customers actually follow me on my Facebook page. My website needs to be redone at this point, but it's Martel, hyphen designs.com. martel-designs.com and I started to redo it just before Covid and found somebody that was going to work on my site. So, post Covid, I'm looking forward to getting it up and running a little bit better, but it has a lot of my fantasy designs on there. So, there's clothing and hats on there. And tells a little bit of a story, so it's worth looking at, but understand that it’s not current work. So, to find my current work Martel-designs.com. And again, I mentioned J. Petter Gallery in Douglas, Michigan J period, Petter, P-E-T-T-E-R Gallery. And that's in Douglas, Michigan. And that is an absolutely fabulous gallery. And she has quite a few of my pieces in there right now. Clothing, as well as two dimensional pieces.

Tia Imani Hanna: So, thank you so very much for being on the show today, Marty, and I appreciate it. You talking with me and sharing your olfactory senses and your eye and your talents. And thank you so much for being on Tia Time today.

Marti Lameti: Oh, Tia. Thank you. It's always a pleasure talking with you.

Tia Imani Hanna: Thank you for joining us this week on Tia Time with Artists. Make sure to visit our website, tiaviolin.com, where you can subscribe to the show in iTunes and never miss an episode. Please leave us a rating wherever you listen to podcasts. We really appreciate your comments, and we'll mine them to bring you more amazing episodes.

I’d like to thank this inaugural season's sponsors: The folks at Jazz Alliance of Mid-Michigan or JAMM, Michigan ArtShare, a program of Michigan State University Extension is a partner in supporting the Tia Time podcast, and Shambones Music. Without their support this podcast would not be possible. Thank you so much. If you would also like to contribute to the show, you can find us on https://www.patreon.com/TiaTime1.

If you want to continue the conversation about topics discussed on the show or start new ones with like-minded people, join us at the Tia Time Lounge on Facebook.

Thank you for listening. See you next week at Tia Time!

+ Transcription

Tia Time with Artists, with guests Nat Spinz, Paige Marie, and Anna Faye of “Flames ‘n Dames”, recorded on February 20, 2021

(Note: There is some adult language in this episode.)

Tia Imani Hanna: Welcome to Tia Time with Artists, the weekly podcast where we discuss the methods, challenges, and real-life experiences of living our creative dreams. What kind of creative warrior are you? Musician? Filmmaker? Painter? Choreographer? Poet? Sculptor? Fashionista? Let’s talk about it right now. I’m your host, Tia Imani Hanna.

Tia Imani Hanna: Welcome to Tia Time with Artists and my guests this week is “Flames ‘N Dames,” who is Paige Marie, Anna Faye, and Nat Spinz. Welcome to Tia Time.

Nat Spinz: Thank you so much for having us. We’re so glad to be here.

Tia Imani Hanna: This is a show about artists and we'll have all kinds of different artists on the show. And this time we're talking to people who do hula hooping, flame throwing, flame hooping, flame flow. Am I getting, I'm getting, am I getting the thing right?… the names right? Tell me about this. Nat, let's start with you. Nat, so how long have you been doing this thing, this flame throwing flowing thing?

Nat Spinz: I have been fire dancing for, I would say, about four years now. I have been a flow artist or hoop dancing for five. So, about a year into my hoop dancing journey, I went out to a place in Detroit. It's called the Detroit Fire Collective, where essentially performers from all over Michigan, it's like one place you can get together and learn and collaborate. And at the end of the evening, they have a fire safety meeting. Every time. And they go through the safety guidelines for fire spinning. And if you are comfortable enough, and you're wearing the proper safety clothing to do it, they allow new fire spinners and well-seasoned ones to go up and try. And all night long, I knew it was coming. And I didn't know, I was waffling back and forth between whether I was going to do it or not cause I was, like, so nervous, but by the end of the night, I decided to do it. I brought my fire hoop with me that I had never lit before. And I finally did it and it was the most exhilarating experience. It's like that… it was like a mix of emotions between utter fear, please don't let me catch myself on fire and holy crap; I'm doing this. So yeah. So about four years now to answer your question.

Paige Marie: So, I've been hooping for about same amount of time for five years. I started with hula-hoop. And then also started burning within like one year of my flow art journey. But yeah, I, since I started fire spinning, it's been like something that I've always wanted to do. I'm like, Oh, why would I play with this when I can put this on fire? Or when I can put this torch in my mouth? Or, when I can spritz myself? Once it gets to that level, it becomes all you want to do because nothing can compare to it. It's awesome. And I love it.

Tia Imani Hanna: And Anna?

Anna Faye: Yeah. So, I've been dancing for most of my life. I've been hula hooping first six. That was my outlet after not being able to attend dance classes anymore. And that's actually how I met and got to know these girls and I've also been spinning fire for four years as well.

Tia Imani Hanna: So, we can take this in any order, whoever wants to answer, but they call this “flow” because you have to get to a certain level for it to flow so that you're not thinking so much fire, fire, fire, you're thinking art form at some point. And that's my take on what you mean by “flow.” But is that true? Or is that just me throwing my thoughts on it?

Nat Spinz: So, no, that is accurate. That it's true. So, I would say flow is relevant in all sorts of art forms. Like when I first thought of flow, I thought rapping. And yeah, it's just like any other type of art form. It’s like, once you practice enough to where you can lose yourself in the music, or even if it's just the sound of the fire around you, it's just moving the way that your body feels inspired to. So, you can do that with any flow prop. And when I say flow prop, I'm talking about a hula hoop is considered a flow prop or a dragon staff or a poi, things like that. And in, of course, when you do go up to the level where you're lighting the props on fire, you have to figure out how to move differently because you can't do the same things. I can't do a chest roll. You can, but it can't really make contact with you unless you want to burn yourself when it's lit on fire. So yes, essentially, it's when you get to the point where you're moving comfortably with the prop where you just ‘go with the flow’, you just go with how you feel.

Anna Faye: So, the way we talk about flow too, is it's like a meditative state. And I think that you can be in that state at any level. But you want to be advanced enough to flow with fire. Just anyone, if you're picking up a boom for the first time and if you really start to get into it and you get into that meditative state. that's what we call the ‘flow state’.

Paige Marie: Burning also takes a level of confidence because I've seen a couple of times people pick up a prop, light it on fire, and they don't quite have that like self-reassurance and they're nervous and they don't know what to do. And that's when I think people can get hurt is when they’re not fully comfortable with what they're working with. So, I think practicing before you light something on fire is very important. Cause I know that, like, fire is exciting and people want to do it, but it's also, you have to know yourself and be comfortable with what you're doing before.

Nat Spinz: Like when you first start, like, when I first started, I wasn't comfortable moving was fire either. And so, when you decide that you're ready for that next step after you've been doing in a while, just take it slow. Like you don't have to do crazy tricks and stuff like that at first.

Tia Imani Hanna: That's the other part is how do you even get to that point? Because I'm going the use a reference for me, a reference for me would be that people used to tell me when I was younger, “You don't smoke. So, don't talk to smokers about smoking, like about not smoking, unless you've tried it.” And I'm like, yeah, but I don't run into buildings, inhale the smoke and say, I'm not a smoker either. So how do, you know, how do you get to the point where you say, “Hey, I want to light this on fire and play with it.” How, what is the thing I'm sure it's individual, but what is the thing that clicked that says, Ooh, this would be so much better with fire?

Nat Spinz: So, I tell you what it was for me, and this is why I pointed at Anna, because she's all about the community, like, the flow community. It's just like any community there's always a couple of cliques here and there, but for the most part, I would say that most flow artists and the community in general is very warm and that, no pun intended there, and welcoming of newbies. And you can get to this level. Don't push yourself to get here, to spinning fire first. You, you know what you're capable of and, and yeah, I think for me, that's the biggest thing, is the reason why I took that next step to spinning fire is because I was surrounded by so many people who had already done it and I felt safe, despite the fact that I was inside of a hula-hoop with five fireworks around me, I felt safe. Yeah. What about you guys?

Paige Marie: The community is a big part. Lot of seeing all these other people with their fire props and they finished and you're like, Oh, okay. But they're alive. That we're having a good time. This is awesome. And like another thing too, is that I've gotten to the point where I'm not afraid of getting burned because it happens every now and again, like little burns here and there. I've gotten to the point where I don't hardly even notice it, but it's also not the end of the world either. Haven’t ever gotten hurt so bad that we had to go to the hospital or anything? Because I looked at that, but we're doing pretty well. We're pretty talented. Yeah, we got a really good fire safety system. There's always at least one person that has the towel ready to put it on a fire, put it out, and ‘knock on wood’, we haven't caught ourselves on fire yet. We hope to continue that.

Tia Imani Hanna: Do you all have fire extinguishers and, like, that gel and stuff that you put on or anything like that too. Isn't there like some fire-retardant gel that stunt people use or something?

Anna Faye: There is, but we don't have any experience working in other with that yet. But we are interested, so we can keep ourselves safer in the future.

Nat Spinz: The equipment, so essentially our Flames ‘N Dames, we are the core three of the group, but we collaborate with other female fire dancers as well, if there's ever a need for more performers. So, there's always at least us three. So, when one person is performing, we have another person there with a wet towel or wool blanket, so if there is something to happen, we'll… so let's say that we're spinning fire and someone's leg or their arm get catches on fire. We'll say, let's see, “Paige. Arm.” Or something like that, and she will freeze.

Paige Marie: And then I'll wipe it out.

Nat Spinz: Or the person with the towel will come over and put out the fire. We have not had any incidences like that because we wear fire-safe clothing where… nothing is a hundred percent fire safe, but like natural fibers, things like that, better to spin in. And then, also we do… we try our best to, what do you call it, to get the fuel off of our props before we light them.

Anna: Spin off.

Nat Spinz: There, that's what it's called.

Tia Imani Hanna: Who did you all learn from?

Paige Marie: Oh boy. I started learning hoop dance things from Anna and from a mutual friend, Missy. She would do these weekly get together s at the park. And that's where I just got comfortable with props in general and got to meet other people and learn about poi and staffs. And I don't know, that's how I got introduced to the community. But where I learned how to spin fire, I'd say more from like the Detroit Fire Collective and the people that go there. I miss going there. I don't like this corona nonsense. But yeah, Maggie and Deanna.

Anna Faye: They are hearts.

Paige Marie: They are fire-spinning goddesses and I love them.

Anna Faye: Yeah.

Paige Marie: It's really the community itself that drew us in because that was my first exposure to the community as well at Patriarch Park, we would go outside and that's just where we started and that's how we all found each other, actually. So, we were all at the park. I remember Nat came up to me and she was like, yeah, Are you Patri one, two, three on Instagram?

Anna Faye: And I'm like, Oh my God, you're on the Michigan Hooper's tag? It was the weirdest thing. And then like… [group laughter]

Tia Imani Hanna: Aww, that's awesome. Yeah. So, there's a lot of fun involved in the whole thing. So yeah. I know you guys are super serious about the safety and all of that sort of thing, but I just wanted to make sure everybody knew that it wasn't, it's not just fun. You have to be serious about what you're doing and pay attention and practice.

Nat Spinz: At least once a week, every week, unless we have a terrible snowstorm, like we've been having out here at Michigan. It’s been cold, but we still make it to our weekly practices because we want to stay sharp. And even though we're not doing a lot of gigs right now because of the time of year, we want to stay sharp, we want to… and that's the best way to stay safe, to continue practicing, keep our bodies conditioned for it, and run through our rotation and things like that.

Anna Faye: It's so good for us to meet weekly too, because there's been a lot of isolation this last year, and it's just been so much fun to just play, you know, with my girls once a week. It's had a significant effect on my mental health. Oh my God.

Paige Marie: Yeah. It's nice to have a tribe.

Nat Spinz: We have great chemistry. It's a great dynamic. Yeah, we're lucky.

Tia Imani Hanna: It's one of those things too, that I was thinking about, you've got the hula hoops you've got… now what's a, is it ‘poi’ you said, ‘poi’?

Nat Spinz: Yeah. So, poi are balls attached to string that people swing around and do fun things with. I guess that's the only way I can explain it.

Tia Imani Hanna: So, you have poi, you've got hula hoops. You've got, what, you've got chains with different things on them?

Paige Marie: This dragon staff behind me. So, it's like a staff with spokes on the end. Yeah, since it has the spokes on it, it spins slower. So, it gives you more time to like work around. I don't know what I'm talking about. I don't spin it, these two do. I'll get there eventually okay.

Anna Faye: It's fun. She's got one now.

Tia Imani Hanna: I've seen the, again, they must be poi and they have a double poi?

Anna Faye: Yeah.

Tia Imani Hanna: Okay. Yeah. You weave them together. Yeah. Okay. Wow! That's terrifying!

Anna Faye: This whole thing gets lit on fire.

Tia Imani Hanna: Unbelievable. That's… yeah. What talent and what skill? And fearlessness. Nobody can say you're not a bad ass. That's cool.

Paige Marie: Yeah. With these two around as well, because when you're up performing and you're spinning fire, you, especially as a professional, you really want to focus on your performance and how you're engaging the audience. And it's hard to do that when you're like, “Oh my God, don't burn yourself.” But when you're like with other, okay… First of all, that's where the weekly practices come in, is that way we can focus on our performances and our audience engagement, things like that. But then also it feels good to be with people that are looking out for your safety and if an emergency were to arise, which we haven't had any yet, knock on wood, then we're in good hands. So. that's the biggest thing about it. Yeah.

Nat Spinz: I think another big component is that we are each other's biggest cheerleaders.

Paige Marie: Say we have a performance, that we have a gig, if we're safety, like if I'm safety-ing it or if I'm, like, fueling up my prop, I am also screaming and cheering on whoever is burning.

Anna Faye: Yeah. It does help.

Tia Imani Hanna: I was glad to see the unity of that. So, do you all have… so the group in Detroit that you are mentioning, now, do you have a group in Lansing that you have new members come to, to do trainings and things like that?

Nat Spinz: So, that is actually in the works. We have, we have a lot of big things coming up on that we're working on this year. One of the things that we would like to do is create a Lansing community, like, fire dancing community. And so, where no, it has not been established yet. It is in the works.

Tia Imani Hanna: How do you go about doing that?

Nat Spinz: So, I think the first order of business is finding a place that we can do it within the guidelines of the city. And having one central location that will allow us to practice and teach and network and do all of that stuff. And so that's the first order of business there.

Tia Imani Hanna: And then with those folks, when they do come, do you start them with this hula hooping and spinning poi that aren't lit and things like that, or?

Nat Spinz: So, what it would be and there, since COVID a lot of this has stopped, but what we call it is, we call them Flow Jams. So, it's basically like a hula hooping party or a flow party. Like people come with their flow props or people come that don't have any flow props and we share with them and all of that. And essentially, people that are a little bit more well-seasoned and are ready to move on to the next step of fire, we would do something similar to like the Detroit Fire Collective. And we would have a fire safety meeting that as well-detailed, and you need to be wearing this kind of clothing, this is the kind of fuel that we use. We use this bucket system because of this and go over the safety guidelines at each one of these. And at the end of the night, people can take turns spinning fire, and they would be surrounded by well-seasoned people that are watching their back, if something were to happen. It's mostly a place… the Flow Jam is the biggest part, so people can dip their toe in. But then at the end of the night, people that are confident enough can try spinning fire as well. Did you want to add to that?

Paige Marie: So, what's really interesting about the Detroit Fire Collective is they operate out of Tangent Gallery, which is already an established business. I don't think they're making any money at all off of this. They have a $5, you know, donation cover fee and we would want to do something similar. So, I think what we're looking for is like a partnership maybe with a studio or art gallery who would be comfortable with us, like spinning in their parking lot. So, we're in search of that kind of hospitality.

Tia Imani Hanna: Yeah. Because it would have to either be a stadium sized thing or something outside, because of that fire and everything, so…

Nat Spinz: Either that, or some kind of industrial building, cause the Tangent Gallery they do fire spinning indoors, but there's also a place indoors and it's like all cemented in there, so it’s actually an okay place to spin fire in the wintertime, which is like, what? So yeah, that would be even better if we could find something similar to that.

Tia Imani Hanna: Okay. So, would there be any other group that you could partner with as far as… that does like… a bunch of welders or something.

Nat Spinz: So, I'm open, I'm opening myself up to the universe.

Anna Faye: If something like that comes up, we will be right there to collaborate.

Tia Imani Hanna: I'm just trying to think of who is already doing stuff in cemented situations that are fire safe because glassblowers, welders, people who work with metal in general. That kind of stuff. They're throwing metal and fire around. So, I just…

Nat Spinz: I know somebody who does that. I might reach out this week. Yeah. Thank you.

[laughter]

Tia Imani Hanna: This is something I'm known for is, I'm not a producer in the sense of if you watch any documentaries about bands are special bands, they have these wild, amazing producers that come up with these great ideas. And I just do that with everybody. I don't necessarily do it in the studio, but I do it like, oh, cause I don't have any skin in the game. So, I'm like, try this, and then it'll be like, Oh, So, I give those for free. So, on a more personal note now, I want you guys to dig as deep as you feel comfortable, but tell me, like, as far as the self-esteem building part of this, what is it… what was it that you were looking for when you started doing this? And did you find it when you… now that you're doing the fire dancing?

Nat Spinz: I know that we all have our own story, so if you guys want to go. Okay. So, for me, for a long time in my life, I struggled with depression and anxiety and my depression in, it was in 2015, had just gotten to an all-time low and, I have kids and stuff and they need their mom. And I was having a hard time just peeling myself off the couch. It was like, I just couldn't, I was just in this cloud and I just could not get out of this heaviness, the sadness. There was no reason for it that I can understand at that time. And so, I'm really big into New Year's resolutions. And I decided going into 2016 that I was going to make some changes in my life. I was going to cut back on social media because that can hit your self-esteem really hard too and stopped drinking so much pop because the caffeine was probably part of the reason why I was anxious. And then I was going to find my thing. I didn't know what it was, but I needed something to bring color back into my life. And I try wire working, like jewelry, making things like that. I tried yoga. I tried all sorts of things. I'm really like a Jack of all trades, master of none. And then halfway into 2016, it was in June of 2016. I was scrolling on Facebook and, you see how long that lasted, staying off the social media. And I was scrolling through Facebook and I see one of my friends that I used to go to school with, who had this big hula hoop and she was like dancing to music and she did this little crazy duck out thing. The hula-hoop went around her shoulder and then she ducked back into the hula-hoop and kept going. And I was like, I want to learn how to do that. That same day I Googled how to make your own like dance hula loops and stuff because online they are so expensive. I went to the hardware store. I got all the accoutrements for making your own hula-hoop at home. And I started. And it was on June 26th of 2016 that I started my hoop dancing journey and slowly, I started to see color come back into my life. I was starting to lose weight and I was building up my confidence. And the thing about hula hooping is it was like, like it was the place for me to release emotional energy. It was also a place where I could challenge myself and learn something new. There were times I biffed myself in the face with the hoop and I'd had to drill the same trick over and over, but it was like, a challenge for myself. And when I accomplished it, it was like, it was huge. Nobody else in my household understood. They were just, here's a 30-year-old woman playing with hula hoops! I feel like most of my family still looks at me like that. But I just, I can tell you right now that I didn't imagine that hoop dancing would bring me to where I am today. But I am so thankful that I made the decision and the promise to myself, to begin that self-love journey and that healing, however I had to do it. And yeah, that's how it happened for me. I'm grateful for that.

Paige Marie: Would you mind restating the question?

Tia Imani Hanna: Basically, just what was it on a personal level, that brought you to hula hooping and then what escalated it up to, I really need to do the fire dancing next? And what made you want to even do the hoop hooping in the first place? Because I look at hula hooping and I said, I can’t, never could do it as a kid. And now I'm so out of shape, I can't even move for less than 30 seconds and I'm like, I'm on the floor gasping for breath.

Paige Marie: So, what started me hooping was this lady, this Anna over there. We went to school together, but we were never really like friends in high school. Not that we weren't like friendly, we just didn't hang out or get together or anything. And I think it was out of the blue that she was just like, “Hey, do you want to come over to my house and play with hula hoops?” And I, same as you, like, I couldn't hula-hoop. Like I couldn't keep it on my waist. That took me so long to get, honestly, like my on-body hooping skills, still not the greatest, but I can whip it around and do everything else. So, I got that going for me. But so, it started there and honestly it became an obsession. Because at that time in my life, like I was living on my own for the first time. I didn't have a car. I was struggling. So, I had to bike to work. So, I was really fit because I was biking to work, biking everywhere, and hooping, because I was obsessed with it because that's all I wanted to do. So, I think I got good at it pretty quickly cause it's all I wanted to do. And then, as I've progressed and as I've continued doing it, I started off probably in some of the best shape I've ever been in, in my life, because I had no car, so I had to bike everywhere. But now, like getting a more personal note, now, like later in life, like five years later, I've gained quite a bit of weight. So, the confidence thing has been a struggle, cause I'm always been the big girl. My whole life I've been big-boned, heavy set, big shoulders. And I cheered, so I was the biggest girl on my cheer team and that was always hard for me. And now being in a group of women again and being the biggest has been a bit of a struggle, but I like finding my own confidence and joy in what I do. And I have support of these two. Cause the second I said, they're like, no, and argue with me about it and I don't know, it's so… there's definitely still that like internal struggle and I'm losing weight up and dieting, yada, all that stuff that you continue to do into forever. It's, I don't know, I really enjoy what I'm doing and I never thought that it would come to the point where I would be doing something I loved and something creative and getting paid for it. It's insane to me. I never would have considered it, especially I dunno, like I said, with the low self-confidence that I have from time to time and I don't know. I think a different side of me comes out when I perform, because I love being in front of people. I love sharing the things I love.

Anna Faye: Cause you're a fucking queen.

Paige Marie: I love feeling myself. And I love getting out there. And I love freaking people out by putting fire in my mouth and it just, I dunno, I've become, not become, I've I found a new obsession. Because I started off just obsessed with like plastic circles. And now I'm obsessed with that, like, that adrenaline rush when you light the wicks. You step out onto a stage, it's just, it's good. I think it's really good for me and my mental health to, to feel one, a part of this group and to share who I love with others. Thanks.

Anna Faye: You're good.

Nat Spinz: That was good.

Paige Marie: Thanks.

Anna Faye: It’s emotional because it is such a big outlet for us. And that's how I got started too is, like I said earlier, is dance was just my foundation. If I was really feeling something, I didn't have to go to therapy, I could go to dance class and express it and push it all out. But when I stopped, there was like a whole year that I was stagnant and it was the worst year of my life. I gained a bunch of weight. I had terrible self-image. I thought, I'll never be able to dance again. And then I took a master class. This is an older group, so I don't know if they're around anymore, but it was a woman from a G L and M performance agency, The Glam Dolls. And she did a little LED hula-hoop performance for us. And it was the first time I ever seen an LED prop. And I just remember every hair on my body was standing on end and I just felt something so special, and just being able to observe that. And that day I bought a hula hoop from her and I took it home. And shortly after I invited Paige over. And most of my life, I've been an adrenaline junkie. I love performing. I longboard. I bought a motorcycle last year. Like, I just have a need for something. And when you're spinning with fire, there's a whole new respect between you and the fire itself. You really do have to treat it like a good lady, to be a little bit afraid of her.

Nat Spinz: Excellent analogy. I’m quoting you the next time we post.

Tia Imani Hanna: So, when you guys have rehearsals, d0 you get together and sing a song to the Goddess first and then… [laughing chatter]… yeah.

Nat Spinz: I love spinning fire under the full moon. I feel so drawn to the moon. Like, it holds so much symbolism in my lifetime. And so, that's a big thing. Whenever there's a full moon, like, I always get super excited. I have to mention at least several times, “It's going to be a full moon! It's gonna be a blue moon!”

Paige Marie: Hard -core witch vibes

Tia Imani Hanna: That's wonderful. It's good to see the comradery in the group. It's good to see the support of each other because in so many circumstances, women, we eat our own. We just do. I don't know why we do that, but we do. So, it's nice to see the support.

Anna Faye: That's something I wanted to touch on too, because I think that all three of us have been affected by it in some way. But I find, throughout the six years I've been doing this, I'll have really high highs and somewhat low lows. And most of the time, those low lows come from stewing on social media for too long. You watch all these people who've been doing it for three times as long as you have and you're like, “Oh, I'll just never be that good. And I'll never get that. I'll never look like that when I spin.” And that's not true, but that's still, even today, if I spend too much time scrolling. I get down on myself and I won't spin, but the second I forget about all that and I pick up a hula hoop and I dance around, I'm 110%, no matter where I started. I think it's important not to feed into that too much and quit the scrolling.

Nat Spinz: I think it's a societal thing for women to be against each other. And I feel like, in my younger years when I was a little more insecure, I was more like that a bit, like more in competition with other women. And I think that's what you were talking about. And so, it's actually an intentional, it's actually something that's intentional, that's to fight against those feelings that we’re supposed to be in competition with each other. And we literally put the crown on each other's head and adjust it, “No you're a queen. You can do this.” And cheer each other on. I also have two daughters and that's something that I talk about with them too. And they're awesome kids. They like flow arts a lot too. And so, I want my girls to grow up in a world where women aren't, like, less than. We're not less than men. We're not less than each other. Like, we can cheer each other on and support each other. I don't want them to feel, like, any kind of negativity toward other women because that just, it hurts you when you do that. I don't know. It's something that's really important to me on a personal level. It's important to us. I know that we've had to have some intentional conversations sometimes.

Anna Faye: Paige and I both have really strong personalities. And sometimes when, when we are collaborating, we might have a different idea of how things should go, but we both do a really great job of communicating. Like, we're having to step back and have a side chat with each other about things. And then there's times where one of us has to, okay, you get to have… you have this project and surrender control in that area. And I think it's important to be, in order for any relationship to work, you have to be honest and raw and you have to communicate. And there's going to be times where you get frustrated with each other. But if you want any kind of relationship to work, whether it's domestic partnerships or in a business relationship or friends, which we're all, both friends and in a business partnership you have to be able to communicate and not think of each other as competition. I guess I feel like competition isn't even the best word for it, but you know what I'm saying ultimately.

Paige Marie: I definitely struggled with that for a long time. Cause I, and I still do this, I'm still guilty of it. Comparing myself to other people and to these two, like I said, the self-confidence, big ol’ legs, big ol’ tum situation. But I remember, I think this was right before we started Flames ‘N Dames, I had Nat come over, and she was like, “Be straight up, what did you think of me, like, when we first met?” I'm like…

Anna Faye: This was over drinks, by the way.

Paige Marie: This is when she came over and we were doing that doubles practice.

Nat Spinz: Oh really? Oh ok.

Paige Marie: So, she I was like, if I'm being like, for real, I felt threatened by you because we both started at the same time and she just got so good. It blew my mind and I'm like, “What in the fuck?” Can I swear? I don't get it, like she just, I don't know, she blew my mind. And then in my own head I'm like, Oh, I gotta be better than her. I gotta work hard or whatever. And it was just ridiculous. And it was needless because it doesn't have to be like that. And I told her that, and I'm like, I'm just being straight out. That's how I felt from the get-go. And I'm so glad I got to know you because you're not, it's not warranted. And the fact that I took issue with her for no reason was ridiculous. And I'm glad that I have the voice I do now to just tell her that, hey, just being straight up. There was a point where I had this weird image in my head of you. And that just totally isn't the case. And I'm glad that we've gotten better in our communication. not butting heads.

Nat Spinz: Yeah. So many women could benefit from just having real conversations because our friendship has developed so much more since we were able to do that.

Tia Imani Hanna: There's a level of trust there. And I think that most folks, you guys have created a tribe. Most folks are coming at you from their own tribes and everybody outside of that tribe is outside of that tribe period. There's already a level of distrust there, with good reason, because that's just how we are. So, to allow somebody else to become part of your new, you're expanding your bubble outside to pull that one person in. But when you take that one person you're taking in their whole group and you don't realize that. So, that's how you end up getting hurt because you're like, I'm taking you in, but no, you're actually taking everybody in their group into your group. And that's where we're going, “Whoa. Wait.” You know, and it's a very real thing. It's just that we don't know that because we have to live long enough to know that. It's like when you have that first relationship and you say, oh wait, I haven't met your mother yet. Wait a minute. Or your sister, or your triplets, the twin brothers or whatever, that are always at the house, that kind of thing. You just don't know that. So, there's a law. And once it happens to you once, then after that, “Whoa. Stay away. Stay away.” So, we have to give ourselves a little bit of a break because that is for real, that's a very real thing. But to have the communication that you guys have. You can't trust somebody with fire if you can’t trust them.

Nat Spinz: I think society wants to pit women against each other so hard because if we all uplifted each other and supported each other, we would become too powerful.

Tia Imani Hanna: The other part about that is, we are powerful. We don't have to become anything.

Nat Spinz: Oh yeah. I agree.

Tia Imani Hanna: It's already there. And with all of this stuff going on, this time in history is, there's, if you want to go into the celestial stuff, the shift has happened. Female energy has come up. And that's why we have the whole Trump versus the World situation happening right now. That’s the pushback of that energy coming in. It’s the old energy is trying to push back and saying, “No, you cannot have control of this.” It's going to be okay to say this about women and do this to women. So that's what's happening. So, we're just in that shifting phase right now. He's out. He's moved through his time. Those who are in that range are moving through their time and it's happening. So, there's not anything anyone can really do to stop that. It's just going to be what it's going to be. So, if we stand in our own energy and make art, make flow, we're going to be fine.

Anna Faye: Yeah, if we just stop fronting too, if we just stopped putting on the face and just be real with each other, “Let our tummies out,” as Lauren Hill says.

Tia Imani Hanna: Yeah. Yeah, that would be nice. Wouldn't it? There's an old episode of “Living Single” that used to be on in the late nineties. And it was Queen Latifa and Kim Fields and a couple of other actresses that I can't remember all the names right now. But there's a scene, and she's… because they were talking about men or something and they were like, they were trying to date them and they were like, so sick of them, but they wanted to date them, but we're so sick of them. And she's, “If it wasn't for men, there'd be a lot of fat happy women.” Yeah. [laughter] So, on that note, Flames ‘n Dames, if you're going to give it a creed to say to the world, what would you say to the world, to the women coming up, to the young women coming up, to women in general? What would you say?

Nat Spinz: My message to the women coming up and stepping into themselves in the world is “Don't let anybody tell you you can't. Don't let anybody tell you what your truth is or what you're supposed to be.” I’m a professional hula hooper. This is what I do. This is my main income. Five years ago, if you would've told me that, I would've said, “No, I don't believe that.” But this is the same thing I tell my daughters is, “It's okay to be a handful.” Step into your truth, whatever that is. It may be a goal that's super far away, but just keep taking baby steps to whatever you want to be. Look at Kamala. Look at that queen. So, nothing is impossible. Just go for it.

Anna Faye: That was really well said.

Nat Spinz: Thank you.

Anna Faye: Because I've been told I can't, several times, you're not going to be able to bond that hill on your longboard. You're a girl, you're not going to be able to do this. You're not going to be able to do that. And every single time someone's told me I can't, I've given it a year and then I've gone and done it. And every single time, that triumph has been worth it even, even though it hurt at once, you know that's what made me who I am, sure.

Tia Imani Hanna: So, did you want to add anything to that Paige?

Paige Marie: I think if I were to add something, it would be not worry about sacrificing your own needs to make everyone else comfortable. Because it's not about appeasing everyone. I've spent a lot of time trying to please other people and make other people happy. And I've found through therapy that like, I need to start putting myself first. And it's something that I would like to share with others is you are number one. You have ‘you’ for the rest of your life. So, if you don't make yourself happy, that's on you. Take ownership of your life and how you live it and just be happy with who you are and what you do and don't take no shit.

Tia Imani Hanna: So where can we find you ladies online?

Nat Spinz: You can find us at flamesndames.com. So, it's not ‘and’, there's an N in the middle. Yep. And we're also on Facebook and Instagram as Flames N Dames.

Tia Imani Hanna: And there's video too up there or?

Nat Spinz: Oh yeah. All kinds of stuff around.

Paige Marie: We're on Tik Tok and Instagram. Flames ‘n Dames everywhere, I think.

Nat Spinz: Yeah. If you Google Flames ‘n Dames, we're the first that comes up now.

Paige Marie: I remember when we were trying to come up with our name and we…

Anna Faye: She came up with the name.

Nat Spinz: But like we were Googling it to make sure no one else had it. And we're like, we found some ladies that do barbecue!

Paige Marie: I clicked right on that button site. [laughter]

Tia Imani Hanna: Thank you so much ladies for being on the show today. So, I want to say thank you to Nat Spinz and Paige Marie and Anna Faye, Flames ‘n Dames. Thank you so much for being on Tia Time.

Nat Spinz: It's been a pleasure. Thanks so much. Bye.

Tia Imani Hanna: Thank you for joining us this week on Tia Time with Artists. Make sure to visit our website, tiaviolin.com, where you can subscribe to the show in iTunes and never miss an episode. Please leave us a rating wherever you listen to podcasts. We really appreciate your comments, and we'll mine them to bring you more amazing episodes.

I’d like to thank this inaugural season's sponsors: The folks at Jazz Alliance of Mid-Michigan or JAMM, Michigan ArtShare, a program of Michigan State University Extension is a partner in supporting the Tia Time podcast, and Shambones Music. Without their support this podcast would not be possible. Thank you so much. If you would also like to contribute to the show, you can find us on https://www.patreon.com/TiaTime1.

If you want to continue the conversation about topics discussed on the show or start new ones with like-minded people, join us at the Tia Time Lounge on Facebook.

Thank you for listening. See you next week at Tia Time!

+ Transcription

Tia Time with Artists, with guest Leslie DeShazor, recorded on 1/30/2021

Tia Imani Hanna: Welcome to Tia Time with Artists, the weekly podcast where we discuss the methods, challenges, and real-life experiences of living our creative dreams. What kind of creative warrior are you? Musician? Filmmaker? Painter? Choreographer? Poet? Sculptor? Fashionista? Let’s talk about it right now. I’m your host, Tia Imani Hanna.

Tia Imani Hanna: Welcome to Tia time with Artists and my guest this week is multifaceted violist, dancer, arranger, composer, educator, Leslie DeShazor. Thank you for being with me today on the show.

Leslie DeShazor: Thank you for having me.

Tia Imani Hanna: We've worked together. I think I've substituted for you more times than not. We've only got a chance to work together a couple of times recently, which has been really fun because in Musique Noire, which you're one of the originating members of that group. And, usually, I get called in when Leslie is not there. So, to work on her group, which is fantastic. So, I'm glad that I've had that opportunity. And then we recently had the chance to work together with Sister Strings: Roots, Voice and Drums at the Detroit Jazz Festival last year in 2020. Anyhow, that's how we know each other. But I've always been hearing stories from all the different members of the group, how amazing a player cause I've seen you play and I know you’re playing and just how you've created all these different things from classical style to Jazz style, incorporating African dance and African rhythms and all of these different things. Tell me, how did viola come into your life? Did that come into your life first? Cause you play a little violin as well, right?

Leslie DeShazor: Yeah. Viola happened by mistake because I walked into the orchestra that I signed up for in sixth grade with the intention to play violin. And that even was like random, cause I don't ever remember actually wanting to play violin, but then when we got like our form that says what you could pick for your elective, there was like band, choir, orchestra, some other things. And I remember just being like excited when I saw orchestra. And so, I walked into the classroom and told the teacher I wanted to play violin. And she was like we don't have any violins left, but if you want to take an instrument home today, you can play viola. And then, basically, she was like, if you play viola, you'll get more opportunities because there usually aren't enough violists and, giving me all these like, reasons why viola would be a better option. So, I was like, okay, that sounds good to me. I want to take an instrument home today. So, I chose viola that day and the rest was like naturally, just naturally unfolded because it was something that I gravitated towards right away. And then knew from the, like that moment when I first played it, that I wanted to play for the rest of my life and be a musician. Yeah.

Tia Imani Hanna: That's impressive. Was there other music in the house growing up or musicians in your family?

Leslie DeShazor: Yes. My mother sang. My mother was like, the church singer, she sang not even as church, but she's sang for all the like kind of local stuff, local talent shows, she's sang for a lot of weddings and funerals, and she sang in church. She wasn't really like an instrumentalist in that she could play. She played piano like a tiny bit. So, we had a piano in the house when I was younger. But my mother mostly sang, and mostly in church, so yeah, but there were no other musicians. My siblings did take up band, but none of them like really stuck with it. They did the one-year thing and then they were over it. So yeah.

Tia Imani Hanna: How many siblings are there?

Leslie DeShazor: So, we have a Brady Bunch situation. There's eight of us. But we're a blended family. So, I have two siblings who are by blood, even though I don't even like to think in those terms. We have a very close family and, yeah, there's eight of us. So, there's always a lot, a lot going on in our house, a lot of noise. I learned to really value quiet time cause it was always loud in our house. But my parents were like really cool about letting us choose what we wanted to do. So, I never got any pushback when it was time for me to go to college and I wanted to major in music. Some of my peers did. Yeah.

Tia Imani Hanna: That's good. That's rare. That's really rare.

Leslie DeShazor: So, I didn’t even know it was a thing like, I don't even know people didn't want their kids to be musicians. just Until I got in college and I had friends who were like double majoring because their families didn't want them to just have a music degree. I get, cause my, I think my parents were just thrilled that I was doing something I love and I got accepted into a good school and I got a scholarship. I think they were just like, happy about that. They didn't doubt my decision, which I'm grateful for.

Tia Imani Hanna: Where'd you end up going to school?

Leslie DeShazor: I went to University of Michigan.

Tia Imani Hanna: Okay. Okay.

Leslie DeShazor: Yeah. Yeah. So that was like, that was another one of those things that, life gave to me on a plate in a way, cause I had went to the summer institution thing and Professor Elliott was there. He was directing it and he heard me play. This was like, I think I was probably 15 or 16 at that point. And he loved my playing. He was really impressed. So, he went back and told the professor who was doing viola then, and I took some lessons with the professor when I turned 16, just took a few. So, by the time I applied for schools, I really didn't apply for many cause I knew I was going to go to U of M because I had been in contact and talked with them. Several of the faculty had heard me play at that point. And so, I did my audition and it went well. And then I got offered a tuition scholarship. Yeah. Was fortunate to be in the company of a lot of people who believed in me when I was younger and made opportunities easier for me to, to attain. Yeah.

Tia Imani Hanna: So are you like pretty self-directed. In the sense of, cause I would never even thought to contact these teachers. Or were your parents in there saying, “Call them”. Cause you know when you're a teenager?

Leslie DeShazor: No, my parents weren't. It was really funny Tia, when I look back at some of the stuff I did as a child, as a teenager, cause I have kids of my own and like my audition, I drove myself to my audition at U of M. I don't even think my parents like really knew what it meant. I was like, I got this audition. Okay. Here are the keys. Like I drove myself. Just like walked in the school, looked for the classroom they said that the audition was going to happen in, and then I just did the audition. It's funny. Cause I had a little fender bender, like right before it happened. A little frazzled, but a lot of the things that I did, I was a really self-directed kid in general. When I saw something I wanted to do, I would be like, I'm doing that. And then would just hand my parents, like the permission slip and be like sign, and so they would sign. There was, with such a big family, I think they didn't have the time to just be like micromanaging every little thing we did. Like when I look back on that kind of stuff, now that I'm a parent, I see what it takes to parent and some kids are really independent. You don't need to be there to direct them as much. Some are… they need a lot more direction. I think I was one of the kids who didn't need as much direction. So yeah, a lot of those things that I did were follow-ups that I did on my own. Information that I shared with people I've met, here's my phone number, I’d love to take a lesson or whatever, and yeah. My private teacher at the time also helped connect me with people too. Cause she was… she had finished her PhD at U of M. So, she was hooked into that community. And she was good about telling me who I should talk to and putting me in touch with certain people too. She was really key too. Her and my orchestra teacher really helped me.

Tia Imani Hanna: Who was that teacher?

Leslie DeShazor: Her name was Melissa Gerber at the time. I think her last name is Nect now. Then I had Michael Andrus. He was my orchestra teacher, and we had a really funny relationship. It's amazing that he even liked me cause I was so obnoxious. I was like that kid in orchestra who was like so bored that I would just do really obnoxious things. And I remember one time he just be like, “Damn it, Leslie,” because I was always doing something like one time, I like learned the violin, the first violin part, all of it, a half step higher than it was. And so, like the whole time they were playing the melody, I was playing the melody like a whole half, like a half step higher than them. So, it sounded like…

Tia Imani Hanna: That’s terrible.

Leslie DeShazor: So, I started playing the flute melody. So, I ended up playing cello and bass when I was in orchestra cause that was just one way for me to not be bored. Because the viola parts in those high school and middle school arrangements, they're terrible. Like you're literally playing… it's like the arrangement was like, oh yeah, the viola that's right, and then just threw down a few whole notes and sent it to press or whatever. But so, the parts would be so boring and I would be sitting there like bored to death in orchestra. I think he got it, but I definitely… I did apologize to him later cause we ended up doing some, like, work together, like gigging together. I played cello for two years because I was so bored with viola. And that was funny because my sister was playing cello at the time too. And she was sitting second chair. There were like six of us and I challenged her and beat her. Because I'm so competitive I didn't even think anything of it. And then she started crying and everybody in the orchestra was saying how mean I am. I wanted that seat though.

Tia Imani Hanna: That's terrible. It's for those listening who don't understand how challenges work in orchestra. For the people who lead each section, or the section leaders, and the first and second chair are the most important chairs in the section, or at least the… yeah, they're the leaders of the section. So, you have to have auditions for those chairs. And so, when you challenge for the chair, then you have to do like a… it's like a face-off. One person plays the part and the other person plays the part. And then you get judged on who plays it better and whoever plays it better wins the chair. So that's what that challenge is. Anyhow.

Leslie DeShazor: Yeah. The funny thing is I was so, like, driven. I was like, I told my sister like “That's what you get for not practicing.” But then I look back and I'm like, man. You knew I was going to challenge. You knew I was coming for that first chair like, and you’re in the way. You're sitting second. Yeah. And then I played bass for a year, also in middle school, I did a year of bass just to keep myself from being bored to pieces. But I loved orchestra, believe it or not. I did love it. And I also played in the Detroit Symphony Orchestra Civic Youth Ensemble, which was really great. That was my window into the world of more competitive, more serious players. My defining, maybe not defining, but my kind of breakthrough moment of knowing, okay, now I got to work harder was when I went to Interlochen and I was in eighth grade. And I remember, cause like when you're from your like local area, like you're the best. And cause there's five people to be better than, so I was used to people being like, “Oh my God, you're so good.” And you think like you don't play off of that energy until you're not the best one anymore. And when I went to Interlochen, I did my audition and got placed last stand lowest orchestra. And I was like, ooh!

Tia Imani Hanna: Yup. Me too. [laughter]

Leslie DeShazor: Yeah. Dang. I thought I was somebody.

Tia Imani Hanna: First chair. I was first chair at Cass Tech's orchestra and I went to Interlochen the first time for a two-week thing through U of M. And I was in the last stand of the lower orchestra.

Leslie DeShazor: That's the reality.

Tia Imani Hanna: Was second to last chair or something like that.

Leslie DeShazor: Yup. That was me, but I was… I was fortunate cause I went to the eight-week program, so I challenged up and I got into the higher orchestra. And then, this is always a hilarious story to me. And to this day, I wish I would have done it differently. You had to play and then everybody had to vote. You close your eyes, then everybody would vote. And I played against this guy and I thought he played better than me. And this would have been for the second chair, highest orchestra at this point, I skipped a bunch. I don't even know how I did it, to be honest. Like I wish I had that same work ethic now. I don't even know how I did it, but yeah, this would have been for like second chair, like first stand, highest orchestra at this point. And we closed their eyes. It was time to vote and I voted against myself.

Tia Imani Hanna: Wow!

Leslie DeShazor: Yeah. And the teacher was like, he pulled me aside after it was like, why did you do that? You would have won it. And I was like, I felt like he played better than me. And now, I admire my honesty in that moment, but I also was like, what kind of dumb move was that? How could you not vote for yourself? To this day I just want to slap myself for that one. Like, okay, you would take the honesty thing too far.

Tia Imani Hanna: It stands to say that your character was, is solid.

Leslie DeShazor: Yeah, I think I was trying to prove to myself that it was something good.

Tia Imani Hanna: It was to make up for the thing you did with your sister.

Leslie DeShazor: Karma. But it was great for me, cause I got a chance to meet people from all over the country. There were some international students there too. I remember meeting a guy, we became friends from the Philippines and I had a little buddy from India named Ganesh who was so cool. And that gave me a window into the bigger world. Because as a musician and, like, when you're just doing stuff locally, you can really become boxed in.

Tia Imani Hanna: Yes.

Leslie DeShazor: I won't say I won’t talk about the level because that's a whole different can of worms. We can get to that later. But I think you don't get enough exposure to the wide world of music and musicians. And that experience gave me a glimpse, okay, this is something that is going to open up a lot of windows for me. And I met so many cool people, people to this day who I know, that I met when I was at Interlochen. And my… now my kids are at the age where like my daughter did Interlochen virtually last year. But, just to see how these things continue in how these traditions thrive, like, how vital they are to young musicians. Yeah, it was cool.

Tia Imani Hanna: I'm so grateful for those opportunities because that's when I had time to actually practice for eight, ten hours a day or, and not mind it and like it, and learn and be the sponge and understand new things. And it's such a prime time. Cause I couldn't, I have trouble practicing for an hour straight sometimes because there's so many other things I have to do. I'm so grateful for that time. So that's fantastic that you had that because, I mean, you carry that with you.

Leslie DeShazor: Yeah. And isn't it interesting though, the timing of how, like, when you're young, you have all this like energy, but then you have this wisdom of older age and those two almost never converge. If you had the wisdom now and the energy that you had younger, like you could have been such a… no we all, obviously things happen the way they should, but I just look at some of my students and I look at the youth that's on their side and how people have that saying that “Youth is wasted on the young,” something like that. It says like they can learn so much and they can do so much with so little actual work, but they don't have sometimes the ability to apply a lot of the non-written or the non-said things because they haven't experienced life in the same way yet. And then by the time we get to that point where we can actually apply those things, our technique is going down the drain, because we are not spending the same amount of time. And we're older and sometimes we start to get aches and pains and playing is not as easy as it was when we were younger. For me, I frequently get shoulder pain. When I was younger, I'd probably play with all kinds of horrible technique and I never hurt, never. Now, I got to warm up.

Tia Imani Hanna: Now where did the composition come in for you?

Leslie DeShazor: So, that's a good question. I think writing it down is where it comes in for a lot of us because we have ideas, we make stuff up, but we never document it. I know I did at least, I would make stuff up, but actually writing it out was different. Think I started writing things. Can you hear my My kids in the background?

Tia Imani Hanna: I can.

Leslie DeShazor: I started writing things when I was probably in my… officially writing it down… more in my thirties. And then with the band, Michelle [May] was like, we need everyone to write something for our projects. So, it forced my, it forced me, having a deadline to do something and solidify it. Cause I've got stuff in my music files right now that I started writing and never finished, like a lot of stuff like that, but there was no pressing need to finish it, so I just didn't. You get like in a mood and you're like, I'm going to write today and you sit down and you start writing and then, 15 minutes later, you stand up and you have a good idea and then you forget it like four days later that you were working on that. Or there've been times I've had ideas in my sleep. I'll wake up and sing it into my phone and then I'll not go back to it. So, I did a lot of that for a long time. Right now, like over the summer, I did some writing because I've really, unfortunately, I have not ever done my own projects. And this year I was like, I gotta do that. So, I did some writing. And then with the concerts that I did online, I did perform some of the music I wrote. And now I'm in the process of making time to go in the studio and actually record it. Yeah, I know. It took me a long enough, now I'm like 75.

Tia Imani Hanna: It's the right time. When you do it is the right time because it's not ready until it's ready.

Leslie DeShazor: True. True.

Tia Imani Hanna: So, it's all good. Sounds good. You have the writing sickness. I have memos up the wazoo in my SoundCloud. Like, “You have a new memo.” Oh yeah. I forgot what that was.

Leslie DeShazor: Exactly. The ideas come. What I found is, one time somebody asked me, like, how do you practice when you have kids? Like, how do you find the time to practice and what I, what I found at least, is that it isn't that you don't have time to practice, it's that you don't always… the timing, or the timing to be creative, isn't always on your side. Because frequently, like the best ideas we get come like in the middle of the night. When you're like in the shower. They come in like sometimes with the odd times. And for me, with having children, sometimes you might have this idea and you walk out of the shower, right? Put this idea down and your kids, “Hey, you forgot to send in my permission slip for blah, blah, blah.” And then you go do that. And then now the creative, the, that mindset has gone. So, it's like having timing on your side to be able to do it when you feel it. Of course, it's different for everybody. And as we mature, our family obligations and things get bigger. And we just, like you said, we don't have the time to spend on ourselves like we would have 20 years ago. But I think I'm aware too, that it's necessary to prioritize it and sometimes even schedule it, even if you don't feel the creativity there, to just do it anyway and set aside time. And I haven't done great about that. Like I'll tell myself, okay, I'm going to set aside 15 minutes every day just to write something. just 15 minutes. You can do that, and then I just get distracted and I don't do it. But it's, yeah, it's just that prioritization of creative space. But having children makes you, it forces you more to take the time to put it in your life because you know how easy it is for days and weeks and months, and even years, to go by and you look up and you haven't done any of your own work. You've been doing everybody else's work. That's one of the blessings that's come out of this pandemic, I think is that we have time to work on things we want to work on. Because we're not like mandated to learn all this music for other people's stuff. So, it's nice. Obviously not making any money.

Tia Imani Hanna: Yes, unfortunately.

Leslie DeShazor: You only need that to live.

Tia Imani Hanna: Exactly. It only grows on trees, no biggie, no big deal.

[“Leslie's Song” plays here]

Tia Imani Hanna: It'll come.

Leslie DeShazor: Yeah.

Tia Imani Hanna: You definitely have to prioritize. And it is. I don't have kids, but I might as well with all the little projects are always whispering in my ear. You gotta do this, you gotta do this. Even just stuff like taking care of your own house. It's there's all these things that have to be done so that your house doesn't fall apart. But if you're working and doing things, you can't do those things. And then, and then the podcast, and then I had a practice, and then there's a song that keeps coming back to my head. Oh, I gotta write that down on project number 27. So yeah, it's… I had a; I don't know if it was a con… I can't remember if it was a conversation or it might've just… it might've been an interview that I watched one time and someone had asked Bobby McFerrin how he practices and he says that he doesn't practice in the sense of every day he does a certain amount of scales or anything like that, but he does just sing every day. And even for 15 minutes, he just does something, especially when he's on tour. He just does that 15 minutes a day. So, that 15 minutes that you were talking about is definitely a feasible thing.

Leslie DeShazor: Yeah. I find the more that I'm doing this I feel like we have a whole period of just undoing. The undoing of a lot of convention, a lot of tradition that doesn't necessarily benefit us as people. You can take this… you can make this wider than just music. A lot of us spend a lot of time trying to imitate other people and what they did. And the imitation has its place, especially since music is a language. But if we spent half of the energy on our own voice that we spend on other people's voices, we'd be innovators and creators more than imitators. And I'm starting to look at this thing very different. I still urge my students to spend time. I'm trying to change my language. Practice. What does that mean? Okay. You devote time to sit in a particular space. You take out your music, you take out your instrument and you spend this amount of time. And we even brag about the hours. Oh, five hours. I practice this many hours, that many hours. But real meaningful, mindful attention to your craft is different than just practicing. So, I'm looking at this and I'm like, okay. How can I motivate students to play their instruments consistently? That's really what I'm trying to get them to do. Play consistently. Spend some time daily just getting to know the instrument. And I think that package is very different than being like, practice, you know, it has this negative. Sometimes it feels negative because it's a lot of stuff you don't want to play. A lot of the stuff kids are practicing they don't want to play. They don't want to play etudes. They don't want to play scales and arpeggios. And most of the time, a lot of times, they don't even like the repertoire they're playing. And so how do you get them to… to work on stuff if they don't like what they're playing. They do it, but it's they're going through the motions, which so many of us have done over a lot of years. We've spent a whole bunch of time learning stuff we didn't even understand, let alone… not to say everything has to be fun. You don’t have to like everything, but I think we can get close when you're talking about music. Cause there's so much great music. It just doesn't make sense that we just keep doing like this one kind of boxed in way of teaching and sharing. So, I'm really starting to change my attitude towards a lot of these things just because I think that a lot of the stuff that I've latched on to didn't have a lot of benefits to me developing myself and my voice as a musician. Yeah.

Tia Imani Hanna: When I think of practice, I know one of the things I used to tell my students would be, you really do have to think about it like a meditation. And I came to the idea of, it doesn't even matter what the instrument is, because you're really… your voice is what… you're trying to get your voice to come out in whatever instrument you're playing. So, even if say, for instance, you're going to be a piccolo player and that's all you're ever going to play is the piccolo, but maybe while you're playing it, maybe you're going to think of yourself as a saxophone player. And then what changes when you think of yourself as a saxophone player playing the piccolo. Are you going to play differently? So, it's really not about the instrument, but that concept of… cause if I think of myself, if I'm scatting a solo, and then I think of myself as a bass player, I'm going to sing a lot differently than if I think of myself as a flute player. It's just going to be a different sound that comes out. So, it's just a… it's a state of… it's a meditation of being that sound or being the personification of an idea of a sound. I don't know how else to say that.

Leslie DeShazor: Yeah, that makes sense.

Tia Imani Hanna: It’s the practice of being that music or inhabiting that music and trying to make that music live in some way that is identified as something that comes from you.

Leslie DeShazor: Right.

Tia Imani Hanna: Like ‘your voice’.

Leslie DeShazor: I think the overarching theme would be the mindfulness, what you do. I literally had this conversation with a student this morning about how she approaches playing, but when speaking to her, the real issue is that she's very self-doubting. I don't know who or what suggestions made her feel like she wasn't good enough, but she plays very apologetically. There isn't a mindfulness and a passion when she approaches the instrument, but she loves the instrument. That's obvious. But somewhere there's a disconnect. She hasn't been able to bridge that gap between what's inside of her and what comes from her instrument. But yeah, that idea of just envisioning or yourself in a different mental space or place and translating that onto the instrument is not something we spend a lot of time doing, cause we're always just, “I gotta practice. I gotta practice.” But in that, there's like definitely something spiritual happening and that isn't always easy to tap into. Yeah.

Tia Imani Hanna: Yeah. I think it's fun that the longer we play music and the longer we try to understand it, the less we know. I like that because you never get bored with it. It is so expansive. And then you also know that you're never going to master it, which keeps the humbleness in there. So, you can't ever get cocky anymore. You, I think when you're younger, you're like, “yeah, I'm the top of the line.” After a certain point you're like, “Nah, I guess not really. Not really.” And so, it's… and trying to teach that to other people is difficult, I think. Cause they don't think of it the same way. You might be the next line of teachers that is basically saying, “Hey, let's think of this as inhabiting the music instead of mastering the music.”

Leslie DeShazor: Yeah. Or replicating. Like, I think our approach to educating, in general, lacks real app application. When we look at things like math and English and history, science. The way that most of us learned it is very abstract, very drill, and regurgitative, but not applicative. There's a lot of concepts that we, basically, walk through every day that are math, that are science. There are a lot of things that we live, a lot of things that we do that if we really understood the history of, we’d do them better, or we wouldn't do them at all. But we don't really educate ourselves or our children in a way that sort of shows the cross disciplinary relationship of all these things. There's connections between all of the disciplines. They don't really exist separate from one another, but we learned them separately. And we put a lot of value in spitting back for the test and not a lot of value in true understanding of what you're doing. That takes longer. It requires more thought. And I don't know if the patience is there to make that happen, but I think when it comes to teaching music, I'm really trying to help students understand it better and apply it better now and not just go for the, okay, do your ‘A’ scale, do your etude, do your piece. I'm really trying to open up more possibilities to them so they can see how these things apply to them in their lives and in their instruments. So yeah.

Tia Imani Hanna: All that deep thinking going on. These students must be amazing.

Leslie DeShazor: They are. Like, but for different reasons and in different ways. I really probably teach every student differently. And even classes, like I've walked into some class situations where you can see that these kids have this strength and I play that strength up because that's what they do. Like, I've got a group that I teach over here on the East side of Detroit at the Ellington Conservatory and I taught them Blues tunes, from the beginning. They learned how to play “Duke's Place,” but we changed the key and they learned pentatonic, the E minor pentatonic, and they learned to improvise, like the first year they played and they've done a series of other blues since then. Those kids loved that. We still did the classical stuff, but that's not… I didn't go in there… that's what we have to do. My other group, and they may vary. We spend more time learning pop tunes and traditional beginning violin tunes, dance with them more, and sing with them more, because that's just the vibe that we get in that particular setting, I have students who they love the rigor of a tradition and so, I stick with the things that they thrive on. And I've got some students who need, like, less structure. So, I try to bend to that. I've got one little student who's eight who is just like all about the Blues. And so, he spends the majority of his time on that. And we, I keep one classical piece in his rep just because I know he's going to want to do auditions and things. But the students, they grow how they're going to grow. I think what I've realized is, I'm just a vessel, I'm not here to like mold them or make them into anything that I want them to be. And they have to be, they have to be ready for whatever it is that you're showing them. That knowledge is not going to stick unless they're ready for it. And so, I just try to be perceptive and meet them where they are, and then try and get them to rise above that, more on their terms than mine. And that's not always easy because I come from a background where that tradition is expected. You do your Flesch scales, you do the arpeggios, you do a Kreutzer etude, and you do one challenging piece that is the classical origins. None of my teachers were making me do like blues pattern scales, or making me like, make up my own songs. I make students… there's some students, I have them do that. Like one student, instead of making her do scales, I have her pick up pattern and she used to take it through the keys because I want her to be able to play fluently in every key, going in scales up and down. That's good, but it's not really doing anything super useful for her. In her current life, what she needs as a violinist, the other exercise is more useful. And the honest to God truth is she probably doesn't practice more than 45 minutes a day. For her, going through the patterns in different keys is a better use of her time than going through Flesch, cause she's probably not going to be a professional musician.

Tia Imani Hanna: But she'll know her keys.

Leslie DeShazor: Yeah. And she'll be able to play. If she wants to learn a song off the radio or off of Spotify and this is the key of F sharp, she’ll be able to figure it out cause she's fluent in F sharp.

Tia Imani Hanna: She can hear it.

Leslie DeShazor: Yeah. There's no song on Spotify that goes up three octaves.

Tia Imani Hanna: No.

Leslie DeShazor: The practical application of what most people really do with their instrumental learning. Most people don't really do that. Most people want to be able to play songs they like. That's it. That's what most people want to do.

Tia Imani Hanna: And you're developing audience because they have ears for the music and there'll be looking for music that does that because their ear is developed beyond what the average person is developed. Because that's one of the things that I lament, some of the loss of some of the music in the schools because the kids aren't developing their ear. So, they're not listening for what I consider to be good music, because their ear is so limited, they can't hear it.

Leslie DeShazor: Yeah, that's true.

Tia Imani Hanna: It affects us on so many levels and we say… we talk about the financial times right now and musicians aren't making any money, but we aren't developing our audience either. And that's part of it. You've got to start young and develop those ears. Once their ears are open, then they hear stuff. They're like, “Oh, that's really cool. I want to do that.” Or “maybe I can start a band. I'm 23. I can start playing guitar now.” That's true.

Leslie DeShazor: Yeah. Yeah.

Tia Imani Hanna: Or hire somebody who plays already and I can do this thing and we'll have this new sound. Cause they hear things.

Leslie DeShazor: Right.

Tia Imani Hanna: But anyhow is part of the mandate too, I think, to, as teachers, to help develop that audience ear. And I think personally, when I look at some of this stuff, the stuff I do is so out there anyway, but it's going to be like, some people are going to love it. Some people are going to be like, “Eh”, and that's fine, but that's going to be that way for every kind of music. But what I try to do is I try to create at least a melody and a harmony that's going to be nice, a nice pocket. And it might sound like there's nothing going on because this is just a general melody, but there's always something underneath going on like really deep. So, if you can hear, it's there.

Leslie DeShazor: Yeah.

Leslie DeShazor: If you can't hear, you won't notice it. And you just hear the melody and that… but the melody is nice. So that's kinda my take on it. I want it to have these layers. And I think that's how it hits everybody, that different people would feel different parts of it. And they don't realize, anyway, rabbit hole. That's okay.

Leslie DeShazor: That’s right. When musicians start talking about their music, we go down fast. I used to have friend who was the only musician in our group, the only non-musician in our group of friends. And he would just be like cool until we started talking about music and he’s “I need to leave.” Musician’s weird. We’re tight. We stick together and we usually have a lot of friends who are musicians because most people just can’t really vibe with us too hard cause we don’t talk about normal subjects.

Tia Imani Hanna: Have you ever listened to Carlos Santana speak about anything?

Leslie DeShazor: I have not listened to him speak.

Tia Imani Hanna: Every now and then he'll have an interview or something and he goes out, he goes. Yeah, you really do, because you're just like, okay. So, I get it. I feel like a non-musician when I listen to Carlos.

Leslie DeShazor: Wow. That's funny. Yeah.

Tia Imani Hanna: Wayne Shorter.

Leslie DeShazor: And Herbie. Wayne. Wayne definitely. Yeah.

Tia Imani Hanna: But it's fun.

Leslie DeShazor: It is. I mean you get to… you learn to appreciate those differences about everybody. I think that's one of the great things about gaining age and maturity, you have… I think most people, those who are interested in growth, they really do broaden their ability to like, take in various perspectives and various personalities. Things were very much cut and dry for me when I was young. But now with some life experience, I appreciate those personalities that when I was younger, I'm like, Oh, they're just weird. I think what you appreciate about those people is that they're unafraid to be who they are, and no matter how much pushback they get, they stay strong and who they believe they should be. That takes a special kind of person because most people don't. There's a lot of jumping on bandwagons in our society. A lot of people just do what everybody else does.

Tia Imani Hanna: And that's true. And you just wonder too, what I always wonder, is why are they so angry about it?

Leslie DeShazor: I think it’s because they know that they should do different, more. You know what I mean? It's like today I saw a Facebook status of a colleague of mine about ‘anti-vaxxer, you should walk a mile in their shoes’. And it was a joke, and they were like clown shoes. First of all, that's no respect to the profession because the clown is like, for real, like a serious profession, like those guys train to do that. But the other thing is that, where is this low tolerance coming from that someone chooses to do something different? I think, in my experience, like there are a lot of choices I made young that offended people, but it was not, it had nothing to do with them. And that made me learn a lesson very early on. So, like, I became vegetarian when I was 15. I was vegetarian for 16 years. I, when I had children, I had one of my kids at home. I delayed vaccinations. I breastfed for what most people think is way too long. And I homeschooled my kids. And what I noticed in all of that… And, of course, I chose to be a professional violist. I'm bucking all kinds of status quos here. And I lift weights. So, I got muscles. A lot of people don't like that for a woman. But I, what I see and all that is that when you go against the grain, people take it as a personal offense because they feel bad that they don't have the courage to be different and that's why they project on to you. It's like moms, for example, women are always measuring their selves as mothers. There’s so much comparing. It's ugly. When you have a small child, people sit around and talk about how their child hit the milestones at three months and so when one parent says I feed my kid gluten-free and they've learned all their alphabet and they're like one, then everybody starts going well, “Learning the alphabet is not that important. Gluten-free is a myth.” They get offended. “Having kids at home, that's not safe.” And I'm like, pregnancy is not an illness. Like you don't really need to go to the hospital. People have babies at home all over the world. But what they took from that was that I was saying that they weren't a good mother because I did it this way. And that's a personal, that's an issue of feeling inadequate. Something inside of you is telling you that you are not making choices from a genuine place. You’re just doing what everybody else is doing. And when someone does something that everyone else is not doing, you want to defend everybody else because you don't have the courage to step out on some things that maybe you felt like you should step out on. We live in a society where assimilation is extremely important. And I think for humans, there's a need to assimilate in some situations like we need that unity. We need that oneness. But a lot of the things that we assimilate it on don't have anything to do with being a better human, it's really just a personal choice. If you choose to not take Tylenol when you have a headache and you take turmeric instead doesn't mean you're saying everyone who takes Tylenol is stupid.

Tia Imani Hanna: No.

Leslie DeShazor: But unfortunately, because of this kind of like, what is the word, like robotic way that we've chosen to live, we just get jolted when somebody's different. And it's unfortunate because that carries into the arts where people should be encouraged to be different.

Tia Imani Hanna: Yeah. That's what art is, isn't it? I don't know, some famous artist said something like that. If somebody is not basically giving you pushback, then you're not making art. Because it's gonna, if you're doing true art, it's gonna, somebody is going to either love it or hate it. And then people in the middle go, “Meh.”

Leslie DeShazor: Yeah. Pushing the parameters. You're taking that box and you're making it bigger or you're just like taking the corners off of it. You're doing something different and yeah, I don't know. People think that musicians are creative and I've had to tell people frequently, “You'd be surprised. You have the same kind of people in music that you have in corporate America.

Tia Imani Hanna: Oh yeah.

Leslie DeShazor: You’ve got the legalistic. You've got the purist. You got the people who want everyone to be the same. Then you've got the outliers. But most musicians are not outliers.

Tia Imani Hanna: No.

Leslie DeShazor: We're not taught to be that way. But that's, no, definitely not string players. [laughter] We are, like, the safest in the group.

Tia Imani Hanna: String players, french horn players, oboe players. Who else in the safe they group? You cannot break out of that group.

Leslie DeShazor: Yeah. Yeah. We are very much, and there's a need for that because when you're playing music with a bunch of people, you have to learn to blend, you have to learn to move with, you have to learn to be sensitive to, because it's a group. But outside of the group, a lot of us don't push any boundaries. We just kinda, “Oh, I'll just go home until my next group thing.”

Tia Imani Hanna: And we want to be safe. I get that too, because there is that fear, as musicians, like where is the next paycheck going to come from? And I've had a lot of jobs.

Leslie DeShazor: There's no fear of that now. There is no next paycheck. Not funny. Leslie. Not funny.

Tia Imani Hanna: Well, what else can you do but laugh?

Leslie DeShazor: I did a panel yesterday and one of the questions was like, what have you lost in this pandemic? I was like, income, a lot of it. And then the question was, when did you realize, like, when did it, like, kind of dawn on you, like what really what's going? And it's funny because, like you said, like with the humor thing, I think a lot of us, just for me at least, I pushed it to the back of my head. I try very hard to not think about how much money I've lost. I started gardening. I'd always wanted to do a garden. And then this year I'm home. So, I just planting seeds, like little, just like planting stuff all over my yard. I got some garden boxes and I just kept myself busy with that. And I did practice quite a bit. I spent a lot of time playing. I did some like porch concerts and stuff where I could, but October it hit me, like how grim this was. Because October is usually when the orchestral seasons are back in full swing. Teaching is back in full swing. Like you're already getting your plans for the winter and sometimes even for the spring and summer for the following year. And I think I went through like a couple of weeks of just feeling really depressed in October cause I was, like, I'm not going to work for a long time. And I've been doing Zoom teaching, but that within itself is a beast. Like it's taken me some time to accept it cause it's not same. But I think it really hit me hard in October when I started to, like, really see like how much work I haven't been able to do and how much work I'm not going to be able to do. And then you look at the vaccine rollout and how things are coming down and all the politics. I don't know that we'll be anywhere ready for concert halls to be filled again, even in this year. It's sad and hard to come to terms with, but with this like more aggressive strand of the virus now out and so much up in the air about what this vaccine can actually do in terms of preventing the spread of the disease. There's a good chance we won't see a concert hall filled again until 2022.

Tia Imani Hanna: If we're lucky.

Leslie DeShazor: Yeah. Yeah. The summer might yield some things because we can be outside. But I also think too event planners and organizers are not willing to take the liability of people working under their watch and getting sick. So yeah, it's, for musicians, it's a hard time. I shouldn't just say musicians. Stage crew, front and back of house people, administrators, big organizations that had to furlough a lot of people. And then you've got the flip side of the people who are in the medical community, they've been working like crazy since last March. They haven't had a break. But it does.

Tia Imani Hanna: FedEx.

Leslie DeShazor: Yeah. Oh my gosh. Yeah. You guys are like the gold of the world right now.

Tia Imani Hanna: We haven't had a break. We haven't had a break. At Christmas time maybe it gets worse. It's been like Christmas time since February last year. And we went through Christmas again and it hasn't stopped. We haven't let up. So, we just haven't had a break. Everybody's exhausted.

Leslie DeShazor: I can imagine, like, what I frequently have a good self-check, because as difficult as it is to be in this position of not thriving and working like I usually do, I've been shielded from the exposure that a lot of people are in every single day. Like I can choose if I want to leave my house or not. And there are a lot of people in other professions who can't choose that, like they have to work. And the demands like for delivery services are huge. Medical professionals, it's huge. Musicians, I think the thing that we'll have to see how this all pans out is how it has affected people's mental health. I think a lot of people are taking it very hard and mentally their health is really declining because they're not doing what they've been doing, so many of us, for decades at this point and the thought of having to give that up. I think I've known a few musicians who've gotten real estate licenses. They're starting to other things, but some of us are starting to think, what else could I do? If I can't work, what can I do in the meantime, what job will hire me? And you look at that. Somebody who's been… for me, I've taught, but like other musicians, some of them haven't taught, they've literally just performed for the last 25 or 30 years and haven't developed any other skills. So, the thought of now I may have to get a job that is minimum wage. And then you're competing, like a lot of minimum wage jobs, they're not going to hire somebody with no experience, or who's over experienced for the job, or clearly doesn't want to keep this job. You know what I mean? If you’ve been playing music your whole life, when you go apply at Starbucks, they're like, eh, you're not going to stay. They might give it to somebody else. So, it's pretty, it's pretty grim for a lot of people, but like for us, in terms of our household, I feel like we're very blessed. We haven't had to give up any huge things in our lives that will create hardship in our household. It doesn't feel good to not be playing out and having time with other musicians. It doesn't feel good for my kids to have to sit in the house all the time. But I am grateful that we have the luxury to sit in the house all the time, in this time, because it's dangerous to leave your house and be in certain situations. Cause we don't know, what's really going to happen if you get sick. So, I'm grateful, even though it's been difficult. I'm grateful that I have all that I have, and I'm glad I'm grateful that people still want to learn because I can always be teaching.

Tia Imani Hanna: Great. So, you did a living room concert recently?

Leslie DeShazor: Yeah, I've done several actually. So, I did, let me think, I did one. My first one was in April last year. I did one in May. Then I did an outdoor. I did three outdoor neighborhood concerts. And two of them I streamed while playing for my neighborhood. Then I just did another, a streaming concert back on December 20th. That one I did live from the congregation. I didn't do it from my home. And yeah, so I've done, I guess that's five. Five live streams. Then I've done two concerts, one through River Raisin Ragtime, the other one through Folk, River Folk Arts organization, solo concerts that were also live stream. So, I've done seven solo live stream. My kids did play on some of them, solo live stream concerts during this pandemic. And that's been good. What I've learned about myself in this process is I need to play. I can't just be sitting here, like, not performing. I need to perform. I need to interact with people. But also, it's been financially like good too, because people want to hear music and they can't go to concert halls right now. So, if you're offering something they want to hear, they're willing to pay for it, so that's been helpful too. It's also forced me to get outside of the’ waiting for the gig’ mentality, and that's part of the reason why I'm wanting to record and do my own project. Moving forward, I have something I can say, “This is my project. This is what I do. This is my sound.” So, I've done, yeah, the concerts, the streaming concerts, have been fun. They've been awkward. So awkward, like in your living room. Like the first concert, hilarious. Like I practiced and practiced for that concert. And then I made a rookie mistake. I changed my first piece, like a week before the concert. So, I was doing a Bach accompanied movement of one of the suites, and I just wasn't feeling it, like I was doing the second movement of the D minor suite. And I changed it, like the week before. But I’ve played this one. It's the Currant from the C major. I played it a bunch of times. I'm like not stressed. I'm playing it at home. And there's this one spot that I'm like struggling to play smoothly, but I'm like, okay, I'm just going to make sure that I don't go too fast. Blah, blah, blah. So, I get my lights and my laptop, everything's set up, got my interface ready. Okay. Deep breath, time to press stream. And when I press stream, when I tell you, I have never felt those nerves in my life. Like my whole body got hot. My hands started sweating, and I'm standing there and I'm looking like, cause you don't know who's watching. You can see that there's… you can see how many people are watching in crowd caching, see how many people are watching, but no comments have come in yet. And so, I'm in my living room and I'm thinking, okay, I'm in my living room, no big deal. This is what I do all the time. I play in my living room. But when that stream started, I lost my bearings. I was just like, wait what am I doing? Wait. So, I started playing the Bach and at one point on that one spot, I stumbled, and I stopped.

Tia Imani Hanna: Wow.

Leslie DeShazor: And then I was just like, I put my instrument down and I was like, that was not supposed to happen. Those words came out of my mouth. The words came out of my mouth, “That was not supposed to happen.” And it was just like awkward silence. And I was like, I'm sorry, you guys, I'm so nervous. I didn't expect to be nervous, bear with me. And I'm like apologizing the comments that are coming in ‘no, that’s fine’. I'm scared. I'm just like, at that moment, I just wanted to shut down the computer and pretend like my internet failed. But I persevered. The nice thing was that my kids were on the next tune, so I could focus on them and get them in place and okay, here's your part. Here's your part. It distracted me from the sheer, like, mortification in the moment that I felt that I made such a horrible mistake and the rest of the concert was great. It went well, but that first concert man, it was rough, but I learned a good lesson. I learned a good lesson from that. And that was like, okay, don't take it for granted that you won't get nervous cause you're in your house. But then also too, that opening piece, you need to… like so what I did was the last concert, the first piece I did, it was one of the Teleman Fantasia's, it's an unaccompanied piece, acoustic piece. And I made myself practice that piece every day with no warmup for about nine days before the concert happened. No warm-up. Because what you find is when you're streaming your own concerts, you got to be in charge of your sound, your lights, the stream. There's a very good chance that when you press go, you have not had a chance to warm up. And then things happen. Like the internet is sometimes unpredictable. So, I practice that piece with no warmup for nine days every day. I just got to pick the instrument up and start playing it. And I was so glad I did that because on the day of the concert, I go to stream, no sound. And so, you can see me on the video. Like the Crowdcast, you'll have the mask on, and my eyes are just like, I'm like on the computer, like trying to figure it out, like looking like… I look so scared and worried people were like ‘smile’, ‘relax’ in the comments and I'm just like touching stuff and tapping stuff and clicking stuff, trying to get it to work. And then finally, by some miracle, it works. Don't know what happened. And so, I just okay, let me play this piece now. And I played the piece and that pretty much nailed it. So glad that I had forced myself to practice that piece with no warmup for those nine days, because that was the only thing that saved me from that completely panicking and sweating all over my viola and not being able to play. I have this big hair and I'm getting hot and I'm like, I want to put my hair up. Okay. Learn lessons, like I'm gonna make sure I try to do a check, but I was waiting on musicians who were a little late, but now I know even just soundcheck without them, just to make sure you have sound. That had never happened before. I've done all these live shows. I've never not had sound. I still don't know exactly what happened, to be honest, but life went on and people enjoy the concert, I think. The nice thing about right now, everybody's more forgiving because they understand that we're all trying to learn new things and work with it and things that we're not accustomed to. So, everybody was cool about it. Nobody asked for their money back.

[“Acceptance” by Leslie DeShazor playing]

Tia Imani Hanna: It is that, right now, that we've all transitioned from the 20th century into the 21st century all at the same time. Yeah, this has never happened before and it'll probably happen again the next time there's a big leap from one technology to another, but it's never happened before in history of man, as far as we know, it's never happened before. So that's, it's like the caveman and all of a sudden there's a wheel, Oh, shoot, everybody has a wheel. Let's get a wheel. We need four of them. Okay.

Leslie DeShazor: Panel I did yesterday asked the question like what should musicians do to increase their resilience? And everyone had all these great, now it's just learn some technology because if you don't, you're going to be behind. And unfortunately, like all these, with all this stuff being canceled, more musicians are going to have to operate completely from home. Recording, videos, teaching with certain technical aspects. Learning even something as simple as zoom. Like you need to learn some technology as much as you might, you might naturally resist it because technology is a beast. But yeah.

Tia Imani Hanna: And that's the way we're moving right now. Thank you for those words of wisdom because that's definitely needed right now. So, where online can people find you?

Leslie DeShazor: I actually, and working on a website with my brother, which would just be LeslieDeShazor.com. So, we're in the process of working on that. But all of my shows that I've done are on Crowdcast and you can replay them and watch them again. So, if you just go to crowdcast.com and search my name, you'll be able to find all of the shows and you can watch them. And then of course I'm on Instagram and Facebook.

Tia Imani Hanna: We're a little bit out of time right now, but the next time I'll have you on again, and we'll talk about the dancing. Because we went down that rabbit hole and it was all over. But thank you.

Leslie DeShazor: You're welcome. Thanks Tia.

Tia Imani Hanna: Thank you for joining us this week on Tia Time with Artists. Make sure to visit our website, tiaviolin.com, where you can subscribe to the show in iTunes and never miss an episode. Please leave us a rating wherever you listen to podcasts. We really appreciate your comments, and we'll mine them to bring you more amazing episodes.

I’d like to thank this inaugural season's sponsors: The folks at Jazz Alliance of Mid-Michigan or JAMM, Michigan ArtShare, a program of Michigan State University Extension is a partner in supporting the Tia Time podcast, and Shambones Music. Without their support this podcast would not be possible. Thank you so much. If you would also like to contribute to the show, you can find us on https://www.patreon.com/TiaTime1.

If you want to continue the conversation about topics discussed on the show or start new ones with like-minded people, join us at the Tia Time Lounge on Facebook.

Thank you for listening. See you next week at Tia Time!

+ Transcription

Tia Time with Artists, with guest Pam Wise 2/01/2021

Tia Imani Hanna: Welcome to Tia Time with Artists, the weekly podcast where we discuss the methods, challenges, and real-life experiences of living our creative dreams. What kind of creative warrior are you? Musician? Filmmaker? Painter? Choreographer? Poet? Sculptor? Fashionista? Let’s talk about it right now. I’m your host, Tia Imani Hanna.

Welcome to Tia Time with Artists and my guest this week is pianist, composer, educator, historian, Pam Wise.

Pam Wise: Oh, thanks for having me.

Tia Imani Hanna: Glad to see that you're here. Glad that you're doing well. And we'll spend some of this Covid time talking about music and talking about the things that make you the musician that you are. And tell me what started you on the track to being a pianist and a composer? Was it… in your household when you were growing up? Were you surrounded by music? Or are you the odd fish in the family? Or how did that all come about?

Pam Wise: I am the odd fish in the family. Yeah, it's probably because of music. No, my dad was a jazz musician. He played upright bass and he had his own jazz trio in addition to being the world star postman in our little, small town. So, that's how I got the music bug. Cause he was always rehearsing his trio in the basement and I was always sneaking down there and as a toddler, “Oh man, that's what I want to do. That's really cool.” So that's how I got the music. And yeah, and then he was always active in church and he showed me a few things on a piano and then he said, “Oh, she catches on pretty quick. The things I'm showing her.” So, my mother was the one who was like we need to get her some piano lessons. And so, I started taking lessons. I started playing in church. My father was the choir director at church for the senior and youth choir. So, that's where I got a lot of my skills. There was an older lady at church that, her name was Mrs. Guy, and she also started training me on the pipe organ at church, which was really a scary thing for me because it was this big, huge monstrosity of a keyboard and if you hit one of those stops and you don't hit them and that's all. It's like a Mack truck going out of control. [laughter] It was really cool because I remember she had me play one Sunday and she made the church take up a collection for me. And I was like, “Oh, I can make money doing this.” She said, “Yeah, you can make money doing this”. She said, “Every time you play, you should, there's a fee that should be charged.” And so, I think that's how I got the business concept was from her. And I think only got like $12 from the collection that Sunday, but hey, and just in the late sixties, that was a lot of money.

Tia Imani Hanna: Sure.

Pam Wise: You can buy a couple of shirts, your favorite records. You can find some baby dolls and baby doll clothes.

Tia Imani Hanna: Do a lot with 12 dollars.

Pam Wise: Yes. Have leftover for candy.

Tia Imani Hanna: That's right. You can get a lot more candy back then you can now, for that little bit of money. That's great. So, you started in churches and stuff. Did you start your own groups or how did you get the concept of being a jazz musician and working and getting paid to do the work, but how did that evolve? Did you go to high school and play in bands and things? Or did you go to college later? Or how did it all…?

Pam Wise: After I experimented with string instruments, I actually, when I started off on piano, of course in school, when you got into fourth grade, I met this really hip music teacher. He was a jazz pianist, but he was also our music teacher. So, he put a violin in my hand because that's what was available for us fourth graders to play. So, I tried that for a while. I didn't like it cause it squeaked too much. Then I went to viola. I played there for a while and then I went from viola to cello, which I really liked, but I didn't like lugging it home from school.

Tia Imani Hanna: I don't blame you. It's big.

Pam Wise: It's big, but I wish I would've kept up with it, and I'm thinking that actually, I said if I ever get a chance to play it again, maybe that's something I might investigate. Cause it, cause I love the low voicing of the cello. But after I got in high school, that's when I got the concept of forming a band. I began watching other R & B groups. There was a couple other big groups that were really good from my hometown. And after watching them, I started forming my own group. And what was really neat, was about the older R and B groups from my hometown, helped us out. They helped form our sound and told us what we needed to do. They would come to our rehearsals and make sure that our show was polished and teaching proper vocal technique to the vocalists that were singing with us and instilling the musicians, instilling us the importance of knowing our instrument, knowing how to read music, knowing how to arrange for R & B group. And we stuck with that. What was called The Ohio Movement. Yeah. And we did quite a bit of traveling in the States of West Virginia, Pennsylvania, and Ohio. That group stayed together for about 10 years.

Tia Imani Hanna: What's your hometown?

Pam Wise: Steubenville, Ohio. It’s the hometown of Dean Martin. [laughter] My dad and him went to school, went to grade school together, actually. There is a lot of [unintelligible] in Ohio. Actually, there were a lot of the slaves came from the South and migrated north to Ohio.

Tia Imani Hanna: Wow. So that was a really a big learning experience. So, you guys are touring already. So what age were you during this time? So, this was during your teens or…?

Pam Wise: Yes, this was during my teens. I would say from like being a freshman. Like we started the band, I think when I was a junior in high school and we were just working around town and after I graduated. By the time I graduated we were traveling. Yeah, around 17 till about 12th grade, about 20, 21, something like that. And then I made my move to Cleveland, Ohio. Then I came to Detroit. And…

Tia Imani Hanna: That was all based on just what was happening in the music scene, how you ended up in Detroit?

Pam Wise: Actually, I had a older brother who used to live in Detroit years ago. He actually, when he graduated from high school, my mother was looking for him one day and she said, “Where's is Craig?” She said, “Where's Craig? I haven't seen him all day.” And he saved up like a hundred dollars and brought this old raggedy jalopy and drove it to Detroit because he didn't want to be in Steubenville anymore. And we had a friend of ours that lived up here and he just ended up on our friend's doorstep unannounced. So, our friend called my mom and said Craig is up here. And she said, “You know what? Tell him he can stay.” Because she was… her mind was at ease. She knew where he was. She said, “I guess he can just stay in Detroit.” And he said, after he started continuing his education and got his self together. He said, “If I ever get a good job in Detroit.” He said he wanted to move back because he left Detroit. He spent about a year up here and had some hard times and he decided to go back, continue his education. He went to school in Cleveland and Pittsburgh and went to Hampton Institute in West Virginia. And when he finished his education, he said he wanted to come back to Detroit cause he liked Detroit. And so, he ended up getting a really good job in Detroit. We were in Cleveland for a while, where he worked, and then I moved to Cleveland with him. There was nothing going on in Steubenville, it’s such a small town. It's like you could walk from one end of town to the other in 20 minutes. So, there wasn't a whole lot going on there. The band was breaking up at that time and everybody was tired of everybody. Everybody just wanted to grow and, you start thinking about other things, and people wanted to continue their education or whatever it is that they really wanted to do. So, I ended up leaving and moving to Cleveland to stay with my brother. And then he got a good job in Detroit. And we came here. We came to Detroit, which was really cool. I was glad that I came. It was hard at first, but, after I got acclimated to the city, I was good to go. I had a couple of day jobs. I worked at Blue Cross Blue Shield for a while. I worked at the Bank of the Commonwealth, which was really good, cool job. It’s now known as Chase, JP Morgan Chase, but long time ago, went through several transitions. And I think that was one of the most… that was one of my favorite jobs, actually, is working at the bank. I worked downtown and I worked in a bank vault so like my till was like $1.5 million a day. It was one-sided, didn’t have enough money to eat lunch, looking at all that cash, you couldn't mess with it, but it taught me the importance of money and organizing and things like that. So, it was… I was glad that I took that job.

Tia Imani Hanna: So, did you have any time in-between to practice or did you play in playing gigs at night or are you looking for gigs at night?

Pam Wise: I would say for the first couple of years I was here, I wasn't doing any gigging. I was checking out the music scene. I was going to different places and checking stuff out, but I did have music that I wanted to record. And so, I met some other musicians after a couple of years and I performed with them. There were some R and B groups around that I performed with, but I had my own music that I wanted to record. So, after meeting some people, I went to the studio to record some of my tunes and something happened to their equipment. And Wendell knew these people because he was producing some R & B groups out of that studio. So, he came by one day and….

Tia Imani Hanna: For my audience, this is Wendell Harrison, a legendary jazz player here in Detroit. Go on.

Pam Wise: Yeah. That's how I met Wendell because Wendell said, “I have a studio and all my stuff is working.” So, I loaded up. We took my piano over there and I started recording with him and that's how we hooked up. And he liked my music. He said, “It's got an R & B flavor, but it's got a great jazz flavor to it too.” We started collaborating on different tunes and it actually, the relationship turned out to be good, which he's now my husband and we've known each other for, oh man, since the eighties. And then through Wendell I met Marcus Belgrave. He was one of the first prominent musicians that I met. And I ended up renting an upstairs flat from Marcus. I stayed with him and his family for a few years, and chain reaction.

Tia Imani Hanna: So, composition. Now, when you first started playing piano, did you immediately start writing your own music or was it just something that came along with learning how to play or did that develop separately? How do you approach composition?

Pam Wise: It's interesting that you said that because one of your relatives reminds me of myself. Hanna was my piano student. And after we would do our lessons, when she was about, I guess she was, must've been about six or seven at the time.

Tia Imani Hanna: Oh, you mean my niece? Okay.

Pam Wise: Yeah. She reminded me so much of me because she would, after we would do our lessons, she would say, listen to this song that I wrote. Then she would play it for me. And that's how I started composing. I would go through my different piano lessons and stuff I had in my books, but I was always experimenting with my own compositions. And Hanna reminded me so much of myself when she was doing that. And I would tell her mother, I said, “She might be a great composer one day.” Cause she would always, and we would have to sit there. The lesson was a half an hour. Hanna would have us there for 45 minutes after the half an hour lesson, playing her compositions for us. And I thought that was really cool. I said, “Oh, she reminds me so much of me.” That's how I started composing. I think noodling around, but like I had the chord structure, and then my that's what my dad was saying, “Oh, she's got a good sense of chord structure and melody and stuff.”

Tia Imani Hanna: Well over the years… Now, of course, now you've got all these skills and you've learned from playing with everybody else and you've picked up things and I'm sure you've asked different people. Were there different mentors? And you have Wendell to ask a lot of things too? Cause I know he knows all that theory and arranging. Besides Wendel, how many other mentors did you think you've accessed over the years?

Pam Wise: Oh, there was so many because staying with Marcus, he had a piano in the basement and he said you could go down there and practice anytime you want it. But there was just such a trail of musicians that would come through there. Johnny O'Neil, then you had the jazz development workshop down on Grand River. Roy Brooks would come through. People like Lamont Hamilton, who was a saxophone player who is not with us anymore. Hiroshima Cox, Kenny Cox, even Kenny Garrett. I was around a lot of people who were writing. Who were writing and arranging at that time and even though I didn't feel that I was really that great of a player, I just felt if I kept hanging around the environment, I would learn a lot, and I did. That experience with the Jazz Development Workshop was a thing that Marcus had put together. And Wendell was a part of it. They were teaching jazz classes down there. They had a big band where Johnny Allen taught a big band arranging and it was just a great school and great environment to be in, which I think is lacking today, something that needs to continue. But yeah, I had a lot of different mentors in Detroit. And Detroit has a certain thing about them where they just take you under their wing and they just show you. Show you the way, and I'm still trying to get there, but…

Tia Imani Hanna: [laughing] Yeah, I know. How do you know when you've gotten ‘there’, wherever ‘there’ is?

Pam Wise: You never know. It's always, you're always learning. It's always going to be.

Tia Imani Hanna: So, you're a perpetual student. So, when did you start getting students?

Pam Wise: I've always, even when I was coming up, I've always had students because, even when I was like taking piano lessons, I would show my other friends. Because when you spend time together, “Show me how to do this. Show me how to do that.” This is what you're doing, I want to learn how to do it too. You just kinda just do that naturally, I think. And then when I started getting students that would pay me, that wouldn't come until much, much later. But when I came to Detroit, I got involved with the summer youth arts program. It was a wonderful program. They've been trying to recreate it for years, but they haven't been successful in doing it, but it was a situation where we had all arts disciplines. I taught this program for about six years where we had jazz and we had creative writing, stage set design, costuming, this was like a six-to-eight-week program. And we all had to come together at the end of this program with a production. So, I taught this program for about six years for the City of Detroit, and it was a very rewarding experience. And I would say that most of the students that came out of that program are doing some wonderful things now. And that's some good reflection to look back on where yeah. So, hopefully, they can get it going again in some kind of way, but I don't know. It takes a lot to get people on board to a situation like that.

Tia Imani Hanna: So, what have you been doing while Covid has been going on?

Pam Wise: Lot of practicing.

Tia Imani Hanna: That's good.

Pam Wise: A lot of writing, a lot of recording. We had the opportunity and the Sister Strings for the Detroit Jazz Festival, which was really good. It was virtual. And it was kinda, I think it was strange for us because we didn't have, really, a live audience. We just were, just streaming and yeah. We didn't really have audience feedback. It was strange cause that's what kind of fuels us to go, but I think we did an excellent job with that production and…

Tia Imani Hanna: Yeah, I think we did too.

Pam Wise: Yeah. And then, I've been recording streaming music for my church and Wendell just had a CD new CD that was released that features me and some other Detroit prominent players. And so, we have been working on that. I just think the sad part is the economic downturn future for us musicians and artists and trying to figure out how we're going to fit into this this matrix of while this pandemic is going on, economically, how we're going to survive and what we have to do to support ourselves, as well as support others. It's very questionable at this time.

Tia Imani Hanna: Have you all done any of the concerts in the living room type thing with tip jars, digital tip jars or anything like that?

Pam Wise: No. Not yet. We've been still holding what we call… Wendell has these “Upper Room Jam Sessions” over here at the house, in our studio, which we have just a couple of other players come over. And it's just, it's a learning thing. Where Wendell teaches jazz improvisation because he's like the guru. So, they all seek knowledge. And everybody wants to keep playing. But may be that we will turn that into some type of streaming thing or tip jar thing, but I'm like, if they don't have any economic stimulus package people, aren't going to be able to afford it. How are they going to support, support the tip jar when they don't have any money? But, hopefully, things so things will work out. I hope that our country learns a lot. And, hopefully, we keep voting for responsible people to be in charge of the government. We'll have some type of leadership when it comes to these kind of things, because I think if there was proper leadership, we could have beat the pandemic a long time ago.

Tia Imani Hanna: True that. True that.

Pam Wise: Here we are. The uncertainty of it all is just, it's just mind boggling.

Tia Imani Hanna: We do what we can. And as I say on this show all the time, our job is to make art. And make art and make more art and continue to make art. And give people hope in that way, because that's what we have our skills in. So, hopefully, this does make a difference for everyone. And I know it makes a difference for me.

Pam Wise: And art is in everything that we do, everything that we look at, every chair that we sit in, every computer that's designed. I don't care what it is, art is always involved. We have to keep creating.

Tia Imani Hanna: Let's talk about some of the things that you have created. Now you have, how many albums do you have right now that you've done, your solo albums?

Pam Wise: At five right now and…

Tia Imani Hanna: Five. Okay. That's pretty impressive. I was gonna say that you're heavily influenced on, I guess, Latin styles of playing, or Cuban music. Now, where did that come from? From your history, you talk about the R & B sound and into the mixing, into the jazz. Where did the Latin come from?

Pam Wise: You know, it was just something that was in me. I've always been, I've always wanted to trace the music of my ancestors. And I think that's what kind of fueled it. I was always curious about where the, where our music originated from. And so, I began researching. African rhythms, Afro-Cuban rhythms, the migration of African people to the Americas. And that's how I became interested in that. And after, of course, doing DNA on Ancestry.com, you find all these different elements that we’re made of. What was curious to me about it is how these traditional African rhythms stayed with us. Through R&B music, through all types of music, even the dance portion of it. We still carry this with us for thousands of years. And one time I remember a grant project that I got and I was writing some Afro-Cuban music fused with Jazz. But I also met a dancer, who later married Francisco Mora, a good friend of mine, which helped me do a lot of research on Afro-Cuban rhythms and Jazz music and how it originated and how we fuse it together. And I also was curious about the dance portion because in their culture, the dance, the music, and the praise and worship, that's all one thing. It's not separated like we separate things over here. It's just like all one thing. And so, I was also researching the dance part of it and I tore up my knees doing it. But anyway, it was pretty interesting because we staged the thing where we had some hip-hop dancing and we had traditional African dance and we had my friend's wife, who was Afro-Cuban descent, look at it. And she was like, the dances were not different from the traditional Afro-Cuban and what they were doing with the Hip Hop. It was the same moves. It was just that the young people don't know the story behind the different dance moves and things like that. And when the young people found out, they were just really blown away.

Tia Imani Hanna: I'm pretty blown away by that too. Because yeah, you just don't, you don't realize how connected at all is.

Pam Wise: Or why you do it, why does your body move like that? It's like this history that you've been carrying with you, that’s been generated through many years and you just have no clue what it is. And I think it's vital for us to know who we are. If you don't know who you are, it's going to be hard to move forward. So, it's that Sankofa thing.

[Sankofa (pronounced SAHN-koh-fah) is a word in the Akan Twi and Fante languages of Ghana that translates to "Go back and get it" (san - to return; ko - to go; fa - to fetch, to seek and take) and also refers to the Bono Adinkra symbol represented either with a stylized heart shape or by a bird with its head turned backwards while its feet face forward carrying a precious egg in its mouth. Sankofa is often associated with the proverb, “Se wo were fi na wosankofa a yenkyi," or “Sankofa w’onkyir” which translates as: "It is not wrong to go back for that which you have forgotten."[1][2] It implores for Africans to reach back into ancient history for traditions and customs that have been left behind.]

Tia Imani Hanna: I know on your Facebook page, you talk a lot about the history of Detroit musicians, so is that something that you're making an effort to, I guess, make more public is the history of Jazz musicians in Detroit. Is there a project in the works for that?

Pam Wise: I just, I think a lot of other people do it, like Mark Stryker, who is a prominent writer, who has a book out about Detroit Jazz history, but I don't think it really tells the whole story, you probably need several books. But Detroit has such a rich history of putting Jazz on the map that I thought that it was important for us not to forget any of them. I've had the pleasure of meeting a few, but there was a lot of them that came before me that Wendell knows, that taught him, and so I thought it was important to keep their legacy alive so people would know who they were. Some people aren't here anymore. People that taught Wendell. Trumpeter, Lonnie Hill, who took Wendell under his wing. And cause a lot of times when he would go to high school, you get laughed at, stuff like that. "Boy you don't know what you doing" and stuff like that but certain people just latch on to you and just, hey man, they teach you how to dress, teach you how to play your instrument and what to do and what not to do. And I think those people always need to be, we need to remember our ancestors and what they've done for us and the people that are still here that have put Detroit on the map, such as bassist, Ron Carter. People like that are very important to our legacy in Detroit Jazz. So hopefully, maybe a film will come at some point. I'm not a filmmaker, but I think one of the problems that I have with some of the books that have been written about Detroit Jazz is they don't capture a lot of the stories, it's just a news report. Oh, this person did that. This person did that. But that doesn't really speak to somebody came into the Blue Bird Inn and tried to sit in and this went down, sure. Or how they ended up getting that gig as opposed to another person. I think people want to hear those stories too.

Tia Imani Hanna: I think you're right. Do you have access to those stories? Between you and Wendell, I bet you have a lot of stories to tell.

Pam Wise: Wendell's really got most of them. At him being 78 years old, one of the writers was just telling him to just turn on the recorder and just talk. Cause he's got some really excellent stories to tell. So, I think him and Bill Harris might be putting something together soon.

Tia Imani Hanna: Oh, that's great. Yeah. Glad to hear that. And cause I'm sure you have stories. Still to this day, aren't as many women on the bandstand and coming up with all those men, how do you navigate that? How did you navigate that?

Pam Wise: Actually, it wasn't that bad for me. Because a lot of the older guys, they just want to show you if you're interested in learning what you want to do. In terms of learning music, a lot of the older cats were very helpful. Even Roy Brooks, a lot of times he would, wouldn't be feeling so well. He would come down to the workshop and just start playing the piano and yeah, say, “Look at this, look at me, look at what I'm doing.” You learn tunes or how to voice the chord or, I never experienced them being like really rude to me or anything like that. Most of the cats that I met were pretty cool. I didn't really experience any type of heavy negative vibes. Some of them look at you strange if they didn't know you, if you sit in and be like, Oh, I don't know about her. I never heard of that. Who are you? But not too much of that, maybe one or two people, but most of it was pretty positive.

Tia Imani Hanna: That's good. I'm glad to hear that. I'm glad to hear that. Cause, you know, I don't get a chance to talk to that many women musicians just to ask how was it back then? How was it when you started out and how did things go? How did you get to where you are? Because a lot of it is word of mouth or auditory or you're sitting at somebody's lap and listening and say, oh, asking questions because that was not my experience. A lot of it was like, just go woodshed by yourself, and hope for the best.

Pam Wise: Yeah, no, I think myself… Marion came before me, Marion Hayden. And I think Marion had a pretty good experience with guys taking her up under their wing and showing her the way. I think, for the most part, we've done pretty good with that. Marion's been doing it a little longer than me, but I think we've gotten pretty good vibes from most of the cats.

Tia Imani Hanna: Oh, that's good to hear. Very good to hear. Are you working on any new compositions right now?

Pam Wise: Yes. Yes. I actually wrote composed some music. I had a project that I did back in 2019 called “Matrix X, Detroit, The Gentrification Nation,” because our city is changing. It was like this production thing that involved dance, poetry and music. And I had a couple of scenes that were acted out. Bill Harris, famous writer, wrote the scenes for me and we acted them out about the different changes that people go through during the gentrification process, like how some people are pushed out of their homes or having to relocate or the financial and economical downturn for some people. For some people, might've worked out okay. But I wrote some compositions in lieu of that. So, I need to work on recording them. So that's what I'm doing now.

Tia Imani Hanna: And then what was your most recent album?

Pam Wise: The most recent was “A New Message from the Tribe,” which features a lot of prominent Detroit players. And we actually played some of that music on the Sister Strings concert. We played “Plena Plenty” and I didn't record “Uncle Checks’ Cha-Cha-Cha.” “Good Hair,” did that. Musique Noire did that for their “Good Hair.”

Tia Imani Hanna: Musique Noire. Yeah.

Pam Wise: Did that on their CD? Which was pretty.

[“Plena Plenty” plays here]

Tia Imani Hanna: So, I wanted to ask you too about, at some point I wanted to do a series about Jazz families and you and Wendell in the same house. And how does that all work out? So, as he has separate projects and you have separate projects and then you guys have joint projects together sometimes? Or mostly?

Pam Wise: Yeah. Or Cause it, cause we ended up being involved with each other because even if he has his own project, he's going to be asking me a lot of questions, “Pam, how do you do this?” And blah, blah. Or “How do you do that?” Just like I was pulling him in the studio trying to get set up for this project, for this podcast, my podcast, I got to ask him, “How do you do this? How do you do that?” [laughter] Luckily, we have a big house and during the pandemic, we haven't killed each other yet. So yeah.

Tia Imani Hanna: That's cool. So, when you're all writing together, like I know when he's writing, do you guys separate and go into different rooms and just say, “Leave me alone. I can't talk to you cause I'm writing.” Or is it more, is it more yeah, how do you do this and how do you do that? Or listen to this? Or how does, how do you do it? I'm just curious. It's because everybody has a different writing technique. So, I'm just curious how that works out with two composers in the same house.

Pam Wise: We don't get in each other is way too much. A lot of times, one day we'll have an idea and after he has a sketched out, he'll ask me what I think, Now I'll do the same thing for him because a lot of times I might need his help with the arrangement and voicings for other instruments and things like that. So, he's able to help tremendously with that or tell me what sounds good, what voicing sound good for certain instruments and what don’t, so I'm always asking him questions and he always asked me stuff. We don't get in each other's way too much for that. Luckily, like I said, luckily, we have a big house, so that helps a lot.

Tia Imani Hanna: Have you guys ever gotten in a drag-out fight about a song?

Pam Wise: Yeah, because sometimes he'll, like, he'll come up with an arrangement. I'll tell him, “I don't like that.” And he say, “I think it sounds good for that.” And I'll be like, “No, it doesn't. I don’t I want that.” So, it won't be a knockout drag-out fight, but it'll be can heated. Not as heated as him and Marcus [Belgrave] and Harold McKinney. Boy they used to get into some big shouting matches. “Yes, you did.” “No, you didn’t.” “Yes, you did.” “No, you didn’t.” But then all of a sudden Marcus will say, “I think we should play it like this.” And everybody would be like, “Yeah, man, you're right.” It was funny. I think that trio, and I witnessed some of their drag out fights. Then it would be just like 15 minutes later they be hollering and screaming and then every, like everything is like back to normal, like nothing ever happened.

Tia Imani Hanna: Yeah. So, from the outside, looking in, it sounds like somebody is killing each other.

Pam Wise: The one that would always bring everything back and he would just say like one thing, “Man, we should phrase it like this.” They'd be like, yeah, Bel, you got it.” [laughter] So, me and Wendell, we aren't that bad. We do have our opinions.

Tia Imani Hanna: Yes. S, totally different subject. Do you do you remember the first album you ever bought with your own money?

Pam Wise: Yeah, I would say it was, might've been The Dramatics, which is “[What You See Is] What You Get.”

Tia Imani Hanna: Oh yeah.

Pam Wise: That album. I think there might've been one of the first ones. It might've been a couple before that, but that's the one that stands out. The Dramatics.

Tia Imani Hanna: And what was like the first, really, like when you felt like you really understand Jazz, what would be the first album that you bought?

Pam Wise: Man. It was funny because my older brother would bring a lot of the Jazz music to our house in Steubenville. Cause he was out in the world getting his education and everything. So, he would bring albums back by McCoy, John Coltrane, Leon Thomas, different people like that. My father had a lot of Jazz records, so we always had Jazz in the house, so I never really had to buy that kind of stuff cause we already had it, yeah. Yeah. My parents were always playing Jazz. I think we were listening to Oscar Peterson, all kinds of stuff. I think Oscar was like one of the first pianists that I gravitated to because of his technique was just so off the chain. Then you have Ramsey Lewis. He was a pianist that I liked that also crossed over from the early Jazz years to being popular. And it was just a shame because it just seemed like the radio stations stopped playing certain things. They would categorize, they started categorizing stuff so much. Before it wasn't a big thing, like you could turn on a Black radio station and you just heard Black music. Whether it was Jazz, R & B. If it was good stuff, they played it. They might play it at different times of the day. They might have a time where they play if more Jazz than they would play R & B. But if music, they just played it. But now you have all this categorizing stuff. This Smooth Jazz this kind of Jazz is right now. So that, I think that just kinda changed. The way we look at music now, or the way we listen to it. When I was coming up, we had like listening parties. You would have people with great album collections and you would go to each other's house and just listen to music. Do that quite a bit. And no one said a whole lot, there wasn't a whole lot of conversation going on. You just sat down and a person will put on their record, “Listen. This is what I picked up today.” It might've been Chick Corea's “Return to Forever,” latest album or something, which was really cool. People don't do that. People don't do that anymore. Of course, there was less TV then.

Tia Imani Hanna: It makes a difference. It makes a difference. Also, that now everything is… even back in the day, they had 45s a lot of times. So, if you didn't have the long play record, you had a 45. And we're doing that with tracks now. The streaming downloads are just, you can buy one track or you don't ever have to listen to the whole album if you don't want to. And then there's places where you don't have to buy anything and listen to the whole thing as much as you want.

Pam Wise: So yeah. It's, yeah, economically I would say, cause think about it, when you bought a 45 back in the day, you had the A and B side and you might've paid a dollar for two songs for the A & B side. Of course, you brought it mainly for the song that you heard on the radio, the most. Occasionally, you might play the B side and say, “Oh, I like that too.” But if you think about monetarily of what you paid for that back in the day, back in the sixties or whatever, and what people buy a track for now, there's really not that much difference.

Tia Imani Hanna: It's a… the more we change, the more we stay the same.

Pam Wise: Exactly. That sounds like a song title, actually.

Tia Imani Hanna: [laughing] Yeah, because we get to, we do get to the same. It's just a new technology, the same way of doing things, but just a new technology.

Pam Wise: Yeah. Yeah, you're right. You're right. I'm saying that maybe we should be charging $2 for a track instead of just a buck.

Tia Imani Hanna: You know, do try it and see what happens. Yeah. What would be your desert island is now, like if you were stuck on a desert island, what five discs would you take?

Pam Wise: What five discs would I take? Definitely take some McCoy Tyner. I'd probably take all of his stuff. Yeah. I just love Baba McCoy Tyner. To me, he was one of the most innovative players that had a special gift in terms, the way he improvised, developing his own style. I know he spent a lot of his early days with John Coltrane, which he was very appreciative of that because it brought some other things out in his playing that he was able to carry with him. So, I would say that in terms of pianists, then I would take five of his discs.

Tia Imani Hanna: And call it good.

Pam Wise: Yes, that's right. That’s right.

Tia Imani Hanna: All right. I don't have any more random questions [laughter], but I was just curious as to what, what your sound inner soundscape was going. That it's the soundtrack of your life is McCoy Tyner

Pam Wise: But I have a question for you.

Tia Imani Hanna: Yeah.

Pam Wise: How well did you know your Uncle Roland?

Tia Imani Hanna: I did not get to know him until I moved to New York in my thirties. And then I didn’t get to see him very often because they lived in upstate New York and I was in Brooklyn. So, I got a couple of maybe two or three Thanksgivings with them. And he did a couple of concerts down in New York and I got to go and see him at those concerts and talk to him and hang out a little bit after, but not a lot. I didn't get to know him very well. Cause he was, we were in Detroit and he was in New York and traveling all over the world and I just didn't get to know him. My dad's family was just not close. They never were. So, I really didn't get to know him very well, but I got to play violin with him. And he was playing cello because he was a cellist. I got to play with him one time at Thanksgiving and I'm just like, and I was laughing. I was like, “So I finally get to play with you and you're not playing piano.” I'm practicing my Jazz and stuff. And I'm like, Ooh, I get to play my Uncle Roland. Not.

[laughter]

Pam Wise: Well at least you got some time with him. I'm sure.

Tia Imani Hanna: Exactly. But I did get to know him. The first thing he told me, cause I was asking him at the time, I think I had a teacher who was saying, “You should learn 50 tunes and play them on all 12 keys”. And he said, “No. Just learn five and play them.” Because he said I'm playing some of the same tunes I've been playing for 40 years.

Pam Wise: Yeah. Yeah. And he's probably right. If you learned five good tunes and transpose them. That will give you a good footing for you needed to know; I agree. Yeah.

Tia Imani Hanna: And it depends on the tunes, because if you learn some tunes, those changes are used on 25 songs. So, if you learn those changes and everybody's every other tune. Yeah, but he didn't go into that much detail. I had to find that out later. Did you freeze on me? You froze on me.

[We had some technical difficulties. So, while we get her back online, listen to one of her tunes called “Blues for Mary Lou.”]

So, Pam, so where can people find you online?

Pam Wise: You can go to my website, “PamelaWisemusickeys.com” and all my releases and stuff is on YouTube, all digital platforms, Band Camp is something that I just recently put a lot of stuff up on. So, you can check out Band Camp, Apple Music, You Tube, Spotify, all of that good stuff.

Tia Imani Hanna: Thank you so very much for being on my show today and sharing your wisdom and your history and your skills and your wonderful self with us today.

Pam Wise: Thank you. This is awesome that you started doing the podcast. Then I think this, these are new grounds that we have to dive into, during the pandemic. That was a great idea.

Tia Imani Hanna: It's been a fun idea. So, I'm get a chance to talk with people like you. So, thank you so much. And we'll see everybody next time on Tia Time.

Tia Imani Hanna: Thank you for joining us this week on Tia Time with Artists. Make sure to visit our website, tiaviolin.com, where you can subscribe to the show in iTunes and never miss an episode. Please leave us a rating wherever you listen to podcasts. We really appreciate your comments, and we'll mine them to bring you more amazing episodes.

I’d like to thank this inaugural season's sponsors: The folks at Jazz Alliance of Mid-Michigan or JAMM, Michigan ArtShare, a program of Michigan State University Extension is a partner in supporting the Tia Time podcast, and Shambones Music. Without their support this podcast would not be possible. Thank you so much. If you would also like to contribute to the show, you can find us on https://www.patreon.com/TiaTime1.

If you want to continue the conversation about topics discussed on the show or start new ones with like-minded people, join us at the Tia Time Lounge on Facebook.

Thank you for listening. See you next week at Tia Time!

+ Transcription

Tia Time with Artists, with guest Sara Caswell 01/23/2021

Tia Imani Hanna: Welcome to Tia Time with Artists, the weekly podcast where we discuss the methods, challenges, and real-life experiences of living our creative dreams. What kind of creative warrior are you? Musician? Filmmaker? Painter? Choreographer? Poet? Sculptor? Fashionista? Let’s talk about it right now. I’m your host, Tia Imani Hanna.

Tia Imani Hanna: Welcome to Tia Time with Artists. And this week my guest is Grammy nominated recording artist, violinist, mandolinist, composer, educator, Sara Caswell. Welcome.

Sara Caswell: Thank you so much for having me. Great to be here.

Tia Imani Hanna: I'm excited to talk to you. I think the first time I met you was years ago in Detroit or in Lansing or somewhere like that, it was associated with the I.A J.E., The International Association of Jazz Educators’ “Sisters in Jazz” concert, Sunny Wilkinson and Ingrid Jensen, and gosh, I can't remember who else. Marian Hayden, I think were involved in mentoring the women in the group, at least for part of the time. I'm not sure exactly how that rotation worked, but you all were doing a concert and I got a chance to hear you. I think you did McCoy Tyner's “Blues on the Corner.”

Sara Caswell: Oh my gosh.

Tia Imani Hanna: I stole that from you. As soon as I heard it, I was, like, Oh, that's hip! I performed it for years after that. So, I was like, yeah.

Sara Caswell: Oh, that's awesome. It was so that was back in 90, I guess it was 98. At the time IAJE, which is the International Association for Jazz Education. They had a… I guess it was kind of a competition of sorts for women, women collegiate jazz musicians. And that was the first year they did it, inaugural year. And the so it was a group of, I think there were five of us, so it was me Anat Cohen, Jody Prosnick, Dawn Clement, and oh I'm forgetting the drummer's name. It's escaping me right now, but our, our coach… oh, Lorraine Falna that was who our drummer was. And our coach was Ingrid Jensen. And at the time I think Sunny Wilkinson was supervising it. She… at least she was the one who was really very much present, kind of was there in a daily, in a daily way. But we met during that… well, actually I guess it was for a couple of days before the conference, to rehearse and hang, and then we presented our set of music during the convention. And then following the convention, we did a few concerts in the U.S. I think one of them was in Detroit. And it was an old, old dance hall. It was just beautiful, in the downtown area. And yeah, that was our, one of our first concerts that we did together. But yeah, we had a we had a really fun run and the cool thing was, I think there's something always very special when you get a group of women like that together, especially since we're not accustomed to being in an all-female jazz ensemble. So, there was that unique and really memorable experience being there and sort of feeling that, that kind of connection and sisterhood that developed from it. But there was also, I think, just that bonding that came from it being the first year and realizing that this was, hopefully, the first of many opportunities for young Jazz musicians to connect and to really feel how that femininity can get into the music and really create some beautiful things. So, we're all still very close. It's, it's pretty remarkable actually, given how many years have passed and how many miles are between us. But yeah, we still are certainly connected on Facebook and, you know, Instagram, and all the social media and whenever there's an opportunity to connect at different jazz conferences and festivals. Yeah, it's like when we see each other, it's like nothing, no time has passed. You know, where we very instantly, you know, we connect. So, that's great.

Tia Imani Hanna: Very great. Very great. So , you were at school at that time. Where were you studying at that point?

Sara Caswell: I was doing my undergraduate degree at Indiana University. My hometown. So, I was doing a dual degree. I was doing a bachelor's in violin performance. So, the more of the classical side of things. And then I was also doing a bachelor's in jazz violin. So yeah, it was a really, it was a really wonderful environment for me to be in. I mean, first of all, of course, I knew the town really well. I grew up there. My father was a professor there, but even with that aside, like if I just had dropped in from another town, the environment that the school had and has was ideal for what I was wanting to do. Cause I really, you know, I love playing classical music. I was doing a lot of competitions and performances and loved that aspect of, of my music, musical upbringing, but I also was, obviously, loving jazz and was loving the music I was learning from David Baker, who was head of the department at the time. And I've been studying with him since I was about eight or nine. So, I'd grown up learning about this music and playing it and it… most of the schools, when it came time to decide where I wanted to go, most schools would want me to make a decision. They were like, you have to do one or the other. And that wasn't me. And I wasn't sure exactly how these musics would sort of come together if they would come together. I wasn't quite sure how that would materialize, but I certainly wasn't ready to make a decision one way or the other. And so, I used one of the few schools that allowed me to do a double major. And that was exactly what I needed to really sort of go my own way and with the guidance of the professors there, and kind of figure out in my own time, how my music would develop and where that would lead. So.

Tia Imani Hanna: Oh, that's great. I mean, to have that kind of support is pretty amazing because, yeah, as a violin player, it's kind of like, basically, when I was growing up, it was just classical music, period. That was it.

Sara Caswell: Yeah.

Tia Imani Hanna: Nobody was doing anything different. Nobody could teach anything different. And if you wanted to do anything different, you really had to figure it out all by yourself. So, yeah, that's pretty great to have that support because it took a long, long, long time for me to start playing Jazz. You know, so just start with David Baker at that point when you were little, that's… what a blessing what a blessing.

(David Nathaniel Baker, Jr. (1931 - 2016) was a world-renowned musician, composer, and conductor who served as distinguished professor of Music and Chairman of the Jazz Department at Indiana University’s Jacobs School of Music from 1966 to 2016. A virtuosic performer on multiple instruments and top in his field in several disciplines, Dr. Baker taught and performed throughout the USA, Canada, Europe, Scandinavia, New Zealand, and Japan. He also served as Artistic Director and Conductor of the Smithsonian Jazz Masterworks Orchestra from 1990 - 2012. Baker was among the first to codify the largely aural tradition of jazz, writing 70 books on jazz improvisation, jazz composition and arranging, jazz pedagogy, how to learn tunes, how to practice, and other related topics. He also has more than 400 articles and 75 recordings to his credit. Best known for his work as a jazz pedagogue, Baker’s impressive list of alumni include such distinguished artists and educators as Jamey Aebersold, Jim Beard, Chris Botti, Ralph Bowen, Michael Brecker, Randy Brecker, John Clayton, Todd Coolman, JB Dyas, Peter Erksine, Jeff Hamilton, John Hasse, Monika Herzig, Bob Hurst, Shannon LeClaire, Alan Pasqua, Shawn Pelton, and Tom Walsh.)

Sara Caswell: I do feel really lucky and, I'm almost certain that this, that that opportunity would not have come about had, had we not lived in Bloomington and, you know, had David not been there… because as you said, like the… at that time, those opportunities weren't necessarily available. It wasn't really until I guess it was starting in basically like 95, 96, like the late nineties, when you started to see this these opportunities for string practitioners of different styles coming together for summer workshops and those kinds of things where, you know, where you start to see that, yeah, there are other styles of music that are played on these instruments, on string instruments. And you know, so much of how we view the world is based on what we actually see and what we hear. And when we can see a bluegrass fiddler doing their thing, or we can see a jazz violinist doing their thing, or if we can, you know, just really witness, up close and personal, what that sounds like and what it feels like to be in a live performance, hearing that stuff, then it, it really can change your trajectory with the music that you play.

Tia Imani Hanna: At some point now, you got your double major degree. So, you've got two Bachelors of Art, one in jazz and one in classical. Okay.

Sara Caswell: Yeah. [laughter]

Tia Imani Hanna: All right. So, I know. That was even, even with all that exposure that must've been tough.

Sara Caswell: You know, it surprisingly wasn't that bad because a lot of the requirements for the two degrees overlapped. So, you know, the music history was required for both classes. Music theory, ear training, all those sorts of things, were requirements for both degrees. So, it wasn't really as big of an issue. Where it came to be a little complicated was with ensemble requirements and with recital requirements. So, for instance, you know, obviously there are certain number of semesters that you'd have to be in an orchestra. And a certain number of semesters you had to be in jazz band and trying to figure that out was a bit of a logistical puzzle. But we did it. The administration, they were, were really great to work with as far as being flexible and doing what they could to try to make it work. I'm, luckily, I wasn't the first person to go through doing something like that. So, there was there was a bit of a precedence, but I, you know, still, it's always there's always a little bit of maneuvering that has to be done to kind of make that work. But, you know, I ended up taking some summer ensembles, so I could do orchestras during the summer. I would do jazz band during the year. And then during the course of the four years I was doing some combos as small group jazz situations and I was also doing string quartets and all that. So is there was a, I mean, there's a lot on the plate as far as ensembles go, in a way that was the most ideal. Cause you're playing and you're collaborating with your colleagues and, yeah, I mean, it's what you want to be doing, is learning through that kind of experience. So, where there was double time, like as far as like double requirements, it was in classes where I was really wanting to be spending my time. So, it was great.

Tia Imani Hanna: Well, now the part that I'm… like, my brain is switching and I'm like, I can't switch from classical to jazz and back again, like really easily. I have to practice classical music to no end now, cause I haven't played it in so long. But even, but even so, like… because the sounds are so different, the attacks are so different. How do you do that? I mean, it's just… because the classical is like ‘on the beat’ and almost ahead of the beat and the attacks are very pointed and very sharp and very bright and I don't know, I have to actually play a different instrument when I do that, because my setup is different. So, I can't. And now it's like, I don't even like it anymore. I like listening to it. I don't like playing it.

[laughter]

Sara Caswell: It's, you know, it's funny, I'm kind of in the same boat at this point, because I don't really do much like straight-up classical music anymore. Every once in a while, I'll have a gig that comes up like a recording session, usually kind of like an orchestral situation or like a chamber ensemble sort of thing. And I do play with the New York Pops. I'm a member of that orchestra, but they're doing more standards, standards orchestrated for, you know, large ensemble. Then every once in a while, we'll do like a John Williams tribute, which is a nightmare for me, because it's like, like all 16ths (16th notes) and like total insanity on the fingerboard. But so, I'm out of practice doing that sort of thing. So yeah, I couldn't pick up and switch, you know, switch back and forth, I think, as easily as I used to. I think when I was younger, it wasn't such a big deal because of the fact that I'd grown up doing both. So, I kind of see it as being, someone being bilingual. They aren't necessarily thinking about speaking say in English and then switching over and speaking in Spanish, like, it's, you know, they've, they've grown up with that soundtrack in their lives and it's just, it's a natural way of communicating. So, the fact that when I was a kid I was doing, so I was doing Suzuki violin, started when I was five and a half, and then I started doing Baroque lessons when I was maybe about seven or eight, it was eight years old or so.

Tia Imani Hanna: Baroque lessons, it's like Baroque music, you mean?

Sara Caswell: Yes.

Tia Imani Hanna: Okay.

Sara Caswell: Yeah. Yeah. So, IU also has a really wonderful early music department. And so… and again, my father knew the head of the department, so. And my mom, my mom and dad are both musicologists, and so, they had a really broad perspective musically in the world and wanted to make sure that both my sister and I had that same exposure. Because this is pre-internet, like, you can't just, like, you know, kind of search up all those things in a click of a button. So, so yeah, I was doing Baroque violin lessons and I was also doing Jazz violin lessons when I was at around eight or nine. So, these things were all sort of just around me, and it wasn't something where I was necessarily thinking about switching from style to style. I think as I've gotten older and certainly… so now my, my music is more in the Jazz realm. That said, classical music, as far as technique and musical development and all those things, that is certainly is a part of what I do, but the actual art of performing classical repertoire is out of… I'm out of practice with it. So, I couldn't switch back. And I've definitely taken this time where I've been focusing primarily on Jazz music to really sort of fine tune a lot of the skills as you were talking about. The idea of really finding that, that groove and that pocket and really being able to fine tune a lot of those things that might get, might get blurred with… or might get diluted with… like trying to do classical at the same time. Yeah, so it's… I can't switch back like I used to, but I'm getting older. I can't do that anymore.

Tia Imani Hanna: I mean, it's just one, I'm always in awe of people. Cause like I know Wynton Marsalis would always talk about that, that he would have to practice for months and months to do a classical gig, you know, and, and then he just stopped at some point, he just stuck with Jazz and I get it.

Sara Caswell: Me too.

Tia Imani Hanna: It's just, it's such a huge push. So, yeah, so I'm always in awe of people who can do both because I used to be able to do classical pretty well, but I was an orchestral player. I was never, you know, a soloist or anything like that. And that was part of it, was like, I… okay, we're going to play Brahms Fourth again, you know. It's like, I love Brahms Fourth (symphony), but come on. And I was always in the second violins and it's like, that's okay. You know, but it was just like, okay. And cause I don't actually, I don't know why I'm a violin player. I should have been a bass player because I… or a viola player, because I don't like playing up in the stratosphere. I really don't like that. It's just too much. It's way up here. My hands are huge, by the way. So, it's like really hard.

Sara Caswell: Oh, lucky you.

Tia Imani Hanna: You don't have to put the… play like little, teeny stuff that's this close together. I was like, what the heck, you know?

Sara Caswell: It's funny. So, I mean, violin is my main instrument, but I recently acquired a hardanger d'amore, which is a variation of a modern invention and variation on the traditional hardanger violin. So, for your listeners who might not know, hardanger is a Norwegian folk fiddle and it has four strings on top that you play just like you would a violin, but then it also has a set of sympathetic strings underneath that simply resonate with the vibrations of the instrument. So, the result is that you get this really beautifully haunting resonance and like the tail of a note, like it just lasts forever. It's just, it's really, really incredible. So, it's meant for folk dances and, like, a lot of the folk music where you're creating drones and, and that sort of thing. And this particular instrument has five strings on top and five strings below. So, the pitches and the resonance is somewhere… well, it's almost closer to the viola in tone. And it's been so much fun to explore because I was… I'm, you know, I'm so used to the stratosphere with the violin. So, to have those lower pitches and just that fuller bodied tone and warmth is amazing. So, I'm like, Oh, this is kind of fun, maybe I should have played viola instead.

Tia Imani Hanna: I know. I have never actually picked up a viola and I just go, ah, I don't want to learn that. I'm just trying to figure this out still. So, you know, it's like, I've been playing violin now for 44 years.

Sara Caswell: Wow.

Tia Imani Hanna: Something like that. And I'm just like, okay. By now you think I should know something.

Sara Caswell: No. You know, I feel this way every time I pick up the instrument. I'm like, are we… do we know each other? Like. No, but, you know, cause some days you pick up the fiddle and it's like, you know, you're just reconnecting with a part of your body. It's like, you know, there's just… it's so connected. And then there are other days where you pick up the instrument, you're like, oh my God, have I forgotten everything I’ve learned for the past 40 years. But I don't know, there's there is such a beautiful connection that we have to these instruments and, you know, the fact that we've been playing them for so long. It's who we are. It’s like there's so much of that in those instruments for better or for worse. And I don't know, I think we're very lucky to be string players and to be able to make the music that we make and express ourselves on those instruments because they are so connected to the human voice. And you would not want to hear me sing, I would have no career. But I love the fact that I can connect on and I can express myself on an instrument that has that ability to soar and sing as string instruments do.

Tia Imani Hanna: Well, I noticed that I think on one of your recordings, you're playing mandolin now, too.

Sara Caswell: Aha! You went deep. I've been playing a little, a little bit of mandolin. I bought a mandolin about, oh, 20 years ago with the idea of strengthening my chordal understanding of the instrument. You know, since the mandolin is tuned the same way as the violin, it just seemed like a really cool way to visualize chord structures and that would be something that I would spend some time developing. And that was the intent and it ended up sitting in my closet for a very long time. And then a friend of mine, you know, I was talking with them and I was like, I really want to start taking mandolin lessons and so, I started taking lessons with him. And then, from that, one of the groups that I used to play with quite a lot called “Rose and the Nightingale,” the leader of the group was like, “Oh, we'd love to have that mandolin in the band, just as an added voice.”

Tia Imani Hanna: Okay.

Sara Caswell: I was, like, all right. Well, if you have some patience with me as I learn my way around this thing, you know, I'll do my best. So, I… that's the only recording, that album that we did, is the only recording that actually has me playing mandolin on it. You know, I should've probably used some of this COVID time to actually get a little more into it, but, you know, there's only so many hours in the day, but I do love it and it did definitely, it has definitely had an impact on how I visualize the fingerboard on the violin.

Tia Imani Hanna: No, I did the same thing.

Sara Caswell: Oh yeah.

Tia Imani Hanna: I used to work at a music store and then just start buying instruments. I have a ukulele bass. I have a mandolin. I have a ukulele. I've got… you know, I played piano first. So, it was piano and violin were always together and then I sing. So, I said, well, I've got three instruments, I'm good. But the mandolin is lovely, cause I just love that sound. And it's funny because I didn't start thinking about it. I heard a recording. I can't, I think it was… I can't even remember who it was now, but it was a pop album and they had mandolin background and it had such a beautiful tone on this mandolin. And I was, like, that is hip! Because they were just playing these chords and it was just there. And it's the only song in the whole album that has mandolin, but it made such a huge difference. Paula Cole, it was Paula Cole.

Sara Caswell: She's great.

Tia Imani Hanna: Yeah. And I was listening to something, she had this mandolin thing and I was like, that is hip, I got to figure that out. And I said, what is that? A mandolin? And that was so… and then I thought, oh, I could learn chords this way. Even though I had piano, I learned classical piano. So, it's like a whole different world when you start trying to play Jazz stuff.

Sara Caswell: So, yeah, it's funny. I learned how to… my mom was an organist and a pianist. And so, she did her best to teach me how to play piano, but I had no skills whatsoever. She even gave up after a while. She used to, like, just play the fiddle. But I think there's a… what's cool about us playing the mandolin is that we already have the…

Tia Imani Hanna: The left-hand.

Tia Imani Hanna: …manual dexterity on the mandolin because of the fact that it just is basically is translated from the fiddle. So, that made that exploration of chordal structures so much more approachable because it wasn't like I was having to actually learn the piano and then like, sort of get… cause I wasn't going to get any, like, fluidity with the piano, whereas at least, even if I can't get my right-hand plucking technique great on the mandolin, at least I can lay out those things on the mandolin and see how they work. So.

Tia Imani Hanna: Yeah, that, that piece of the pick is like, I don't know what the heck. I'm like, and you can't, you can't, I don't know. And then slurring, like you can't slur. So, it's like, what the hell? How do I play these notes?

Sara Caswell: It did not go well. I did the best I could, but it was like, I'm never going to be a mandolin player. I know this. I’m not aspiring to be a Chris Thile. It's just, we'll put it out there.

(Christopher Scott Thile (born February 20, 1981) is an American mandolinist, singer, songwriter, composer, and radio personality, best known for his work in the progressive acoustic trio Nickel Creek and the acoustic folk and progressive bluegrass quintet Punch Brothers. He is a 2012 MacArthur Fellow.)

Tia Imani Hanna: All right. So, at least I know I'm no alone in that boat. [laughter] Oh, that's funny. So, tell me about working with… I know at some point you started working with Darol Anger for a while. Weren't you on tour with him for a little while?

(Darol Anger is an American violinist and founding member of The David Grisman Quintet.)

Sara Caswell: Yeah, that's another throwback. Yeah, I met him… must have been back in 92 or 93. My sister was taking a summer during her, I think it was somewhere in her college career, she took a summer to go to a variety of jazz camps. And one of the jazz camps that she went to was a Stanford Jazz Workshop. And I was talking with my boyfriend about this. I don't remember if I was there as a camper or if I just kind of went there to audit and just kind of hang out with my sister. So, I think I was like freshman or sophomore in high school at the time. And Darol and the Turtle Island String Quartet, they were there at that workshop teaching. And so, that was my first, my first-time meeting Darol and Mark Summer and those guys, and it was great.

(Mark Summer was the Turtle Island Quartet's original cellist; he is a co-founder of the quartet and performed with Turtle Island (a.k.a. Turtle Island String Quartet) from its founding in 1985 until the fall of 2015.)

I immediately connected with Darol. I actually had like a little crush on him for a while. [laughter] I just thought he was so cool. He was just, you know, this really like just happy guy who was playing fiddle in the most unreal ways, like, just so inspirational. And yeah, so I got to meet him there. And then a few years later he was putting together a tour, a touring project, called “Four Generations of Jazz Violin.” And so, I think we did a handful of concerts. The membership of that group kind of rotated based on people's availability, but Darol was always there. I think Matt Glazer was part of a few shows. Johnny Frigo was part of a few shows. Claude Williams did them as well. I was part of the younger generation and then Regina Carter did a few as well.

(Matt Glaser is an American jazz and bluegrass violinist. He served as the chair of the string department at the Berklee College of Music for more than twenty-five years. He is now the founder and artistic director of Berklee's American Roots Music Program.[1])

(Johnny Frigo (December 27, 1916 – July 4, 2007) was an American jazz violinist and bassist. He appeared in the 1940s as a violinist before working as a bassist. He returned to the violin in the 1980s and enjoyed a comeback, recording several albums as a leader.)

(Claude "Fiddler" Williams (February 22, 1908 – April 26, 2004) was an American jazz violinist and guitarist who recorded and performed into his 90s. He was the first guitarist to record with Count Basie and the first musician to be inducted into the Oklahoma Jazz Hall of Fame)

(Jazz violinist Regina Carter was born on August 6, 1962 in Detroit, Michigan to Dan Carter, an auto worker, and Grace Williamson Carter, an elementary school teacher. She began taking music lessons at the age of two, first for the piano and later for the violin. Though classically trained, she started to become interested in jazz and funk when she was a teenager. She graduated from Cass Technical High School in Detroit, Michigan and enrolled in the New England Conservatory in Boston, Massachusetts. She went on to receive her B.A. degree in music from Oakland University.)

So, she and I were representing the younger generation. And so, we never, we never actually did a concert together. It was one of those things where we were like waving from afar cause we were both in the project, but we never actually did them together. But yeah, so we did a few concerts there together through that. And yeah, that was that. And then I've reconnected with Darol just a few years ago when we were both teaching at Berkeley together. So, yeah, there's the stint that I did with Darol was brief, but it was a really fun project and really having the opportunity to be around him was awesome. And we also ran into each other every summer teaching at Mark O'Connor's fiddle camps.

(Mark O'Connor (born August 5, 1961) is an American violinist and composer whose music combines bluegrass, country, jazz and classical. O'Connor has released 45 albums, of mostly original music, over a 45-year career. He has recorded and performed mostly his original American Classical music for decades. He is also an expert at traditionally based fiddle and bluegrass music. He has appeared on 450 albums, composed nine concertos and has put together groundbreaking ensembles. His mentors have included Benny Thomasson[2] who taught O'Connor to fiddle as a teenager, French jazz violinist Stéphane Grappelli[3] with whom O'Connor toured as a teenager, and guitarists Chet Atkins, Doc Watson and Steve Morse.[4])

So, that was happening from the camp, started in 95. I started teaching there when I was… I guess it was in 98 and taught there for about, God, it was close to 20 years straight. And Darol was there almost every single camp. I mean, like, the camp would actually have two different sessions. And so, sometimes we were at the same session, sometimes we were at different ones. But we would oftentimes see each other at those camps and we'd have a chance to jam at those sessions as well. So, Darol has been one of those guys who's been present in my musical journey, whether it's directly or indirectly, he's always been there. He's just been a presence from pretty much the… yeah… from when I was in high school on. An amazing guy. I'm sure you know him. Well, he's just really awesome.

Tia Imani Hanna: I know his work. I got to do a workshop with him in New York. I used to study with Julie Lyonn Lieberman in New York. And she used to host him and he would come to do workshop with the students. I had one workshop with him and he was, you know, chopping. And we were like, looking at him like what?

(Julie Lyonn Lieberman is a pioneer teacher of music improvisation and ergonomic performance. She is an American improvising violinist, vocalist, composer, author, educator, and recording artist specializing in fiddle and international violin styles. She is among the first to teach improvisation and world music at the Juilliard School; she also created the first eclectic styles teacher training program in the world as Artistic Director for the su)

Sara Caswell: That's another skill I need to work on.

Tia Imani Hanna: Yeah, me too. It's on the list.

Sara Caswell: Yeah. Yeah. The Covid list.

Tia Imani Hanna: So, he's amazing. I’ve enjoyed his work for many, many years. But now when you're playing with all these folks, you're just a youngin basically, and you're coming up and you're like, hey, I'm touring with you guys. I mean, was any of this intimidating to you at all?

Sara Caswell: Oh yeah. And you know, the funny thing too, I mean, I guess I'm getting, I'm trying to get better at it, but I was, I was very much an introvert at the time as well. Was just, I was a shy kid, you know, I've always felt completely myself when I was playing music. But if I was actually interacting with them using words, I was screwed. I was just… partially, it was just being in awe of the people I was surrounded by you know, these, these veterans and these legends in the field that I was having a chance to make music with. And that was, yeah, I knew it was an opportunity to really to cherish and to you know, just live as much as I could, but I was also a little bit nervous and scared of the whole thing as well. But you know, what was wonderful about those guys is that they were all so supportive and so nurturing. Like just really supporting me and giving me all kinds of encouragement in what I was pursuing and, really, just giving me the confidence to pursue what I was wanting to do. And you know, it's a, it's a journey. It's a process. But I think to have those figures in my corner to… to give me that little nudge and that little push forward and to, you know, just knowing that they're there to support me was really, was super important for me and my development.

Tia Imani Hanna: Oh, so getting these gigs, like, how did this happen? Did you go out looking for gigs or did people just come to you or because I know, as a Jazz violinist quote, unquote improvising violinist, I always had to be a leader. I always had to start my own bands. I never got called for side gigs, ever. It just didn't happen.

Sara Caswell: Yeah. It's interesting. A lot of the initial work that I was doing… I mean, I was doing in my hometown, Bloomington, most of the gigs I was doing were ones that I led. So, you know, doing concerts at a couple of venues in town and doing, taking part in concert series around the state, those were things that I almost always was leading. When I was getting ready to move, or was considering moving to New York… Actually, I guess it was my, my first big… sort of the, the moment where I kinda like was considering moving to New York, I connected with Skitch Henderson, and this was a connection that we actually made through Matt Glazer.

(Lyle Russell Cedric "Skitch" Henderson (January 27, 1918 – November 1, 2005) was a pianist, conductor, and composer. His nickname "Skitch" came from his ability to "re-sketch" a song in a different key and Bing Crosby suggested that he should use the name professionally.[2])

Matt was the one who… Matt got hired to do the session with Skitch Henderson. Skitch Henderson for, for the listeners who might not know, he was, well, just an amazing conductor, pianist, musical director. He was the band leader for the tonight show when Steve Allen was at the helm and then was there with Johnny Carson for, for a bit as well. And he was like, he was Frank Sinatra... What was it? I think he was working with Bing Crosby on piano for a while. I think he also did some work with Frank Sinatra if I'm not mistaken. Judy Garland, Mel Torme, he was just. Yeah, he was just… he was on the MGM studio grounds all the time, like, just like helping out with a lot of those, those movie productions. But for the latter part of his life, he was… he founded and directed the New York Pops and was… that was kind of his, his project in his retirement. And so, he did an album that Matt Glaser was contracted to put together a string quartet for, and Matt called me up. And so, yeah, I was part of that, that session and Bucky Pizzarelli was there, Jean Burton, Sr., a lot of these just terrific musicians that were part of Skitch’s world and so I got… I had a good relationship with Skitch from that session. And he started to hire me and bring me out to New York to do a lot of things. And it was as a member of his band. It was, like, I was a side man in someone else's group. And that was sort of my first real experience, sort of like being a sideman and really just having the opportunity to be part of a part of a crew. Once I actually moved to New York, then I did a handful of gigs on my own, but a lot of the work I was getting was from other leaders who were wanting to incorporate a violin vibe, just the violin sound, into their ensembles. So, those… yeah, those were calls that I was getting and it was really great. I mean, like the big gig that I had… actually there were a couple, so one was with Mark O'Connor's American String Celebration. That was that was my first real touring experience where we got, you know, we're in a rental bus, like a touring bus and doing the whole sleeper camper things. And it was Mark, it was Mark's tour, but there were a batch of string players. We were all part of, like, contributing members of the group. So, that would, that was my first real touring experience. We did that for about a year. But the really big touring experience I had as a sideman was with Esperanza Spalding. And that was for… from 2010 until 2012. And again, it was, it was two…

Tia Imani Hanna: Oh wow, that long.

Sara Caswell: Yeah, it was two years of touring that album. And that was, again, like I was part of the band. It was her music. It was her repertoire. And you know, and so from that, there were, you know, a sideman with some different vocalists that, you know, I'd gotten to know over the years, some instrumentalists as well, who are maybe doing larger ensembles and they had like a string duo string trio that were part of the ensemble. Yeah. So, it just kind of snowballed in a way, to the point where, essentially, I could, you know, for the last 10 or 15 years, the bulk of the work that I've been doing has been as a sideman. Just, you know, playing with these groups. In the last two or three years, it's been like, I really want to be doing more of my own thing. I mean, I love the sideman work, but that's always going to be something that is a part of my, my career. And that's where I've grown so much with, like, you know, having my ears expanded and my technique expanded, but I do have repertoire that I've developed and written and arranged that I wanna, you know, start putting out in the world again. So, it's trying to strike a little bit more of a balance between the two, but yeah, being a side man for these last ten years has been just such an eye-opening experience and one that I'm super grateful for because it's just, yeah, it's just opened my eyes to so many different things from performance, to technique, to pedagogy, to touring, to all of it. And you know, it's been really, really valuable.

Tia Imani Hanna: Yeah. It's one of the things I just never done a lot of touring. I toured a little bit with a dance troupe, which was really fun to do. I'd like to do that some more. But that's pretty much it. I didn't really do tours. I, you know, basically was always leading a band. So, it was… so, that experience, I, you know, I'm envious of that.

Sara Caswell: What? [laughing]

Tia Imani Hanna: So glad somebody is doing it, you know, so that people can say, Hey, look, you can put a fiddle in there. You can put a fiddle in there. You can put a fiddle in there.

Sara Caswell: More fiddle.

Tia Imani Hanna: Yeah. I'm glad that you're doing it because it really does open people's minds. Cause they don't, they don't book what they don't see.

Sara Caswell: Yeah, exactly.

Tia Imani Hanna: And so, yeah, that's very cool.

Sara Caswell: Yeah, that is one of the things that's been difficult with Covid, is not traveling. Cause that's, that's been something that I do love to do and I've been fortunate, you know, to… yeah, I don't have, I haven't been part of, like, many big tours, like multi-year tours. The Esperanza thing was certainly one and then the other one was David Krakhauer’s “The Big Picture.” That was one I did for about a year, but it wasn't like the entire year was blocked off for that stuff. It was usually like one or two weeks, but I love that kind of travel. You know, I love performing with people. I love seeing the world. I love having a chance to, you know, I'm one of those travelers, like, when we're in a city for a day, like, I get up really early and I put on my walking shoes and I'm out exploring and checking out the sites and the sounds and the tastes of these different places. And then I'm coming back to the hotel and getting ready for the show and then really putting all of my energy and my focus in my experience into that… into that moment. And yeah, I miss that, you know, I miss, as we all do, you know, it's just the, just the, some of the challenges that have come out of something that we never thought would actually happen. Like, we always assume there are going to be gigs. There there'll be performance opportunities and venues and festivals, like, cause none of us have lived in a time where that hasn't been part of our norm and our every day. And to actually… for all of us to experience this year where suddenly the opportunity to really craft and create and do what we love to do. We, that's just not a choice, you know, it's like we just hang out until this whole thing blows over.

Tia Imani Hanna: Well, so, you've been teaching, doing a lot of online teaching and things like that during this? Are you still at Berklee teaching?

Sara Caswell: Yes. Yes. I've been teaching at Berklee since fall of 2015. It's been wonderful. The, the department, you know, it's, it's one of these situations where, because the improvising string world is still fairly small, at least the ones who like those of us, who've been around for a little bit. I joined the faculty and I was like, I know everybody here. This is great. Like, I've known you guys for like 20 years. This is cool. And like, it's… I'm coming to… a coming home of yeah, homecoming of sorts. It's a small department. Probably about twenty of us. When you compare it with other departments in Berklee, like, you know, there are like eighty or ninety, like, bass instructors, maybe not that many, but they're, they're like, I think there like maybe sixty guitar instructors or something there. I mean, it's just kind of crazy. But yeah, I love the department. I love our students. It's, it's really genuinely a family, unlike anything I've really experienced before with a school. So, it's been very cool to be part of that. And certainly, you to be hearing, both from the faculty and students, such inspirational ideas in both performance and pedagogy. It's really… it's been an eye-opening experience and I feel very lucky to be there.

Tia Imani Hanna: So, there, do you get together with any of the other professors or to do any music or do you just teach, like what, you know, before Covid?

Sara Caswell: Yeah. So, before Covid, I would go up… So, Berklee, of course, is in Boston. So, I would go up super early on Monday mornings. I think my alarm was set for like 4:45am. It was, like, super early to travel up there and it's a four-hour train ride. Get up there and teach usually for about four to five hours. And then I, basically, turn right back around and come home. So, the unfortunate thing, at least with my schedule, at what my schedule has been in the past, is that because I'm just there for a day. I don't really have as much of a chance to interact with the faculty on a regular basis. But what's cool is that, throughout the semester, there are various times for us to collaborate. Like there'll be a jazz violin summit, concert. So, you know, certain like select number of faculty and I will get together and put together a program and perform with the students as well. Yeah, so, we select opportunities for us to, to do, you know, different collaborations in that, in that way. We're always getting together for string department meetings weekly. So, there's a chance to certainly exchange ideas in that capacity about what we're doing, what we… different ideas that we have, things that are working, things that aren't, yeah, I mean, I would certainly love people to actually jam and play with everybody on a more regular basis. But the structure of things right now, that's not kind of how my, my schedule is set up. But, you know, that's one of the cool things is that I… you know, maybe down the line, I might end up deciding to do a… to lead an ensemble there and to actually, like, you know, maybe do like a, I don't know… I've thought about some different ensemble ideas that could work. And that might happen down the line. You know, there'll be more of a chance for me to collaborate with the students in, you know, in that, in that capacity. But for right now, I'm just teaching privately and that's been it's been a good balance for me as far as doing what I love as a teacher, but then also being able to be available for the gigging and touring that I like to do as well.

Tia Imani Hanna: When you're teaching your students, I mean, what do you try to get from them? Like what is one of your teaching, I don't know, credos? What, like what is your philosophy? What do you really think about teaching? What are you trying to get from that student?

Sara Caswell: That's a good question. You know, I think about my dad a lot when I, when I teach. And my dad was he was just an incredible professor. Was one of those folk who, you know, he wasn't scared to make a fool of himself if that meant making the students feel comfortable and enjoy the process of learning and really begin to think about what it is that they do and what they say, and just becoming much more engaged in the learning process and just finding that fire and excitement that comes with expanding your mind. And I think… so, I'm one of those teachers, I don't have a problem, like, just being silly and being a goof if that means that my students are going to enjoy making music and are going to feel comfortable enough to explore new things or just… or explore things that they've been wanting to learn about, but have been too frightened or too, I don't know, just don't feel they don't have enough confidence to do it. So, my goal is to teach each student. Like to teach who they are, like, to learn who they are and to teach them. I always am a little… I see this and I'm sure you do too, teachers who just sort of teach the same curriculum. It doesn't matter who the student is, who's in their studio. Like it's the same stuff, same exercises and sort of like, you know, it's the same lesson plan from student to student. And I've seen professors use that too. And, of course, it's harder in a large class setting, but I've seen teachers who have succeeded in overcoming that and, like, are diverting that, and really learn who their students are and have really connected with them in that way. So, you know, I want my students to leave Berklee feeling that they were understood and that their artistic vision was… that it was also understood, but we were there to guide them and help them and perhaps enlighten them to some different things that could be part of it. So, yeah, I just want to connect with them. I want them to feel that they're seen that they're heard, and that I, yeah, was able to help in that journey in some way, just helping them feel that they have a… helping them to find their voice and their grounding for it.

Tia Imani Hanna: How would you compare your studies, your personal studies, compared to what kids are getting now at, like, Berklee? Like, is it a whole different world? Or is it very similar? Or is it more expanded now because of the internet? Or what do… you know?

Sara Caswell: You know, it's, it's different and there's… certainly there are a lot of things that are different. I think technology has certainly… like, the learning tools, the teaching tools, that we have available to us are wonderful assets to have. You know, for me, I don't play piano very well at all. So, it was, when I was growing up, I had, I was very much reliant on either my mom playing piano with me or Jamie Aebersold was coming out with those play alongs at the time.

Tia Imani Hanna: Ahh, Jamie Aebersold.

Sara Caswell: Those were lifesavers for me, cause it was just a chance to actually play when I couldn't play with somebody necessarily. But now, you know, it's, you know, there's so many different jamming platforms for students that, that you can modify tempo, speed, keys, all that kind of stuff. It's a very… there's a lot of learning tools out there that make the absorption process easier in that way. But at the same time, it still comes down to the same kind of fundamentals, listening and practicing, you know. Like there's no technology that can expedite the absorption process and the sweat and the tears that you put into learning your craft, like, that's just hours in the room, practice room, learning. And you can certainly take advantage of these tools that will help with that process, but it still comes down to you picking up your instrument, practicing your scales, getting your technique down, transcribing solos and practicing licks and, you know, harmonic sequences, all those kinds of things that are just part of the learning tradition. So, there are some things that are very different, but there's some things I'm just going to always be part of that infrastructure. I think what's unique about what Berklee is doing, which was not, I mean, I'm only starting to see kind of pop up, just been happening within the last few years, is the sort of the variety of music that is now being taught in these schools. Like, when I came up, it was just classical and there were some Jazz programs that were being developed, but even at that time, there were, like, it wasn't a universal thing. It wasn't like if you have a music school, you have a Jazz department, it was like, you have a classical department and maybe you'll have a Jazz department. Now, like every pretty much every school, if it has a strong music school, has a Jazz department. And you know, and then you're starting to see, this has been really wild. I've been doing some residencies over the years at some smaller schools, smaller colleges around the U.S. and is so enlightening to see that there are a lot of smaller schools that maybe don't have a huge music department, but they, because of the fact that maybe it's smaller, they have a quicker ability to change and adapt to what the students are wanting. So, like students are saying, you know, I want to learn more about the style of music or that style of music, or I want to learn more about recording and recording technology. I want to learn more about, you know, tour managing and all this. So, these professors and these deans of these departments are seeking experts in these fields to come and teach for their school or do residencies. So, even the most remote school, because of these technological advances and, you know, just grants and those kinds of things, are able to really be, in a lot of ways, be more at the forefront of giving their students a much more diversified musical education than some of the old… the institutions that are so ingrained in tradition that they have a harder time sort of expanding to include different styles of music, like Bluegrass and Hip Hop, and Rock, and Hungarian music and Indian music, which are the kinds of things that Berklee is offering in their infrastructure. So.

Tia Imani Hanna: I know some of the people who work at Berklee and everybody is so adjunct, so I don't ever know if anybody knows anybody else. It's like, oh yeah, you teach there too. Cause I know Mimi Jones teaches bass there. Some people that used to teach there, don't teach there anymore. But, you know, Christianne Karam is still there. It's just different styles, of different… I don't know. It's just so fun to see all of this inter-meshing happening.

Sara Caswell: I know. It really is. Yeah. And I think what Berklee is able to do that a lot of schools haven't done as well. I like, yes, there are a lot of adjunct faculty. There is… there are with most of these schools, like when you look at Juilliard and you look at Manhattan School and New School. I would… I don't have the stats in front of me, but I wouldn't be surprised if like, you know, it's a large number of adjuncts. But what Berklee has been able to do through the division, through departments, and like, departmental meetings and all this, like, on a regular basis. They… that is a way of creating community. But then there's also… they do various events throughout the year that are for the entire school. So, there's the thing they call Opening Day where, like, for a day, there's a keynote speaker, and then there are like, you know, all the faculty full-time and part-time can take place in these classes, take part in these classes, that are taught by Berklee faculty. And it's just a chance to get to know other people in the school and learn from your colleagues. And they do that in the spring as well. So, we… it just happened last week. It's called Be Taught. So, it's Berklee teachers on teaching and it's two days where we just get together. We hang out, listen to a couple of keynote addresses. And then we… there are three different classes that take place throughout the day. And you know, each hour we have a chance to take… we have a choice of, like, ten classes and they're taught by our colleagues and we have a chance to learn from them and get to know them and interact with them. So, there's a real… like during regular times, we'll actually do that on Berklee's campus. So, there's a chance for all of us to be, like, just the teachers. To hang out for a couple of days and to have lunch and dinner together and to learn from each other and listen to concerts and it's just… it's a chance for us all to connect and really feel there's a community there. So, it's a cool thing. Very cool.

Tia Imani Hanna: Yeah. It sounds like a beautiful thing. Yeah. I applied to Berklee for a master's program a couple of years ago. But I don't think I fit into the grouping of students that they have because I'm way too old and have way too much experience, I think.

Sara Caswell: You could be teaching the classes.

Tia Imani Hanna: Yeah. Most of the people who were interviewing me, there was like, a huge band of people, you know, like the Danilo Perez and all these other folks. And I'm like… I'm the same age as they are. So, they were like, you're not going to fit into this. And I'm like, dude, I do this all the time. But, you know, it was kind of like, well, you know, I just figured I'd give it a shot cause I never got to go to school for music. So, I always wanted to do it and I figured, well, I'm getting older, so I better try. And I thought, well, Berklee is where all this stuff is happening there. All these different styles are coming together and that's where I want to be. But it just didn't work out. But I really do think it was more of a… I just had more experience than the students who were there because they were all in their twenties. I'm in my fifties. So, you know, it's going to be harder I guess, but I, I don't know. I go into a room all the time, I wish COVID was over. But you know, that's what I do. I mean, I follow the Rhiannan and the Bobby McFerrin technique. And we go in and say, you sing that, you sing that, you sing that you play that, I'll play this and start, go. And that's how it, you know, so it doesn't matter what age you are, you know. It's like, I think we can figure it out as musicians.

Sara Caswell: Yeah. You know, that’s another thing too. Of course, we do put a lot of value into what schooling can offer, like as far as that kind of, that background. You know, the schooling isn’t everything, you know. I know so many students who went to school, got their degree in, like, architecture, and then they ended up being a musician because it was just so much a passion for them. They don’t have any, like, formal training, but they’re such incredible musicians. And like, I hear your stuff and it's just like, I, you know, it's amazing. And it's, it’s not something that you necessarily have to be taught in school to do. It’s who you are.

Tia Imani Hanna: It's one of those things, is more about… thank you, by the way. It's, it's one of those things where I just want to have the time with people on an ongoing basis so that we can, like, I can like, stretch myself.

Sara Caswell: Yeah.

Tia Imani Hanna: Because after a while it's just sounds like me, me, me, me, me, me, me, me, me, me, me, me, me, me. I want to have other people to say, “Well, I'm going to throw this in.” And then, like, huh? I never heard that before. How do you do that? And have some dialogue and have some interaction. And then when you're at home playing in your closet, you know, it's just like, okay, I'm so done with me.

Sara Caswell: It's interesting. I've talked with some of my students who are adults, you know, approaching this music and that's been their biggest part. The biggest hurdle is like, how do I… you know, I'm learning this stuff, I'm practicing it. I need to actually apply it in real life. And I'm not necessarily ready to be doing gigs, but I want to have a chance to like regularly play with people. And, you know, it's been a challenge, either to get a group where you feel as though all the levels are pretty much at a similar place. But, you know, somehow, I don't know, you put enough feelers out there that you ended up finding a way of sort of exercising those things and, like, or with, like, with the band that you have or bands that you have, like, just making a point to not to get it together, to practice for a gig necessarily, but just to get together to try stuff out. And just to for all of you like to say, okay, like everybody bring a tune or two and let's, let's try some stuff out and just workshop stuff. And you know, a lot of my friends here do in the city, at least when things aren't shut down, is they do sessions, you know. And that's been a big way of networking too. It's, you know, they just call up, you know, a drummer and a bassist and do sessions, they just play tunes. And it could be things that are like standards or it could be things that people are writing. But it's just that chance to interact and to expand your ears and have a chance to play.

Tia Imani Hanna: Yeah. It's tricky. I had… I lived up in Lansing for like ten years before I moved back down to the Detroit area. So, I just came back here about three years ago into the actual Metro Detroit area. And I started… I joined an art collective down here and I had a spot where I could do, like a once a week, I had a spot to do whatever I wanted. So, I started something, I called it “The Woodshed” and I said… I put up and I said, we're going to do these three tunes, show up. You know, I got one person to come once. I did it for like a month and I did it… like I was there every, like, Tuesday night or something, nothing. And I was like, I don't know how to get people to come, you know. And maybe it's because I'm a violin player, you know.

Sara Caswell: That shouldn’t matter at all!

Tia Imani Hanna: And I'm not well known, but I don't know. I don't know. So, it's like, I tried, I'm trying, I mean, now Covid hit and everything, but it's one of those things now I'm just like, okay, well, we're not going to do that. Maybe I will just reach out to people individually and just say, we're going to… I want to do this. Do you want to do this with me? I don't know I have had… I don't know if there's levels because there's levels in professional world too. Like some people just won't do anything unless it's paid. And then other people are like, yeah, I could do that. I just don't have any time. Or, you know, folks like me that I don't have any time anymore. Cause I keep creating, none of that was working. So, I created a podcast also. Now that takes up a lot more time. I actually don't have a lot of time to practice at all because I'm doing this and I also have a full-time job. So, it's, you know, it's you gotta to feed yourself, but it's just interesting how the world is changing and how we're having to adapt to things that… I would never thought of having a podcast in the past, you know. It's just like, are you kidding? And then, you know, Covid hit. I said, okay, I've been thinking about doing it. I did have a radio show for a very short time for like a year or two back in the nineties in at the community college in Lansing, Michigan. So, I have done this, but it wasn't with any guests. It was just putting on, literally putting on a CD and saying, “Now that was Stuff Smith playing.” You know, and that was it. So, that was pretty simple. This is a little bit more in depth, so it's kind of funny how just things are shifting and I'm just digressing all over the place. Rabbit holing.

Sara Caswell: No, it's interesting how, like we've… the paths and the journeys that we all taking. And especially during this year, like what sort of things have been revealed? I wonder, kind of going back to what you were talking about with trying to get people together to play. I wonder how this whole experience is going to change that because suddenly people are not going to be maybe quite as stuck on the idea, like of getting together with people to play and have there be a paycheck at the end of it. There's going to be a lot more gratitude with the idea that we can actually get together in a room and play and not have to worry about, like, putting hand sanitizer on everything and, you know, just like we can actually just be in a room together and make music and experiment with stuff. And I hope anyway, that at least as far as us creating and working on our craft, that there's going to be a little more flexibility with that kind of stuff and people are going to be like, yeah, I'd love to get together and play. Let's get together and jam and have that be something.

Tia Imani Hanna: Yeah. I hope so, too.

Sara Caswell: Yeah.

Tia Imani Hanna: So, your sister Rachel, right? So, you two have gotten together and recorded together, which I think is pretty amazing because… are there only two of you in the family or are there other siblings?

[“Receipt Please” played by the Caswell Sisters]

Sara Caswell: So, it's two of us. We have three half siblings, but as far as the, oh, like our unit was, as a kid growing up, it was just me and my sister. So, yeah, so we, we grew up playing music together all the time. She used to play cello. That was her instrument. So, it was violin and cello, and my mom played piano. And so, yeah, so we were doing string trios all the time and my dad was our biggest fan, listening to us practice. So, we played, we've played music together since we were little kids. And then, when she finished her… she did an undergrad, a double undergrad as well. She did it in classical cello and Jazz cello. I know. That was pretty amazing. So, she did that, but then basically once she finished her undergrad, she, I mean, she knew that Jazz was her… sort of her stylistic realm. But she wasn't convinced that cello was her actual voice. And she just didn't necessarily have that same connection, that… to that instrument that I had to the violin. So, she ended up actually switching to voice, being a vocalist. And that was where she really just took off, like where it was. She'd found her, her musical, her musical instrument. And so, then after she, yeah, she took a year off from school to kind of like make that transition, to get some vocal instruction, get it, kind of get things going. And then she ended up moving to Boston for three years where she did her Masters in Jazz Voice at a New England conservatory. So, yeah. So, we've it, you know, it was a switch going from playing classical trios with her, to playing in Jazz quartets with her, you know, with her singing. But at this, you know, like that, that musical connection is always there and it was just a matter of sort of, yeah, adapting what we were doing to that particular medium. I love playing with her, you know, it's like that, that, that ability. It's kinda like, I guess, with twins in a way. Talk about like, as far as like just connecting with each other and really having there be a different level of communication that's there. And we've always felt that when we make music together, that we just, we read each other really well. We, we feel a lot of these musical ideas and expressions in the same way. And that's always been a real joy to be able do that with her.

Tia Imani Hanna: That's fantastic. I'm glad that you're able to do that. I mean, my sister and I, my sister's a singer as well. And it's… we've got completely different styles. She's more gospel and R & B. So, it's kind of like, okay. I wrote a gospel tune for her. We got to perform at one time at the Brooklyn Conservatory of Music, 2005. And that was a gigantic ensemble. I had six voices and I had a seven-piece band. And so, like if we ever get to record this piece is going to be this huge production number. We really want to. So, it was just kind of one of those things, you know, but to do a project together like that would be… it'd be difficult because it just is, because in order for me to really encapsulate the voice that she has, it needs to be supported in the right way. So, and then, and just writing the one piece, it’s not like I write a lot of stuff. I write here and there. And that was, you know, that was one of my good ones. So, I have to, like, I would like to get it produced. But yeah. And then, you know, then I have, my aunt is a jazz singer. My mom sings classically. I have two cousins, first cousin and his son, Michael and Myk'l Hanna. They're Sir Roland Hanna's kid in and grandkid.

Sara Caswell: Got it.

Tia Imani Hanna: And so, they're both singers. And then I have my sister’s son, my nephew my sister the singer's son is a DJ. So, it's like, we're trying. I want to do a family album.

Sara Caswell: Yeah, you need to. You got, the whole band.

Tia Imani Hanna: Is kinda nuts. It's insane. We've been all thinking about how to do it for years because everybody's styles are so different and this would be the funkiest album ever.

Sara Caswell: It's so great. Wow. That's like, I love this collaborations where you have people who are coming from such different traditions and they find their musical voice. They find that thread that really makes something like that work. And it's awesome. They’re all within your own family. I love it.

Tia Imani Hanna: So, that, you know, it's a dream. We'll see if I can make it happen at some point. Cause somebody has to, like, steer it and I know if it's going to happen, I'll probably be the one to say, “Oh, okay, you do this, you do that.” Do I want to take that on? I don't know. So…

Sara Caswell: But it would be… it'll be worth it in the end, for sure.

Tia Imani Hanna: Yeah. So, it's one of those things. And so, tell me, another groundbreaking thing for you is that Grammy nominated. . . Chuck Owen. So, how did that, that recording session even come about? And then, then your solo gets Grammy nominated then, and just the solo.

[“Can't Remember Why” plays]

Sara Caswell: That whole thing was just very unexpected. So, that was another sideman gig. Chuck, Chuck Owen is a really amazing composer and arranger based in Tampa, Florida, and our paths would cross a few points over the years, like jazz conferences. And I think I came down to do a workshop at USF where he just retired from USF this semester, but he'd been there for 40 years and I did a concert there in 2000 and he was kind of there overseeing the, my residency, and helping out with, you know, popping on piano. But we never really interacted much until, like, collaborated much until I think it was 2008 or 2009. Manhattan School of Music was performing like the Jazz Philharmonic was performing one of his pieces that he'd written for his, you know, Jazz Surge which is his big band plus orchestra. This was like a kind of a unique situation. And so, they brought me on board so that the piece itself features tenor, guitar and violin. And I was… I'm on faculty at Manhattan School of Music as well. And so, they featured me and Jack Wilkins on guitar and Donny McCaslin on tenor. And so, that was the first time I actually had a chance to really work with Chuck on this piece. Cause he flew up from Tampa and helped coach the orchestra and just kind of there to oversee the, some of the final rehearsals and then for there to be there for the performance. And yeah. And so, from that point on, it was like, you know, we, we really hit it off and, and he expressed interest in having me be a member of his Jazz Surge ensemble. So, I was like, yeah, I would love it. Sign me up. And so, shortly thereafter, I guess, a few years later, the assembly of this album, “Whispers in The Wind” came into the conversation and so he'd written the whole thing out, so it's for big band plus… so the featured… Well, so the, his, like the Jazz Surge for him, his big band plus violin. And usually, he has two guitar players who are usually part of the part of the ensemble as well. So slightly expanded. With this album in particular, he was bringing Randy Brecker on as a featured soloist and Grégoire Maret on harmonica. And so those are the two featured soloists and then the entire band. And I was part of that band. Anyway, so, the band recorded their tracks. And then he flew me in later to overdub my parts to all the stuff. All of it was orchestrated with my part included, but it just wasn't going to work for me to fly down and record with the band at the same time. But yeah, he gave me a couple solos on the album, which was awesome. It was really nice of him to do that and we did the recording and then, you know, he said goodbye and onward. And then I got an email from him not too long after saying, “Hey, the album was done, we are getting ready to submit it for a Grammy consideration. And is it okay if I include your solo on this track is as one of the possible Grammy things.” So, I was like, my God. Wow. Thank you. That's amazing. Really awesome. But I, again, I didn't think of it after that because of the fact that hundreds of solos get submitted for Grammy considerations. So, you never know, and it's like a needle in a haystack kind of thing. [music playing] And certainly my name is not one that's very well known to, you know, certainly not enough to get any like notable attention. So yeah, didn't think anything about it. And then I was at Berklee teaching, I just finished teaching. Was a Tuesday morning, I was getting ready to go back to New York. And this was in November of 2017 and standing in line at a coffee shop and I get this text from a friend and he's like, “Sara, congratulations! We're so excited for you!” And I was like, huh? That's why I sent him back literally, like, what are you talking about? And he's like, you don't know? I was like, no. And so, then he sent me over the link that had all the Grammy nominees listed and there my name was, there were five of us. And with the improvised solo and I, I screamed so loud in the cafe was like, Whoa, what just happened? And I was, Oh God. It was just such an unbelievable thing that all that came to happen. And yeah, like that whole period from November through the Grammys in a couple of months later, it was just so surreal to be part of that experience and to yeah, just to have that happen. So, it's very much burned in my brain.

Tia Imani Hanna: Well, did you get to go to the ceremony at all?

Sara Caswell: Yeah. And the funny thing was that that was the first year the Grammy's had been held in New York in, like, years. I can't…. I think, like, I don't know, it was, it had been decades, I think, since they've been held in New York. So, it was great for me cause I, you know, it was like three subway stops away instead of having to stay over and like fly to LA and get a hotel rental. So, it was actually really cool. So, my mom flew in for the ceremony. And one of my good friends, her husband was also nominated for a Grammy. So, we decided that the easiest way to do this was to meet on the corner of 96th and Broadway, like, all dressed up in our gowns and, like, everything and to take the subway down to Madison Square Garden because the, you know, road, like, there's no way we're going to find parking down there. And it's like, and for cars like taxis or anything to get through the… there was no way everything was barricaded. So, they're like, well, the easiest, most direct way to do this is just to get on the subway. So, we get on the subway where like, and we're in these amazing, like, you know, super dressed up ball gowns, and everyone on the subway is just like, What the, oh my God, this is so embarrassing. But at the same time, it was awesome. It was like, this is how you do the Grammys in New York. It was, yeah, it was really amazing so, you know, having it there and in the city and just to kind of experience it from, you know, my backyard was really awesome.

Tia Imani Hanna: So fantastic. I'm glad you had the opportunity to experience that. That's very cool. You know, I could see you get on the subway and you got your gown on and you just have to look down your nose a bit and say, “Yes, can I help you?”

Sara Caswell: I have to get to this point somehow.

Tia Imani Hanna: Fantastic. Really great. Really great. Where online can people find you?

Sara Caswell: Yeah, so they can find me on Facebook and Instagram. That's where I do most of my social media posting. I have a Twitter account. I check it, but I'm not great about posting on it, but yeah, Facebook and Instagram are where I hang for the most part. And then my website's going through some revisions now, but it's, you know, SaraCaswell.com. That's S a R a, no H in there, saracaswell.com. And once things get back up and running, I'll have my gigs posted there and different projects and news of note. Right now, I have a project, it's my first pro a solo project in like close to 15 years. I did one with my sister back in 2013 with Fred Hirsch. But this one is my first solo project in 15 years. And the plan had been to release it this year. But with Covid I didn't really fee, it made sense to release it if I couldn't actually do any performances to support it. So, kind of feeling things out. I'd like to release it this year. You know, the touring thing is still very much… if things resume, as you know, it's probably not going to be until the Fall, when the venues open up again. But I, I just want to get that material out so I can share it with people and you know, keep moving forward. So, I'll have those kinds of things posted on my website and there'll be news about the release statements and such. So.

Tia Imani Hanna: Well, thank you so much, Sarah, for, you know, allowing me to come into your home and speak with you and in sharing your heart and your goals and your dreams and your past and your journey and just all the exciting things that are Sara Caswell. So, thank you so much for being on the show.

Sara Caswell: Thank you. It's been such a joy to talk with you and to finally, like, really like, you know, talk face to face. And yeah, just to feel your energy and good vibes and all that. It's been really, really awesome talking with you.

Tia Imani Hanna: Thank you.

Tia Imani Hanna: Thank you for joining us this week on Tia Time with Artists. Make sure to visit our website, tiaviolin.com, where you can subscribe to the show in iTunes and never miss an episode. Please leave us a rating wherever you listen to podcasts. We really appreciate your comments, and we'll mine them to bring you more amazing episodes.

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Thank you for listening. See you next week at Tia Time!

+ Transcription

Tia Time with Artists, with guest Renee Manning - recorded 12/19/2020

Tia Imani Hanna: Welcome to Tia Time with Artists, the weekly podcast where we discuss the methods, challenges, and real-life experiences of living our creative dreams. What kind of creative warrior are you? Musician? Filmmaker? Painter? Choreographer? Poet? Sculptor? Fashionista? Let’s talk about it right now. I’m your host, Tia Imani Hanna.

Tia Imani Hanna: Welcome to Tia Time with Artists and my guest this week is my good friend and one of my past vocal instructors, vocal stylist, song writer, educator, and overall exciting person, Renee Manning. So welcome Renee.

Renee Manning: Thank you very much. Thank you for having me. How are you?

Tia Imani Hanna: I'm very good. Very good.

Renee Manning: I'm glad to hear that. I’m glad to be here with you.

Tia Imani Hanna: I'm so glad that you're here with me. I was like, yay, I get to have my friend. And we used to stand on… we used to live in Brooklyn. I lived in Brooklyn and Renee, you lived in Brooklyn too, but worked at the Brooklyn Conservatory of Music together. We would get out of work and stand on the corner and talk for a couple hours before we went home. I miss doing that.

Renee Manning: We had to catch up on all the drama of the day.

Tia Imani Hanna: Exactly. So, I want to know about what started you on this track to be the musician that you are today?

Renee Manning: It's so interesting because how was like a little chocolate Shirley Temple? I took tap lessons, three or four years old, and the tap teacher, you know how they do the recital things, and the tap teacher decided that I had a little voice. And my mother was giving me some lessons, but it was mainly dancing. And then he wanted to do this routine, “Oh, you beautiful doll.” And he taught me the song and after that, everybody's ‘Ooh, the little babies got a voice’. And then later on, which I used to love to sing around the house, so my mom was like, you know what, maybe we should give her some… I'll give us some singing lessons and I continue to be, for a couple of years, I was that Shirley Temple, that little chocolate Shirley Temple. And then you know, you getting into school and you wind up in choirs and a lot of stuff went on, but my Nanny used to, yeah, we went there every Sunday and my nanny played music all the time and fell in love. And then there was this minister. Every summer we went down South. And when I stayed at Aunt Ruby's, she went to this Baptist church and the preacher had a beautiful baritone voice. I didn't get up for the sermon. I got up to here him. He'd leave the doors open and he'd sing the congregation in. And that really inspired me too, cause I was like, wow, this cat must be a singing angel. You could hear him. When you come around the road to the church, you could hear his voice in the choir and he'd be singing this tune, “Rejoice.” Oh, my goodness. I had a crush on that minister until my aunt cooked him dinner. Aunt Viola, and being a New York kid, I got my seat at the table. He sat at head of table; I was thought I was going to sit right next time. And she was like, “Oh no, get up from there!” And I had picked peas and took feathers off of chickens and all kinda stuff. And she said, “Uh uh… get your little behind from up there. Go out there on the porch.” And so, after all that, beautiful chicken and laying out stuff and getting up early for the sunrise and everything, I got to sit on the porch and eat my food? I didn't like him anymore after that. [laughter] I went to church, I pouted, but it was all good. He really… that was really inspiring cause it was just, wow, can I grow up to sound like that? Like an angel? Because he really did sound like that. You could tell he was connected. You know what I mean? It was really a beautiful thing. So yeah. And then I was a big Aretha fan. I loved her. Yeah, when she left, I was really devastated and yeah. It's been nice.

Tia Imani Hanna: What kind of lessons were you taking? Was there a neighborhood school when you started out or was there an actual vocal teacher that you had?

Renee Manning: I had several vocal teachers. I sang in school, but I had Elliot Ames, and I had Joe Lucas, actually I had Joe Lucas first. He was a Broadway teacher. He taught Broadway and cabaret. I don't know how my mother found this guy. It may have been through somebody at the school. And then the one day I went in and he found that my tonsils was hanging down my throat. He was like, “Renee. When was the last time you looked in your mouth?” This morning when I brushed my teeth. And he was like, “Okay, we need to call your mom because your tonsils are really big.” I may have had always suffered with earaches off and on. So, I was just eh, and so yeah, so I had to go get the tonsils taken out. I was about 16 then, and they weren't as nice to me as the little kiddies cause they put little kiddies to sleep. I had to sit up in the chair, yeah. Then I took a little time down off for that. And then he had told me, “I have a great teacher for you, this guy, Elliot Ames.” And I'm like, okay. So, I wound up with Elliott, I studied more pop with him, then I tested for Music and Art. And I tested as an art major and a music major. High school music and art, yes.

Tia Imani Hanna: In New York.

Renee Manning: Yes, because it was separate schools then, when I went.

Tia Imani Hanna: I see.

Renee Manning: And that point, I had a coloratura first soprano voice. When I went in and tested, they were like, Oh, think you should come into the music department. Okay. And so, I studied classically there and yeah, that was a nice ride. For all you folks who are R & B and Blues folks, that classical stuff is pretty amazing to sing, so I went through that and I was gonna go to Mannes. [School of Music]. And then I went through some stuff with my mom about at that time, my boyfriend Earl, she wasn't enamored with musicians, actually. And he had been on the road, he went on a road with Taj Mahal really early. When she met him, he was wearing his hat and with bell bottoms and the leather, long leather coat and stuff. My nanny was a dancer at the Savoy and my mother came up in Harlem. So, her perception of what musicians were wasn't very nice so that was a whole war through high school. So, I decided I need to get a job and move out of the house. So, I let that go. But I continued to study and all that. And I was doing all these… they were hiring me, (David) Fat Head Newman. I called him Poppa Nap. And Nat Adderley and all that. I was getting hired. And some of those Jesse James dates, we'll talk about those midnight to eight. Get a little money. But I got hired for all the Minnie Ripperton stuff. I got hired for all the high stuff. That was good.

Tia Imani Hanna: You, so you worked with Minnie Ripperton. You worked with Nat Adderley. You work with…?

Renee Manning: Nat Adderley. They hired me to do the vocals. When they were doing all that Afro jazz stuff, I got hired to sing the high backgrounds on some albums. And yeah, that was an interesting ride until I had my oldest daughter. And then my voice dropped an octave and a fifth.

Tia Imani Hanna: Wow!

Renee Manning: And yeah, I thought my career was totally over. I was talking down there like this. It was not cute. Every month of my pregnancy, my voice dropped. And I actually asked the doctor, you got to check down there and make sure I haven't changed up because my voice is dropping. I'm getting a little hairier. Something is wrong. [laughter] Yeah, but I know you have some other questions, but I have to thank God for my husband and Carmine Caruso, who taught all the top brass and woodwind players. He didn't really… well, they have a couple of singers he said he taught, but I have to tell you, he blessed me so much. He really blessed me so much. Because when you study classically, it's really rigid and strict or whatever. And everything was up, and the breathing and everything. And now, I have this kid and my voice is, like, in the basement, I got a C-section cut. I can't breathe. So, I was like, okay, I'm done.

Tia Imani Hanna: How did you meet Carmine?

Renee Manning: Earl was taking lessons from Carmine. And I had this baby and Earl was really worried about me psychologically and musically cause I had said… and I stopped talking. That was the other thing too, I stopped talking also.

Tia Imani Hanna: Your voice. So, I understand that.

Renee Manning: No, I couldn't hear anything. Earl was really depressed and when he talked to Carmine about it, he said,” Oh, bring her, I've taught a couple of singers. Bring her to me.” So, Earl told me, “Carmine is going to give you some lessons.” I was like, I made every excuse, “Oh, I don't have a babysitter.” Carmine was like, no, bring the baby. So, I got on that train. He was in Manhattan, near Sam Ash [famous NYC music store] . I got on that train. And Amanda, that's my oldest daughter, hollered the whole way. Embarrassing. And I get there and she's still screaming and Carmine is, “Give me the baby.” And she looks up at him and smirks and then goes to sleep. And the whole year I had to bring the baby and she'd do the same thing, scream her head off, Carmine would take her. She’d get in the crook of his arm. She’d look up at him, boom, sleep. And of course, I had to take the hollering baby home.

Tia Imani Hanna: Of course.

Renee Manning: But he took her. And I got in my first lesson, I just cried, and he talked to me, I just cried. He said, “What are you crying for? God give you a new gift. Everybody wants to sing in the sky. God give you a new gift. You have to appreciate that.” So, at first, when I went through the breathing exercises and everything, he took all my classical vocal eases and tapered them to, you know, what it is, he teaches and first thing, the breathing. And I said, please, he put me down on the floor. And I went back and told Earl, “I'm not going back. Cause the old man tried to kill me.” He was like, “What do you mean old man?” I said, “That old man tried to kill me.” But I have to say now with the teaching and everything, I developed my own method and, with his influence and the influence of my two classical teachers, Ms. Man… God bless her soul, Ms. Mandell, Sybil Mandell, and Miss. Ext. Miss. E-X-T. I think her name was Ellen Ext. I can't remember her first name. I do remember her though. And Sybil Mandell. And she was remarkable. She's the one that busted me on my reading. They put me and the senior choir early and them divas, they tortured me, and they really tortured me cause they was like, what's she doing in here, sophomore. And I was really good at learning all the parts by ear. And finally, she had me stay after class and she said, “Renee. Wow. I'm really impressed that you is keeping up with everybody,” and blah, blah, blah. I'm like, okay. And she said, “So let's just go over your part.” Went over the part, and she says, “Okay, so let's, what's the second.” And we were doing the Handel Requiem. Okay. She's, “Turn to them.” I'm singing it. I could even sing the tenor part. Then she turned to the part that we hadn't gone over. Oh, she's, “Okay. Right there. Let's take it from here.” And she started playing and I'm like. She says. “Yeah, you did here. I want bar.. .” “Yes.” She's playing. So, she stops me. She said, “I'm really impressed by your ears, but you have to stop cheating yourself. You're gonna learn how to read. So, you're going to come to me, let's go over your schedule. You’re going to come to me and we're going to sit down and learn to read.” So, I appreciate the fact I've had a lot of support in my education, my career. So, it was really nice. Carmine was absolutely right. I couldn't hear anything. First time… and my first time I stepped out, Andy Bey came to see me, and Andy Bey was like, “Oh my God, you are down there.” And I started to cry, and he said, “No,” he says, “It sounds beautiful. Don't cry.” His sisters have some low voices. Altos right there. Got a bunch of encouragement, so I accepted my new gift and I'm glad I got my new gift. I actually thanked Amanda. That's when my career… they say you should thank your daughter. Yes, I should. She’s a pain in the butt. But it was okay.

Tia Imani Hanna: That's a trying experience to go through that. Cause you've had your whole identity as a vocalist or as a singer wrapped into what you're able to produce. So, all of a sudden, you're singing way down in the basement and you were up in the stratosphere before, for years. So, all of a sudden, that's really quick in, what, less than nine months that you're down and then you stay there forever.

Renee Manning: And we were in the middle… we had a funk band and Columbia records had decided to record us and every month Earl had to rewrite the arrangements, because I couldn't sing it where it was and thank God for the band. And when I went in the studio, I was pretty big, and the guy freaked out when I went in the booth. He was like, “Excuse me, you can't sit in there. You have to sit outside. We’re getting ready to record the singer.” Everybody said, “That is the singer.” This cat panicked because when you sing and everything, the baby starts moving around. So, I'm singing and the belly, it's dancing in there. And he kept stopping going, “Are you okay?” “Yes, I'm okay.” “You sure? You okay?” “Yes, I'm okay.” But it really, I get a lot of vocalists that have had careers, particularly classical singers who come to me and the voice changes because of hormones, because of age, and the whole thing. And they're like freaked out because we can be diva and now our chops have gone away and I've been there, done that. And so, I just talk to them about that next chapter. This does not mean… and the teachers let them go and stuff… and this does not mean that your career is over, so you have to move on to something else. Okay. You can't be a first soprano, that you can't be a second soprano, altos are nice. It's very… they say you go through certain things in life so that you… and, hopefully, you'll learn stuff…. and once Carmine let go of me after, because understand this, I wasn't allowed to, for a whole year, I wasn't allowed to listen to any singers. All lower brass ,all lower strings all lower woodwinds. Okay.

Tia Imani Hanna: So, you get the ear ready for that sound.

Renee Manning: Exactly. And the other thing is, what I had to listen for was ‘wind’. He wouldn't ask me what I heard as far as notes, even with the string players. He said, “ Renee, I want you to sit real quiet and listen to how they breathe when they're playing.” Very what-you-call-it. And then at the end of the year, he gave me Johnny Hartman, only singer he left me. And in fact, he gave me his album, the one with Coltrane [John Coltrane and Johnny Harman 1963 on Impulse records] the swan song I had to learn was “Lush Life.” I went home and listened to that… cause he’s a big funker, so I went home and listened to that and I was like, “This man's crazy. I'm not going to be able to sing this song. This song is hard.” But I've always been the kid that if you dare to eat the worm. Said, “Okay, I'm going to learn this song so he won't bother me about it again.” And I learned the song, and Earl was very encouraging, “Come on, you can do this. You can do this.” I learned the song. He listened to me. He was like, “Oh, that's a nice, but you come to me again the next week. I think you need to listen a little more.” I'm like, “Oh no!” And then I was like, I'm going to nail this. And I went in and I sung “Lush Life.” And he said, “Renee, you watching me?” And I said, “Yes.” And he got up, he had a big chair, he got up out of that chair, walked to the window and stuck his hands out and did his hands like he was letting the bird go. And he said, “Do you understand?” And I was like, “Yes.” I'm getting choked up. I'm sorry. I said, “Yes.” And then after that, he invited me up this cabin and everything, and right behind that, Mel Lewis asked me to come sit in with the band.

Tia Imani Hanna: Wow!

Renee Manning: And I was like… and he came to our funk gig too. We were at, I think Eric's, it was a club called Eric's, and he came. I saw Mel sitting there. I was like, why is Mel sitting here? But yeah, Carmine, all the teachers I've had were remarkable.

[ “The Nearness of You” as sung by Renee Manning]

Tia Imani Hanna: It's a beautiful story. That's awesome. So, I know that you have adapted, like you said, you've adapted some of his techniques and some of your classical musical teachers’ techniques to ‘getting on the mat’. So, when I've taken lessons from you, your whole class that you took taught group vocal lessons to, we would be on the ground. Every class on the blanket, on the floor, doing our breathing exercises. So, what kinds of things got you to that point? How to develop that particular method?

Renee Manning: I've always loved biology. That was my favorite. I think the human body, a lot of folks thought I was going to go into medicine. I actually applied for veterinary school because I'm such a lover of animals. It took them two years to call me. By that time, I was doing some social work stuff. But studying the body, just the whole breathing thing and how the vocal folds work. And then you have to understand, too, that the mind also has a big effect on how you're going to use the body. And that was my other big thing was psychology. I studied all the biological stuff and watched. Like, at the time I had an epiphany. I was going through the Swiss Alps, actually, on a train, and I heard Carmine say, “Okay, Renee.” Because he had passed away. God bless him. “Okay Renee.” Just clear as a bell, “It's time to share.” And then, all the stuff, I sat quiet, and all the stuff that I had learned and absorbed, I realized had a certain connection and I'd also have to use it with the psych stuff. So, I was my first guinea pig with that because nobody taught Carmine's method. So, I had to stay on top of my own chops. So, I had to record myself and all that. And then I had a student, Syeeda, that was an asthmatic actually. And I was like, you know what, I'm gonna use this, as I developed it. Syeeda, as my… what do you call that? I don't want to call her a victim or I don't want to call her a guinea pig either.

Tia Imani Hanna: Just ‘case’.

Renee Manning: Yes, ‘case’. And what started happening, actually, as God would have it, I started getting all these students with different issues, which made me research student asthmatics, students with heart problems, different breathing irregularities. And then I got into just studying sound and how people hear sound, because I realized, after a while, that there was some students who could not hear the really register the ring of the piano, but if I sang to them, they could register the note and just the different dimensions of how people hear. So, I started researching all of that, how some people hear highs better, some people hear low better, and it was, and it's still a learning process because every voice, when I say every bird has a song, unique song, every voice. There's some basic stuff you could give, but you really have to work with each singer individually. Even in a groups you have to have… that was what was so great about Ms. Mandell. Cause she heard everything. Her ear was incredible. I… we used to do two orchestras and two choirs. Junior and senior choir and we'd be singing, blah, blah, blah. We do the [unintelligible] thing and she'd stop it. One time she stopped, and she pointed to somebody in the choir that was right near me. I was like, and I was, I can admit it now, I wasn't reading my part. I had learnt it and she pointed and asked her, “Did you mean that?” My heart was sitting all the way outside. And she said, “Did you mean that?” She said, “You sang da-da-da-da.” I was like, “Whoa!” And then the girl said, “No, I didn't mean that. I wasn't paying attention.” I was like, “Wow! That's really incredible.” That made me tighten my act up even more. But, yeah, some of it was just I had to work through it. Just learn all the biology. And then, from person to person, you learn more because everybody's physically different. The way that your voice rings within your chest cavity. I have been heavier and then thinner and at this point where my voice is, like I need to get some meat off, but I'm not going to go below 30 pounds. And a lot of people when I said that at one point, didn't believe it. But if you think about Luther Vandross and [Luciano]Pavarotti, when they lost all that weight, it wasn't the same voice. It’s part of the reason why they made Pavarotti come back up in weight and I really think it was somewhat of both of their demises because, you know what I mean? Body can't go through that. But yeah, that you need… that chamber changes up from point to point. So, you really have to investigate. I've done workshops with the vocal teachers and I showed the vocal folds and they're like, “Eewwh.” Hello. I won't tell you about the crazy things with the breathing and stuff like that. But I also have instrumentalists. I teach instrumentalists to breathe also. And there's some guys who studied with Carmine and they were like, “Hey, Carmine, didn't give me that.” I was like, “You didn't have a baby and had breathing problems.” So yeah, it was… it's still a learning curve. And then when I have students from other countries, then we got to get past it, past the accents and the… it's a, lot of people think, it's a very easy thing. Oh yeah. Just give them a song. Okay. Breathe that. Okay. Sing the scale. It's not about that. You really got to set into the individual, really learn individual. And like I was telling a couple of teachers who asked me, you have to respect the honor of stepping into somebody's life that somebody allows you and trust you in their lives to do the right thing. You know what I mean?

Tia Imani Hanna: Yep. I do. So, when you have a music school now, you and Earl have a school. And you're… well, how did that come about? Cause I know we used to use to teach at the Brooklyn Conservatory of Music, and then one day you and Earl packed up and started your own school.

Renee Manning: Well. Yeah. We started Excelsior Music Studio and basically, well Tia, some of the history behind it, but yeah, I had the most classes and my private roster up was really huge and they really weren't paying us that much money. But again, giving back, and the love of the music, and I do like to teach. And the other thing is, teaching keeps me on top of my game, too. I developed a lot of classes at the Conservatory. Yeah, and then people came in, I had… remember I had three choirs, three choirs. I was doing an outreach. I had three vocal tech classes, all three different levels. I was teaching the little guys theory. Okay. And then one lady came in to do that classical choir and they paid her a bunch of money for that one choir. She got health insurance. Her husband got paid, nice money, one choir. And so, I started looking at it going, “Okay. I see exactly what's going on here.” Changed directors and when the new director came in, Karen Gear, I was leaving. I don't know how she knew I was leaving. And she said, “Could you do me… could you, could we have dinner?” I'm like okay. And we had dinner, and she says, “I'd really like it if you'd stay.” I said, “Who told you I was leaving?” She said, “It's all over the place that you're leaving. She said I'm new here. I understand that you and your husband are the guys, and if you stay just one more year and help me get acclimated, whatever you want to do, I'll help you. I'll back you up, whatever recommendations, whatever.” I wound up staying two years actually. And when she got ready to roll out, she was talking about leaving and I was like, okay, I gave you two years. And I'm not going to go through the bias and all that anymore because it was bias and racism. Yes. And split. And, of course, when I left, 86 students was like, oops, Renee's leaving, I'm out. And they try to put me through this whole legal thing. Oh, the students can't study with you for 18 months. You can't tell people how to spend their money. You lost your mind. But anyway, When I left, students left, and Excelsior, oh my God, Renee, you gone, blah, blah, blah. I said, “Don't worry. I got this.” And so, we started up Excelsior Music Studio and it's been a blast and the great thing about it is, I have some folks who want to give me a bunch of money. They want me to be this big… buy me a building. And I think we, we should be. I like my little boutique school. We're a family. The other thing is, I like that personal touch and you can't give that personal touch if you have 200 students. Which also would mean that I would have had to train a bunch of folks. I have some folks I was mentoring. Unfortunately, one of them that I was mentoring that's from Japan. We won't talk about him cause he's leaving. When he messed with everybody's visas and all that, then a lot of those ladies, a lot of my European students and Japanese students, Asian students, not just from Japan, they canceled their visas and they had to go home. The thing about working virtually is that I can still catch up with them. So, it's all good, but you can imagine how devastating that was.

Tia Imani Hanna: Sure.

Renee Manning: And yeah, and so we got the Excelsior family, we had all the different levels of class and Earl teaches theory. I stay out of the professor's way with that. I do have the ear training class and the vocal stuff goes the different levels, up to professional division. He has the blues class, and then all the brass players and whoever else. And we actually have friends who we give students to or whatever it is, but I mainly take care of the voices. I have to start mentoring folks because somebody is dyslexic, but Renee's starting to get up there. And I would really like for my legacy to continue on, but it takes time because the person has to really sit. I don't want them… like I have students who come in… Tia, if you have an hour lesson, plan on being with me about an hour and 15. I'm not going to let you walk away without totally understanding what I'm trying to do with you. Okay. And everybody has different learning curves. So, I'm patient like that. But I want the person, the people, that take over… or spread my legacy… they have the same kind of patience and the personal touch. I don't want them to just take and say, “Okay, sing this and then, okay.” And how many students come to me and say that the teacher has an alarm clock or one of those… the thing you time your egg with… and they're in, like, in the middle of the exercise or in the middle of a song and the alarm goes off and they say, “Okay, I'll see you next week.” Yeah, put the money in the jar right there. Okay. I have folks who have auditions of Broadway shows and this and that. And the other… Earl will tell you; they call me up panicking. They're in my house at 3:00 AM, “Let's go over this.” Okay. “You're going to be okay.” Earl will wake up and go…

Tia Imani Hanna: What's going on?

Renee Manning: I had one, two students that was like, so freaked out. They actually slept on my couch and I let them get up. I warmed them up and everything and send them off. And they went on, they got their auditions and went off dancing, they're going on road things. That's crazy, but then on another level, that's just me, I just want to make sure that you do well, that you feel well. The music is very healing, it's medicine.

Tia Imani Hanna: So, did you have any American mentees, I guess you call them?

Renee Manning: One of them. Remember Marjorie?

Tia Imani Hanna: I do. Okay.

Renee Manning: Marjorie has been with me a very long time. And so, Marjorie has taught, even when I did the summer things, she mentored with me and I'd let her run a class off and on. But I am looking to really have a student that really wants to take time to really learn the system and really listen, because it's not even just about the listening, you also have to do the psych. You know what I'm saying? Because there's some folks, the minute wrong note comes out of their mouth as I call it, ‘oops moment’. How are we supposed to learn everything if we don't have ‘oop’s. I wish people would stop talking about ‘perfect’. Cause there’s nothing that's perfect. There's nothing down here that's perfect. And at any given day, you could have nailed something and your voice sound… I've had that… your voice sounds beautiful one day and you get up and you go, what is going on? Oh, hormone problems. Not saying you drank or ate the wrong thing the day before, I'm saying? Wind up in some dusty place. You're not going to kill yourself Tia, I'm saying. Or with me, my band will ask me in a heartbeat, “What key?” Because you should know, as I say, you should know your animal and if its… some folks are so egotistical in denial… I get up and hum or whatever it is and it ain't feeling right. I'm not trying to be that brave and the band will go, What key, Renee?” And that's what we say about being flexible and knowing your voice. You'll say what key, that’s all today, we're gone, okay. Not to take it so serious. You can't… people beat themselves up so much. The voice singing should be as natural as your speaking voice.

Tia Imani Hanna: I agree with that.

Renee Manning: You don't see birds going through a head trip before they start singing. They just take a breath and start chirp, chirp, chirp. You know what I'm saying? So, this is why we got to get the tech, My thing, I'm the chop doctor. You gotta get the tech. If you've got the tech, then you can sing anything you want.

Tia Imani Hanna: True. That's the… I can speak loads about that because I'm asthmatic. When we worked together… and it's gotten, things have gotten so much better since then because now I just know, oh, this is going on and just breathe this way and do that and I don't even think about it, I just start singing. Half the time I don't even have to warm up, I just go sing. Sometimes I do the improv thing, so half the time I don't have any warmup time. It's oh, you're on. [laughter]

Renee Manning: I did this project with some people and they had a few singers. And Tia, they were getting up, I could hear them in the hotel. Now, we got a concert to do. It was an opera. Why are you wearing out your chops before the two hours we got to do? So, they would hear me humming, and I get up there and, they could be snooty mooty. So they were, “She's going to sound like doodoo, I didn't hear her practice.” “Why you minding my business?” And then I opened my mouth and they're like looking at me. I didn't wear my chops out for two hours before the gig. Why are you going there? It's not going to benefit you to wear your chops out. I had a couple of singers come to me. I was… I could not believe Tia. Did you know the singers be going taking shots?

Tia Imani Hanna: Coritzone shots?

Renee Manning: Yes. When they tired and see, this is how we get injured. This is what happens. And then you turn around and you're spitting up blood and you're out of commission. Some of those singers out there, I'm not going to blow 'em up, but there some professional singers out there and making all that money, they have to understand we carry an instrument. We need time down. The managers and the record companies, they don't care, they just want their money. Know what I'm saying? You have to get in touch with yourself when you're out here, and the other thing is, we gotta make ‘oops’, so we can grow and be better.

Tia Imani Hanna: I know that a lot of the labels used to send people to you that they're developing.

Renee Manning: Yes.

Tia Imani Hanna: To correct issues and help their new talents come to fruition, and they send them to you. So, it's is not that you don't know what you're talking about. [laughter]

Renee Manning: I've had a lot of that. I felt bad because I think you was there when the record company… well, they always want an entourage to come with them. And I'm like, nope, we're not having a crowd in the room. And we had one young singer, I could not believe it. They had spent all this money on her. Went in the studio, took her in a studio with this rapper and she's singing da-da-da. And then the A&R cat listened to her and she had a lisp. She had a literal, she had lisp, a lateral lisp. So, she talks like that [Renee makes the sound of speaking with a lisp] . And we're listening to the tracks and she's saying she had to sing, “Let Me Make It Crystal Clear.” You know what it sounds like [Renee imitates the singing with a lisp]. They did four tracks Tia. It took four tracks for you to hear.

Tia Imani Hanna: “Crystal Clear.” That's interesting.

Renee Manning: Yeah. But she had ‘the look’. And that's part of the problem with record companies. Until you stop that thing about lip syncing. Because, as we know Tia, they can do remarkable things in the studio. What? They can make a rock look like a diamond in that puppy. But then when you go out in the public and open your mouth ,uh oh. You better have the best sound engineer, the best sound engineer.

Tia Imani Hanna: Which they don't usually have.

Renee Manning: Nope. So, everybody got to know your business. I think that happened to a couple of artists a couple of times. So best thing to do is to really get your training. If you really love, if you really love the music, then you're going to get your training. This isn't about ‘the look’ and everything, this is about, you know what I'm saying? Because people heal through that stuff and they trust you and they're buying your stuff. And then they go to the concert and they're like, “Oh, this isn't what I bought.” Especially after you strip all that weave and eye lashes. But some folks asked me. I've had folks call radio WBGO and say, “Why are you playing her? She's not a jazz vocalist.” They're right. I'm a vocalist. They call me out and I can rock whatever it is they need. I can rock it.

Tia Imani Hanna: Exactly. Cause you've got the chops and you've got the right demeanor and you've got the right attitude and it's there. It's there when you need it.

Renee Manning: I took the time to learn all the heartbeats, So it's a good thing. That's what we want to do is be well rounded because things happen. You won't be able to move on nicely.

Tia Imani Hanna: So, you're performer, an educator. You're looking for mentees and I call them ‘mentees’ because you're the mentor. So, mentees. You can pass that tradition of learning on. And yeah, we need them. We do, cause that form of breathing is important for the tech and then you're also a songwriter. [Renee laughing] So, yes, stuff just rolls through your head and you just rip it out.

Renee Manning: I lucky that I live with a cat that can do arrangements. Sometimes, I hear differently from him, but we manage to work it out. And sometimes we will take the tune them going to rehearsal. And it's funny because, depending on who's playing bass. Sometimes it's Jerome Harris, sometimes it’s to Drefon Demetra. When I have… Jerome has known us really long time… and so, whenever I have… Earl gets in professor mode, I'll call Jerome and say, “Hey Jerome.” I’ll sing it to him. “Jerome, does this sound crazy?” Jerome is like, “Nah, it don't sound crazy.” And Earl will write it out and it's not quite it. Sometimes it needs that, know what I'm saying? That little what'd you call that, ‘flavor’. Yes. And so sometimes, what's on the paper doesn't necessarily have the ‘flavor’.

Tia Imani Hanna: Correct.

Renee Manning: Yeah, so we settle it in the rehearsal once the band plays it.

Tia Imani Hanna: Where do the lyrics come from?

Renee Manning: Craziness that goes on in my mind. So, a lot of it, some of it is life experiences. “You Never Miss a Good Thing Till It's Gone.” That tune I had some friends going through some stuff and all that. And then I had an incident that happened, like I said, certain parts of my career folks just have to mess with me and they'd be like, “Oh, I don't understand why she's getting all this press.” Because I don't know what a real jazz vocalist is supposed to sound like.

[“You Never Miss a Good Thing Till It's Gone” composed and sung by Renee Manning]

But anyway, dear, so I wrote that tune, “You Never Miss a Good Thing Till It’s Gone,” because I love the blues and then I wrote this other tune that I guess at some point you guys will hear. I previewed it at Birdland, but it’s basically my song about ‘do what makes you feel good’? And a line says… everybody, all the instrumentalists used to say, “You don't have to scat to be a jazz singer.” Guys used to make me play with them. That's how I got into it. I think scatting is an art in itself. And if you really don't get that down, maybe you shouldn't do it. So that tune, “Do What Makes You Feel Good” basically talks about let's get back to the groove. We don't need 18, 18/ 7, and you know what I'm saying? All these odd freaking meters. Let's get down to the floor. And so, the line release goes, “So you want me to doodly and be a jazz singer or I can doodly do them to be in it. You want me to doodly doodly. So, I said, “Stop and do what makes you feel good?” Know what I’m saying, sometimes it comes out of situations and things that go on in life. Sometime I… it just… I wake up from some crazy dream and it's sitting there.

Tia Imani Hanna: Okay. So which song is that one… with the ‘doodly dooes’?

Renee Manning: I haven't… I'm going to go in and record that one. I took it. I said, you know what, I'm gonna do this song. And, I had a hit in Birdland. And when I... when the band played it, or Earl actually heard the lyrics, because he wrote the music, and I just hadn't gone over him to say, he said, “Oh, so you just want to isolate yourself from all the singers. You want everybody to hate you.” I said, “Listen, this, I don't care what they do, really. Because I'm Renee.” Know what I'm saying? And either you like me or you don't. And if you don't, that's not my personal problem. [laughter] You know. The song has a great groove, and that's why I loved Prince so much because Prince could… and that's, believe it or not, that's who I listen to. My husband gets annoyed, but when I want to get revved up for a gig, I put Prince on.

Tia Imani Hanna: Works every time.

Renee Manning: Throw a groove down. Yeah.

Tia Imani Hanna: So where online, can we find you and information about Excelsior and your lessons and all of that sort of thing? And your recordings?

Renee Manning: We do have a website. It is ExcelsiorMusicStudio.com, www.excelsiormusic.com. And we're going to update a little bit because we are virtual. I believe my albums are on Spotify. You can find some of my madness on YouTube. And we’re getting ready to come into that virtual world because that's where we are. So, I think that I'm going to go in… everybody's on me about the next recording. Cause I wanted to do like a string… like, I had saved up the money. I was going to do this whole string thing and I wanted live strings. I did not want those other strings, the synthesizer. I wanted breathing strings. And I saved up all this money and I was excited. So, I was going to go in the studio and do all this stuff with real strings and John Blake had said he would come in and do solos and help me contract and everything. This was just before he died. And the IRS took all my string money. So, I didn't bounce back with that. But it's going to happen. We're going to do that. But like I said, I want, when we get past this pandemic and the whole thing, I'm saving up money again, Tia. Real strings and some real woodwinds, that real warm. Yeah. I want that. I know we know a lot of wonderful people, so…

Tia Imani Hanna: True that. It's workable. You can do it.

Renee Manning: Yes. I could do it virtually, arty. We just finished a project where everybody plays a thing and an engineer puts it together, but I really… there's nothing like being in a room together and getting the real energy of…

Tia Imani Hanna: That’s true.

Renee Manning: Yeah, so I want to do that. That's on my, I hate saying bucket list, but that's on my bucket list.

Tia Imani Hanna: There’s nothing wrong with that. [laughter]

Renee Manning: Yes. And that and New Zealand. That's what my bucket list.

Tia Imani Hanna: Yeah, mine too. I want to do that.

Renee Manning: Really. Let’s do it. I love that Maori culture. Oh my gosh. Ya know. Yeah. Let's go.

Tia Imani Hanna: Thank you so much, Renee, for spending time with me today on Tia Time.

Renee Manning: Thank you so much for having me. This was a joy. This really was a joy. I'm glad I got to see you and talk with you. It's been too long.

Tia Imani Hanna: Definitely has. And we will do it again soon.

Tia Imani Hanna: Thank you for joining us this week on Tia Time with Artists. Make sure to visit our website, tiaviolin.com, where you can subscribe to the show in iTunes and never miss an episode. Please leave us a rating wherever you listen to podcasts. We really appreciate your comments, and we'll mine them to bring you more amazing episodes.

I’d like to thank this inaugural season's sponsors: The folks at Jazz Alliance of Mid-Michigan or JAMM, Michigan ArtShare, a program of Michigan State University Extension is a partner in supporting the Tia Time podcast, and Shambones Music. Without their support this podcast would not be possible. Thank you so much. If you would also like to contribute to the show, you can find us on https://www.patreon.com/TiaTime1.

If you want to continue the conversation about topics discussed on the show or start new ones with like-minded people, join us at the Tia Time Lounge on Facebook.

Thank you for listening. See you next week at Tia Time!

+ Transcription

Tia Time with Artists, with guest Earl McIntyre, recorded on 12/18/2020

Tia Imani Hanna: Welcome to Tia Time with Artists, the weekly podcast where we discuss the methods, challenges, and real-life experiences of living our creative dreams. What kind of creative warrior are you? Musician? Filmmaker? Painter? Choreographer? Poet? Sculptor? Fashionista? Let’s talk about it right now. I’m your host, Tia Imani Hanna.

Tia Imani Hanna: Welcome to Tia time with artists and my guest today is Earl McIntyre, the most amazing trombone player and arranger and educator and friend of mine. So welcome Earl to the show.

Earl McIntyre: My pleasure. Great seeing you. It's great doing this show, especially during these times, we need to reach out and tap people and talk about some positive stuff. So here we are.

Tia Imani Hanna: And it's one of those things where we were just talking about is that I know you're home, so I can get you. So, I'm honored that you're here. This is my inaugural season. And one of the people that I know that are fabulous to be on the show. So, more people can hear about you and know what you're doing. Trombone work, teaching arranging, being the husband of Renee Manning. Those things are amazing and wonderful. Tell me, what was it about the trombone that called you to it in the beginning?

Earl McIntyre: I think the first thing you have to understand is my family, we generally don't think about African Americans in this way, but my family came up in the Salvation Army. So, everybody in my family played a brass instrument. My father played the coronet and the alto horn, and my mother played the baritone horn euphonium. And both my brothers played coronets because the Salvation Army comes out of the British brass band thing. And coronets are preferred as opposed to trumpets. If we found a trumpet, we would use it, but it was really preferred coronet. So, when I started out, I was so small that I had a trumpet, and I would put the trumpet on the edge of a seat so I could hold it and play it. And my father would, and he says if you play a brass instrument, you've got to at least learn one song before you give up, you gotta learn a song. So, I started working on “Beautiful Dreamer.” And now I'm working on playing this thing and now my boys out playing basketball and they're doing all this stuff and I said, “Man, I'm gonna learn this song so this man leave me alone.” So, I went and learned “Beautiful Dreamer” and then my father looked at me and said, “Son that was wonderful, but that wasn't a song I meant.” And he pulled this method book out called Arbonne's Tutors, like the Bible for brass players, and in the back is the “Carnival of Venice” and it looked like a fly had just run across the page. I was so mad I couldn't see straight. But see my father, this was a very wise man, and he really knew about positive peer pressure. And this is back in the day. Now you got to remember we're in Bed-Stuy, Bedford-Stuyvesant, which was a relatively rough neighborhood then, but my father was a very upstanding kind of guy. So, what he does…

Tia Imani Hanna: Bed-Stuy in New York

Earl McIntyre: Yeah, in Brooklyn. He goes to the pawn shop and buys a bunch of cheap brass instruments. And then he invites all my friends into the house to learn how to play them. See what I mean? So now they're not out playing basketball. They're in there and he starts playing now. And this is one of the things that got me into education. Cause out of that group, he got a professional musician, a lawyer… and this is from Bed, from the hood. You know what I mean? Professional musician, a lawyer, a doctor, and the fourth of our little crew, he has held blue collar gigs and he's been straight for his entire life. And when you consider that this is a kid whose brother was in jail for murder charges for murdering their mother.

Tia Imani Hanna: Oh wow.

Earl McIntyre: It's like an incredible story. You know what I'm saying? So anyway, to get to the trombone though, so I started, I started playing the trumpet and I think my father always wanted a trombone player cause he didn't have one in the family, see. I start with the trumpet and then he kinda got me to play this slide trumpet thing for a minute. Then the next thing I know I had a euphonium, which is like a baritone horn. And from there I got the trombone and I started playing the trombone and the trombone, I liked the trombone, and the Salvation Army at that point, who played first trombone, or second trombone, had to do with seniority. And since I was at that point, I guess I was, it must have been coming up on 15. So, even though I played better than most of the adults, I didn't have a chance of playing first trombone. So now, like I said, my uncle, he was what we call an officer in the Salvation Army. You might as well say the minister of the church. And he could tell I was getting irritated and you could imagine, you're a teenager, the vibe. So anyway, he said, you know something Earl, come here for a minute. I want to show you something. And he takes me in this back room. He says, “Listen, we got this instrument. And nobody's playing it. And it's in good condition. It's pretty new. It's called a bass trombone and we don't have a bass trombone player in the band. So, you might want to try this out and see what you think.” And Tia, I picked up the horn and I play on note, “OOOOO.” I said, “That's it.” So, I switched to bass trombone. Now they figured… now this is what happens with parents. They figured that this was the end of the story, but I'm practicing the bass trombone. And I'll tell you one of the big hints my father told me, which I give to this day to all my students, is that I lived in the back room of a brownstone in Brooklyn and it had a lot of room, and he told me, “Just clear out, make sure there's nothing in a way, but practice with your eyes closed or in the dark.” Because so many people play the trombone and string instruments and he played strings, incidentally. Some of it is his teaching techniques came from playing some violin, but he'd say, “This way you won't get wrapped into looking at the slide when you play. It's all about hearing it and feeling it.” See, but once again, the same way that he didn't have a trombone player, he knew tuba players, but they never had a horn. So, he looked in the union newspaper, because he was in the union. He was one or two guys who played alto horn in the union. And he orders this tuba. He paid like a hundred dollars for it. It came in a wood crate. And one of the only places where we had space in the house was my bedroom. As they say, the rest was history. Cause I looked into it, and it was like the creator wanted me to play this thing, cause I looked in there, I pulled it out, I think I played it once or twice. And I had this concert… I got in this orchestra is pick-up orchestra is called the Harlem Philharmonic. And the Harlem Philharmonic had some great American players. A lot of them graduated from Manhattan School of Music. There was a trumpet player named Wilmer Wise, [Trumpeter Wilmer Wise first came to national prominence with his appointment to the largely non-integrated Baltimore Symphony Orchestra as its assistant principal trumpet player in the early 1960's. This time marked the beginning of the Civil Rights Movement, and Wise played a key role in integrating American orchestras.] who was in there, who was Leonard Bernstein's favorite trumpet player. When Leonard Bernstein recorded West Side Story…there's a video... at one point he stops the whole orchestra and says, “Don't worry about me. Just follow the trumpet player. He's a genius.” You know . So anyway, I got in this orchestra. I waited for the audition, being a kid, didn't eat before the audition. And the audition had the “Tannhäuser” [Wagner opera] in there and this guy is one of those guys who was flowery, he wanted it real slow.

Tia Imani Hanna: The “Tannhäuser” solo from the solo from Wagner?

Earl McIntyre: Yeah. So, I haven't eaten, I'm playing this big horn and I started playing and I fell asleep. Next thing I know, somebody was touching me, “Are you okay? Are you okay?” So, yeah, I was so worried about being late for the audition, I didn't really eat. I just ran out. He said, “If you get this, you gotta eat.” So anyway, the first concert is in, not Prospect Park, Central Park, at the bandshell, and I'm walking in, and this is like about two weeks after the tuba arrives, walking in and I hear this incredible sound and I thought at first it was a euphonium or baritone horn. They're playing all over this horn, man. And it turns out it's a tuba and the tuba player was Howard Johnson.

[Howard Lewis Johnson (August 7, 1941 – January 11, 2021) was an American jazz musician, known mainly for his work on tuba and baritone saxophone, although he also played the bass clarinet, trumpet, and other reed instruments.[1]Johnson was known for his extensive work as a sideman, notably with George Gruntz, Hank Crawford, and Gil Evans. As a leader, he fronted the tuba ensemble Gravity and released three albums during the 1990s for Verve Records; the first Arrival, was a tribute to Pharoah Sanders.]

And that came… Howard has been like a mentor and a friend. Oh, gracious, over 50 years. So, that's how I wound up with both the bass trombone and the tuba.

Tia Imani Hanna: That was an epic journey.

Earl McIntyre: Yeah, I met some incredible people cause by the time I joined orchestra and then started playing the tuba, from that time, by the time I was 17, I was out on the road with Howard and Taj Mahal. Yeah, it was an epic journey and a fast one too.

Tia Imani Hanna: Even just the fact that you've passed out at an audition and got it anyway, that's impressive. So, you must a had it going on.

Earl McIntyre: Well, I guess he saw something, and so many of the people, it's incredible when I look back because so many people who were in that orchestra became important in my life. Warren Smith, the great percussionist [Warren Smith (born May 14, 1934) is an American jazz drummer and percussionist, known as a contributor to Max Roach's M ‘boom ensemble and leader of the Composer's Workshop Ensemble (Strata-East).] was also in that orchestra, there's just, like I said, there's so many different folks who are like that. I can't remember the name she uses now, but Sharon Freeman who was a great French horn player and composer, she was there for that. [Ahnee Sharon Freeman is a jazz pianist, French horn player, and arranger. Freeman played French horn for the jazz opera Escalator over the Hill, Gil Evans's 1973 album Svengali, and in 1983 she worked on a piece of jazz Christmas music.[1] In 1982 she joined Charlie Haden's Liberation Music Orchestra and recorded three albums with the group between 1982 and 2004.[2] Freeman has also worked and recorded with Frank Foster, Charles Mingus, Don Cherry, Muhal Richard Abrams, David Murray, and Lionel Hampton, and served as musical director for Don Pullen and for Beaver Harris' 360 Musical Experience.] And then a number of great woodwind players. It was… there was one, oh, Hal Archer. When we talk about African Americans who play classical music, they should have a special place for Hal Archer, cause Hal Archer is such a great flute player, as I believe if I'm correct, he's from Barbados, I think, but he auditioned for the Berlin Philharmonic. And they actually came out, the people who auditioned him, actually came out and told him that he's the best flute player that they heard, but they could not accept him because the conductor would not accept an African American.

Tia Imani Hanna: Wow. that's just sad.

Earl McIntyre: Yeah, it was pretty intense. And a number of the people that I've met in that genre along that way, triumphed past all of that, so yeah.

Tia Imani Hanna: Unbelievable. It was just sad. Sorry to hear that story, it's…

Earl McIntyre: Oh yeah. It's heartbreaking stuff. But so many of those guys, like I was talking about Wilmer Wise. Wilmer Wise also did this thing. He wound up making a big living on Broadway and, incidentally, he was also one of Wynton in Marsalis’ teachers. I met Wynton through Willmar. At one point, just as a lark, Wilmer… usually the trumpets in B flat for most commercial music… on a lark where Wilmer just decided to play everything on a C trumpet for two years.

Tia Imani Hanna: Just because.[laughter]

Earl McIntyre: Just because, he’d say, “I just want to get into the sound.” He was one of those guys who crossed over quite often later on when I worked with Thad and Mel [Thad Jones Mel Lewis Orchestra] I would look up, and there would be a trumpet forum going on in the back. Cause you would have Jimmy Owens and Donald Byrd and Wilmar cause they all had this kind of cross-influence of Wilmer's interest in jazz and their interest in classical and that whole thing. So yeah.

Tia Imani Hanna: So where did the crossover come for you? Cause you were playing Salvation Army, and then you played classical. So, where did the jazz come into the mix?

Earl McIntyre: A couple of different things happened. One thing was that, when I went to the high school music and art, as did my lovely wife Renee. And the students, I think at that point, we all had this thing where we decided that you couldn't talk about any music badly unless you could play it. And Duke Ellington always had that thing where he said, “There's only two kinds of music, good music and bad music.” So, when I was in music and art, I played in orchestra, I played in the symphonic band. I played in what they call the stage band, then, interestingly enough, the bass player in the stage band was a gentleman named Andy Gonzalez, who later became one of the premier bass players of Latin Jazz. And…

Tia Imani Hanna: Right. Fort Apache right?

Earl McIntyre: And when I came out, when I'd finished my day at school, we had this band uptown in the Bronx, and we would play little weddings and stuff. And we had this scam going on. See when it was an African American wedding, the saxophone player, who was African American, we would call it “The In-Crowd” and we would play Soul and Funk. But see, the guy… one of the guys in the band happened to be David Valentine, flute player. And a lot of people don't realize it, but he was a percussion major. He had to lay, like if it was a Latino couple, then David ran the band and we played Latin music.

Tia Imani Hanna: Because he is primarily known for flute, right?

Earl McIntyre: Yeah, but he was a great Timbalero or too. So, we used to have… we had two trap drummers in the band. And we had, as we say, a Caucasian guy who played organ and he was more into Psychedelic Rock. So, if we had something going on there, then he took over. See. So, we had this whole thing covered. The main thing I learned from that was just that, that ability to adapt and that, I think, has probably taken me through my whole career. It's always been that thing about adapting and playing different kinds of music. And that's always been like exciting for me.

Tia Imani Hanna: You never run out of things to do if you're doing different stuff.

Earl McIntyre: Oh yeah!

Tia Imani Hanna: Is there a lot of call for country or… ?

Earl McIntyre: We go through that. Where the kids sometimes they say that to me and say, “What about Country Western?” And I tell them a couple of things. One thing is it, man I love Willie Nelson. He did he did a standards album that's killin. Of course, you had the Ray Charles stuff that, stuff that Ray did, and at different points in my career, I worked with Ray. And then there's also that aspect, because when you work with Taj Mahal, the Americana comes out. See. And Taj Mahal was an expert on the banjo, so much so that when the Smithsonian gets a banjo that they can't figure out, they called Taj. And then also, at a different point in my career, I worked with The Band, the rock group, The Band. And later on, because of that, I also worked with Levon Helm and there's a certain country element to all of that. So yeah, all of that is up in there too.

Tia Imani Hanna: I wanted to have you talk about that because a lot of people don't understand that.

Earl McIntyre: Oh, would you… listen. First of all, the first thing you have to understand where we talk about the banjo is a North African instrument. That's where it really comes from. And so much of the music, when you hear, it's interesting. When you go back and listen to what they might call Hillbilly, there is still… you can see the connective tissue between it and rural blues. There's a certain thing that's there. And the fiddle is up in there too. So that there's that connection. And it was really interesting to me cause you know, the drummer that used to work with Taj Mahal, he passed away about a year ago, no, I don't think it's even been a year, and his name was Jimmy Odie. He used to play with Little Richard too. And Jimmy was one of those guys, he played great, but he really didn't like life on the road. So, he went back home, which happened to be Nashville. And the last time I talked to him, he was saying, “Man, all over the country Western acts have rediscovered the backbeat. I'm working all the time.” Sure nuff. You listen to that stuff, everybody from the Chicks, listen, that backbeat and its addictive.

Tia Imani Hanna: The country music now is a lot different than what it used to be in the seventies and the sixties It's not even… it's almost just like regular old pop.

Earl McIntyre: Everything is so diverse, and everything is… the melting pot is happening. There's some, for instance, contemporary gospel that I really like, but then I also, it's almost confusing to me, because I also have this love for the traditional Gospel. And I don't want to see that leave us, I don't think it ever will, but you know what I'm saying? I like all that diversity.

Tia Imani Hanna: Yeah. It's nice to definitely hear the melting pot. I remember not too long ago. I guess it has, by now it's been about 10 years ago, but I happened to cross some videos, some country music videos, and they had black people in them playing drums and stuff. I said, “Whoa, what happened?” Because it never used to be that way. So nice to see that there's, oh okay, it's not just all white people playing country music anymore.

Earl McIntyre: Or listening. It's interesting to me that, especially when you get to certain parts of the Caribbean, you hear a lot of country/western. You hear a lot of Country Western, and I even believe to a certain degree, there's a certain influence on Reggae that happened with that. because when Reggae really started, one of the big influences was the fact that across the Gulf they could get the stations that were down in New Orleans. So, some of the very first Reggae stuff was actually covers of New Orleans Rhythm and Blues. So, you got all of those kind of cross pollination things happening.

Tia Imani Hanna: So, you've learned all these different kinds of styles. There's the melting pot going on in your head as well as in the music that you're playing. And then, did you start arranging as you went to university? Or where did the arranging come from?

Earl McIntyre: That's… I'll be honest with you. Of late, I've been trying to figure out more of that myself. No really, because part of what happened, it's like a process and it's a process that I've also used to teach. Now, one thing, of course, I became interested in it when I was with Taj Mahal, amongst other things, because during that period… actually, I guess it was a little bit before then now that I think of it. One of the people who became very important in our lives, when you talk about myself and Renee and Buddy Williams and David Valentine, and many of us who came to music and art, and he's…this guy is one of the unsung heroes of the music. There was a guy named William Fisher. Bill Fisher. Now Bill Fisher, amongst other things, he graduated at the top… he's from New Orleans, graduated top of his class. I think it was at the Vienna Conservatory. And then went out on the road, playing tenor saxophone with Ivory Joe Hunter. [October 10, 1914 – November 8, 1974, Joe Hunter was an American rhythm-and-blues singer, songwriter, and pianist. After a series of hits on the US R&B chart starting in the mid-1940s, he became more widely known for his hit recording "Since I Met You Baby," 1956.] So now, Bill Fisher was a teacher in music and art, but he was also, at a different point, the musical director for Atlantic Records. He wrote arrangements for McCoy Tyner, for Herbie Mann, for Yusef Lateef, he wrote Roberta Flack's first album, he did stuff for Aretha (Franklin), and just wide stuff too, a lot of strings stuff, a lot of whatever. So, he was in Music and Art. And I, one of the first things I wrote, was in Music and Art. And he talks slowly. He always t a l k e d l i k e t h i s [speaking very slowly]. So, I was excited when I realized some stuff about him. Cause even when we were in school, he would go to Europe and do Stockhaüser concerts. So, at one point I said, Mr. Fisher, “I'm going to take your composition class.” And he says, “Y o u d o n’ t w a n n a d o t h a t? A l l t h a t' s g o n n a h a p p e n i s I' m g o i n g t o h a v e t o g i v e y o u s o m e t h I n g h a r d t o d o

t h a t y o u n e v e r, e v e r g o n n a u s e.” Of course, I was confused by this. So, finally I said Mr. Fisher, what should I do? He says, “T a k e m y 20th c e n t u r y l i s t e n i n g

c o u r s e.” Okay. So, I take the course. The first day… let me see if I can get straight… The first day he played Alban Berg, Louis Armstrong, BB King, and Miles Davis’ “Witch’s Brew.” And he showed the relationship to all of them. That was the first day. And I always loved him because he would say stuff like, “T o u n d e r s t a n d A l b a n B e r g, y o u h a v e t o

k n o w w h e r e h e l i v e d. V i e n n a i s c o l d a n d r a I n y. Y o u c a n h e a r t h a t i n t h e m u s i c. H e l i k e d t o l i s t e n t o j a z z r h y t h m s a n d h e t r i e d to

a p p r o x i m a t e t h e m i n h i s c o m p o s i t i o n s.” Then there's this long pause and he say, “H e d i d n't q u i t e g e t i t.” Yeah, but Bill, through my whole life, he has been one of the ones that not just telling me what's going on, but what's going to happen. I'll give you an idea of the kind of guy that Bill is. And this was like, oh, had to be over 20 years. No more than 20 years after I got out of Music and Art. I get this call from Bill Fisher and he says, “E a r l, I n e e d y o u f o r a r e c o r d d a t e. W e'r e g o i n g t o p l a y “T h e

S t a r – S p a n g l e d B a n n e r.” I n e e d s o m e t r u m p e t p l a y e r s. G i v e m e

t w o o r t h r e e, t h r e e. O n e s t h a t c a n p l a y f a n f a r e s, t h e t y p e. I t's

g o i n g t o b e a t t h i s s t u d i o t h r e e o' c l o c k o n T h u r s d a y.” Click. Okay. So now, I get in the studio and I come to find out that what it really is, that somebody doing an animated film short on “The Star-Spangled Banner,” and particularly featuring the antiwar verses the we never sing. Yeah. Okay. So, I do the date and now I had another project and I had to go up to Bill's house. And so, Bill I said… Oh, I forgot to key part… who's singing it. Aretha Franklin. [laughter] So, I go up to Bill's house. So, Bill, man, how'd the thing go with Aretha? Okay. I'd worked some with Aretha as well. “O h, I h a d t o g o b a c k t o

D e t r o i t b e c a u s e A r e t h a w o n't f l y. S o I c o m e t o D e t r o i t, t h e f i r s t

d a y i n t h e s t u d i o, n o A r e t h a. T h e s e c o n d d a y i n t h e s t u d i o,

A r e t h a's l i m o u s i n e p u l l s u p, s h e s t a y s i n s i d e a n d e a t s c h I c k e n.

N e v e r m a d e i t i n t o t h e s t u d i o. [laughter]T h i r d d a y, A r e t h a m a k e s i t i n t o t h e s t u d i o. W e w e r e f i n i s h e d i n 45 m i n u t e s.” [laughter] To… like I say, but through that, watching him, I did that. I used to work at a spot called Boogie-Woogie where all the… listen, Tia , you could walk in the one room and the original Weather Report would be in there with Joe Zawinul and Wayne Shorter and Miroslav Vitouš, and Al Mouzon, and Airto (Moreira). The other room would have Cannonball Adderly's group with George Duke, right? It was a demo studio. Everybody came to this spot. Richard Pryor, Miles Davis, Woody Shaw, Nina Simone. You never knew who's going to be at the door. We used to do demos. So, for instance, we did Angela Bofills' first demo. And what I would do is, they want some extra on these little demo tracks and how I got into writing for choirs. When I say choirs, I would write a track with all flutes, but Piccolo C flute Alto Bass, if they had, or all brass. And I started doing that. Then, as luck would have it, I worked for, you might as well say, an incredible array of the world's greatest arrangers Thad Jones, Bill Evans, Carla Bley, Gerald Wilson, Oliver Nelson, and the list just goes on. And when I would be working for these guys, especially with Thad, and when I heard something I liked, I got into just going in and pulling out all the sax parts and making my own little score and seeing what was there. And the later on, I studied a little bit formerly with Slide Hampton and Slide really got me into analysis. And then I even had a couple of lessons with Bob Brookmeyer too, but much of what I got came from working with those great arrangers and copying that stuff down and listening and just… and also listening to who they said that they listened to. There's a great story. There's a great arranger, Billy Byers and Billy Byers, He's one of those guys who could write an arrangement and seemed like in 10 seconds. He did a lot of Broadway, a lot of commercial stuff. He did the Cotton Club; he did this and that. And somebody asked him about arrangements, and about teaching orchestration and arranging. And he said, “No, probably all I would do is sit you down in my house with a couple of beers and we would listen to arrangements by Robert Farnon.” [Robert Joseph Farnon CM[1] - 24 July 1917 – 23 April 2005 - was a Canadian-born composer, conductor, musical arranger and trumpet player. As well as being a composer of original works (often in the light music genre), he was commissioned by film and television producers for theme and incidental music. In later life he composed a number of more serious orchestral works, including three symphonies, and was recognized with four Ivor Novello awards and the Order of Canada.] Now, when he said that, I didn't know who Robert Farnon was. And then when I talked to all of my mentors, like people like JJ Johnson and Benny Golson and Jimmy Heath, all these guys, turns out they knew Robert Farnon. So much so that one of his last records or recordings was JJ hired Robert Farnon to write all the orchestral arrangements for a JJ Johnson album called “Tangence.” And JJ was a good arranger himself now. So, it turns out that Robert Farnon was one of these guys who, like in the thirties and forties, it must have been a little bit later, but the score to the original Captain Horatio Hornblower. When all this stuff was big, he was the guy. And he's one of these guys who wrote… he had the same attention to detail that for instance, Ravel has. And so, everything is in its place and those guys really admired him. And I was blessed because I admired them. And then, through JJ, I got a chance to talk to him. And even in that 10-minute conversation, I learned a lot. Yeah. Just because of their approach and just what he was looking for. And it was just amazing. I learned… same thing happened, I learned more in a cab ride. I took a cab ride with Jimmy Owens and Gerald Wilson and we went from, you might as well say, Oh, it was that L. I. U. [Long Island University] In Brooklyn to Midtown in Manhattan. And I learned more in that conversation than in two years in the BMI Writer's Workshop.

Tia Imani Hanna: I believe you.

Earl McIntyre: He was amazing, man. Guys like that, sometimes even the way they just look at you will tell you more. One of the things that was interesting is the way I got to speak with him, was I was JJ Johnson's music supervisor towards the end of his life, like the brass orchestra recording. And there's another record called “Unsung Heroes.” And he wanted me to edit his method book and different stuff. But anyway, JJ asked Robert to write an arrangement on JJ’s “Lament ” And it was all for brass. So, I get the score and JJ wants me to copy it, and I called JJ, “JJ. It says here something about metal mutes, but I don't know what he means.” JJ was very particular. “That's very interesting. I don't know what he means either. That could mean a lot of different things. You should call Robert.” And he lived on the Isle of Wight. That’s why Robert's got to be, I guess he… I think he had turned 80 by then. And I called him, and he says you have to understand that when you make a straight mute for a trumpet, it could be made by plastic or it could be made with cardboard or metal. When you have metal, the sound has a certain ping to it that you can use when it's mated with the percussion. Cortals, and that kind of stuff. I've never been shown where there's (can’t decipher), the finger symbols. And when you mate it with that sound, you get a very distinctive kind of ping. And I was like, “Okay.” And like I said, wow, all right. But that's what I'm talking about when I say, ‘attention to detail’. And if I learned anything from him and particularly JJ, because JJ was a fiend for detail, that's one of the things that, especially in my more mature years, one of the things I've really tried to come to grips with and really be better at, is attention to detail in the arrangements and the performance and the preparation. So much of it is in there.

Tia Imani Hanna: There's so much to that. It takes so long just to learn how to play the instrument you're playing, and then you have to learn how to play, write it, and arrange it and understand all the details and understand how to even… how the voicings work, and how the different layers, and the different octaves and the different clefs. And there's just so much. I'm always in awe of people who can do it. Because I try a little bit, but I haven't gone that deep cause it just takes more time than I have.

Earl McIntyre: You got to look at it different too. One of the things that it also took me a while to learn is that… And I learned to actually, okay, I learned it because I had no choice. It was just that quite often when, especially when, you start writing large things, you're always thinking, like you panic, when you hear somebody say we need a 40-minute piece and you keep thinking, I got to have all these ideas. And the truth of the matter is, you only need one or two really good ones. I mean, listen, and as they say, the rest is history. And I had a thing where when Lester Bowie… [Lester Bowie - October 11, 1941 – November 8, 1999 - was an American jazz trumpet player and composer. He was a member of the Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians and co-founded the Art Ensemble of Chicago.] He was very sick. And I think at that point he had stage four liver cancer and he really didn't have long to be with us. And he had this thing going on, where he was going to be at the at the Chicago Jazz Fest. And he called me up and he says, “Listen, man, we needed a piece for the Jazz Fest and it's a 40-minute big band piece. And I need it by Tuesday.” And this is Thursday. I say, “I'm gonna come back and I'll give you some ideas.” So, he shows up and he has two pages of single line melodies with no changes. And he said, “Listen, I'll come back and bring you some stuff. Tomorrow I have to go and have a full body transfusion.”

Tia Imani Hanna: Oh, my goodness.

Earl McIntyre: And I said, “Lester, I got this.” And I sat down, and I found these melodies and I just started twirling with the melodies and just looking at every aspect. And I did it compositionally. And I finished the piece, and I went to his house and I gave him the parts and the score. And I told him,” Lester, a couple places, you just play this simple melody, the rest of the time, just conduct small strokes like that.” And when I gave him that music Tia, that was the last time I saw him alive.

Tia Imani Hanna: Oh, my goodness.

Earl McIntyre: Yeah, it was pretty heavy. But like I say, from those kinds of situations, I started to realize that so much of the music is in the development. And you also start to realize that along with the development of the music is a development of the spirit. It all kinds of goes.

Tia Imani Hanna: So, would you say that your attempts at creating music, playing music, writing music, arranging music, is to develop the spirit of yourself and others, or is it a calling?

Earl McIntyre: It's a combination. It's a combination of all those things. It's also therapeutic in some aspects and it helps me. And hopefully it helps the people that hear it. There's a great story. You might've been around when this happened. Years ago, at the Brooklyn conservatory, I booked Airto Moreira, to do a solo concert.

Tia Imani Hanna: Oh, I was there.

Earl McIntyre: Airto gets on the bandstand and he starts talking about his life. And one of the stories he tells is about being a toddler and they thought he was sick. And they thought he was having tantrums, there was some kind of problem. And it was poor family. They pulled together the mother, the money, the grandmother comes up, and they’re getting ready to take Airto to the hospital, and all of a sudden, he starts to have a conniption. And then the grandma says, “Wait a minute.” And she walks over to the radio and turns it down. And Airto stops. Turns it back up, Airto goes back up again. Finally, the grandmother said, “It's even worse than I thought. He's a musician!” So sometimes, as he says, you don't choose, music chooses you. So, I think it's a combination of things like that, but it is an amazing thing. And you're going to have my lovely wife at some point and one of the things that we both will never forget is that some years ago, in Cobble Hill, we love to go and play for the seniors. And it's a big challenge because they remember.

Tia Imani Hanna: Oh, Cobble Hills, is that a nursing home or a retirement center, or…?

Earl McIntyre: This was a retirement center. So, we play… and, in fact, it was not, it was a, yeah, it was a senior citizen center. Correct. So, we’re playing a bunch of different stuff. And there's a woman sitting there in a wheelchair. So, like I say, you got to play everything. Cause you play a Tarentella, they know it. You play James Brown, they know it. So, we decided to play this James Brown. We start playing and I look over at the head of the senior center and tears are coming down her eyes. I'm trying to figure out what's going on. And then I look up and I realize the woman who's in the wheelchair is up and dancing. And that's the first time she'd been out of the wheelchair in 11 years.

Tia Imani Hanna: Wow. Wow.

Earl McIntyre: 11 years. Yeah. You know what I mean?

Tia Imani Hanna: I do. It's important.

Earl McIntyre: Like David Amran is another one of our mentors, David, you're probably familiar with Dave. I think he… you were around for some of that too. But David Amram wrote the original score for “Splendor in the Grass” and the “Manchurian Candidate.” So, he sees the stuff we do, particularly with seniors and young people. He always says we're doing God's work. And in a way, I think he's right. That's important stuff. Then we… everybody needs to get involved.

Tia Imani Hanna: True that. So, what are you working on these days?

Earl McIntyre: Couple of things. Of course, I'm still active with Arturo O'Farrill’s Band. And we do virtual Birdland. We do virtual Birdland, and we do virtual performances just about every week. Okay. So, there's that. Okay. So, we got that going on. Recently, I did a project which you'll see out there for Midori and Friends featuring a bunch of their artists. It's a holiday card and it's winter wonderland thing. And they wanted something that would show all their… a lot of their artists… that they're going to use virtually. It's close to about 30 or 40 people. And I wrote the arrangement and in the middle of it, they had a tango group. So, I wrote it. I wrote a tango version in the middle of this arrangement of “Winter Wonderland.” And then we found out that the tango folks, cause they were going to dance, but some of them got sick with the COVID thing and all of this, so we have since managed to open with a couple of other luminaries who you'll recognize when you see it.

So, Midori and friends it's coming up or it's already out?

Earl McIntyre: It's still editing. Okay. It will be out by Christmas.

Tia Imani Hanna: Okay. We'll look for it for sure.

Earl McIntyre: And it's a great cause. So, we put in them some of the luminaries. Renee is singing on it though.

Tia Imani Hanna: Oh, nice.

Earl McIntyre: So, it came up pretty well. So, we're doing that. One of my long-term projects has been… and I do this thing through Unsung Heroes, who I write music to commemorate people who I think who are important in my life and who you don't hear as much about, so like for instance, I wrote up a thing on Father Divine.

Tia Imani Hanna: Father Divine?

Earl McIntyre: You hip to him?

Tia Imani Hanna: No.

Earl McIntyre: Okay. Father Divine, during the Depression, was a minister who… his rap, what they tried to get him on was that he claimed he was God. Really a lot of what he was saying was that there is God in everybody. But, during the Depression, he influenced a lot of people to make their own money. But one of the things he did was that if you went into his one of his spots or ministries, put something ridiculous, like a quarter, you get a full meal, so he fed thousands of people, but he had a very diverse congregation. And because of that, he was a threat. So, they eventually got him on tax evasion, put him in jail. And he said, “Oh, I feel really badly about this. I feel really badly about this. Cause I don't know how many people will be here when I get out.” And sure enough, I think the way it goes is the judge, the D.A. and the foreman all died of mysterious causes. Yeah, no, it's a very weird story. And I've always wondered, I wasn't sure how I felt about this man, because you hear a lot of good and a lot of bad. Lot of people under his influence got houses and the whole nine yards, so the writing becomes therapeutic and me deciding how I feel. Also, you ever hear of Satchel Paige?

Tia Imani Hanna: Yes.

Earl McIntyre: Okay. I wrote about Satchel Paige, and one of the things I love about Satchel Paige, I really believe Satchel Paige, I think, he's… people will say that he's probably the greatest pitcher ever. When I was a kid, they used to have a show called “You Asked for It.” One of the things they had was, they would take a goalpost, something that looked like a goalpost, maybe be a little bit lower and they tied them up upside down and he would throw strikes. He pitched, I think the rap was, he pitched two or three no hitters in one day.

Tia Imani Hanna: Wow.

Earl McIntyre: But for me, with all of that, Satchel Paige pitching was his day gig. For me, he was a philosopher. You can look him up, but some of the stuff he said was just modern-day philosophy, like one of his is like... how so I say this thing? “Don't pray when it's raining if you didn't pray when the sun was shining.” That was one of his. Another one, how’s he say this thing, says, oh, “Work like you don't need the money.” “Dance like nobody's watching.” And “Love like you’ve never been hurt.” But there's just always, he's always got something, something like that going on, but there's a whole, there's a whole list of them. And then when he describes his pitches, they're just, it’s just classic. He's just one of those people, every word is a gem.

Tia Imani Hanna: He was also overlooked because he was Black during the time of Jim Crow.

Earl McIntyre: Oh, listen. Do you realize he was the oldest rookie in American baseball? He still is. He was a rookie at 40 years old and killed it. I mean, you know, but there's just so many things. Oh, when they put him in the Hall of Fame, he said… how did he put this thing? He says, “Now Satchel gets a chance to go from being a second-class citizen to the second-class hero,” or something like that. But he just always… so he's another one. Another one I wrote about was a great boxer, Sam Langford. Sam Langford came out after Jack Johnson, but they were frightened of having another African American champion. So, he literally, and he admitted, he chased Jack Dempsey around and Jack wouldn't fight him. He said he didn't fight him til he's much older because he was really worried about it. They used to call him the Boston Tar Baby. One of the reasons was that he was legally blind. He was fighting. But if he caught you…

Tia Imani Hanna: How?

Earl McIntyre: It was over. Yeah, but this is amazing cat, and he's considered one of the fourth… I think it was like something like the fourth greatest heavyweight of all time, but nobody knows about him. See what I mean? So, I've made it a thing where every year I write about a few different people. I did a whole thing, I did a thing for 40-piece orchestra on the great poet, did “Melindy Sings” and… Paul Laurence Dunbar, used to do dialect poetry. And I wrote… years ago I wrote a piece. In fact, it featured Lester Bowie and David Langston Smyrl and John Stubblefield, and 40-piece orchestra. So, all of those kinds of things, every year I try and do a couple. I'm trying to create some dialogue about these folks. Cause especially younger players, younger children don't know about it. I redid it for all brass.

[Rivals plays here.]

Now we're starting to do virtual stuff in the schools. And one of the projects is going to be a social justice project. So, I'm hoping to be able to shed some light on a bunch of that kind of stuff. Right now, a lot of our stuff, we are starting to go into the schools to do that. Like I said, I have been doing the stuff with Arturo. Renee and I have our own projects we're starting to work on again. And now as I master more of the tech stuff, I'm hoping to do some other virtual stuff on our own, cause I'm… I've been writing and doing stuff, so go into school orchestras of New York. And so, I've been doing virtual stuff for them and for New Jersey Performing Arts Center, the Jazz for Teens program and all that kind of stuff. But now we're at that point where we want to start to do our own virtual things and I'm looking at different projects, particularly hoping to get some more of the ‘unsung hero’ stuff done. And both Renee and I are way past doing our own CDs. So, folks have been trying to light a fire under us about that. So that's going to be coming around soon, I can tell.

Tia Imani Hanna: Now, you and Renee have a school, right?

Earl McIntyre: Yes, absolutely. That's part of it, Excelsior Music Studio. And we tend to… we deal with a lot of different students that we're prepping, some for college now. But a lot of what we do is with seniors and, during the COVID crisis, one of the things that's been happening, and you could talk to her more about this, but Renee does a happy hour because she had senior choir. And, of course, it's hard for the senior choir to meet and we're always worried about the state of mind and just about our seniors in general. And one of the things that Renee started to do, just on a lark, is she got this happy hour happening. It's three o'clock on Saturdays now. And they get together and she's… she sets up stuff so that they can sing together to a track, they mute and sing and listen, and they have a dialogue, and they get to see each other. And we always crack up because, three o'clock they say, no, this is happy hour. You got to get your drink on. No, listen. They've got everything from hard cider, somebody had some kind of scotch or something. And Renee said, “I can't drink right now.” “You need to get up at eight and take your meds so you can have a drink with us.” They're like our new moms and dads. And so much of what happens, I'm not going to spoil it for you, you got to tune in and hear Renee talk about the seniors because they are the new… Tia, they are the new teenagers, man. You hear the stuff that you do. I won't even tell you what senior it was, but recently I had a situation where... the stuff that they're doing, just remind you of stuff in your youth, what they… what you find in their pockets and they just, yeah, but not just that, but you forget that where our grandparents were, everybody's in much better shape, physically doing stuff. Like, even at one point, we did this thing called the senior prom, right? Like I said, it was one of the toughest gigs we do, because we literally… you'd have to be able to do a Tarantella or a Horah, Latin music, James Brown, everything. So, we do this. And when they call it the senior prom, they mean ‘senior prom’. They come dressed to the nines and I think they said the median age was something like 75 or something like that. Now I'm going to ask you, Tia, at the end of the night, cause remember we, I think we did two, three sets and all the politicians would show up because they know those folks’ votes. Who do you think was on the floor at the end of the night?

Tia Imani Hanna: All the old folks.

Earl McIntyre: Yeah, but which ones?

Tia Imani Hanna: The oldest ones?

Earl McIntyre: Yep. The 90-year-olds. The 90-year-olds. And they would be on the floor. One year, and it broke our heart, because one year we had one that showed up all the time and she said. “I don't know if I'll be here next year.” And she was 93 or four. But that's the hardest part about working with them is you develop these relationships. And, sometimes, Renee meets the choir at the table. When, before COVID that she used to give this speech, “Listen, nobody leaves the table. Don't ya'll be doin’ nuthin’. You be here next week.” Cause you just can't handle the emotional thing, but they brought a lot to our lives and, hopefully, we brought a lot to theirs. And then, of course, we got the little ones, and we deal with them. We deal with people at every age and whatever they bring, we deal. Fortunately. We've taught, literally, from preschool to a hundred and then had a bridge all the way though.

Tia Imani Hanna: Yeah, I've been at some of the concerts that you all used to do at the Brooklyn Conservatory of Music. Those were fun. Everybody from all ages, and it was always a party, and everybody was having a good time. So, you were definitely bringing joy to the world, especially the Christmas concert every year. That was fantastic. So, I know you guys are still doing the same thing and with COVID, I'm sure it was a little bit more intense and different, because it's virtual, but are you all doing something this year for the Christmas concert?

Earl McIntyre: You know what? I think they're going to get together and just do a small thing. Cause Renee was just talking to me about… I think they're going to do it the Saturday after Christmas, they're going to do a Zoom thing, but we've been doing that. We've been putting together some stuff. And, like I say, Renee and I are planning to put out a little Christmas card and stay tuned because we have a very special version of Auld Lang Syne that we're sharing with everybody. I think you've heard about. I don't know if you've heard the recorded version, the recording version has a bunch of luminaries on it. Lester Bowie and when I think about some of the people who are on Renee's first album, it's actually incredible. But I think Lester Bowie is on there. And then, we got folks like Nat Adderly, Jr. and Jerome Harris and Buddy Williams and the rhythm section and Howard Johnson's playing baritone, and the horn section, and all kinds of folks, and then you can hear it. It sounds if it was a party and it sounds like it.

Tia Imani Hanna: That's fantastic.

[“Auld Lang Syne” plays here]

Earl McIntyre: I wrote a bunch of things that commemorated different people. I think I said I sent you “Witch's Samba,” which is a commemorative of a relationship my brother had with a lady.

Tia Imani Hanna: Okay. [laughter]

Earl McIntyre: My brother was sick, he passed away from MS. And in that period, he met this lady from Brazil and became enamored with her, and got a little strange towards the end, but that's what that song is about.

[“Witch's Samba” plays here]

There is a tune on it that Renee sings. She makes almost like a cameo appearance. It's actually, I rewrote it. I rearranged it for… he's from Trinidad, but he's of Indian extraction. He's one of these people who used to work like three or four jobs, and then the weekend comes, and he goes out, he parties hard. He drinks. He dances. He just has an incredible time over the weekend. And then he goes back to work. You know. But when he's working all these jobs, and as I looked at it, I then also realized something that was rather interesting in the house, in the family, there's this is whole relationship between women, African American women of a Southern background and males with a Caribbean background. And many other relationships are based in that. Like on my end, I'm… my mother is from Barbados, is Beigen, [Renee and Earl's slang for mixed race]. Renee's folks are from down South, then her sister married Singh and he's from Trinidad. Their daughter married a guy who's from Haiti and she's got a Southern background and it just keeps going like this. So that it's called a Second Line Soca because of that. And the tune and arrangement reflects all that, cause you hear the Caribbean thing at one point and then at another point it's got a kind of like Second Line, New Orleans thing going on and so yeah.

Tia Imani Hanna: Fantastic.

[“Second Line Soca and Brudda Singh”]

Tia Imani Hanna: Where can we find you online?

Earl McIntyre: Oh, that's a good point. Of course, you can always find us on Facebook and all that kind of stuff, but you can also check out ExcelsiorMusicStudio.com, you know, which is something we're working on over the holidays to bring some new stuff to that.

Tia Imani Hanna: Okay.

Earl McIntyre: On YouTube, if you look up “Renee Manning, Earl McEntire Septet” or even “Renee Manning,” and because most of the time Renee Manning, I'm there somewhere. I always say I'm the silent partner.

Tia Imani Hanna: I wouldn't say silent. You hear both of you guys in your music, so it's fantastic.

Earl McIntyre: Oh, some performances there, some live performances from Birdland, which are quite special. Trying to remember if they took this one… I'm trying to remember if they took it down, but there's a version on there. Cause you know, when we went into Birdland and we just found out that Aretha had passed on and Renee sings this really deep version of “Dr. Feelgood” and not of Aretha, but there's a lot of stuff on there on YouTube. And you can look at stuff together or separately and there's a pretty decent body of stuff that you can check us out.

Tia Imani Hanna: Thank you so much for being on Tia Time today, and I appreciate your willingness to share your stories and your heart and your warmth and your music. And we're going to be looking out for you. And I'm going to talk to Renee, and we'll have her on and then it'll be the family affair. Thank you so much.

Earl McIntyre: Thank you. And now Tia, we need to do something here. If I thought about it, I would have figured out something, we going to have to do something, I'm always… one thing I should say is… you'll love this. This is something else I should have done a way to show it to you. But since I've been working with the interschool orchestras of New York, my whole string thing, I've been doing a lot more string writing. One of the projects I didn't mention is that, during the COVID thing, I worked on a thing where I wanted something for the kids to play, for the younger students to play, and everybody was playing this stuff that ‘we're going to get through COVID’, and it still had this sad kind of feel to it, and I wanted something that was fun. Looking for a classical piece because they had a full orchestra and we also did something with the Mingus, the dynasties, a septet, and full orchestra for them. But this particular project, I was looking for something special, a classical piece that I can make fun. So, I started thinking about “The William Tell Overture.” And then I started thinking, cause when we were kids, you always saw the Lone Ranger riding furiously to “William Tell Overture,” and I started thinking the Lone Ranger and Tonto, they couldn't have been in a hurry all the time. If you slow it down, [sings a scat] it turns into Reggae. So, I did a version of the “William Tell Overture” with a reggae band for the ISO thing. So that's another… when you're talking about cross-pollination.

Tia Imani Hanna: That's fantastic. I love that. Really great.

Earl McIntyre: And you actually animated this thing of the Lone Ranger going like this. [laughter] Thank you so much for having me. I'm glad to see you doing this. This is the time to be doing this kind of stuff because otherwise, they say history will be his story. It won't be our story.

Tia Imani Hanna: Thanks a lot Earl.

Earl McIntyre: And have happy holidays.

Tia Imani Hanna: Happy holidays to you. Bye.

UPDATE: Now I recorded this session before Christmas with Earl, and then I found out on Christmas day, the new movie “Soul” came out and I enjoyed the movie thoroughly. And I watched the end credits, which I always do. And I saw Earl McIntyre’s name in the credits as a consultant. Then I watched the extras and found out that he was definitely one of the extras and they had him on screen talking. So, if you get a chance to see that movie, watch the extras. Anyway, I called Earl back immediately and spoke to him about the movie “Soul.” . So, here's that part of the interview:

Tia Imani Hanna: So Earl, tell me about “Soul,” the movie. That's a Pixar movie. It's about a jazz musician who has to figure out some things in his life. It is an animated feature and you're involved in this. And tell me all about this.

Earl McIntyre: Well, it's interesting, cause I got a call from Patience Higgins, great tenor saxophone player, and he said that a guy wanted, a contractor from Los Angeles, wanted to speak with me about being involved in this movie and, sure enough, he calls and he asked me a few questions. And then the next thing I know I'm talking to Pete Doctor, who is the director of “Soul” and a couple of other people at Pixar. And they questioned me about jazz musicians and clubs and all of that kind of stuff. And Pete plays bass. He's been involved with the music for quite some time. We had a great conversation and then I hung up and I didn't think any more about it. Then a couple of months go by, and they call me up and say, listen I actually, in fact, they sent me an email and they said, “Listen, we want you to come out to California to talk some more about the movie, and we'll set up flights for you and the whole thing and the hotel, and Pixar.” Now you have to understand my youngest daughter has a degree. She has a split degree in biology and animation. So, she's very involved in that. I didn't even tell her, I just… I basically talked to them, said, “Would you mind if I bring my daughter?” And I explained it, and he said, “No, you got to bring her.” So, it was right around her birthday and I just handed a card saying that she was coming to with me to Pixar. Of course, she just freaked out.

Tia Imani Hanna: I bet.

Earl McIntyre: So yeah. We go out there and first thing is the whole place is just amazing, if for no other reason cause they, of course, they took us on the tour and one of the things that really stood out that was amazing to me was that the workspace for all the animators, they really let them decorate it the way they want it. So, for instance, and Pete was involved in "UP" and a couple of, he wrote on, they always revolve, so, for instance, he wrote on “Toy Story,” he directed "UP" and few others and there's one animator, they decided there was a scene from the movie where the characters were living in an airplane hull that had crashed and it had all the growth, the weeds and everything. And so, their turned the office into a replica of that. Another one turned their office into a replica of a speakeasy, including an opening hidden door and the whole nine yards. So, that was part of it. Now, as far as the discussion show stuff, we got there, Herbie Hancock was there. And I hadn't had a chance to really talk to Herbie in, like, years and Terry Lynn Carrington was there. So that was great. And we just talked about… and they were very attentive. I have to tell you I was really pleasantly surprised because I've dealt with some movie people who just… I did the "Cotton Club" and that was a whole ‘nother kind of experience, but he really… they really went a long way in terms of trying to understand. They asked us about the dynamic of clubs and what the clubs were like and musicians, the whole nine yards. And at one point I, I told them after, as a matter, I told them that something looks strange with the way the young lady in the movie was playing the trombone. And then when I saw the final cut. They really got it down. It was… it's better than any other film I've ever seen with somebody playing the trombone because she really has the positions down. And then I found out that they actually took… they actually filmed folks and made sure that it matched up. So, they really went to a great degree to try and get it right. There's some, any movie there's going to be some issues, but I have to say that I can't think of one that's better in that regard, unless you're not counting like documentaries, of course, where the people actually playing in there. But it was really, a really nice experience to see somebody take the music, like, seriously and try and figure out how to do this.

Tia Imani Hanna: We did the first part of our recording on this interview before the movie came out on Christmas. So, I called you back today to talk a little bit about this because we didn't even talk about this movie, now I don't know if you were on restriction before to talk about it.

Earl McIntyre: I was.

Tia Imani Hanna: And then I saw the movie and I loved the movie. It was one of the best movies I've seen that actually did talk about Jazz and they actually play Jazz. Cause some movies say it's Jazz and there's no Jazz in the movie at all. This is the first time I've heard real Jazz and Tia Fuller was killin. And was it Jon Batiste, was killin. And I was just so thrilled to see that. And then I went to look at the extras and I saw your face there. And I looked at the credits. I usually do watch the credits and I said, “Wait, that's Earl!”

Earl McIntyre: It's one of those things I couldn't even tell you truth. I have pictures of myself with Herbie and different ones, and I couldn't even share that stuff online because the gag clause and I can understand it cause people, they steal the stuff before it even hits the air. So, Pixar is really tight about that. It should be, and I hope that with the success of this movie that people continue to move in that direction. Cause not only is it's deep in terms of the Jazz part of it and the part about the African American community, because some of the shots of that are really interesting, but also his subject matter. This is, there's some things that go through all of this stuff that, all of this stuff that are like, how can I say, more cerebral than you would think of in that kind of movie.

Tia Imani Hanna: Yes. I think we've gotten to the point now where we realize that animation is not just for kid’s stuff. And that we are doing full length feature films that are real films that are happened to be animated, as opposed to it's a kid's movie. So, I think that animation is finally evolved to the point where people appreciate it as a… just a true art form just as they would film. So, it's… but that's pretty exciting that they flew you out there, you got to take your daughter, you got to talk with Herbie Hancock and other musicians that were there and Terry Lynn Carrington. And so, I was just pleased to say, “I know that guy.”

[laughter]

Earl McIntyre: Yeah. The other thing that was great about it, that I thought was exceptional, was the involvement of the kids. Cause you know, the kids actually played on the soundtrack. When we did the… we did this like a virtual red-carpet thing and they had a whole thing for the kids from that school, and they also made sure that they included educators who had to deal with kids at that age to get… they got a lot of input from really good people in terms of the reality of those kinds of situations.

Tia Imani Hanna: So you were considered part of the… what's the advisory board, or what did they call them?

Earl McIntyre: I'm not even sure how they figure out all that, cause a lot of folks that I was with, we were considered consultants. I was considered an advisor. It could have been about who's available here or there. When you start talking about movie people and credits, if you think that you understand it, then you really got a problem. But like I say, most of the folks I think that I was there with were under the consultant thing. They may have done another session. I may not have been available. I can't remember how… I'm not sure how all of that worked, but I was just pleased to be involved with it. And it was very interesting to hear different takes on what we do and where we do it. Cause I had a very interesting conversation, when we talk about clubs and myself and one of the other folks that had a very different concept of the clubs. I think one of the theoretical questions involving a motion picture like that has to do with, do you want it to portray clubs as you know them, for instance, or do you want to portray clubs as you'd like to see them? And I'm always the one, I don't know, I like it like to portray it the way we see them. I think that there's a certain thing about the grit and the club and the folks that hang out in the club that have always added to the music. It's like a thing, at one point we did a concert and a bunch of us who've been in music for years, and we were talking about education, and we were just saying that we can teach you chords and scales, but we can't teach you to have a personality.

Tia Imani Hanna: True that.

Earl McIntyre: And so much that, when you hung out with those clubs, there were these personalities and all of that. It's hard to separate that in that culture from the music. And I don't think we necessarily want to, so yeah, that's a big part of it.

Tia Imani Hanna: I'm so pleased to see that you were on and involved in that. And thanks for coming back on to talk about that today. So, I appreciate it. And I'm to let you go. I just needed that little bit, so wait a minute.

Earl McIntyre: You got it now, and I'm glad to see you doing this. It's a lot of people are sleeping on it, but you know what they say about his story? It's his story. If you want it to be your story, then you better get up off of it and start doing stuff like this so that's a good thing. So, you take care of yourself. You be safe.

Tia Imani Hanna: Thank you.

Earl McIntyre: Bye-bye.

Tia Imani Hanna: Thank you for joining us this week on Tia Time with Artists. Make sure to visit our website, tiaviolin.com, where you can subscribe to the show in iTunes and never miss an episode. Please leave us a rating wherever you listen to podcasts. We really appreciate your comments, and we'll mine them to bring you more amazing episodes.

I’d like to thank this inaugural season's sponsors: The folks at Jazz Alliance of Mid-Michigan or JAMM, Michigan ArtShare, a program of Michigan State University Extension is a partner in supporting the Tia Time podcast, and Shambones Music. Without their support this podcast would not be possible. Thank you so much. If you would also like to contribute to the show, you can find us on https://www.patreon.com/TiaTime1.

If you want to continue the conversation about topics discussed on the show or start new ones with like-minded people, join us at the Tia Time Lounge on Facebook.

Thank you for listening. See you next week at Tia Time!

+ Transcription

Tia Time with Artists, with guest George Shirley, recorded on 12/18/2020

Tia Imani Hanna: Welcome to Tia Time with Artists, the weekly podcast where we discuss the methods, challenges, and real-life experiences of living our creative dreams. What kind of creative warrior are you? Musician? Filmmaker? Painter? Choreographer? Poet? Sculptor? Fashionista? Let’s talk about it right now. I’m your host, Tia Imani Hanna.

Tia Imani Hanna: Welcome to Tia time with Artists. My guest this week is Mr. George Shirley. He is a Grammy winning opera singer. One of the first African American tenors to sing at the Metropolitan Opera in New York City. He is a National Medal of Arts winner presented by President Barack Obama in 2015. He is a Lifetime Achievement Award winner from the National Opera Association, presented in 2016. He is also a distinguished professor emeritus from the University of Michigan. Welcome Mr. Shirley.

George Shirley: Tia, thank you for inviting me. Thank you.

Tia Imani Hanna: You're, like, Epic Legend. My family has known you for many years and you're the Epic Legend in the house. So, what was it about opera that got your attention? What was it about opera that…, as opposed to other kinds of singing, what was it about that particular art form that really captured your spirit? Was it, your family was very musical? Everybody did classical music as opposed to doing some other kinds of music. Just tell me, what was it about opera that captured your spirit?

George Shirley: My interest in opera, per se, did not happen until after I was in the Army. I grew up in, both of my parents were musical, not formally trained. My father came from a family of 14 in Kentucky. And he was musical, as were other members of his family. And he and his brothers used to play for dances in the community. My dad played three instruments, piano, fiddle, and guitar, all by ear. And he sang. My mother came from a family of 8 in Arkansas and she sang. So, they met in Indianapolis, Indiana when they both had left the homestead. They met in church. My mother sang in the choir. My dad sang in the choir. These were hymns and spirituals. I was born nine years after they were married. Only child. And I probably was singing in the womb. And my earliest musical experiences were in church and at home. Opera was not a part of that. Both of my parents being from the South, they love country music. And what I heard on Saturdays; it was not the metropolitan opera. But Grand Ole Opry from Tennessee with Minnie Pearl and all those good old folks. So that was opera. The rest of it, like I said, was spirituals and hymns. I started singing with my parents when I was about four years old, five. They would sing as guests in local churches in Indianapolis, as well as singing in their own church. So, for a tea or something like that, my parents would go, and they'd take me. And I started performing with them reciting poetry and singing a hymn. That's where it started. And we moved to Detroit, Michigan when I was six and that's where I started public school. And my parents had started me actually teaching studying piano when I was about five before we left Indianapolis. But in Detroit, the music education system in the public schools was second to none. That's one of the reasons why so many great musicians have come out of Detroit, Jazz and in the classical world as well. So, from the first grade on, I had a music teacher, we had music teachers. By the sixth grade, anybody who had any musical talent at all could read music. We were musically literate. It just wasn't all by ear. We could pick up a piece of music and read it. Junior high school, wonderful choirs. High school, my first exposure to, say the Verdi Requiem, was on one of our spring concerts when we did the first chorus of the Verdi Requiem and I sang tenor solos. We sang Messiah every Christmas. And I started seeing the tenor solos in Messiah when I was in the 11th grade, not realizing that it was preparing me for a career that I, at that point had no idea of… had no interest in. By the time I got to the 12th grade, I was determined to become a music teacher because I was so moved and impressed by the musical education, I had in Detroit Public Schools. And I entered Wayne University in Detroit as a music education major. There was no opera program at Wayne. It was a music education school. And there I continued to be exposed to classical, European classical music. And I had also, before I got to Wayne, my parents started me studying voice with a local teacher in Detroit. And he was Caucasian. He was white. He gave me songs written by European composers, as well as songs written by African American composers, like Howard Swanson and others who were writing, using the techniques, the European techniques. I was… my exposure was to the whole thing wide. I think maybe I said, try to sing early on, maybe one operatic Aria, but it was too early. When I got to Wayne, Edward Boatner came to Detroit to become music director at King Solomon Baptist Church in Detroit. I went to Ebenezer AME church. Now let me backtrack a bit. Ebenezer had four, three or four choirs. One was a senior choir. My mother sang in that and they did the European or oratorio works and Messiah, things like that. There was a gospel choir. There was a young people's choir, young adults’ choir. There wasn't a children's choir, but I was surrounded by music. Going back a little further, back to Indianapolis. My parents entered me, when I was five years old, they entered me into a local competition that was sponsored by a big department store in downtown Indianapolis, Block’s Department Store. And the first … there were prizes given. I was the only black child in the competition, and I won second prize singing an old Bing Crosby tune my dad had played for me, “There Was a Gold Mine in the Sky.” The second prize was the chance to make a recording of me singing this. My first recording when I was five years old and my parents had that recording up until the early seventies when they moved, and they lost it. The end of it, you hear me saying, “My name is George Irving Shirley and I'm five years old.” So here again, I believe that everything is written before you come into this world. So, I was having experiences that were preparing me for what, I didn't know what was coming and what I wasn't even thinking about. So that was my musical background. High school, tremendous education. University. As a matter of fact, my senior year the glee club director came to me, Harry Langsford, and he said, “I want to do Stravinsky's ‘Oedipus Rex’.” Oedipus Rex is classed as an opera, oratory slash oratorial. And he said,” I want you to take a look at the role of Oedipus.” Okay. I did. I felt wow. We did the production at the Jessie Bonstelle theater in Detroit. And we did, I think, three performances of it. It was my first taste of anything operatic. And I loved it. It was a wonderful experience. I have a recording of it, as a matter of fact, from that time. But it didn't speak to me as a way of life. I was focused on becoming a music teacher, choral, and indeed that same semester, I was assigned as an emergency substitute in regular position to Miller High School. They had an opening there. So, I started my teaching career really the semester before I graduated. I had a wonderful choir, really talented students, and this was going to be my life. I was looking forward to that. Opera, come on, you gotta be joking. So, the matter of fact, in my girls’ voice class, I had two singers that were going to go on to worldwide fame. One was Kim Westin, became a great jazz singer, and the other was Martha Reeves, the Vandellas. So, I was happy being a music teacher, but Uncle Sam said no. Korea had ended before I graduated. The draft was still alive and well, so I wound up being drafted in 1956, early 1956. I wasn't going to try to escape the draft. I had the sense that my job would be there for me when I came back and be there for me in the system, maybe not at Miller. So, I was drafted. I went into the Army as a bandsman. I played euphonium when I was in college. I didn't go in as a singer. I had heard about a new unit that was formed in early 1956, attached to the official United States Army Band and Washington DC, Fort Myer, Virginia. And they were recruiting young guys who are getting out of college to audition for this new singing group. I heard about it, but I decided, no, I'm not going to go there. It was a three-year commitment, first of all. Now, I didn't want to spend three years in the Army. I had planned to get married in 1956 and it was messing up our whole plan. So, we had to move our wedding up a week. So, I wasn't thinking about committing three years to the Army. Plus, the fact that the Army Band, the parent organization of the chorus had been formed in the 1920s, 1926, I believe ’25, and it had never had a black member. I thought there was no sense going, spending my hard-earned little cash to go and audition for this chorus in Washington, DC, which at that time was still segregated, basically. I wasn’t going to waste my time. So, I went in as a bandsman and I spent my first weeks of training, learning how to shoot people. And the second I went back, as a member of the band. And that wasn't very exciting. This was Fort Myer, Virginia. Fort Leonard Wood, Missouri, where the training took place, is an engineering post. So, the band would play the flag up in the morning and then play for graduation cycles and then maybe play in a little concert somewhere and play eight ball until we had to go out and play the flag down at night. Sure. And I thought, “If I'm going to spend two years of my life doing this, I'm going to go out of my mind.” So, I, along with two other guys, both white, decided that we would go to Washington and audition for the chorus. The driver, the car was a little two-door Studebaker. Three of us had great difficulty fitting in there with any degree of comfort because, especially one of the guys was rather large. So, we got as far as Cincinnati and we decided we can't take this. This isn't going to work. So, we bought airline tickets to Washington. We arrived at the Fort, met the captain, a man named Samuel Labooda. He was… the captain was the conductor of the chorus. There was a major named Curry who was commander of the band. So, my two colleagues sang their auditions and the captain said, thank you very much for coming, but we won't be able to use you. I thought, “Okay. My turn.” I sang. And after my audition, the captain said, “Can you wait a few minutes?” I said, “Yes, sir”. The few minutes became a half hour because he went into the command room and I sat there for half hour thinking. Yeah, I knew it's the same old stuff. Same old scene. He came out and he said, “We've decided that we would like to have you join us if it's what you really want. And I've said this repeatedly, the only time we ever caught Sam Labooda with his pants down was in this moment. I said, “Sir, if it wasn't what I really wanted, I wouldn't have traveled all night to get here.” And he said, “Yeah, you're right. Yeah.” That was my entry into this organization. An organization that was constituted of young white guys my age who had graduated from college, like I had, some of them were initially cool. Others were welcoming. And over the... but they didn't ask me to stay in for two, for three years. They accepted me just for two years, which made me feel, “Thank God”. But as I began to get to know these guys and they began to get to know me, it became a brotherhood. I can say that. I'm still in touch with them. I've gone to all of the reunions and it is a brotherhood. There. So anyway, about in towards the end of the second year, when I was getting ready to get out, there's one fellow named John “Jack” Gillespie is his name, but he sang professionally after he got out of the Army in Germany as John Gillis and came back to the States and ran the opera training program at Texas Tech in Lubbock, producing some really excellent singers amongst them the black bass, Terry Cook, who had a fine career. But Jack kept pushing me saying… he was studying with a private teacher in Washington… and he kept pushing me “Come and sing for Georgi.” The man's name was Therny Georgi that had an operatic career in Germany and a bit in the United States and he was a senior citizen living in his own home in Washington and teaching privately. And I kept putting Jack off. “No, man. I'm not interested. I'm going to go back to Detroit and teach.” So, he just kept pushing me. So, I finally said, “Okay. Okay. Okay.” So, I went and sang for this old fellow and he looked at me and he said, “You study with me one year, I guarantee you’ll have a career.” Now, come on. He had to know that there weren't that many black tenors singing. Matter of fact, there was only one that I knew of at that point. And he is, he was in the Singing Sergeants, which is the Air Force Chorus, but he would get out to go and sing smaller roles with the New York City Opera in Manhattan. Name is William Dupree. But this old fellow didn't look like it looked like he needed the money. He had his own home, was comfortable. But for him to say that to me, I thought, “Oh, something is operating here.” So, I thought about it and I thought, “Okay, if he who has done this thinks I can do it, I'm going to find out because I don't want to go back to Detroit and resume my teaching career and then be kicking myself ten years down the road for not finding out if this old fellow knew something. So, I signed up for the extra year, which made the captain happy, and I started studying with this old fellow. And at the end of my third year, I entered the Met auditions in Washington, DC area because I wanted to get some feedback from people who knew what this was about? The judges were from the Metropolitan Opera. The chief judge was a man named John Gutman, (Mr. Gutman was one of four assistant managers of the Metropolitan Opera during the tenure of Rudolph Bing, the general manager from 1950 to 1972. He was in charge of the Metropolitan's national auditions Mr. Gutman established the Metropolitan Opera Studio, which developed many young singers for the Met and other opera companies around the world), who was the second in command of the company. Rudolph Bing was the artistic director.

[Rudolf Bing was General Manager of the Metropolitan Opera from 1950 to 1972. A strong leader, he took complete responsibility for running the company. Much of his work can be documented with official correspondence that reveals him as a firm and witty letter writer.

From the Metropolitan Opera Archives:

Rudolf Bing

1902 – 1997

Rudolf Bing was General Manager of the Metropolitan Opera from 1950 to 1972. A strong leader, he took complete responsibility for running the company. Much of his work can be documented with official correspondence that reveals him as a firm and witty letter writer.

One of Bing's first acts on arriving in New York in 1949 was to arrange for the return to the company of Kirsten Flagstad.

February 6, 1950. Bing to an angry Met subscriber.

"Please don't think that I am attempting to persuade you to renew your subscription. I merely wish to say that I have sincere respect for your feelings and the only thing I ask in return is for you and others to respect the sincerity of my convictions. I have left Nazi Germany during the first days after Hitler's advent to power. I have lost friends and of course all my possessions through leaving Austria and Germany. I have spent the war years in London in the Fire Services - but I am here to run the greatest operatic organization in the world, and I am determined to run it without prejudice of race or politics, on the basis of quality and Quality only. I cannot in this letter go into the details of the Flagstad case. The Norwegian government has cleared her; the American government has given her a visa and permits her to appear here as she appears in France, England, and other European countries. Is there to be no end to the hatred? As I said, I respect your views, but I want you to know that mine are based on Miss Flagstad's vocal and Artistic qualities and on nothing else."

April 20, 1950. Bing to a writer who had protested the announcement that Bing would hire artists regardless of race. Thank you for your letter of April 19th and for the kind interest you are displaying in the Metropolitan Opera's affairs. I don't think that I will have any Negro singers in next season's roster as there are no suitable parts and the roster is complete, but I am afraid I cannot agree with you that as a matter of principle, Negro singers should be excluded. This is not what America and her allies have been fighting for.

Thank you for having written to me.”]

[Ballerina Janet Collins, who made her debut in the Aida production which opened Bing's second season on November 13, 1951, was the first black solo artist at the Metropolitan. Marian Anderson sang Ulrica in Un Ballo in Maschera on January 7, 1955 to become the first black solo singer at the Met.]

I entered, and I sang, and I didn't win. I didn't win anything, but I went to the reception afterwards. And Gutman and a man named Howard Hook, who was the chairman of the national auditions. [He was Chairman of the National Council Auditions - read the National Council History here - from 1954 when he founded the organization until 1968 who was the head of the national auditions.]

They came over to me and Gutman said, “We want you to know that we like very much what we heard you do, but we don't think you're ready to go to New York City yet for the semi-finals, but you keep doing what you're doing.” That was all I needed here. From that point, I had won. They affirmed that I had a right to be singing this stuff. So, I started my career when I got out of the Army. I started my career in Manhattan, 1959. I had an opportunity to… actually, before I got out, I had auditioned for a small company in Woodstock, New York, and they gave me a contract so that when I got out. I had worked that summer in 1959 with this little company up in Woodstock that a theater, the seated about 200 people. Two pianos only seven singers, no chorus. We sang the chorus parts when necessary. We sang the whole thing. It was a great way of starting off, for the spotlight wasn't that bright, but with people who really loved performances. And when I walked out on stage that night to sing “Eisenstein Die Fledermaus,” my operatic debut, I knew that I was home. I knew that I was doing what I was born to do. And let me backtrack and then I'll shut up for a bit. Before I got to the Army, after I started studying with George, Therny Georgi, the Army, of course, didn't travel that much. We'd take a trip now and then, and in 1957 we took a trip to California to sing for an ROTC convention. And Captain Labooda put a concert on our itinerary for our return trip to sing with the Denver Symphony Orchestra at Red Rocks Amphitheater. So, we found ourselves in Denver area. We had about three days there, so we had some time off when we weren't rehearsing. And I, along with three of my colleagues, one day, we just rented a car and we just took off. We wanted to seek, see what we could of Colorado. We went to the campus of the university and then we went… we wound up that afternoon and Central City, which is a big tourist attraction and old gold mining town. And they have an opera company there. They have an opera season there. It's quite famous. And so, we were walking down the street and, here again, we weren't thinking about going to performances, just walking down the street. And one of our members, fellow named Ara Berberian and who's from Southfield, Michigan. Who took a degree in law from the University of Michigan. Sang in the glee club. He wasn't a music student, but then it shows how God works. Wound up singing for about 20 years as a leading bass at the Metropolitan Opera. Go figure.

[Armenian: Արա Բերբերյան, May 14, 1930 – February 21, 2005 was an American bass and actor who had an active international career in operas, concerts, and musicals from the early 1960s until his retirement from the stage in 1997. He notably had an 18-year association with the Metropolitan Opera in New York City, where he gave a total of 334 performances between 1979 and 1997. He sang over 100 roles during his career, including those of Osmin in Mozart's Abduction from the Seraglio and Sparafucile in Verdi's Rigoletto.]

We were walking down the street. There Ara saw somebody coming towards us that he had been in law school with at Michigan. This fellow was the chief tour guide and also the head usher for the opera. So, we wound up with four tickets to see the opera that night. The opera was Verdi's “Rigoletto.” The lead role was sung by Frank Guarrera, who is a Metropolitan Opera stalwart. The soprano singing Gilda was a woman named Joan Carol, an American who was singing very successfully in Germany, but came back to do this summer session. And the tenor was a man named John Crane who sang with the New York City Opera. This is the first opera that I ever seen. Now, I'm 23 years old. And I sat there listening to John Crane rattle the walls of this theater, small, a small theater, not huge. And I thought to myself, it's a good thing that I never wanted to be an opera singer because I can never do that all night long. Little realizing that four years later, I would make my Metropolitan Opera debut with Frank Guarrera in Mozart's “Cosi fan Tutte” (April 6, 1961) and that was that was how all this started. And so, when you ask, what brought me to opera, that is what brought me to opera. Dragging me initially, and then realizing that, but this is what God created me to do.

Tia Imani Hanna: A great deal of synchronicity.

George Shirley: Yes.

Tia Imani Hanna: That's an incredible journey.

George Shirley: Well, its… life is an incredible journey for anyone. But for me, seeing how my life has played itself out, doing things that I didn't know I was going to do, doing some things that I wanted to do, and knowing that when I was born, I didn't ask for any of it. It was given to me. It was given to me in the endowment that I was given when I was conceived. There's no one who, I think, stands before the intelligence has created life and says, “I want to be a football player.” But persons who go on to become football players and good ones have been given that possibility. They've been implanted with what they needed to do it. No one can put anything in you in life. They can influence you to discover what was planted in you when you were conceived. The things that people can put into you in life are things that can mess with what's been implanted. Can drive you crazy. Can get you all befuddled. Substances, or what have you, but I've never been able as a teacher to put a singing voice into somebody that wasn't born with it. I've been able to help them to uncover and discover. I haven't been able to put the work ethic in them that is necessary to develop it and if that's not there, then the talent is going to go to waste. So, those individuals who develop and do things are those who have been made aware of what they have by what life brings it. That what opens him up to their possibilities, but those possibilities are embedded when the father's sperm fertilizes the mother's egg. So, I'm just grateful. I am grateful.

Tia Imani Hanna: When you were trying to get to know… you said, I don't know how I can do that for that long. And you're trying to develop those skills. Now, what kinds of things as you knew you had some talent because you could sing and people were recognizing that and you had been studying, but what kind of determination did it take after that point to get to the Met?

George Shirley: To get to any stage. I had to do the work. I tell students do the work that's in front of your nose, in front of your face to do. If you do the work, then you discover as you grow, whether you have been implanted with what it takes to get to this level or that level or this level. But if you don't do the work, if you don't have within you the desire, the discipline to sweat and to fail, and to pick yourself up and learn from that failure and learn that well, because I failed there, it doesn't mean I'm going to fail every time. If you don't have that consciousness implanted within you, then you won't move ahead. I believe… I've said this in a number of interviews and people who look at the interviews say… are probably saying… he's repeating himself. When people ask me about my life, I'm going to repeat myself. I believe in the theory of multiplication by zero. If you are a scientist and you need five test tubes that are filled with material in order to complete your experiment, and you've got those test tubes and they're full to the brim, then you will complete it. If, say, one of those test tubes has less in it or there varying levels of it, of that substance, in these test tubes them you get… you make some progress, but you won't get as far as you’ll get if everything is at the top. If you have four test tubes that are absolutely filled, and one that is absolutely empty, there's no way that you're going to complete the experiment. I've worked with singers, students, who have fantastic voices. The instrument is “Whoa! Wow!” And they can't sing in tune. You think, “What a tragedy?” This is… this would be something that Whoa, but it’s all out of tune and no matter how hard you try to work with them, they can't. So that test tube is empty, and it will mean that person cannot take that magnificent physical gift and the musicality that it expresses, and they can't use it in the professional world because nobody's going to really pay you to sing out of tune. There are people who have all of those ingredients, but not at the top level. And they can rise to a certain level in the profession. They won't be maybe the big star, but they will do those roles in an opera that are necessary because they are part of the story. I believe firmly that if you're born with everything you need, then you will succeed. If something's missing. At the beginning, then you only go be able to go so far and that's not unknown to the intelligence that created you.

Tia Imani Hanna: Now, have you found when you had a test tube that was empty or not as full, did a teacher appear that you need to help fix that or to show you or point that out to you? Or did you have to search for that on your own?

George Shirley: The teachers that I've worked with have encouraged me to develop in every way that's necessary. Now, I would not, by any stretch of the imagination, say that my voice is as great an instrument, or I wouldn't say as that of Leontyne Price or Franco Corelli or some of the people that I've been blessed to stand on the same stage with. But the compensation, from my point of view, is that my artistry has been at the top level, which has enabled me to be there and do with them what I've been able to do. But I was not born with a phenomenal voice. I was born with a voice that is better than most, but when you look at those people who can open their mouths and just the sound of it can just lift you out of your seat. No, that's not the class that I occupy. But my combination of gifts, I thank God for, has put me where God planned for me to go. And I'm grateful for it. Learning is about learning what you have inside of you and developing what you have inside of you. I, as a teacher, or nobody else can put something in you, nobody. If you don't have courage, nobody can give it to you. The courage is there, and it can be brought out by what you face in life. I'm just happy that the packet that I received from God through my parents has enabled me to do what I've been able to do and what people feel is worthy of recognition.

[”Imgeminsco” plays here]

Tia Imani Hanna: So, I guess I'm trying to get an understanding of… cause you teach as well. So, you're… if you have a student who… say they're lacking in the acting part of opera or their pronunciation of a different language in opera? So, how do you work with those people? They have almost everything. Do you say, go take some Italian lessons or German lessons or do you say you should only sing in German? I don't know enough about how opera is taught to know, like, what those stages are, and I don't think my audience does either. So, I'm just trying to understand how that works.

George Shirley: Let's step aside from opera for a moment because that's music and text. If you were an actor and you were given a text. This is a French play. We're going to perform it in French. So, you're going to have to study French pronunciation. You're going to have to know what every word means when you say it so that it rings with truth. You're going to have to study the character to know why the character is saying what the character is saying at this point. What is causing this to come out of this character, these words? What are the emotions behind it? You're going to have to use your imagination about this character if it's not all written out for you to see. You've got to make a backstory for this character. You just can't take the character where they are and then make sense of what's going on. You got to make up something that makes sense of where they are. What kind of childhood did you have? Did you come from a happy family? Was there abuse in your family? Make it up, as long as what you make up makes sense of what the playwright has given you from page one of the play to the end of the play. And that's the process that a singer of opera or musical theater has got to go through in order to be able to convince the audience that this is the character, not the actor. When the audience enters the theater, they have to do what is called ‘suspension of disbelief’. You're not in Paris, that’s scenery. This is a theater. But the power of the performer is… should be… has to be such that you forget that you're in a theater, that this is an actor who's going to go out and have a drink with his or her buddies after the performance. For that moment, when the curtain goes up, you gotta be drawn into a world that you can believe in as an audience member cause the actors believe it. It's what you do… what you did… when you were a child and you played with your doll. Wasn't the doll real to you? Didn't this doll have a life? No, the doll was just there like this (demonstrates lifeless doll), but you gave it life. So, that's the process. With the voice of God who as a teacher work the voice, and its drudgery. I give the students exercises and say, “Look, you take this, and you work this over and over again until it’s second nature.” And they'll go into the practice room and, “Ooh, I can't sit in it.” [demonstrates vocally bad musical sounds here] You got to hook it up. You gotta be in your body. You gotta be connected from mind to solar plexus to heart to throat. I ask my students, “Do you know what the solar plexus is?” (whining) “A chakra.” Well, it's called by some a chakra. It's one of those places and divisions in the body, but do you know why it's so important in expressing yourself, whether you are singing, whether you're speaking? Do you realize that this place behind which the diaphragm is attached to your sternum, which is just above your belly, the piece of cartilage that hangs down and the diaphragm is attached there and goes all the way around the lower course of your ribs into your back? Okay. And we know, in singing, we know that the diaphragm is a thing that functions to compress the breath on which we sing. Ah, helps the throat. But in back of that place is your solar plexus. It's the place where all of the nerves in your body come together. All the nerve endings in your body are the solar plexus. It's where you feel butterflies. It's where you, Oh, (grunts demonstratively) angry. You need to be connected from your mind to your solar plexus. Now there is a nerve that comes out of your solar plexus called the vagus nerve, not Las Vegas, but the vagus.

Tia Imani Hanna: Vagus, V A G U S.

George Shirley: Thank you. And it is wrapped around your heart and it attaches itself to your larynx. Now I, as a singer, must be aware of that highway when I'm speaking to you, it's automatic. It's connected. You hear in my voice what I feel. Whether it's, yes, it comes from here to there. And if I'm upset, you hear the difference. So as a singer, I've got to respect that verity. I've got to respect that truth. I've got to know that… I've got to know what I'm singing and why I'm singing. I've got to feel what I'm saying and why I'm saying it. And I've got to be attached to that place where I, yes, my heart, because it affects the sound that comes out of my throat. Have you as a child ever, a young person, ever been away from home and you call your home, you call to speak to your parents, and say, “Hi mom, how you doing?” Then mom says, “What's wrong? “What do you mean mom? What's wrong?” No, I can hear it in your voice. What's wrong?” Why can she hear it in your voice? She's not seeing your face. This has been before FaceTime, but she hears something in the sound of your voice that lets her know that things aren’t cool, right? Now, as a singer or as an actor, I've got to understand that. I've got to honor that connection, so that when I open my mouth to sing something, you hear my soul. An Aria, an Operatic Aria, is a soul song. A German Lieder is a soul song. A French Melodie is a soul song. All the sounds we make, unless we trying to make people not aware of how we feel when we talk. All of it is soul. What do human animals make noise about? They make noise in order to express themselves. We are from the primate line, right? In this form, the fallen state, we are human animals. And if you are ever around infants and you walk past their room, if they’re quiet, if you don't hear anything, they're either asleep or they're content. And when they're no longer content, if they're awake and they're not content, what do you hear? They're trying to say something to you. My diaper's full. My belly is empty. Come in here. Help. When there's no need to make a sound, to say something, they don't say anything. So again, as a singer, I've got to understand that whenever I step on stage and open my mouth, if I haven't got anything to say, then all the audience will hear is fairly nice sound, but it's not going to move them. And my job on stage is to move them. To present what it is I'm presenting in such a way that hopefully, and prayerfully, they will remember it for all the right reasons. So, working with students, I got to make them aware of the fact that these sounds are just unless they are pregnant with meaning, then you might as well just go home.

Tia Imani Hanna: Yeah! Have you ever had to say that to a student?

George Shirley: Not just, like I said to go home, but yeah. The whole point is, if I'm not teaching them to sing from what they feel, and that feeling has come from their study of the music, study of the text, study of the character they're representing. If that's not the case, if they're just, they're singing la-de-dah, that's not going to make it. You ain't going to make any money doing that. So, that connection to making sound and making sound that makes sense is what singing is all about. Now for opera singers that challenge is stretched because we have to learn to master the pronunciation and the meaning and understanding of foreign languages. When I, sometimes when I hear people sing in English, I know they're not connected to the message. They're singing syllables. And a lot of time I spend is on saying, “Look, sing the words. Observe the rules. Observe proper syllabic stress”. Composers are notorious for writing against the proper pronunciation of words.

Tia Imani Hanna: Yes.

George Shirley: For instance, say something like, “I'm going downtown today.” And they may write something like bababa, which would make the singer, who's not really into singing words sing “I’m…going…downtown…today.” “I'm going downtown today.” [Mr. Shirley demonstrates singing emphasis on different beats, and notes and tones in a phrase.] Ah, that enables the audience to really understand the words and to get a sense of how you feel about ‘going downtown’ today. So, don't come in and just punch every note like this ‘bump’. That's not singing. That's just making noise.

Tia Imani Hanna: Yeah. That's just not musical.

George Shirley: No, it's not… it's not sensible.

Tia Imani Hanna: And sometimes you do want to shoot the lyricist.

George Shirley: Well, the lyricist… Yeah. The person who's writing the music… that’s one of the reasons why poets don't always appreciate composers wanting to set their poetry because a poet writes, they have a musical sense of what they write and how they want it to be read, how they want it to sound. And the composer comes along and says, “I'm going to do this. I'm hearing this.” That sense that the poet has poured into the spoken words is blown apart and becomes something else. So, my job is to focus on singing as expression of a message and to try my best to help the singer strengthen the instrument and the connections, internal connections, to the point where the voice then is able to do what the composer has asked it to do musically; and the poet wants to happen when that music is sung so that the words are clear and have an effect that the poet wants them to have. Here again, if the singer is missing something that I can't expose that singer to within themselves and all the work just will never go as far as it could otherwise. That's the job.

Tia Imani Hanna: Saying all of that, is there a composer or a particular part or opera that you… that moves your heart the most, like you loved playing that part because the music and the lyricism and the point of the opera was so tightly connected that you loved doing it or you always wanted to do, or is there a composer or a part?

George Shirley: There are so many. I've been blessed to be able to sing great music, from spirituals, great music. Cause that is… you can't sing a spiritual unless you're connected. To Verdi works of Giuseppe Verdi, Giacomo Puccini, Ricard Wagner. One of the operas that I recorded, and I love because I love the musical style, there's Debussy's “Pelléas and Mélisande.” The words fit; the music fits the words so… like a glove. The combination of the music, the style, and the story, I really enjoyed doing. But here again, I've just been blessed to sing stuff, wide range of things, that repay me just from being able to give voice to them. And that again, wide range of music, spiritual, some popular things. When I was growing up, my… couple of my favorite singers were Sarah Vaughan and Nat King Cole. It's… Duke Ellington said, it's all music. It's all Music.

[George Shirley singing “O Freedom”]

Tia Imani Hanna: That is true. I’m always just… I'm just curious about composers that you like. Like you still listen to the Grand Ole Opry or country now?

George Shirley: No, but I actually, when I left home, that was the end of the Grand Ole Opry days. Although, here again, there was some, there were some wonderful country songs that they sang, and they sang them with soul and the sang from where they feel things. So, there are songs in any style, music in any style, that can touch me there again. There's a lot of classical stuff that it doesn't touch me. There's a lot of popular stuff that doesn't touch me. Here again, why doesn’t it touch me? Because I don't have the implants internally to appreciate what I don't appreciate as much as other people who have those implants and appreciate what they appreciate. I believe that the intelligence that created us all, we're not monolithic. We've been given different implants. And if that intelligence had wanted us to be all of one mind, all… then that's where it would be, but we ain't.

Tia Imani Hanna: True. True. If you were going to sum up the musical collage of your life, if you had to give that song a title, what would it be?

George Shirley: “Frustration, disappointment trials.” Life is a mix. It’s not all a one road path, it's diverse. We would love to find ourselves all traveling one path in unity with no problems whatsoever, but that's not the way life works. We're always challenged to make something work, even when we think that we've got it.

Tia Imani Hanna: That. Yeah. That's good. Now you've got the national medal of arts. Now what did that say to you about your accomplishments in life?

George Shirley: I'm grateful that people have… that they see me in that light. I've just tried to do the best I could do, given the talent that I was given. I tried to develop it to the best I can or could, and to use it. And to be recognized with that award was wonderful.

Tia Imani Hanna: And what was that day like? Did they say, “We'll fly you to DC and put you up in the hotel and you can come and meet the president and the first lady.” And what was that even like?

George Shirley: It was a highlight. It was “Whoa.” Something that I never expected to happen. But life has had moments like that. My family. The birth of our children. Those are the… those things are just out of sight. Counterbalanced by some things that are on the other end, but that is the path that we travel as mortals and trying to learn from both so that we remain on something of an even keel. Not to take the positives of the say, “Get down all y'all.” Or, when you're down to say that's, “I can't see the light. I just give up.” No. That's the human condition, the human struggle. You have… we ride the crest, and we drop into the trough, like the ocean. And we pray that when we drop into the trough, we will have learned enough from when we were riding the crest to empower ourselves, to find ourselves riding another crest. So, I'm grateful for the good things and have to be grateful for the negatives that have taught me things that the good things didn't teach me. That's what life is about. Riding the crest of the wave and climbing out of the trough. I've been blessed to have crests that I wasn't even thinking about. So, I trust that I'll continue to be able to ride a few crests as I near the shore. I've been blessed. I'm grateful for it.

Tia Imani Hanna: So, at this time you are still teaching at a University of Michigan or you're about to retire from there or…?

George Shirley: I retired in 2007.

Tia Imani Hanna: But you’re still there.

George Shirley: But they have asked me to continue to work with a small number of students every year since then and I enjoy it. It keeps the gray cells functioning, as you see somebody coming into your studio who's going to be a challenge. It's your job to try to inspire them to, first of all, identify what they have and learn how to develop it. And I enjoy that. I'm grateful for the opportunity of doing it. And I think the “retirement” with no challenges is death.

Tia Imani Hanna: True.

George Shirley: So, I hope to be able to continue to contribute on some level or another, for as long as I draw a breath. I've been blessed to have experiences that I've had. To share those with young people who want to have the same kinds of experiences. Cause that's the reason why I've had the experiences, I believe, to be able to share them with those who are coming along. And I've been really blessed to have some wonderful students who have achieved a lot as performers and as teachers. Now at Michigan, we have two of my former students who are on faculty. One is the chair of the department and the other is a phenomenal young woman, Louise Toppin, who is the head of the Damos Foundation that supports my voice scholarship for African American Composers. Voice scholarship. I'm a very blessed individual. I thank God for that.

Tia Imani Hanna: So where can people find out about studying with you? Just going to U of M or is there a place for them to find your recordings online or more about you online?

George Shirley: There's a lot online.

Tia Imani Hanna: Is there a website or anything like that?

George Shirley: I don't have a website other than the University of Michigan School of Music. Just type my name in to a Google search. There's a lot of stuff that comes up on You Tube and there’s just a lot of information So, if people are interested in studying, they can reach me through the University of Michigan. I have private students as well.

Tia Imani Hanna: Discography anywhere?

George Shirley: Discography? I think probably. I haven't put one on. But might be able to find if you type in. Yeah. I've never tried typing in “a discography for George Shirley.”

Tia Imani Hanna: That would be nice to know.

George Shirley: It might. It might come up. I'm amazed at what happens when people… when you type in what you want, you come up with a whole lot of stuff that maybe you don't want. But I've never typed… I've never typed in “George Shirley discography.”

Tia Imani Hanna: Okay. I will have to look into that because I don't have any of your recordings, so I need to find some of them.

George Shirley: They're there. I've been fortunate to have made a few. And one of the great thrills was working when the early recordings with Igor Stravinsky, working and doing “Oedipus Rex” with… which was, again, the first opera I ever sang when I was a student at Wayne, but then to do it with him, years later, as a professional, what was a great thrill.

Tia Imani Hanna: I bet. What was he like?

George Shirley: He was fine. He was easy to work with. At that time, he was up in age and I remember the last recording session we did. I did “Oedipus Rex” with him. I did “Pulcinella,” I think, a couple of recordings with him. And the last recording we did was out in Los Angeles at a church, it was set up as a recording, and he was… but by that time, he was partially paralyzed. And so, the limousine pulled up the front door of the church and he was lifted out of the car and carried. Two men carried, holding him under his arms, carried him into the church and sat him down. And I thought to myself, his feet was dangling like this off the ground, I thought, “Oh my heavens. One of the greatest composers of our time and having to be lifted,” but he was still alert. He conducted the recording sessions and I'll never forget it. It was something that was worth remembering, that brief relationship over a period of two or three years. And so, as I said, I'm a blessed human being.

Tia Imani Hanna: That's pretty amazing stuff. So, thank you so much, Mr. Shirley, for being with me, with our audience today, on Tia Time. And I loved having you on and thank you for your heart and your spirit and your essence of what it means to be a consummate musician and an example of excellence in the world. So, thank you.

George Shirley: Thank you, Tia, for inviting me. I've enjoyed sharing with you and will look for more of your interviews with people. I enjoyed the interview with your Aunt Naima, I believe. So, I want to check out the rest of your interviews with folks. But thank you for including me and have a blessed holiday season and blessed and safe and healthy new year. Thank you.

Tia Imani Hanna: Thank you for joining us this week on Tia Time with Artists. Make sure to visit our website, tiaviolin.com, where you can subscribe to the show in iTunes and never miss an episode. Please leave us a rating wherever you listen to podcasts. We really appreciate your comments, and we'll mine them to bring you more amazing episodes.

I’d like to thank this inaugural season's sponsors: The folks at Jazz Alliance of Mid-Michigan or JAMM, Michigan ArtShare, a program of Michigan State University Extension is a partner in supporting the Tia Time podcast, and Shambones Music. Without their support this podcast would not be possible. Thank you so much. If you would also like to contribute to the show, you can find us on https://www.patreon.com/TiaTime1.

If you want to continue the conversation about topics discussed on the show or start new ones with like-minded people, join us at the Tia Time Lounge on Facebook.

Thank you for listening. See you next week at Tia Time!

+ Transcription

Tia Time with Artists, with guest Myk'l Hanna, recorded on 11/7/2020

Tia Imani Hanna: Welcome to Tia Time with Artists, the weekly podcast where we discuss the methods, challenges, and real-life experiences of living our creative dreams. What kind of creative warrior are you? Musician? Filmmaker? Painter? Choreographer? Poet? Sculptor? Fashionista? Let’s talk about it right now. I’m your host, Tia Imani Hanna.

Tia Imani Hanna: Welcome to Tia Time with Artists and my guest this week is Myk'l Hanna. And he is a singer and an amazing songwriter as well. And I'm so grateful that he is here. He's my cousin. And so, I'm going to brag on him a little bit. Welcome to the show. Thank you for coming.

Myk'l Hanna: Thank you for having me so much! I am definitely most grateful and happy to be here.

Tia Imani Hanna: So, it's a thrill to have you on the show. It is great to talk with you. We don't get a chance to do that very often, which I'm going to remedy. But I want to talk about your influences, your start, where you want to go? What you want to do? So, let's talk about why singing? What was it about music? Was it just because of family influences? Did you play an instrument first? What was it about singing that drew you to that art, that particular skill?

Myk'l Hanna: Hopefully, the people who are listening, some of your listener base, is hopefully familiar with our family lineage and so, without needing to do too much name-dropping because I imagine we'll get to plenty of that, but definitely without going, without saying that, yes, I grew up in a musical family.

(Myk’l is the grandson of notable Jazz pianist Sir Roland Hanna, knighted for his musicianship in 1966 by Liberia.)

That music was always around. So, it was never that there was an ‘aha’ moment for when music was introduced to me. Actually, as a kid, I wanted to pursue the visual arts and I was drawing and doing a lot of… I was in art classes and a lot of my curriculum, formally, was in visual arts. I had music as well. All of the kind of programs that we were in had all of that stuff available to us. And, of course, I was singing in church, singing in the choir. And so, there was a handful of things that you're interested in and I was pursuing drawing. I wanted to be a comic book artist. And as I became more entrenched in music there was an ‘aha’ moment for me while I was singing in the church one day and I couldn't have been older than ten years old, maybe even, not even older than nine or so. Old enough to think I know something, but I know, certainly, I had one of those moments that I really heard myself. You're singing, you grow up doing the thing, but I had that moment was, “Wow, this is pretty cool.” And so, I definitely, from there, my passion for being in that space where I felt like I could really hear my own voice in a way that I couldn't in terms of expressing through visual arts or through other means, athletics, and things like that. I think certainly that was where it happened, even though I was exposed to music and an array of different aspects of my life. I had that moment in the church. I had that. That was when it started.

Tia Imani Hanna: When you were drawing, cause that touched a different part of your brain or a different part of your heart, did that continue? Do you still do the fine art and the drawing?

Myk'l Hanna: Absolutely. Absolutely. I got a few tattoos and all of which that I've designed myself. So that's the most easy way to assess where my art still lives.

Tia Imani Hanna: Ok. Ok.

Myk'l Hanna: But no, I definitely have… I keep sketchbooks and its always just therapy for me. Oftentimes, what I'm drawing is it's an expression of how I'm feeling whether it's just a little doodle, oftentimes I like to do caricature style work of the people that I'm close with… my wife, or my friends, or if I'm on a gig and you see a moment that kind of stands out, you want to just… so oftentimes my stuff is small, and my sketchbooks can fit in my book bag. They're not large-scale works or things like that, but some of them, I thought, “Hey, this might be cool enough to put in a decent enough frame and put it out, at least on my own wall, let alone somebody else’s.”

Tia Imani Hanna: Well, that when you do your memoirs you can always have your little, your cartoons, the ones that you think that are ready for publishing that go with your memoir down the line. Keep that in the sketchbooks, “Myk'l Hanna Sketchbooks” for sale now. Don't miss it. So, I can see that.

Myk'l Hanna: I'll come back around to it. It'll be… it'll always be there. I've got plenty of stuff.

Tia Imani Hanna: So, when you're in the sketch mode, is it the same kind of mode in your, I guess, in your brain when you're thinking about art? It's like when you start to write music, do you feel like you go to the same place as you do when you're sketching? Is it that comfortable kind of place or is it a different place?

Myk'l Hanna: I believe, yeah, it is definitely a similar place, I think. I was trying to explain this to someone else in terms of trying to access different parts of music from a different instrument. Once you have a relationship with the music, the instrument is… it's just a… it's a conduit, a medium trying to express the thing that's already there. And so, in the same sense, sketching or dealing with visual arts is ‘I have something that I'm trying to say, and this is how I'm going to do it. This is how I'm going to get to it.’ So similarly, and I imagine yourself and other composers and songwriters deal with just having certain ways that are comfortable to your process, your method, things that reveal maybe the ideas that you're trying to get to, that they themselves aren't the ideas. I'm going to just keep doing this thing and keep drawing some shapes until something comes out, as in like maybe sometimes singing for me. I'll just riff around with no real structure until maybe a melody forms until something, reveals itself as being a more of a device. So yeah. Similarly, when I'm sketching, oftentimes I don't have any real direction when I start, because it's more about, this is just, this feels good and it feels therapeutic and I'm churning through the process to find the thing that will reveal itself. Sometimes, like I said, I'm doing caricature stuff, and I think, yeah, as in the songwriting, when you have, boom, this rhythmic thing that's just stuck in your head. It's “Oh no, I need to lock that down because that's gold.” And so, sometimes, yeah, I'll… growing up, I would see things like in the leaves or in the grass, or certain shapes that would look like something else that would like, maybe tell a different story. Do you see the guy in the corner of the leaves where or there in the clouds? Look that cloud looks like an elephant. So, I think, yeah, that's a similar thing. Or you're able to capture the idea from whether it reveals itself to you, whether you're trying to bring it out. So, I think that as in visual arts, as in music that, there's that space that's similar in terms of the process.

Tia Imani Hanna: I always wanted to know how other artists approach their art, as a lot of folks don't really talk about that. I know for me a lot of the time it's write something because I'm taking a walk in the woods. It's almost always a physical thing. I have to be moving. Like I have to get out of the body first and then it will come up and then some rhythm will come up because I'm breathing differently. Or I'm in a place where I'm hearing the plane fly over at that exact moment that the garbage can fell over there. And then all of a sudden there's a new rhythm. And I was like, oh wait, [Tia makes rhythm sounds] there it is. So, to me that's always such a magical thing and then I think, I'm just a crazy person.” So, because that's how my brain works, but other people don't hear it that way. And I'm always surprised like, “You don't hear that? Yeah. You don't hear that?” But what I hear and then another musician hears is completely two different things. You can be standing next to each other and they come up with something completely different. So, I'm always interested to see how people get to their compositions or their ideas for lyrics. Like I have no clue. So, I've written few lyrics. I don't like them. They're not very good, but I do it sometimes. Cause I'm like, “This needs words. Okay. Let's start. Let’s do something.” But other folks will hear the lyrics first. Now for you, do you hear lyrics first or you hear music first?

Myk'l Hanna: I mean… coming back to what we were just saying. So, without doubling back on the process and trying to reveal or churn it out. For me, I'm an MC. I'm a lyricist and a lot of people maybe don't know that so much, because certainly probably more readily in an environment where I'm singing, where I'm vocalizing melodically. But when I think about myself as a vocalist, I certainly include that aspect of my artistry, and it's always been there. It's not, “Oh, I just. I just started rapping.” I've been running around, and I've been performing lyrics in that way as well for a long time. And certainly, as a kid, you grow up just memorizing lyrics until, your favorite songs and things like this, until you find the ones that are like, “That's me. That's the one that I would have written if I were writing rhymes.” And so, from that space, lyrically I try to come from that genuine place of what is… what do I want to be able to hold true to my name? When I'm speaking these words if someone is going to say, “Oh, that’s what Mik said.” And so, to be able to have that aspect, woven into whatever lyric creating. But with regard to what comes first, it's just as well, right? And people who deal with rhyme know this. When you're doing little lyrical kind of exercises, freestyle improvisation, things like this, people will throw out a word and just rhyme or just riff on that, and just go. And so, similarly, oftentimes you might just be… some words just sound good together. Some lyrics… I think that's the aspect of poetry, right? Sometimes beautiful verbiage is just, it's just candy. It just, “Ah, that just, that's just nice.” Maybe it doesn't have to mean, or really having real substance versus, “Hey, I'm trying to get this message out. And so, I need to deal with this very carefully and craft this.” I think, yeah, it still hearkens back to where you are emotionally, where I am emotionally, creatively. I haven't been in a space where I've done a whole lot of penning of heavy lyrics, in that sense. I've been trying to deal more with the candy of it. And I feel, oftentimes, when you talking about emceeing, we talking about rhymes. That world just begs for, ‘Ah nah , I can't. Ain't nuthin’ sweet. We need that real.” And so, it asks you to dig a little deeper, and certainly, I try to stay limber, right? I'm always doing a little something, but I've definitely been doing more singing and writing for melodies, writing lyrics that, like I said, are just sweet to the ear and a little easier on the palette.

[“Reprise” track playing]

Tia Imani Hanna: I know you studied at, was it Xavier?

Myk'l Hanna: I did. It's Zavier with a Z. We're touchy about that. It's spelled with an X, but the way that it's pronounced.

Tia Imani Hanna: Zavier. Okay. Sorry. That you studied jazz now. Was that because that was the closest thing to, I guess doing more hip-hop kind of style or just the love for both things?

Myk'l Hanna: Actually, at Xavier, I didn't study jazz proper. I wouldn't study jazz proper until I got here to North Carolina Central. But at Xavier I continued in the... it's more classical / contemporary African American rooted. So, coming out of high school in Detroit as well, that was a similar programming, doing a lot of Moses Hogan and all the stuff that was written for that contemporary black ensemble sound. And so, I continued in that kind of study at Xavier. But being in New Orleans, you can't not be into jazz. And of course, with family inclination and just being exposed, I certainly found my way into certain corners and got a good taste. Maybe not as much in college as… I always looked back on my time in New Orleans and I'm like, “Oh man, I could have gotten so much more, if I knew, if I was more hip.” But certainly. it was an invaluable time and yeah, I wouldn't study jazz proper until I got here to North Carolina. So, I did though, in between my time in New Orleans and in between getting here, I was in Chicago and certainly I would say that at that point I was digging deeper into my hip-hop roots and I had a project that I was working on with one of my high school classmates that really started to gain some traction and then ended up losing some steam. It's still semi- available out there, but that was what I was doing at that time. And, then I came to North Carolina and started deal with some other things, but certainly, no, no shortage of experience along the way . But I've never left… I've never left hip hop alone and that's been the hard part is trying to make sure that stays a part of my narrative while people may be experiencing me in different ways. Like I was just recently singing some country and people engage me in that way and they may not know that I sing jazz, “I thought you were a country singer.”

Tia Imani Hanna: Music is music. Good music is good music. That's all there really is to know, at least in my book. You can't limit yourself to one thing because then there's no growth ever. So yeah, I can understand that. So, you’re in North Carolina now, during the COVID crisis. Now what have you been doing in your COVID time? In your lockdown?

Myk'l Hanna: So, I was saying this, and I guess I gotta get into it now. Essentially, you know how everyone else… life was going in a way, whether wonderfully or not, it was going in a way that I thought I had some traction on. I have my hands on the wheel here. This is great. I'm leading my own life. Go figure. Boom! COVID hits. And so, at the time I was still hosting a few radio shows on 90.7 WNCU, here in Durham. Shout out to everybody still there doing really great work. Alan Thompson and Serena Wiley, and both in, they got the show. Serena actually ended up taking over the show that I was doing, The Jazz Stage. So, long story short, I needed to go to Canada. My family is in Canada and they were closing the borders. And we were concerned that we may not essentially be able to see my folks for… who knows when this thing was going to be over. And I had to make a hard choice to essentially let my spot on the radio go. And, as well, of course, all gigs… I had a calendar full of gigs. I was working pretty steadily. I've been working for a long time now with a group called Irresistible Groove, shouts out to Lee Johnson and those guys. Lee is a killin’ tenor sax player and band leader. And so, I've been working with those guys. Full calendar gone. So, all of a sudden, I'm a starving artist again. You work real hard to not have to carry that. It's “Oh no, they got me anyway.” So yeah, I'm in Canada. I'm in Canada from March until pretty much September. Yeah. I pretty much spent the year in Canada. It was cool because we got to quarantine together. And we just packed up… us, the dog, me and all the whole… just trucked up to Canada. And I actually got a chance to do a little bit of music there. So, my mother is pastor of a church there, Fourth Avenue Baptist Church in Ottawa, Ontario. And so, they had no one in the church and they were doing the live streaming of her sermons, her and just the people basically to man the cameras, and the organist. And I would come and sing. And as well, my father was there. He would sing sometimes. And that was a blessing and just a gift to be able to stay singing and as well, being able to kinda be in service of the church and to my family. And so, through that as well, another friend of my parents, a gifted pianist out of Ottawa, John Dapaah, John Kofi Dapaah. And he often does a lot of concert, more classically oriented, works solo style, or I've seen him working with other string instrumentalists and things like this. But yeah, he and I got together and did some soul tunes, a couple of jazz ballads just as a duet kind of show. And we live streamed that from the church. And so that was really probably the jewel. Oh, one of the really cool things that I got to do... my father and I sang in the TD Ottawa Jazz Festival, Michael Curtis Hanna, and Myk'l. They announced me as Michael Anthony Hanna. So, I know this is another point, right? My name is Mike. My given name is Michael Anthony. Yeah. Going by the spelling I've been going by that professionally and artistically. But yeah, so he and I did this, and it was really cool. Obviously, this would have usually been outdoors and all the stages and things like that. And so, they as well were adapting and doing the live streaming thing, but yeah, we put together this acapella arrangement of a blues popularized by Joe Williams.

Tia Imani Hanna: Yeah, I got to see that. I did get to see that. It was lovely. Enjoyed it.

Myk'l Hanna: I'm so glad. It was a lot of fun. It was a lot of fun. So yeah, I got to be a part of some cool things there in quarantine. And now I'm back in North Carolina and…

Tia Imani Hanna: And you're singing country.

Myk'l Hanna: And I’m singing county. I don't want to. I don't want to monopolize the trajectory of questions, but I can tell you some…

Tia Imani Hanna: No. That's fine I want to know what's going on. So, have you found some musicians in North Carolina that are, besides your band, to work with, or do collaborations with, or you just started to hang out with people who are doing country instead, or what happened?

Myk'l Hanna: So, I've been down in Carolina for a little while now. Definitely made some friends along the way, a lot of brilliant musicians. One of whom… guitarist that I've been playing with for some time, Will Darity, shout out to FTMF, that’s his project. He does booking and some artist management as well. And that's essentially the whole country connection. I've been… I sing plenty of, I’ve got some other friends that I sing with and done some stuff with, but in terms of what's gotten some real traction. The project that we started a few years back, he calls me up, was like, “Yo, let's do a Charlie Pride tribute.” Charlie Pride is like an icon in country who happens to be a black guy and people in country know that. It's not little known, right? He's definitely a hero. And I had to come in to learning about him and learning to celebrate his music and be able to step into being able to sing his songs. But that was the thing. It was basically a bunch of brothers doing country, doing Charlie Pride, and we would flip some of the tunes to be a little bit more whatever you want to say, soul oriented or…

Tia Imani Hanna: Just a little bit more stylistic change.

Myk'l Hanna: Yeah. But most of it would be, “We're going to lay this down, dead on.” And then folks have that shock value of “Whoa! Oh, we did not expect this.” But so, fast forward, we've done a… we did a few, a few shows over the years where we've opened up with other acts and doing the Charlie Pride Tribute. But I, just recently, yeah, we were a part of this really cool, I wanna say it's something like a festival. It was, it's like an all-encompassing platform. The given name is The Country Soul Song Book Summit. And it's essentially just this whole thing where there was all kinds of content geared around inclusion of black and Brown and marginalized voices in country and in that rural aesthetic of music and culture. And so, there was just all kinds of really cool stuff. That was a part of it, but yeah. Will and I, we got to sing as well. It was just the duet version, still doing some Charlie Pride stuff, but then as well, we did some stuff where we were part of, a bigger group. And yeah, that was most recently, just about a month ago. And so that was, I was still, I'm still being able to ride on the high of that and the friends that I've made off of that project. So.

[https://www.countrysoulsongbook.com/]

Tia Imani Hanna: Is that project going to record? Is that going to be an album coming out of that?

Myk'l Hanna: In terms of the Dove, The Dirty Dove Charlie Pride Tribute, we've been talking about that. Will's kind of one of those guys who's got his hands in a lot of pots. And so, for me, I have some other things going and I've always said to him, “Hey. Yo, we need to do this.” And hopefully it'll happen, but I'm not saying that it's going to happen necessarily.

Tia Imani Hanna: I would like to see it, so I give him a little nudge for me. I know he doesn’t know me, but hey, people want to hear this.

Myk'l Hanna: Until then you can check out the sou… The Country Soul Song Book Summit. I think that some of the content is still available, like, on the website.

[https://www.countrysoulsongbook.com/]

Tia Imani Hanna: That's definitely good to know cause I had not heard about that. So that's really cool. Yeah. So, you've got that project now. You've got other projects that you're working on your own, right? What are you working on right now?

Myk'l Hanna: Lot of folks are familiar with “The Jon Doe.” That's essentially my band. Mine to say that I'm a part of that group and the guys in that band would say it's their band too. But we we've definitely been working for a while and our project is coming together and I'm happy about that. But, as well, on some more solo, individual stuff. I've been working with these guys that I'm really excited and got some new content coming out pretty soon, E. L. Scott. So, that's two guys. Esquina Lee, who is a guitarist and a producer, and Lance Scott, who's a bassist and producer. And Lance and I have known each other for some years out of North Carolina Central. And both of those guys are killing producers, killing musicians, and Lance and I had a relationship and I hit him up. I'm like, “Yo, Lance, what's good? Let's get into the lab. Let's work on something.” And he's, “I'm working with Tyler, Esquina Lee.” And so, yeah, we got together, and we've been working on some things for… interrupted by COVID. So, we started working together like the end of last year, and then things got interrupted. We picked back up when I got back to Carolina in September. And yeah, so we've got some stuff, hopefully, ready to go close to the end of this year, early next year. And this is definitely going to be more Hip Hop, soul oriented as opposed to some Jazz stuff. As well, of course that Jazz makes its way there. If you had it dang near, it could just call it all Jazz. We gotta have genres and compartmentalize stuff.

Tia Imani Hanna: Yeah, I know. And I think that starting to disappear, I really do because people aren't feeling restricted by that anymore because we aren't selling albums in a traditional way anymore. It's all tracks. So, you do what you do. And I think that's really good at this point in time. It's like I, for one have been waiting years to do different things and I can't afford to do it all as one project, but I might be able to do one track. And so that track is done, then I do another track and maybe it's a different style cause that's where I'm at right now. And I think that's a much better way to go with it. We didn't have the technology before we do now, so I'm taking advantage. So, I think it’s really a good way to go. And I think it'll free things up for a lot of folks to not just have to be stuck in the genre think I've gotten stuck in the genre of Jazz only because what I do is considered Jazz, but it's not what I… when you listen to it, it's not Jazz, it's improvisation, but it's not Jazz. So, there's moments of Jazz, but there's a little bit of Country in there. There's a little R& B in there. There's some dance music in there. There's a lot of Arabic stuff in there and I'm like, I don't even know where that comes from. But it's just there.

Myk'l Hanna: This is a part of years of education and pounding these messages into my brain that's eventually going to believe some of it. But for me, the way that I’m able to excuse some of it, I will… I learned that jazz has three elements, always. It's got Blues. It's got Improvisation. What was it? Jazz has Blues and Improvisation, dang, I'm missing the third element real quick. But for me, when I think about Improvisation, when I think about Blues and that hearkens to deeper stories, right? Whether you want to say,” Oh, there's literally, I hear the four chord. And then I hear…” The structure maybe doesn't have to be there, but when you think about narrative of the people and the culture that created that music, in terms of that honesty in that genuine spirit of, “I got to sing these woes and these emotions out in a way…” That's there. You know what I mean? When you, even when you switch styles. Or certainly the Improvisation, definitely, whether it's, swinging like Charlie Parker or you know, doing Bird and all kinds of Dizzy style stuff. Like you don't have to do that to be improvising. And I think, as well, like you said, certainly, mentioning the Arabic style stuff, but that's the continent. That's Africa all day. You know what I mean? So yeah, for me, I've just been trying to find places of embracing, like, all of those elements, like, unabashedly. Yeah, no that's my stuff. That's. And especially when it comes out as when you're not working for it, it's this is just in me. It's just, “No, that's mine. That's my music, and you're gonna tell me it's not.”

Tia Imani Hanna: I remember hearing a group out of Scotland and it's called Salsa Celtica. If you haven't heard them, you should. And they have Salsa musicians mixed with Celtic musicians and they'll have the flute that they play. It's almost like a bagpipe, but it's I think it's called the Uilleann Pipes or something like that. And they'll have fiddle players, but they're playing Celtic style, but they'll have salsa underneath it and it works. It is deep.

Myk'l Hanna: I can only imagine. It sounds exciting. Sounds like a party.

Tia Imani Hanna: Really cool. Yeah. It's really cool. And you think all this wouldn't work, but then all of a sudden, you'll hear, and whoa.

[playing Salsa Celtica plays “El Agua de la Vida” from the album El Agua de la Vida]

Tia Imani Hanna: Some people are a little bit weirded out by it. I just think it's fantastic!

Myk'l Hanna: So, this reminds me of, so I got to spend a summer back in 2010 in Beirut, Lebanon. And yeah, I was with a young lady who was singing basically at a gig. And it was a part of a program with the lineup of other artists. And she was one of the artists in that lineup. So, one of the other groups was essentially doing something similar. It was a group of guys from Cuba and they had their lead vocalist was a Lebanese woman. And they were calling it Arable Cuban, and so she would come on and they were doing the Rumba and all of that stuff underneath it. It was great. There was also cool because me being like one of the only other black guys there, I just defacto became a part of the Cuban band Muy Cubano. Yes. Yea sure.

Tia Imani Hanna: Oh, fantastic. Fantastic. I'm glad that you got an opportunity to do that. That's one of the things I haven't had the chance to do is play with a lot of international players. I have a one Oud player that I work with, Igor Houwat, he's Lebanese. And he's a fantastic Oud player, but he played jazz saxophone first, which is interesting, and then he switched over. He's only been playing Oud for maybe five or six years, but you can't tell. It's like he's been playing his whole life and then he improvises. So, he's playing like some funk on the Oud and we're like, yeah! So, it's very cool. I'm waiting for COVID to be over so we can do… cause we're going to do some duet stuff together. And I was like, we're just waiting for that to happen. And I know Lebanese singer, she teaches over at Berklee, Christiane Karam, a wonderful singer. And she does a lot of improv. We both have studied in the Bobby McFerrin tradition of kind of the free improv that way and circle singing, that sort of thing. And she does that, but she also does work with Baltic, Women's Baltic Choirs, which is a whole different sound. If you haven't heard of Baltic Choir, it's amazing sound. It's like a wall of sound with all these women's voices and the harmonies are so lush and it's super exciting. So, if you get a chance to listen to Baltic Choirs.

Myk'l Hanna: How many voices in the choir?

Tia Imani Hanna: Anywhere from thirty to a hundred, depends on the group. There's this, I can't even explain it. It's this sound and you just go, Whoa, like this! it's, but it lifts you up. It's wonderful.

[playing “Pilentze Pee” sung by Bulgarian State Radio & Television Female vocal choir on the Album Les Mystere De Voix Bulgares]

Myk'l Hanna: Yeah.

Tia Imani Hanna: That’s really wonderful.

Myk'l Hanna: That kind of effect, often to me, I think you can't duplicate without having those kinds of numbers involved, right? Think about symphony or even a big band is only close to 17, 18 pieces, but it's still that much more formidable. But then, yes, symphonic piece where you're just getting on 50 pieces. And then when you have those all doing kind of the same thing as in a choir and, I come from that experience of doing a lot of ensemble singing and, let alone being out in the audience, in the group, you can feel powering up. It's just so… I can only imagine that. Yeah, it's probably great. I got lots of good homework to do listening stuff. You're giving me some new ones.

Tia Imani Hanna: If you're still locked down and it's a good thing to be able to have new stuff to hear. Unfortunately, I have not been locked down. I have had to go to work every day since the beginning of this thing. Luckily, no one's gotten sick, but I almost envy people who were able to lock down because I would like to see sitting at home and, yeah, listening to some music and writing and in my studio and I'm doing the podcast, but that means the four hours I have before I go to work and then that's it. So, it's go to work, do the podcast, go work, come home, go to sleep, get up, do it again. So, I envy the people who would get to stay home and “Oh, I can do this right now.” I'm like, yeah, I wish I could. I'm grateful for my job, but at the same time, I would much rather be doing this.

Myk'l Hanna: Grass is always greener because you know that there are folks that are sitting down like, “Oh, give me something to do.” Folks, just stepping out, go into the end of the block aimlessly. Like I just wanted to take a walk. but you know maybe that’s good cause some people haven't taken any walks.

Tia Imani Hanna: Yeah exactly. It gives you the chance to take a walk. That's pretty exciting actually for me. Wow. Walk, I'd love to go do a walk. I'd love to be able to take a nap in the middle of the afternoon, but it's all good. I get it. Cause it's hard to be on Zoom all day long and doing meetings and trying to do your work and all of that kind of stuff. So, I get it. And if you have kids at home, that’s hard cause they can't go and play and they’re with the adults all the time. Who wants to be with the adults all the time when you're little? Yeah.

Myk'l Hanna: I can only imagine. I've been on both sides. Like when I got back to Carolina, the group I was telling you about, Irresistible Groove. We do mostly wedding stuff. And so, a lot of the stuff that got postponed from early in the year, a bunch of it got piled into September. So, I did have a little bit of work in September. It was weird because after that it was back to nothing. But I was moving around just a little bit. And it was really cool to be able to see how people were adapting and doing the distancing and limiting their crowds and all the whole nine, but just to still be on stage and have a moment where it's like, oh yeah, I do this. That was great. But one of the guys in the band is a trumpet player. He's, well, he's a teacher. And I believe back in the classroom now, but at that time they were still at home and he just had the stories from all the parents talking about whether this work was simple or not. He was telling the one, he said, “I sent a video.” And it's the music teacher. So, it's identify the instruments in the symphony. What does the bassoon look like? What does the cello look like? Things like this. He said, “I sent out a 15-minute video to be done in a week. And you have parents coming back, like, this is too much work. Can't expect my child to complete this work. What are you trying to set him back?” So, you just have to take that pause. I thought I was being gracious and making it simple, but it's just so wild to see how different people are dealing with this and certainly, yeah, the teachers and people with kids at home. Ooh.

Tia Imani Hanna: Yeah. It's tough it. And unfortunately, because we weren't locked down long enough, it's going to extend for a whole ‘nother year, probably. But we're recording this on the day the new president got announced, so hopefully things will change. Hopefully, things will change. So anyway, and Woo Woo! It's over.

Myk'l Hanna: Certainly, but it’s over, however people are leaning, because I'm certainly trying to do good about engaging people with different opinions than me. But just the anxiety of this all is not good for anybody. It's… This is not a healthy way to do these things. And hopefully, like you said, this new administration will bring some unifying elements, and everybody can take a breather and just step back off of the ledge.

Tia Imani Hanna: Yeah. Hopefully, we will focus more on just healing the country in the sense of we actually do have a pandemic happening. That needs to be addressed before everything, because we can't heal the country if everybody is actually sick and dying. So, just that there's so many levels. So hopefully, yeah, that we'll move in that direction first and then we'll deal with everything else as it comes along. But you just never know.

Myk'l Hanna: Cool times though, certainly amazing times. On either side, right? Like for me, it's always trying to find the silver lining, to be cliche, but we're here. We're able to have this dialogue. We're able to witness the way in which things are happening and, hopefully, that is the… that is a part of the healing, right? It’s being able to engage concurrently while witnessing, waiting. I think a lot of times people… because I was talking to this... I was talking actually to Lance, the guy with that I'm working on some stuff with, I was telling you about. And we were talking about, just how you have kids politicized in a way that I certainly wasn't growing up, talking about, “Yeah, we need to hold onto the Senate. We need to flip the Senate.” Middle school kids, it's you're… go for it. Go. This is amazing that you have that kind of engagement and that kind of involvement. So, that's always encouraging and just amazing to witness to me. And I try and draw on inspiration for that as well. And that's my overall, I try to come back to that because we need a little encouragement. We need some inspiration folks are, I feel like, feeding on. We're feeding on fear. We're feeding on anger and we're feeding on all of these divisive elements. And that makes its way into all, everything that we do, right?

Tia Imani Hanna: Yeah, it does.

Myk'l Hanna: So, if we want to see the healing, we got to put some healing into it. We got to put it on our words. So, in terms of coming back to the lyrics, that's why, I've been more inclined. A lot of people making protest music, a lot of people trying to channel that anger that's what's up. Go for it. But I've been like, that's not going to feed me the way that’s needed. And I need to give myself and people who were engaging me, I need to give them something sweet to feed on, because I feel like that's what's gonna make a bigger impact. From my vantage, using that "I" language.

Tia Imani Hanna: Oh yeah. That's the only advantage you have is the one that your experiences are what's going to create truth in your world. And what's going to make a difference in the people that are close to you. They're going to affect those people in a certain way. Everyone you affect is going to affect someone else and it's going to go out like ripples on a pond. If you throw a pebble in the pond and the ripples go out, that's what you create in the middle. It's going to go out in waves. So, I get what you're saying. It's, I believe, the same thing I've been telling everybody. Since the beginning of COVID, I said, just make more art, just make more art. Cause everybody's already afraid. And so, what is our job? We're artists. We have decided to be artists, or it's decided for us that the art has chosen you to be the artist. And because that's what comes through your blood and your veins and your mind and your voice and your vision. So, put it out there as much as possible. That's our job. So, if we do that, we can't go wrong. You can't go wrong.

Myk'l Hanna: Agreed.

Tia Imani Hanna: You know. Not everybody's going to love what you do, so what! It's not about that. It creates conversation. It creates inspiration for other artists is like, “Oh, I saw what that person did. Oh my gosh. I had that same idea, but I would take it this way.” Okay, “Go ahead. Take it that way.” You see something in art, you steal it and then make it your own. That's how it's always been done. Not because it's like the only way to do it. It's just, there is nothing new under the sun. It's just… it's how you put it together that's new. And like we're talking about these different artists that put these different genres together. It's yeah, because that it's time. We are a world culture. This is not the only place you can be. It's yes, I get it. If you're a Blues artist and that's what you love to do, then just do the Blues. You don't have to mix it with anything else, but if somebody else does, that's good too. I know as Jazz artists, a lot of times we run into purists and they're like, “You cannot call that jazz. This is not jazz. You can only play it like this and don't do it that way.” I went to a jazz camp once and got a chance to play with these really great artists as part of a workshop. And they said, “Okay, decide on what tune you're going to do, and then count it off.” And so, there's five people who never played together before and I said, “What about this tune? What about this tune? What about…” And they're all sitting there going… I'm the only woman in the group too. And I'm like, okay. And then I said, “Okay, let's just do something. Everybody knows Ipanema?” Sure. And I counted as a swing. And the drummer got off on me and yelled at me for 20 minutes, wasting all of our time. You counted it off as a Swing. I said, “Yes, I did.”

Myk'l Hanna: That's the third element that I had forgotten: Blues, Improvisation and Swing.

Tia Imani Hanna: Yeah. I was thinking about it and I was like, man, he doesn't know that AC Jobim or Tom Jobim, when he wrote Ipanema, he was listening to A Train. That they fit on top of each other. He doesn't know that.

Myk'l Hanna: Gotta let them know sometimes.

Tia Imani Hanna: And it was like, he just… and one of the bassists later, he came over to me and said,” I really apologize for him. I don't know what is wrong with him.”

Myk'l Hanna: Well, you already know that people get puffed up on this music too, right? Because I can play the whole Omni book or I transcribe Giant Steps or, that I feel entitled to be able to, whatever, belittle other ways of interpreting this music. It was like, no, like you need to stop because they weren't doing that. Like, these people who you're idolizing and putting on a certain pedestal, you're like, you're toxifying the legacy when you lead from that place. And, thankfully, I've been around guys and instrumentalists… and women, there's a lot of killing female instrumentalists and vocalists around here too. And I’m just trying to keep that in the narrative. I'm like, “Hey, look, chill all that out. Ain't no space for that.” If you really want to serve the music, right? You can't get caught up on feeling like your voice is more, more valid than another.

Tia Imani Hanna: I've had the chance to play with some well-known players and I talked to some other well-known players. I said, “Oh, what did you think about playing with them?” And they said,” I just felt like I couldn't even measure up to them at all.” And I'm going, Whoa. They're willing to play with you. So, obviously, you measure it up. So, what are you thinking? Cause that's not what those players were thinking. They were playing, thinking that you're a good player. And then there's other older players would be like, “You aren't good enough to shine my shoes. So how dare you do this?” I've had that happen too. And I'm just… I had I'm not even going to say the name, cause I don't want to do all that, but I had, it was a famous bass player, nice guy, but I had my violin, he came over and he was trying to touch my violin. I'm like, you don't touch my violin. I don't care who you are.

Myk'l Hanna: Touch my violin.

Tia Imani Hanna: You don’t touch my violin. Who does that? You don't walk up to somebody and touch their instrument. You just don't. I wouldn't go up and grab his bass. There's like this similar disrespect thing. And I was like, “Excuse me. No, please don't do that.” And I was respectful. And I just said, “Please don't touch that.” “I used to play.” I don't care if you use to play, this is mine. So there this weird thing, sometimes, that happens with people. They're like because I'm so famous, I can do what I want to do. I'm like, no, it doesn't work that way.

Myk'l Hanna: I think generationally right there are these things that we've moved away from. But certainly, thinking historically, before music pedagogy and education was available in that mass level, like in colleges and in schools, you had this real kind of ‘rites of passage’ way of getting to it that came with all of the really destructive kind of talk and exchange of violating boundaries and you're being real mean and just… right? And a lot of that is still sneaky there. You know what I mean? But now we mask it in the ability to do things at a certain level. And I mean, we both know that there are some really killin’, skillful people out here, people that can do amazing things on their instruments. But, oftentimes, the thing that I lament about is at what cost? Like now, what comes with that in terms of your sentiment about the music and how you're able to work with other people and how you're able to create music that is going to have a lasting impact, less than just saying, okay, I did that. And now it's there. So that's what I've always, like I said, try to keep in the forefront. It's what are we doing? We trying to move people here with this music. That's what it's for. And when that happens, the rest is easy. You know what I mean? And oftentimes becomes, in that way, very skillfully or technically able to be dissected and appreciated. But when it lacks that, then all of that technical acumen kinda is for nothing, except more information. And we need more art, less information.

Tia Imani Hanna: For sure. It's one of those things where we work so hard and for so long to master whatever instrument we have chosen. And it could be our voice. It could be our writing chops. It could be a piano or violin, but the older I get, the more I'm like, Oh, I'm picking up other instruments now because it doesn't matter what instrument I use. It's what am I trying to say. It's totally, those are just tools. It's all just tools. And it's what am I really trying to say? What am I trying to get across? Like you said, we're trying to move people here. And that's really the focus. So, for the Jazz thing, because of our family heritage, I wanted to at least be at the… try to be at a level, but, and learn as much as I could, but I started late. I didn't start playing improv or listening to Jazz till I was like 26. So, there's a lot of time in there where I just wasn't getting certain things. And then I really tried to lock it down. I didn't go to music school. I just studied with lots of different people and listen to a whole lot of music and just kept trying and going out and falling on my face and going out and falling on my face and looking for people who will let me try that. That was the other part because violin players are not the first call. So, I had to start my own band. So that added a whole ‘nother level. I was like, I don't really want to be a leader, but I guess I have to, can't be a side person. Cause nobody's gonna call me. And as a singer, it’s the same thing. If you don't have your own band, usually you're not going to work that much. You have to get your own group or at least have some really good friends with okay, let's do it. And then they do call you but doesn't happen for me that way. It's got to the point now where it's like, what instrument can I use or what people can I use on this project to get what I'm trying to say out to the world. It doesn't even matter. It's great if they're great players. I don't care what style they play. If they’re great players and we can work together and they know how to talk to other people, then we have something to work with. If they don't know how to talk to me and they can be the best player in the world, but I don't want to work with you. If you're just nasty or mean or something like that, I don't want to work with you. Cause I've seen that a lot too. There's these great players are so famous and blah, blah, blah, and you meet them and they're not nice people at all. And Oh, okay. Thank you very much. See you. Bye. You go do you over there? It'll be fine. So, cause what are we trying to do? If we’re creating a culture of good vibration and creating culture in the world. Do we want to create a culture that's elitist and you can't be part of my band? You can't play this style of music anywhere near me because that's not true to the art or, you know, what is that? What is that? That's why I'm like so interested in these bands that do the meshing because there's so much great music comes out of that. Just crazy stuff. You're like, “Aw man.” Then you meet people that you would never have met. There's some bluegrass players that are phenomenal. And then you've got… there's bluegrass players and then there's some Brazilian musicians that I wish they would get together because their styles, there's some similarities in there. They all play ten different instruments. No, because that's not part, for whatever reason, the American culture is not that way. You don't just grab 20 different instruments unless you're playing in country music, bluegrass music. If you're playing in Brazilian music or Latin music, they tend to play a lot. People tend to play five and six instruments. Very well. We play one, if we're lucky.

Myk'l Hanna: Well, in church, they got that a little bit. There's that. Move around the rhythm section, organist, drums, bass guitar, maybe. But oftentimes what happens in the church tradition is that they're missing formal aspects as well. And so, like for me, I felt like I can occupy a bunch of these similar spaces where I grew up in church. So, I understand that space as well. I was in music school. But I wasn't studying Jazz formerly until I got to grad school. Really. So, I certainly identify with the element of you don't know what you're talking about and you can't be included in these conversations and all of that kind of stuff. This is how it's supposed to go. And yeah, it's just, it's always that grass is greener, but I find that, like I said, the people who are really at a high level, who do have the voices that ring out true, they're not those folks. And there's a few folks, like I said, I'll follow suit and not deal with any name dropping, but there's a few pretty notable folks that are hanging around here and I’ve had a chance to have some conversations with sometimes. And it's, yeah, it's a refreshing air of just humility. Take a load off. This is cool. I was doing these things. I didn't do these things, and these are people who, yeah, world renowned, like on a high level. And so, I think that it really, like you said, it's about what kind of world are you trying to create? What kind of culture are you trying to create? Like one where you're a part and I gotta be on this pedestal or that you can make music together. We can create together, one of inclusion. So, certainly, what I'm trying to do. And by the way, the stuff that you've got out right now is killin.’ The trio with a percussionist and another string player. Yes. That stuff is killin’.

Tia Imani Hanna: Thank you. Thank you very much. Yeah, that's the idea. So, I'm going to keep doing things. Yeah. And now I'm trying to get through COVID and do similar things, keep grabbing different people. It's I still want to do Hanna cubed. So, you and me and your dad and while we can make it Hanna Four and put my sister, Penny (Wells) in there.

Myk'l Hanna: Got to get Kyle (Hall) too then, right?

Tia Imani Hanna: And Kyle. But yeah, it's one of those things we just gotta figure it out and make it happen and figure out what tunes are going to work and create some things that are going to work. Because I know your dad does more traditional stuff straight ahead stuff. Penny does more R & B and gospel stuff. And then I don't know what the heck I do. I just, like, jump in the middle.

Myk'l Hanna: I'm all over the place too. Whatever we do, you know.

Tia Imani Hanna: Yeah, it would be a riot. It would be a riot. So, we've got to, like, book some time, get it all together. And even if we have to just do it this way, sending tracks back and forth and working with them, it would be really cool. And sit down and write some stuff, “Ooh, I hear this voice and this voice.” And look, I got a song I wrote ages ago that I want your dad to sing on. I wrote one for Penny that's a gospel tune, but it's so big a production number that I can like, I'm trying to figure out how the heck I’m going to pay for it. But we got to do it. One time in New York. I did this concert back in 2005 and Penny sang on it. And it's the gospel tune. It's like a one-hit-wonder, but gospel song.

Myk'l Hanna: Wow!

Tia Imani Hanna: I probably never get it again.

Myk'l Hanna: That's interesting and amazing because maybe just before then was around the time that I was singing with Penny. I was singing back up when she was “The Fertile Ground” record. I don't know, but yeah, no, I was singing back-up with her around that time and I don't recall that. Just sounds like a big project. I'm like, man, how did I miss that one? But yeah, that was like 2004. Cause I was, about to date myself, but yeah, that was a good time back then. And certainly, certainly formative for me because I was in New Orleans as well, and I was singing with a group down there called Water Seed. And that band is still working today, but with a completely different personnel. I believe it was like silently one guy who was band leader that I didn't realize was pulling the strings, but they're still killin’. But I was singing with them and I was singing with Penny. And so, I was getting my chops, okay, I'm out here, I'm doing the thing. And those were some of my first really formative experiences being able to be in performance settings.

Tia Imani Hanna: Is there any place that folks can find you online now?

Myk'l Hanna: Absolutely. I am. Of course. On social media. Instagram, Facebook. So, really, I'm most active on Instagram. A little bit more passively active on Facebook, but so at M Y K L H A N N A just. And I'm on YouTube, I've got clips and things up on YouTube from years back when I wasn't really. Kind of doing it seriously. And I'm in the midst of kind of building a website and getting my stuff together for some of this new content that's coming definitely with E.L. Scott and, Jon DOE soon enough. But yeah, I'm on… I've got a couple of things that I'm featured on streaming platforms. I did a record with another group out of North Carolina, Zoocrü, and we did a record a few years back called “Out of Reach,” and you can find that on Spotify, as well. Another group out of North Carolina, a couple of them are friends that I've worked with an irresistible group band, but Bahãma is the band. “Simple Things” is the record. The name of the album and the track that I'm on is called “Reprise.” I'm actually doing a few backup vocals as well on record, but that's the one that I'm featured pretty prominently on.

[“Reprise” by Bahãma, featuring Myk'l Hanna playing]

I got a few other things. I'd be remiss if I didn't mention, as we talk about Jazz, Lenora Zenzalai Helm, a vocal professor and just all around badass pioneering woman and musician. But she's my vocal professor and the director of vocal studies at North Carolina Central. And I'm on a record of hers from 2011 called “A Conversation with God.” And it's basically the vocal line, the vocal rendition of the John Coltrane. And yeah, that was pretty cool. And actually, here's the link. The rhythm section on that was including Lance Scott on bass, who I'll be having some with his project, with E.L. Scott.

[“Conversation with God” playing]

So yeah, a few things. I'm out there. If you type in M Y K, possibly L, H A N N A on streaming platforms, you find a few things and, as well, I'm on social media at Myk’l Hanna. And website coming soon to be able to streamline all of those things.

Tia Imani Hanna: All right. Thank you so very much for spending time with me today and talking to the audience and letting us know what you're up to in exposing us to just how you think about the world and how you create art. And I appreciate it and hopefully will stimulate some growth out there for some other artists to keep doing the same. So, thanks for coming to Tia Time.

Myk'l Hanna: Thank you so much for having me look forward to talking again soon.

Tia Imani Hanna: For sure.

Myk'l Hanna: Bye now. Peace.

Tia Imani Hanna: Thank you for joining us this week on Tia Time with Artists. Make sure to visit our website, tiaviolin.com, where you can subscribe to the show in iTunes and never miss an episode. Please leave us a rating wherever you listen to podcasts. We really appreciate your comments, and we'll mine them to bring you more amazing episodes.

I’d like to thank this inaugural season's sponsors: The folks at Jazz Alliance of Mid-Michigan or JAMM, Michigan ArtShare, a program of Michigan State University Extension is a partner in supporting the Tia Time podcast, and Shambones Music. Without their support this podcast would not be possible. Thank you so much. If you would also like to contribute to the show, you can find us on https://www.patreon.com/TiaTime1.

If you want to continue the conversation about topics discussed on the show or start new ones with like-minded people, join us at the Tia Time Lounge on Facebook.

Thank you for listening. See you next week at Tia Time!

+ Transcription

Tia Time with Artists, with guest Craig Mitchell Smith, recorded on 12/18/2020

Tia Imani Hanna: Welcome to Tia Time with Artists, the weekly podcast where we discuss the methods, challenges, and real-life experiences of living our creative dreams. What kind of creative warrior are you? Musician? Filmmaker? Painter? Choreographer? Poet? Sculptor? Fashionista? Let’s talk about it right now. I’m your host, Tia Imani Hanna.

Tia Imani Hanna: Welcome to Tia Time with Artists and my guest today is Craig Mitchell Smith, who is an artist extraordinaire whose done everything under the sun but has settled into the glass arena. So welcome to Tia Time, Craig.

Craig Mitchell Smith: Thank you. It's so nice to see you and hear you.

Tia Imani Hanna: So. I can't believe the transformation I've seen over years of knowing you. The stories you told me about starting out in HGTV and the faux painting and I remember when we lived in Lansing at the same time and they tore down the Capitol Building, and you took pieces of the Capitol Building and made moldings and….

Craig Mitchell Smith: I stole a piece of the Capitol Building and made molds of them, but they were in the dumpster, but …

Tia Imani Hanna: All these kinds of things. And it's like now you're like making glass sculptures all over the place and in gardens and Epcot center and at Michigan State University and in, I think, Kentucky, and in Maryland, and St. Louis

Craig Mitchell Smith: I'm the luckiest guy I've ever met. It's been a blur. I'll tell you my story… I'm 57. I never considered myself an artist until I was 42. People say what did you do before then? I said mostly floundered. Here's what happened Tia. When we met gosh, that was like 1993. I had just come back from eight years in Oregon and I had owned a flower shop there that failed. And I'd done theatrical set design that doesn't pay the bills and I'd done carpentry to pay the bills. I'd done so many different. Things, but nothing captured my interest for too long. I was just either bored or bad at things in the real world. Anyway, I'd come back to Michigan and my partner and I had bought my family home, mid-century modern, cool house and spent several years restoring it. And then it was getting really beautiful. I loved the house. And then what happened to start my glass career was a friend of mine had purchased a class at Delphi Glass learning how to make coasters and small things with glass. And then she realized she'd scheduled vacation at the same time. And she said, “Craig, would you like that class? I've already paid for it. And it's non-refundable.” And I said, “Sure. I'd love to.” So, I took this class, and I was just hooked. I was just smitten with things you can do with glass, but pretty quickly, I was annoying my teacher because I kept saying, “Can't it be fluid? Can't it be dynamic, like it's alive. And why on earth would a coaster be glass? You're just making a round problem, a square problem.” And she was so annoyed with me. I remember she said to me once, “Why don't you get your own damn kiln and find out.” And then just throughout that same week, I was in contact with HGTV and they were going to do one of those six-minute segments on my kitchen and garden on the house we'd restored. And so, I'm sending pictures back and forth to Hollywood, California, and she says, “What's that thing in photograph number 14.” And I said, “What?” And what it was a cobalt blue gazing ball that had been my grandmother's and I'd had it for years since she passed, and a tree branch fell on it and broke it into shards. And. I couldn't throw Grandma away. So, I glued it back together in a new shape, just these kinds of swirls that intersected. And anyway, that's what she saw in this photograph, this woman in Hollywood. And she said, “What's that thing in the corner?” And I said, “I don't know. I guess it's a sculpture.” And she said, “Do you have anything more like that?” And I said, “No, but I'm thinking about getting my own damned kiln and making my own glass that would feel like that for my garden, only much bigger.” And she said, “Oh, that sounds great. We'll fly out a crew to film it in nine weeks”. And I thought, you can make this real if you want. So, when my partner got home for dinner. I made a really nice dinner and said, “Oh, by the way, I've got a Hollywood film crew coming in nine weeks. Can I borrow $5,000 for a kiln so I could make some stuff. I said I would.” And he said, “Oh, okay.” And I did. I just bought a kiln and glass. And I started making stuff and because I was untrained, I drew from my background. I used to be a painter, so I thought like a painter. So, I started cutting glass in the shape of brushstrokes and painting with shards of glass, not knowing that no one had done this before. And I just started making stuff that just flowed out of me. I already knew how to do something that nobody had done before. And I was just in my element just making stuff and, sure enough, they flew out a crew and they spent a day filming and all I was thinking was, “This is really fun. I'll get on TV and my friends can watch.” And then when it finally hit the air, I immediately got a call from a Chicago gallery saying, “Who represents you? Do you ship? And can we meet on Tuesday?” I had no idea that most artists were years and years to get any kind of gallery representation. And I was just on a roll making, making stuff, and having some success with it. And I did a museum show, like what, 18 months into making glass. I was, and I didn't know anything about the art world. So, I did this large-scale piece called “Faggot,” a politically motivated piece, and I'm setting it up and I'm so naive I didn't know who the other artists were. And it was oh gosh, I've done Jeff Berlin, Andy Warhol, John Michel Basquiat, big name hitters and I didn't know who any of them were. And I said, “Will the other artists be there?” And she said, “They're mostly dead sir.” And I thought, “Oh, I might be on to something.” So anyway, I just started making more and more stuff. And then the economy tanked in 2008 and the arts just died. And I thought, “Okay. That was nice. I guess I'll go back to carpentry or floral or something.” And so, I started making more stuff and next thing, I know I got a grant from the Arts Council of Greater Lansing and it enabled me to go wholesale. And the idea was that I would have to make something that benefited my community. And there was a garden in Lansing called Cooley Gardens, an urban garden, and I used to volunteer time and weed there, and I approached them, and I said, “How about I do an exhibition of sculptures in the garden? And if anything sells, I'll give you 25% of sales.” And they said, “Sure, that sounds great.” So, they did, and I sold everything. It was just a knockout show and it was ‘do or die’ for me. I thought if this works, I could continue this career. And if it doesn't, I'll just be a carpenter or fail at something else. Anyway. So, it was a big hit. And then the Meridian Mall called me. This is a big, 150 store shopping mall in Okemos, Michigan. And anyway, they called me in, and I was thinking, “Oh, Boy, maybe they want to buy something shiny for the mall.” And instead, they brought me down to this gorgeous 4,800-square-foot Ann Taylor store and they said, “Want it?” And I'm like, “There's no way I could afford, a place like this. I know what malls cost.” And the, my original deal was $100 a month and 10% of sales and utilities. And it turned out, I found out later, that the mall was failing and one of the big anchor tenants told them that if they didn't fill these empty stores that they were going to pull out. So, I just was in the right place at the right time and got a sweetheart deal. And so, I gathered as much stuff as I could. And suddenly, I went from my basement to having the largest single artist's gallery in Michigan.

Tia Imani Hanna: Yeah. I remember. I was there for the opening, playing for you.

Craig Mitchell Smith: Oh, you played. You played. With Elden Kelly. It was… Yep. That was the… we had a lot of parties. We had a lot of parties. I haven't set foot in the mall since. I spent four years in the mall. Then the Disney thing happened. I've just had so many freaky-good things happen my way. I developed these poppies, these glass, brilliant orangey-red poppies that just made me happy and makes other people happy. Anyway, we developed these and I'd done another garden show. So, I'd done a show at Dow Gardens in Michigan. And so, then we'd had some publicity materials, I had enough money to print some stuff and I said, “Oh, let's send them to these different gardens.” I said, “Send one to Head of Horticulture, Epcot Center. Orlando, Florida. It's all we had. And it landed on the head of the… landed on the desk of the head of horticulture the day that they were scheduled to have a meeting about a publicity garden for the movie, “The Great Powerful Oz,” and they wanted poppies for this garden. And they were trying to figure out, poppies don't grow in Southern Florida, they were trying to figure out could they chill the soil for them to grow and all these different permutations. And they didn't like anything artificial that they'd seen. And on the same day that they were holding this meeting my brochure with the poppies on the cover landed on their desk.

Tia Imani Hanna: Wow!

Craig Mitchell Smith: And so, she walked in with this thing and she says, “Oh, what about this guy?” And sure enough, so Disney contacted me, and they leased a field of these glass poppies and something like, I don't know, like a quarter of a million people saw them over the three months that they were displayed. And that was an interesting experience, which I'll never do again. I'm just not cut out to smile for 10 hours a day.

[laughter]

Tia Imani Hanna: How did you go about making a field of poppies that large? Was it just poppies for hours and hours at your kiln?

Craig Mitchell Smith: Yep. And I had, I only had the nine weeks to do it. I seem to have this curse of being given nine weeks to do the impossible, but I always make it happen. Just cranked it out and that's when I hired two more people. So, I… it was, I was an employer, and the economy was failing, and I was doing everything I could to give people jobs in the arts, just when there was absolutely nothing going on in the arts. I've always done really well in bad times cause what I do makes people happy. So, in really hard times, I seem to be more in demand. I'm really super busy now working on another show that'll open in the spring.

Tia Imani Hanna: Fantastic. What's the show about this time?

Craig Mitchell Smith: This one will be my first show in Michigan for ten years. I've been all over the place, but I haven't done a show in Michigan. So, Dow Gardens is bringing me back and I'm doing 30 sculptures. The tallest one is 22-feet. So, these are some of the largest… they’re certainly the largest fused-glass sculptures made. And they're all mostly floral design. So, we just worked up a giant hydrangea that's nine-foot-tall. These are just… we're doing this huge scale work and I'm welding all my own metals. So, we're making geraniums and orchids and 14-foot-tall hollyhocks and a thousand Monarch butterflies for one.

Tia Imani Hanna: That's beautiful.

Craig Mitchell Smith: And that opens a May 29th (2021) in Dow Gardens, Midland, Michigan, and runs through October 15th. Then, on September 1st the show will be lit at night. So, I'm learning things I never thought I would like color temperature and I have having to figure out the exact way to light these pieces to make them look most magic. The expected attendance will be a hundred thousand.

Tia Imani Hanna: All of these nature-based things. Now you were working in flowers way before you started to do glass. Now what brought you to flowers in the first place? So, I'm trying to understand, maybe you don't understand either, but how you got from… did you always doodle? Did you always paint? Did you always draw?

Craig Mitchell Smith: Always, I was always creative. I always had to make something with my hands. I've always been someone who had to putz with my hands and make stuff. And I remember my dad was an attorney and he wanted me to become an attorney. I would have made a lousy attorney. I remember he's…

Tia Imani Hanna: I can’t see it.

Craig Mitchell Smith: I do not have a poker face, but he said that, “If you don't get an education, you might end up working with your hands.” [laughter] That's the goal. I like making things and always have, ever since I was a little kid, I was a gardener since I was a child. I remember one of my first memories is stealing tulip heads and giving them to my mother. And one of my earliest memories is just being dazzled by color. I remember scooting under the Christmas tree and crossing my eyes and looking up at all the colored lights and thinking, that was just like a drug to me. I remember being a little boy and I… my mother had a bottle of Noxzema, which came in this cobalt blue glass jar, and I just wanted the light to come through that jar. So, I scooped out the stinking stuff on the inside and dumped it in her clothes hamper. [laughter] And I was walking around just seeing what the world would look like, cobalt blue. It's still a thrill for me. I get to work with liquid color. And I feel like I'm painting in liquid color in three dimensions.

Tia Imani Hanna: Well, you are.

Craig Mitchell Smith: I just… I still… I just love what I get to do.

Tia Imani Hanna: You had to start teaching yourself this glass thing in this nine-week period. How did you go about doing that?

Craig Mitchell Smith: Fearlessly. I just dove in and I'm so glad I hadn't had any training because I started doing stuff that the glass world thought was not possible. And because I didn't know that I could just experiment and see what worked and see what didn't. And I had a theater background doing a lot of sets, so I knew how to make things look good on camera, not necessarily up close. So, it did look great on camera and then it took years to refine it, the techniques we developed, so that now they look good, far away and up close.

Tia Imani Hanna: It works.

Craig Mitchell Smith: And teaching. I love to teach what I do. COVID has screwed up everything, but typically I've been spending a hundred days a year in hotels , just teaching. So, I've got a gig that I've been doing every year in England, two different facilities in California, Florida. I'm working on a couple of new ones. We spent a month in Sri Lanka. The strangest… I know this was so weird. I did the show at Epcot Center, and then we got an email that said, “Sri Lankan businessman wants to partner with you.” Delete. And we kept getting this and who thinks that's real? Then they eventually called the studio, and it was this Sri Lankan billionaire who said he saw the spirit of my work when he was at Epcot Center on vacation with his daughters and wanted to know if I would teach how I make glass for decor items that would be in his… he owns 37 hotels and 150 restaurants.

Tia Imani Hanna: Oh, so there.

Craig Mitchell Smith: There you go. So anyway, I said yeah, I teach classes. There's no, we'd want you to come here. And I said yeah, I use really specialized equipment. These kilns are five to $10,000 apiece. And they said if you would design a studio, we would build it for you.

Tia Imani Hanna: Wow.

Craig Mitchell Smith: And so, I thought this can't be real, but it was. So, I designed a studio in an abandoned casino that he owns in Colombo, Sri Lanka, and my crew and I spent a month making stuff for his home and teaching people. So, I was mic’d the entire time and they recorded everything and how I do my techniques. And it was just the most magical month of my life. Just making stuff with people, half a world away. This glass career has just expanded my life in a way I never, ever could have imagined.

Tia Imani Hanna: No, who would believe that was real.

Craig Mitchell Smith: Who would believe this? I mean, who gets calls for this? And then we just got a call. I'm dealing with a guy now who's on the board of several art museums in Los Angeles. He's flying me out in February. I'm making a meeting with him and he's building a gin distillery in South Africa and he wants me to come to South Africa with him. And just talking about a massive chandelier that would be in this three-story entry of the distillery that would be based on all the botanicals that they make the gin from.

Tia Imani Hanna: Wow!

Craig Mitchell Smith: How cool is that? And I liked gin.

Tia Imani Hanna: Oh, that's awesome. That's awesome! And you get to go to South Africa.

Craig Mitchell Smith: To go to South Africa. So, this is… this is pretty thrilling.

Tia Imani Hanna: If they let you in at this point.

Craig Mitchell Smith: Yeah. I’m thinking… we’re thinking it’s going to be a year out before everything really settles down again, but I never dreamed that a life like this. What's a harder career than glass or art? And it's the only thing I've done.

Tia Imani Hanna: It's paying the bills. You're able to build a company you're able to hire people. Did you ever think of yourself as an employer?

Craig Mitchell Smith: Been an employer since I was 24 years old because I owned a flower shop and I hated it. I'm a really lousy boss, but I figured out how to surround myself with people who don't need to be bossed around, who work as a team. So, we are a team of like-minded people. I tell people that my name is on the ship, but there's a lot of people rowing. It takes a lot of hands to do this. I'm the most disorganized person I know. So, Jay Letterber has worked with me for 10 years and she says it's like walking a tornado. But she keeps me organized and keeps the world working and I have a couple of assistants who just help keep me on track. I'm like a dog who sees a squirrel. It's so easy for me to get off track and say, “Oh, I gotta do this.” And I need people to say, “All right, but only after you've done this and this.” So, Joan who is my assistant says that if I ever replace her, she said, “Don't hire anyone who hasn't had children because they won't know how to deal with you.”

[laughter]

Tia Imani Hanna: I can understand that. If you have an artistic mind, it does jump from idea to idea. And that's how the flow goes. You can't stop the flow when it's going.

Craig Mitchell Smith: And it's hard to change course and suddenly just do something that you don't want to do when you've got this great idea. But that's the part… that's the difficult part is being a business with this. What I do is between teaching, sales, gallery sales, and then these shows are… I lease them. So, the gardens pay me to lease the work for a show. So, I've had to develop enough business acumen to figure out how that all works, that benefits them and me at the same time.

Tia Imani Hanna: So, what happens after the lease is up? You have to get… go and pack it all up again and then send it to the next place.

Craig Mitchell Smith: Yes, and I typically book it… and I book a show at least two years in advance. Sometimes more. So, we've got stuff planned out for… we're up to or booked out to 2024.

Tia Imani Hanna: Fantastic.

Craig Mitchell Smith: And I can't release what they're going to be, but I want to do just one big show every two years.

Tia Imani Hanna: No. That's wonderful. So, do you have storage spaces large enough to deal with all these different projects that you've done?

Craig Mitchell Smith: Yep. I rent a barn in a secret location that's got a huge amount of glass and stainless steel in it. I have to insure the contents over 10 times what the barn is worth.

Tia Imani Hanna: Oh, my goodness. Wow.

Craig Mitchell Smith: Let's take care of that but cause the studio here 4,000 square feet and I'm hoping to move. We purchased a house up north in Charlevoix and building out a studio there that'll only be 2,500 square feet. So, looking forward to retirement, I may not want to do these giant show-offy pieces and just I may well just do things that are smaller scale and easier on my body as I get older, I'm doing 22-foot-tall pieces and falling off of 22-foot-tall pieces different at 60 than at 20.

Tia Imani Hanna: True, and that's what the assistants are for.

Craig Mitchell Smith: And I'm terrified of heights and everything I do seems to be way up in the air.

Tia Imani Hanna: Okay. So, do you actually see yourself retiring at any point at all? Cause how do you retire If you like to work?

Craig Mitchell Smith: That'd be like retiring from breathing. I want to retire from being a business, but I don't want to ever retire from my work in glass. And I figure I'll teach for the rest of my life. I just… I love doing that, but I can see the day coming where I just don't want to do these giant, exhausting shows that take a full year to produce.

Tia Imani Hanna: Sure. I understand that. And again, that might just be adding a few more people who do just the businessy business stuff.

Craig Mitchell Smith: Yeah, I need grownups around.

Tia Imani Hanna: Yeah. So, you did have those people and you just say, this is how many I'm going to do. Figure it out.

Craig Mitchell Smith: And just say ‘no’ to stuff. It's really hard. It's really hard. All those years of struggling when you, you know, couldn't pay the bills, it's really hard for me to say, “Oh, I don't need anymore.” Cause you're just always remembering when it fell apart and you couldn't pay the mortgage and I think those hard times always stick with you.

Tia Imani Hanna: Oh, they do. They do. And you can't be, you can never be, too sure what's going to happen. So, you always want to make sure you have a little extra coming in at all times. So, I understand that completely.

Craig Mitchell Smith: And so, I'm trying to be an adult about all of this and all I really want to do is make shiny things.

Tia Imani Hanna: Are there things that you haven't done that you really want to do at some point?

Craig Mitchell Smith: There's a couple of facilities. I'm anxious. So, I've got to some feelers out there's a facility in Houston, Texas. That's 20-foot underground in a cistern. And I toured it when I was installing a couple of sculptures there, oh, two years ago. And I thought this would be an amazing venue. It's a pitch-black, it's got one foot of water in the bottom that acts as a black mirror. And I just… and they're using it as an art venue now and some light shows have gone on in there and I just thought that's where I need to be. So, after this show is done and filmed, because the scale of the work would be appropriate for there. We'll be sending them a package and maybe they'll bite the same way Disney did. And I hate heat and it's always 64 degrees under there. So that would be perfect.

Tia Imani Hanna: So, what does that… the 64 degrees… What do you mean?

Craig Mitchell Smith: It's the cistern underground.

Tia Imani Hanna: So, it's 20 feet underground, so it's always 64 degrees in there. Why is that? Perfect? Is it perfect for glass at 64 degrees?

Craig Mitchell Smith: It's just perfect for me. I hate heat. [laughter] Oh, I hate… cranky above 74 degrees. I'm just not… I'm not built for it. That's why I'm the only person I know who moved to Portland, Oregon for the weather.

Tia Imani Hanna: Okay. So, what does that? Scotch ancestry.

Craig Mitchell Smith: Irish. I’m a redhead We like it gray and gloomy and cool and rainy and green.

Tia Imani Hanna: I see. So, have you tried to go over to the Emerald Isle and do any work yet?

Craig Mitchell Smith: I haven't yet. I've done England six times and absolutely love it. I love the British people. I love every moment that I've spent in England and I was scheduled there for three weeks this October. And, of course, COVID cancelled that.

Tia Imani Hanna: Were there a lot of gardens that you worked on there?

Craig Mitchell Smith: Teaching, that was a teaching gig. And so, I was… you don't know what kind of impact you have. But those classes all sold out. I did not know that I had a reputation in England from glass people. So, when the facility there contacted me. And I thought do you think, you can fill those classes? And that's when she said, “Oh, they're already full.”. And I, sometimes I teach here in the Lansing studio, pre-COVID. The last class I taught, I think was last November, here in the Lansing studio. And Joan, my assistant, handles all of the scheduling. I don't know who's coming to these classes. So, I've maxed out at 12 people and I did three sets of classes and they all sold out and I like not knowing who's coming to the classes. And so, I never forgot on the first one. Yeah, I was there to say hello to everybody when they arrived. And not one of them was from Michigan. I had two from California, one from New York, two from Florida, one from Texas. People… and one lady came from Israel to take a class with me. And that was so humbling to realize that there were people who knew me all over the world who were willing to fly to Lansing, Michigan to take a class. That was a moment I will never forget.

Tia Imani Hanna: Oh, I bet. Now, did they say how they heard about you in the first place? Was it Epcot or was it other things?

Craig Mitchell Smith: Just mainly Facebook? I have tens of thousands of people that follow me on Facebook and because my work looks so different. This the only technology I can handle. The website gets updated whenever I can find somebody who knows what they're doing. But Facebook, I know how to do on my phone. So that's how I can communicate visually with stuff. So that's… I've had so many people that I didn't even know who is following my page.

Tia Imani Hanna: So, what about Instagram though? That's owned by Facebook to now.

Craig Mitchell Smith: Yes, and I, yeah, and I post occasionally on Instagram, but it's never gotten me the communication that Facebook has Facebook seems to be much more two-sided. Instagram is me just putting out images. People don't communicate with me through Instagram, but they certainly do through Facebook.

Tia Imani Hanna: Wow. Fantastic. Are there things in glass-making that you haven't learned yet that you want to know more about?

Craig Mitchell Smith: Oh yeah! We're always….I think next is going to be casting to do really thick pieces, you have to contain the glass and so making… what we're doing now is all of the pieces that I've made in the last couple of years are on single use, plaster molds that I'm working with my fingers with wet plaster and making all of these designs. And then I'm face casting the glass on it. A few years ago, I got so tired every time I became just a machine, I was making so many, I don't know how many thousands of poppies we made. And I just felt like I was repeating myself. And I got sick because I worked so hard. I didn't take a day off in 16 months and I was absolutely exhausted. And I thought, “You've got to reinvent yourself again and now come up with a way of making glass where everything is unique and one of a kind and slower.” And so, I developed a technique where I'm making my own plaster molds, and they are destroyed in the firing. So, you can't repeat yourself. And it made me… I'm a hyper person, this made me slow down. And best thing I've done. So next, I want to do big thick cast pieces and the thicker the glass, the longer it has to anneal in the kiln. The thickest piece of glass ever cast was for the Los Alamos telescope. It's 30 inches thick and the annealing time was two and a half years. So, you could make… I'm not going to that thing. But if you're making a, like a 10-inch-thick piece of glass, it's in the kiln a month to slowly cool. And so, I thought if I'm pushing my patience, there are pieces that I would love to make that are massive and thick and would strengthen my mold making skills. So, you make these pieces out of wax first, then you encase them in Plaster of Paris, a special fortified Plaster of Paris, then you melt out the wax and then you can fill them with a pulverized or powdered glass. And then make a single, a one-of-a-kind, sculpture that takes a month in a kiln. And I have nine kilns, so I can do things like this.

Tia Imani Hanna: Yes, you can. And what about the height? So, they don't have to be like 20 feet tall.

[laughter]

Craig Mitchell Smith: No. They're just pieces for homes or I do a lot of for businesses. A lot of businesses buy statement pieces. And so, I'm in a lot of lobbies across America.

Tia Imani Hanna: What about hospitals and things like that?

Craig Mitchell Smith: Oh, I did! I didn't the biggest pieces I've ever done was for the Herbert Hermann Cancer Center here in Lansing. It's made of a hundred components of glass and it's over 40 feet long. And there was an open competition for this, it is the plum sculpture. It's filled with art. Hospitals have realized that art heals. And so, they're filling themselves with artwork and, here's an interesting aside, if you're doing artwork for a hospital, it must not be a color that comes out of a human body. So, that's cool. So, there's no red. No bilious green, no yellow. So, that's why if you're in a hospital, what you're going to see are a lot of blues and aquas and turquoise and white and silver and gray. So, that's why you see all those colors in hospitals. So anyway, meeting with the hospital people for the possibility of this piece, they asked me how I would approach it. And I lost, you know, my father to cancer and many friends. And so, I looked at the space and I said I would ask myself, “What is the shape of hope?” And I saw a giant spiral leading the eye up. It was that the eye must travel. And all of my pieces, hopefully, engage the eye. And there's something very optimistic about tracing a line that goes up. So, I wanted to make a shape that reflected what I thought hope would feel like. And that's why they gave me the commission was because of… because of that feel.

Tia Imani Hanna: That's fantastic. I love that. I really love that. So, what does hope feel like?

Craig Mitchell Smith: Yeah. Uplifting, and something that leads you up. So, I made a physical shape that felt like hope to me.

Tia Imani Hanna: That's a statement for sure. Is that what you want to leave the world with your art? Is that, when you're doing your artwork, is that what you're thinking about?

Craig Mitchell Smith: Absolutely. I'm trying to affect moods. I learned early on in life that I cannot change the world. I cannot fix the world, but I can make it look better. And like in my background in theater, I realized for those two hours that you've got someone paying attention to what's on stage, you affect them for that period of time and some of it lingers like a ghost. So, making these pieces that affect how people feel. What I'm trying to do is show people the beauty in nature. I just make it huge so they can't miss it. I make the colors louder than they are in nature, so you can't miss it. One of my favorite pieces that I've done, I think five times now, is called “Making a Wish.” How many… haven't we all, as a kid pulled a dandelion and blown on the puff and made those seeds spread everywhere. So, I've made one of those 22 feet tall. So, just the leaves are like four and a half foot long out of stainless steel at the base. And then this tall trunk, and then this just spray of stainless steel with glass seed heads. And then there are like 40 additional seed heads that are cabled on very fine, almost invisible, stainless steel hanging from trees, hundreds of feet away. And the whole idea is that it makes you remember to do that. And one of my best memories, as I did this piece for Art Prize in Grand Rapids, and did well, but I will never forget a lady an 80-year-old lady turned a corner and she saw this piece and she just instinctively pursed her lips and blew and said, “I haven't done that for 75 years.”

Tia Imani Hanna: Oh, that's beautiful.

Craig Mitchell Smith: So again, that's what I love about the whole thought of that is it's a secular prayer. Making a wish doesn't offend anyone, but it's the exact same energy as a prayer, it's just putting out good intentions. I tell people “make wishes” because some of them come true.

Tia Imani Hanna: Oh, yeah. If you don't make them, you'll never get the chance to, you'll never know. You'll never make that effort to get towards or go towards that wish. So, it could happen because you've moved that direction.

Craig Mitchell Smith: Yeah. So, make a wish everyone.

Tia Imani Hanna: Yeah. So, while you're working on this and you're sweating and working and going “Arrg! Another poppy!” Does that still… does that energy get imbued in there anyway?

Craig Mitchell Smith: Absolutely. I've learned if I'm in a crappy mood, don't make glass. It's gonna… it's not gonna work. It's not gonna work. If I watch the news, I can't make glass. I have a perfect excuse to be somewhat uninformed, because if I pay attention to the world, man, everything I do would be black.

Tia Imani Hanna: Hear that. Yeah. I haven't watched the news on a regular basis for over 30 years.

Craig Mitchell Smith: Good. It's bad for you.

Tia Imani Hanna: It just doesn't work.

Craig Mitchell Smith: Do what you can do to affect change but, man, do not. If I obsess over the gloom and doom of the world, I sure would. I'm trying to be the antidote to what's out there and post COVID, the show opens May 29th. By everybody is hoping that by May 29th we'll be able to go back to the lives we used to live. And I think everybody's going to be ready for a party and be wanting to celebrate. So, we've upped our game. The uglier, the world gets the more my commitment to making beauty is.

Tia Imani Hanna: Yeah, I'm with you on that. That's been my slogan for the whole time of this show is to “Make Art,” “Make Art.” People have constantly asked what are we going to do, especially because of COVID? I said, “Just keep making art. What has really changed?”

Craig Mitchell Smith: You're gonna still make music!

Tia Imani Hanna: Yeah, you still have to do the art that you're here to do, is to make the art. So…

Craig Mitchell Smith: You just keep on keeping on.

Tia Imani Hanna: Gotta do it. So, where is the best place for people to find you online?

Craig Mitchell Smith: Craig Mitchell Smith.com.

Tia Imani Hanna: Okay. Easy enough. Easy enough.

Craig Mitchell Smith: There's my website and my Facebook page. Again, I update the Facebook page regularly because I know how. I am an idiot with technology. I will always be an idiot with technology, but I know how to do Facebook on my phone, and I can take a decent picture.

Tia Imani Hanna: And now you have assistants to help you, which we're very grateful for.

[laughter]

Craig Mitchell Smith: Yes. Oh, I need young people. I don't do the technology thing. This would never have happened without a delightful 23-year-old who understands computers and things.

Tia Imani Hanna: Is there… what do you see as your legacy of your art? Like what happens to your art when you're gone? Have you made choices on that?

Craig Mitchell Smith: Yes. But I don't want to go into that just yet. My legacy will be the techniques that I've shared with people. When I first started making glass, I was like other artists and thinking, “Oh, don't, I don't want anybody to know how I do this because they'll steal it.” Guess what? They're going to steal it anyway. So, you might as well charge them to learn. So, then my resentment just evaporated because they paid me. So, I thought that was an easy fix. So that I have changed how thousands of people make glass. Nothing is more meaningful to me than when glass artists tell me that I have inspired them to do something they never thought they could do.

Tia Imani Hanna: Fantastic.

Craig Mitchell Smith: And I never lose my curiosity.

Tia Imani Hanna: Oh no. You can't. Now I know there's going to be somebody who's going to do something and you're going to look at it and go, wait a minute, how did you do that? And then have you gone to find other artists that to teach you things about it?

Craig Mitchell Smith: Yeah. I've written many fan letters to other artists that I whose work I admire, and I've had some wonderful conversations with people and shared and met many people through this amazing internet connected world. I was in Sri Lanka and a woman knocked on the door in Colombo, Sri Lanka, because she followed me in Facebook. She happened to be in Colombo and tracked me down half a world away. And she was given permission from the gentleman who hired me to participate in it for a day, just a magical connection. The legacy is really the connections you make. I don't have children. So, what I'm leaving behind is a mood that I hope persists.

Tia Imani Hanna: Thank you so much, Craig, for being with us today.

Craig Mitchell Smith: Oh, I cannot tell you what a pleasure this was to reconnect with an old friend. I think I met you in 1993.

Tia Imani Hanna: It's been a while.

Craig Mitchell Smith: When the world opens up, come back, say hi.

Tia Imani Hanna: Fantastic. Thank you so much.

Craig Mitchell Smith: This was my pleasure. I'm so glad we were able to make this work and all my best to you.

Tia Imani Hanna: Thank you so much, Craig.

Craig Mitchell Smith: Welcome. Bye, bye Tia.

Tia Imani Hanna: Thanks for being on Tia Time.

Tia Imani Hanna: Thank you for joining us this week on Tia Time with Artists. Make sure to visit our website, tiaviolin.com, where you can subscribe to the show in iTunes and never miss an episode. Please leave us a rating wherever you listen to podcasts. We really appreciate your comments, and we'll mine them to bring you more amazing episodes.

I’d like to thank this inaugural season's sponsors: The folks at Jazz Alliance of Mid-Michigan or JAMM, Michigan ArtShare, a program of Michigan State University Extension is a partner in supporting the Tia Time podcast, and Shambones Music. Without their support this podcast would not be possible. Thank you so much. If you would also like to contribute to the show, you can find us on https://www.patreon.com/TiaTime1.

If you want to continue the conversation about topics discussed on the show or start new ones with like-minded people, join us at the Tia Time Lounge on Facebook.

Thank you for listening. See you next week at Tia Time!

+ Transcription

Tia Time with Artists, with guest Owen Valentine, recorded 12/12/2020

Tia Imani Hanna: Welcome to Tia Time with Artists, the weekly podcast where we discuss the methods, challenges, and real-life experiences of living our creative dreams. What kind of creative warrior are you? Musician? Filmmaker? Painter? Choreographer? Poet? Sculptor? Fashionista? Let’s talk about it right now. I’m your host, Tia Imani Hanna.

Tia Imani Hanna: Welcome to Tia Time with Artists. This week my guest is Owen Valentine. I knew him as “Fiiddla” Owen Brown, Jr., a violinist, a multi-instrumentalist singer, a naturopath, enzyme specialist. You do everything so welcome to the show.

Owen Valentine: Well, I hope all of them that made it with me today.

Tia Imani Hanna: I'm hearing that you are a superhero in the gym. You're doing amazing things. I see your Facebook feed all the time.

Owen Valentine: Awesome. Hey, I'm trying to encourage my fellow musicians to get it in.

Tia Imani Hanna: Move the body. Move your body and that's something… that's one of the reasons I had you on today. I want to talk about the violin. Why the violin? You play so many different instruments. I want to talk about how you got to where you are now with the health and the naturopath and all the different instruments? And how all of that binds together, how do you get all those things to work together? So, at the beginning… It is a lot.

Owen Valentine: That's a lot, that's a lot. At the very beginning for me starts, I was born in London and the first couple of years of my life, I'm living in London. And from what I understand from my mother, my father used to play Charlie Parker records over the top of the crib. Now my father, interestingly, he didn't tell me that he was like a big jazz aficionado and that he was friends with all these guys. So, I find, yeah. So, I found out later that his buddies are all the buddies that were friends with Trane and with Rollins and all it is… Monk, all these guys… and my father was a dentist. So, he was doing everybody's teeth. And playing the trumpet. He, without ever saying a word, he passed the love of the jazz and all those things to me. My mother was an opera singer. She was accepted to Julliard. Her sister was a piano virtuoso, but of everybody in the entire family, the decision was made that I would be the doctor. So, I was going to get no music lessons. I'm the only person in, like, generations that didn't get music lessons as a child.

Tia Imani Hanna: Oh. That's not fun.

Owen Valentine: That was no fun. I was like, so y'all gave me all these genes and y'all just decided unanimously that I would be the doctor and not get any piano lessons, no nothing. So, I had to give you that to know that the bug was already planted, but there was no preparation to actually go into it. So, at 16 and a half, just going towards 17, the drive was so strong that I moved out on my own. I would go for everything. As a vocalist, I started, I would go for everything possible. I wanted to learn everything about music possible, and that helped me as a… that helped me to understand the voice in an extreme way. I read entire treatises and books. I went in with a passion. And prior to that, when I was nine, the thing I was allowed to do was the martial arts. So, I took that Shaolin Kung Fu, Jujitsu, Aikido, Shotokan, Tae Kwon Do, all of that, Judo, all of that, and applied it to music. In those later years, people said, how can you do something for three or four hours? I said, have you ever been to a Shaolin Temple? Wash on, wash off for the next four hours. Literally, you're cleaning a floor, cleaning the walls. Now, get over here and do these pushups and then hang upside down and all this kind of stuff. Before you throw a first punch of the day. The Kung Fu, and the athleticism was actually what allowed me to do the music. My first voice teacher was Tony nominee, Gilbert Price, He was the star of a show called “Timbuktu” with Eartha Kitt and Melba Moore. Yeah. He used to say, “Welcome to Timbuktu, starring Eartha Kitt, Gilbert Price, and Melba Moore!” l remember. That was a long time ago, but that was my first voice teacher. Music was not an easy road for me because I couldn't seem to either keep teachers long enough get me through or life couldn't stay simple long enough to get me through. So, I got married early, became a parent, did a whole bunch of things, and I just never gave… the burn was inside me so much. So, I'm going to shorten this story and say that one day while I'm singing and taking dance lessons and doing all this stuff. I actually went and bought a violin for my then young wife, who I was trying to encourage her to start an instrument. She said scrape and put the violin down on the floor and left it there and that was it. But there was a violin in the house now, so I picked it up and I never put it down. That was, wow, that was 37, 38 years ago. I never put it down. It wasn't once I picked it up, it just took, I started… that first year. I learned all my three octave scales on one string, in twelve keys.

Tia Imani Hanna: On one string.

Owen Valentine: It was crazy. It was absolutely crazy. But when I went in a hundred percent and I met John Blake that same year, the year was 1983. I met John Blake and he was actually the violin soloist on one of his friend's weddings. And I was the vocalist. And so, after I was done singing, he took his solo and then we were scatting back… I was scatting. He was playing the violin. And I was like, when I was done, I was like, “Ah, I found the other thing I'm supposed to do.” And he was like, “Why? What is the other thing you're supposed to do? I said, “I was supposed to play the violin.” He was like, “Really.” “And there's one sitting at home on the floor,” and he looked at me like, “Oh my God. You must be out of your mind. Do you know how hard the violin is? How many kids you got? What?” So that same year my daughter was born. It was like, now you got a violin and a new daughter. And it was like, “Oh, my God. That's a lot.”

Tia Imani Hanna: That's a lot.

Owen Valentine: The violin is a tough mistress.

Tia Imani Hanna: Yes, it is.

Owen Valentine: She demands that you play with her and talk to her and take her out for lunch.

Tia Imani Hanna: That’s true. Exactly.

Owen Valentine: I went in with a passion. I was passionate about being a dad. I was passionate about my martial arts. I was passionate about this new instrument and I'll tell you a story. When I was 16, someone gave me a guitar. And I came home and pronounced like, like Eddie Murphy and, uh, what's that thing coming to America, I came home and said with my guitar to my mother, “Now I know I will be, I renounced my throne. I will know a guitarist. I will be the world's greatest guitarist. That will be what I am.” And I held this guitar in my hand. I held it out to her, and I was like, “Yes.” And she's like, “Where'd you get the guitar from? I said, “Somebody told me he was no longer going to be a guitarist and gave it to me.” I set that guitar and I went away for a week or two. When I came home, they were so determined I would be a doctor that I hate to tell you what happened to that guitar. She took that guitar, took all the strings off, painted it with some black latex and hung it on a wall as the ornament.

Tia Imani Hanna: Oh my gosh.

Owen Valentine: And I was like, “Oh no, how could they do that?” She kept playing dumb and then finally she said, “We've got enough musicians in this family! You're going to be a doctor and that's it!”

Tia Imani Hanna: Yeah.

Owen Valentine: Yeah. But we know that you can't force someone.

Tia Imani Hanna: No. You really can't.

Owen Valentine: Yeah. Just cause I was good at bio didn’t mean I wanted to sit through eight years of traditional med school. And there was no naturopath school then. There wasn't no go to school for being a naturopathic doctor in the United States currently available, unless you were maybe an Arizona somewhere. And I was in the city of New York at the time. But the violin starts in Harrisburg, PA the violin. I practiced it. I read every book. No one wanted to teach me, so, I taught myself. And I continued studying. I took the violin with me. As soon as I was done with Army bootcamp, I came all the way back, kissed my kids, grabbed my violin, and then went back to base.

Tia Imani Hanna: Wow.

Owen Valentine: And I soon became known as “Fiddler Brown” on the Army base of San Antonio, Texas. That was Fort Sam, the medical base. So, mom got what she wanted anyway. I don’t think you meant me to be a doctor with a gun, but yeah. But I was the only guy, like everybody would leave the base, and I would be the only one on the whole base just with my violin. Practicing in the barracks. And they used to have little practice rooms there. I would practice in there, no one on the base, just me alone. So, it was pretty nutsy. I would bug violinists from time to time. I followed John Blake like a stalker and he's part of the reason I moved to Philadelphia. And over the years, I was blessed to meet some of the greatest guys of the idiom of jazz violin and of violin itself, right? Francis Fortier came in with his, I think it was a Guarneri he had at the time, from Julliard, he came down. I met Ruggiero Ricci, the great classical Paganini soloist, and I got a chance to watch him for a couple of days. And I got a job cutting grass for the guy who was the head of the American Violin Makers Association. It was like, just one thing after the other, I just was dedicated a hundred percent, I will do what it takes. If it means bleed, I will bleed for this instrument.

Tia Imani Hanna: And you did. Sounds like it.

Owen Valentine: And I did, anyway, that kinda brings you up into… that covers the first 25, 26 years of life.

Tia Imani Hanna: Now you do play lots of other instruments too now. So those pop up in the middle or?

Owen Valentine: Okay, this is going to sound real strange, but at 25, 26, I meet a man named Sun Ra. And Sun Ra stretch the envelope of what I was going to do for the rest of my life, because he was like, you can't just be a violin player. You can't just be a singer. In fact, I was a better singer than a violinist. So, I was like, just let me sing. I don't have to play the violin. He says, “Nope. You need to be up front with the violin.” I said, “No, I would be better in the back. I think back near the trunk.” He said, “You must be in the front.” So, he mentored me. He pushed me, kicked me. And because I was sitting in a band with 16 other instruments, I'm being surrounded by like John Orr from the Thelonious Monk Band and people from the Duke Ellington Orchestra and people from Basie Orchestra, all in one band. And it started to rub off. You start hearing these other instruments and… school made me learn some things, but it didn't really stick because they didn't apply it in a functional way. But once you're in a band consciously watching those other instruments working, you do start to… you start to grow a little bit and you start to have a feeling for what the horns do and the trumpets do, what the saxophones do, and the percussion does, and I started playing percussion…. I had some piano in school, but yeah, I started playing percussion and I found out I was good at it. And I think the next thing I really took to was the bass. Which was the opposite of the violin. It's like, violin players don't play bass.

Tia Imani Hanna: It's upside down and backwards.

Owen Valentine: Exactly. But something weird happened. And I'm going to say, after I'd been playing the violin a good 16, 17 years, something weird happened. And I… the door opened up one day and it just, it was weird. I went from bass. Getting serious about the piano to get more serious about the percussions, the studying Indian music, to sitting on the floor playing the violin in my sock… with the tip of a violin, my sock traditional Carnatic style. I started sitar. I started harmonica. And it was just one instrument after the other and they just kept coming. And before I knew it, I had added another 20 or so instruments in. And people were calling me, “Hey, listen, I need a harmonica player. Hey, listen, I need you to do the whole Indian thing on this concert over here.” And I started appearing on hip hop records, was some of those little weird sounds that you hear like with Talib Kweli, Mos Def, Common, Santana, Parliament Funkadelic. What's that sound? That's me. I was the little weird sound you heard. It was like, yeah. So, if you turn to like Common’s “Sun God” you hear a little weird sound and all this crazy stuff. What instrument is that? It's a violin. Yeah, that's how it started. And I got serious about it. I give credit to cats like Gerald Veasley, who is like a great bass player, but he was the first like bass player that I got, like, really… “Wow. That moves me.” I could feel that in my chest when he would play. I was like, “Man, I want to do that too.” And the people were like, “You’re like a little kid. You don't know what you want to do.” I said, “No, I think I'm supposed to do more than one thing.” So, I had to wrestle with myself because when you feel what everybody's telling you to do one thing and do it well, and your insides are telling you do 20 things and do them well. Someone sent me something recently, a psychological thing, and it said… that they said there are certain people who are meant to do many things, not one thing. And I guess that fit… I fit the profile.

Tia Imani Hanna: So, just knowing that's a possibility because you get told by so many people and I've been guilty of telling people that too, I say, yes, it's good to play lots of different instruments, but I said, try to understand one of them first. And that is what I tell them so that at least you can expand from the one that you know.

Owen Valentine: Exactly. Exactly. Listen, I will tell you that things cross-pollinate. The violin led me to the bass, but I was doing everything wrong on the bass. Everything. Because I was thinking of it like it was a big violin, like it was just a low violin. No, it's a different function. It's a different instrument. It's a different range, everything about it. So, the bass actually changed how I played the violin.

Tia Imani Hanna: Okay. I can see that.

Owen Valentine: Harmonica changed the way I played the violin. Both chromatic and diatonic, they changed the way I looked at the instrument. And singing, of course, changes the violet. So yeah, it was like a weird, strange journey. Yeah.

Tia Imani Hanna: So, you've gone from being “Fiiddla” to now you are Owen Violin

Owen Valentine: Hey, ‘Owen Violin’ is a good name. Maybe I'll do that next. Yeah. Yeah. But someone said it sounds like a stripper name. I said, “No.” I said, “Yeah, that's my stripper name.” So why do you work out so much? I got to make the money, got to pay the bills. Shout out to all my girls on the pole. [laughter] So, yeah, he said you made that real. Hey! So, listen, I think from the Army calling me Fiddler, the Sun Ra calling me “Fiddla.” He says, “You always say… you always just fiddling around.” He said… and he was from the South, so he would have that ‘Fiddla’ ‘Fiddla’. So, I just put two "i’s in it. For a minute I was called “The Fiddler.” And then everybody else was around me, including some of my ex-students, started adding “Fiddler” to their name. And so that was real common back, you go back about 20 years ago, there was a lot of fiddlers around. Where you all come from? So, I added two I’s to my name and made it “Fiiddla!” And I figured, listen, I gave Fiiddla 20 years. I did. I wore… I have locks down to my butt. Then I cut all the locs off for 10 years. And I did the genie look. I had all kinds of colors in my hair with the locs going down to my butt and throwing them around and all that. Did the muscles and locs kind of thing.

Tia Imani Hanna: Okay. Sure.

Owen Valentine: You know, it was nice. It was cool. But then you get a little older and you want that more refined thing. And I sat down, and I said, “If I was going to choose a new stage name, what would it be?” And I said, “There's not a lot of Owens out there. So, I'm still unique with that. But then Owen means Prince. But I can't use Prince because somebody already used it.

Tia Imani Hanna: Right.

Owen Valentine: I thought to myself, I said, what about a last name? Adding Owen something. And I started to look up… I said, what do you represent? I represent exercise and health and diet. I looked these things up and I found the name that means ‘healthy and strong’. And that's what ‘Valentine’ means.

Tia Imani Hanna: Huh? I did not know that.

Owen Valentine: Yeah, we associate it with Valentine's Day, you know. But, actually, it means healthy and strong, youthful, those kinds of things. So, my first name Owen means Prince. It also means Warrior. It also means Strong. Those kinds of things. So, if you put them together, Owen Valentine means “The Prince of Healthy and Strong.”

Tia Imani Hanna: That's fantastic.

Owen Valentine: I was like, that's me. I got it. I took the name on and I wasn't sure about the name at first. And then I got a gig working with Denise Valentine, who is a fabulous poet. She did historical things and these kinds of things. And she asked me, as a naturopath, to take care of her mother. And I was a part of her mother’s last few years and we got her from… she was supposed to expire in a week or two and we got her a couple of extra years and some quality of life. And at one point, I called Denise up, and I said to me how you feel about having a brother. And she said, “Huh?” I said, “I'm thinking about changing my last name.” She said, “I need a brother. Go ahead. But I should let you know I wasn't born a Valentine either.” I said, “Okay, fine. Either way, we're going to stick with it.” So, I became “Owen Valentine.” It seems to work for me. People liked the name. Owen Brown. I think if you look in history, Owen Brown was a rebel.

Tia Imani Hanna: Yeah. You definitely fit that.

Owen Valentine: Yeah. You've heard of John Brown’s father was Owen Brown.

Tia Imani Hanna: Oh, I did not know that.

Owen Valentine: And John Brown, his son, was named Owen Brown.

Tia Imani Hanna: Okay.

Owen Valentine: So, historically, Owen Browns have been the guys you want to hang from a tree. And I was, like, we've got to change that up a little bit.

Tia Imani Hanna: Sure. Sure.

Owen Valentine: Anyway, that just took you down a whole path of madness with that. Yeah.

Tia Imani Hanna: It's a good path of madness. What was the “good trouble” John Lewis was talking about, “good trouble.”

Owen Valentine: Good trouble.

Tia Imani Hanna: So that's another name for your next composition, right?

Owen Valentine: I'm going to use it right. Good Trouble. I like it though.

Tia Imani Hanna: Oh, you know, I got a million of them. Now, when did you become a naturopath?

Owen Valentine: I think I was on my way to being a naturopath from the time I was probably six or seven years old and didn't know it. My grandmother would hold up a leaf and say, “Look at this leaf. See what it looks like? Okay, turn around, look at the back of it. Now, go out and find this one in the woods.” Now today, that sounds scary. You sent a little black child out into the woods by himself, but times were different. I came back. I survived. I don't know how. Nothing ate me, you know, nobody snatched me. But I would go out in the woods, in the creek, or wherever she told me to look for it, and I would go find her whatever she sent me. So, she was actually teaching me. She said, “Dandelion is very important. If you can learn how to heal and eat this. You can learn what this is and what that is.” And so, by the time I was in my teens, those things were normal to me. Naturopathy starts for me, I think around 28, 29, when I made a serious life change. I gave dairy. I stopped eating meat for a while. I gave up preservatives. I gave up fluoride. I gave up everything and I started to make a complete different lifestyle change. And it led to me studying a lot and eventually going to school for it and apprenticing and studying under people, naturopathic doctors and other people who were herbalists and studying. And what started as a path of self-preservation became people asking me, “Hey, you doing something at 35 that most people only do at 16 and 18. How do you do that?” And there was a naturopathic doctor here in Philly, Dr. Frank Wyatt, who was also one of my Kung Fu brothers. He encouraged me to go back to school again. I was like back to school, not. He encouraged me to go back to school. And I went back to school and got my… it's a naturopathic doctor certificate and I continued studying and apprenticing even after that. And I went to some other schools for nutrition and for enzymes and this and for that and got my personal trainers’ certifications and got my this and got my that. And somewhere in the middle of it, just as a violinist yourself, things start to merge together.

Tia Imani Hanna: Yes.

Owen Valentine: So, what you learned from all these different arts start to merge. My calling food background started to make sense now because I had been introduced to all these Chinese herbs when I was like eight or nine years old. So that, my grandmother, all those things came together, and being a medic in the Army taught me to quickly assess a problem and focus on getting a person back up and functional. So, you combine the military assessment training with the biology background, because yes, I did go to school for biology first. With the herbs later, and it all made sense. Now it’s, “God, I just thought this was never going to make sense. All these gifts and things that I'm feeling inside me don't feel like they belong together.

Tia Imani Hanna: Well, of course they do.

Owen Valentine: They do, but I didn't… I was constantly made to feel strange. There's something wrong with you. You don't know if you want to be a doctor or a musician or an athlete, pick something. And then you find out, wow, I'm supposed to be all those things and some mixture of the three. So, when I work with artists as a voice teacher or a coach, I get their bodies ready. I get their diet ready. It gets the nutrition ready, get the this ready, get that ready and then get them out on the road. Get them out and do their thing. And so that… those things all started to merge together, you know. Yeah. What else you want to know?

Tia Imani Hanna: Well, now during the COVID situation, are you not meeting with people personally as much, are you doing a lot of things online or how are you getting people?

Owen Valentine: How am I working or how am I servicing people?

Tia Imani Hanna: Well, yeah, both.

Owen Valentine: A very select group of people wanted me to keep them healthy through the middle of all of this. And so, I've been working with those people through the COVID experience. I've had a couple of people who actively call me and say, “Listen, I was just told I have COVID. I'm sick, I'm tired. Save me.” And backtracking, I started making herbal formulas roughly 20 years ago. And there are some things that I had already invented that became useful. And so, I started sending out formulas to people and, thankfully, nobody I've worked with has expired. I got them through their COVID experience, kept their incidents of coughing to a minimum, no mucus issues, nobody choking and dying and all that kind of thing. So, I'm batting a hundred percent right now. Knock on wood. So, COVID has definitely slowed down business as an artist, as a naturopath, as a trainer. I got this beautiful gym here with all these wonderful things in it, but they keep shutting the world down. My take on COVID is they're closing the gyms. They threw gym… they said, “Number one place you're more likely to catch this is the gym”. I said, “Not really.” I disagree with that highly.” They threw the gyms under the bus, but they didn't close the liquor stores. They through the gym under the bus, but they didn't tell people to stop smoking. They threw the gyms under the bus, but they didn't close the candy stores or the pizza shops. And they got people drinking milk and doing lots of dairy and all these other wonderful things. But no, like, they threw fitness under the bus. I have my own personal take on… None of my comments are endorsed by the FDA, if you're listening. And I don't endorse them. So, good, we don’t endorse each other. It's a strange world we live in where health is what's dangerous. What pizza and alcohol and getting drunk is not. I'm like, “Really. Stop.” If you really want to be concerned about people's health, tell them to stop smoking and stop drinking, do this, and do that. But you've got to clean up if you want to make it through this.

Tia Imani Hanna: Exercise. Eat. Drink water.

Owen Valentine: Yes. I've been doing some... Yes. Yes. Come on, say more.

[laughter]

Tia Imani Hanna: And mental health, meditate.

Owen Valentine: Yes.

Tia Imani Hanna: Movement

Owen Valentine: Yes. Come on.

Tia Imani Hanna: Stretch. Talk to your family and friends.

Owen Valentine: Yes. Come on.

Owen Valentine: Yeah. Yeah. You're talking that medicine. Talk to me.

Tia Imani Hanna: All that I have to do more of, cause I still have to go to work too.

Owen Valentine: It's making a decision. It's making a decision, and then making the decision into a religion. So, my first religion is health and fitness and staying connected. I believe we're given gifts. Take care of them. Life is a gift! Gotta love it. I love my violin and my instruments, and I got some fabulous ones, but at the end of the day, I got to take care of this body or I don't get to play. Yeah. I don't get to play. How is COVID affecting you in your real time?

Tia Imani Hanna: In my real time, I work for FedEx full time. So, we are just at stress Christmas levels, and we have been that stress Christmas levels since February of last year.

Owen Valentine: Wow.

Tia Imani Hanna: And it hasn't subsided. So, it's tiring. It's very tiring.

Owen Valentine: Wow.

Tia Imani Hanna: I'm grateful to have income, but it's tiring. Which… so my outlet was creating this podcast was one of the things, because I was talking to other artists and saying, “Hey, keep doing what you're doing. Cause we need you.”

Owen Valentine: Right. This is a valuable thing. We need outlets and we need ways of expression. We need ways of documentation. It's all very important. Very important, you know. Yeah.

Tia Imani Hanna: Yeah. So that's where we're at, but it's all good because things are moving in the right way. I think the stress of the elections has taken this toll on a lot of people.

Owen Valentine: Yes.

Tia Imani Hanna: Hopefully, that will shift now, a little bit back to a little bit more normal scene in the way of not being so over the edge in one direction.

Owen Valentine: It just feels like… I just heard, they said 17 or 18 states are, like, voting to try and fight the election or something strange.

Tia Imani Hanna: Yeah, something strange.

Owen Valentine: Of course, the 17 that didn't, that were swung in the other direction. These are truly strange times. Nothing like it.

Tia Imani Hanna: Did you see that there was a Netflix documentary called the social. …I think it's called the “Social Dilemma” or the social…

Owen Valentine: Yes. Excellent. Excellent.

Tia Imani Hanna: So, that made a lot of sense to me how, if you only see the algorithm that shows you only what you want to see, of course, you're going to all get skewed in one direction and think that your whole world is the only world that there is.

Owen Valentine: Exactly. Exactly.

Tia Imani Hanna: So that's another reason I have this podcast.

Owen Valentine: What you're doing will keep a lot of musicians sane, so please don't stop. Keep doing it.

Tia Imani Hanna: I’m just grateful you all are coming on and telling your stories and inciting people to exercise and stuff, like myself.

Owen Valentine: Yeah. Yeah. Well, last week I did 120 pull-ups and 75… 75, 78 pushups and I got that done all within a half an hour and ran up out of here. And so, I'm like, I make sure that I keep moving. You gotta stay strong. You need endurance, not just for the stage, but for life. Keeping my diet clean. This year I planted a garden. And, which makes sense for the old Fiddler to be in the garden and doing his thing. I don't know if you knew this, but ‘Fiddler’ used to be the name that they gave to the plantation fiddler there that was working during the time of indentured servitude, otherwise known as slavery in America and everybody was called by their job. So, they weren't necessarily given a name. So, you were ‘Fiddler’ and the other person over there might be a person who was the person who knitted the cotton together and whatever your job was, you’re given that. The Fiddler title that I used to use was also a tribute to those first musicians. But that's like the first gig in this country, is playing for those kinds of things. I think like I've come full circle because I'm serving my community and working on my health and still able to tell the stories, the connections with the violin and its precursors. How in crossing the oceans and starting with those stringed instruments in Africa and how the instruments come here. By the way, I play Kora now. I had a fine Kora made, I can't think of the brother’s name, but it's a fine instrument. And I just kept developing that thing. But I look at it now. It's like, from wanting to be a musician only to going through the medical and the naturopath thing to getting serious, really seriously thrown in the music, and having to do the teaching and the crafting, working inside the community thing. To writing. I wrote the music for a show called “Transformation,” which premiered at Lincoln Center. And it was all about the transformation of the music, how it transformed from Africa to here.

Tia Imani Hanna: Oh, fantastic. When was that?

Owen Valentine: This was 2014.

Tia Imani Hanna: Okay.

Owen Valentine: Yeah, 2014, and we had a standing room only audience and standing ovations at the end of the show. It was wonderful.

Tia Imani Hanna: Now is any of this available for sale anywhere?

Owen Valentine: It's not. This was a project I shared with Jason Samuel Smith, who is a fabulous dancer and an amazing talent. “Bring in The Noise, Bring in The Funk” and numerous other things since. He's in that company with… may have seen him dance at the White House with Savion Glover and a lot of other things. But we did this project together and we took him to the ? Vineyard and stayed there for a week and I did a residency, and we did a bunch of wonderful things, but it's not available. He and I need to do the whole show and get a fine taping of the whole thing and put it out. I'll take your idea. That's your second one. You’re batting two and two.

Tia Imani Hanna: Told ya. They come, they come. That's part of my thing. I just pull them down and say them, no matter who it’s for.

Owen Valentine: I don't know why we didn't. Why did we do… we just did the live thing and left it there. But no, it needs to be a recorded show that you can watch.

Tia Imani Hanna: That’s right.

Owen Valentine: Cause it had music. It had… there was an intensity. There was a storytelling. Onaje Allen Gumbs was a part of the last production that we did. We had some wonderful players. Tyrone Brown was the first bassist on the show. Bill Meeks was on keys in the beginning. Harry Butch Reed later on. We had Shima Moja on bass. Wonderful, just wonderful folks, wonderful folks. And I look at it and I go, yeah, I've gone full circle with the historical thing. That was a part of my initial identification. Through the music, through the health, through the teaching, and back to history again. Yeah. So yeah, it's been a good thing.

Tia Imani Hanna: I just the pleasure and the honor of playing at the Detroit Jazz Festival, the virtual one, this year with my aunt Naima. Thank you. Naima Shamborguer, who is a vocalist in Detroit. It was called Sister Strings: Roots, Voice, and Drums. And we did the same thing. We took music from different periods and we put our spin on them and did original works. It was wonderful. Hopefully, soon, the videos will be out, cause they're working on that right now.

Owen Valentine: Awesome. Awesome. I look forward to hearing it and seeing it myself. This sounds awesome. The project I did with Denise Valentine, we did… the last thing…. this is after we did our initial thing at the Philadelphia Museum. She called. She put my name in and they called me up for this project for Fairmont Park, where they walk these trails. And there's some… she's like the voice of culture and speaking about what each trail meant. And they had me come through and I played like a good ten instruments on this thing. And so, if you go to Fairmont Park and go through the trails, you'll hear all of these sounds and violin and background vocals and harmonica and drums. I'm playing a Cajon and a bunch of other things on there. And I'm like, yeah, that's nice to leave a little piece of history from your talent, you know, so please continue to do just what you're doing. Keep recording and submitting more stuff so we get more, you know.

Tia Imani Hanna: Like I say on almost every show, I've talked to people, people say, what do we do surviving this whole time, period. I say, “Make Art.” That's what we do.

Owen Valentine: That's what we do. We make art. Yeah. We make art. Yep.

Tia Imani Hanna: So where can we find you? The best places to find you online.

Owen Valentine: Okay. Let's talk about a few things. Okay. I'll put out a love song back at the beginning of this year. I should have put out a horror soundtrack, then I would have been in touch with 2020. It was like, “I put out a love song. Ain’t nobody want to hear no love song right after that.” That was back in February. So, I got a song out called “Valentine” by Owen Valentine. If you go on all of the social media platforms, from Apple Music, to Spotify, or YouTube, wherever you go out. There’s a video out there. There's a bunch of things out there. Owen Valentine. And the song is called “Valentine.” And I put a little love song for Valentine's Day for the lovers and for people to enjoy.

[“Valentine” by Owen Valentine plays here]

Owen Valentine: I have a lot of music sitting in a can, just waiting for the right moment where I feel like it's time to give it a push, but I want to start the year off with a bang and start doing a bunch of songs. Just do a bunch of things. I'd like to see that and see guys stop by Instagram. I'm pretty active on there. And that is “The Owen Valentine,” T H E O W E N Valentine. Also, on Facebook. Also, on Twitter. There's an “Owen Valentine… “theowenvalentine.com” And, yeah, just stay tuned for lots of great music cause that's… I've got some wonderful stuff in the can. Like I listen to it and go ‘this is amazing’. I'm singing and playing percussions, on harmonica and keys and bass and all this stuff on these tracks and I'm listening to it. It's great. And the guy who's producer on a lot of these tracks used to be an engineer for Prince.

Tia Imani Hanna: Oh, fantastic.

Owen Valentine: Yep. So, it all came around again and he was like, “You are doing that thing?” He said, “And you've got…”, it's not like some guys when they play everything, they sound like the same person on everything. I have different personalities. I don't know how to explain that one, but it's like different parts. Wow. Completely different attitude as a bass player than I do as a violinist. Completely different on keys than on percussions, versus harmonica, they're like, they're all different. I'm thankful for the ability to be able to do that. But I think you'll enjoy the work. Look on… just for a little taste. The love song takes you back to the kind of stuff that came out in the seventies and eighties, but something good for your heart. And that's called “Valentine.” Look for that one first and then expect to see a lot of stuff coming out, from Jazz, to R & B, to Reggae to World Music. For a discography of… take a listen to Talib Kwali's “Four Women,” it's called. Yeah. And that was on Reflections Eternal. “For Love, part one,” which was on Rawkus Records. Santana’s song called “After Supernatural.” Common's “Sun God.” There's the Little Kim “La Bella Mafia” album. There’s quite a few things out there. Something with Mary .J Blige, a bunch of stuff out there. I'm just glad for the opportunity to have a chance to make music and keep going. And if I'm blessed to do that another 60, 70 years, I'll be happy.

Tia Imani Hanna: I'm happy you're doing it. And, if I go on your Facebook feed, that you're always working out. So, it's get up and move. You're telling everybody, “Get up and move!” I'm like, “Yes. Okay. Okay. I'm doing it.”

Owen Valentine: Yay! I'm going to give you a shout out, like I give everybody a shout in between working out. I'll give you a shout. Let me ask you a question. I got a violin joke for you, or it's a violin funny. I was at a John Blake concert and I want to say that this was around 2007…8, somewhere in and around there. And John is playing, and I'm sitting in the front row, and I don't think he knew I was there. And at some point, he looks down, the lights must have went through, and his eyes get real wide. He goes, “Wow!” Into the mic, and he said, “Owen Brown.” I was like, oh man, “Fiiddla.” Oh God, he's about to give it to me. Because Johnny had a big sense of humor. I'll tell you another one called Fiddler Williams had a big sense of humor. So, John looks down at me and he goes, “Owen Brown used to be one of my students years ago. Now he takes his shirt off and plays the violin.” He said, “I would take my shirt off, but y'all might run about here.” [laughter] I'm so grateful to all of the violinists, including yourself. Because we are part of the community. These new guys, I look at them as people who followed in 15, 20, 25, 30 years ago, I was running around on stage or rolling on the floor with the violin, flexing my muscles for the ladies and all that kind of stuff back in the eighties. And now they've got Damien Escobar and Lee England and all of the younger cats flexing and licking their lips while they played the violin. Nothing but strings and all that. But then we got the more tasteful people like Tia Hanna.

Tia Imani Hanna: I was never going to do the take off my shirt and play, but there you go.

Owen Valentine: Oh, no, you do that. You gonna create a new trend. Actually, I'll pay extra for that one. Remember Tia Hanna. She's the first woman to take her shirt off and play the violin. Yeah, I remember her. That was my idea. You said you got a lot of ideas. This is my idea. Thank you for the opportunity to do this.

Tia Imani Hanna: Thank you. So, it was really great talking with you and thanks for being on Tia Time today.

Owen Valentine: Awesome. Awesome.

Tia Imani Hanna: Thank you for joining us this week on Tia Time with Artists. Make sure to visit our website, tiaviolin.com, where you can subscribe to the show in iTunes and never miss an episode. Please leave us a rating wherever you listen to podcasts. We really appreciate your comments, and we'll mine them to bring you more amazing episodes.

I’d like to thank this inaugural season's sponsors: The folks at Jazz Alliance of Mid-Michigan or JAMM, Michigan ArtShare, a program of Michigan State University Extension is a partner in supporting the Tia Time podcast, and Shambones Music. Without their support this podcast would not be possible. Thank you so much. If you would also like to contribute to the show, you can find us on https://www.patreon.com/TiaTime1.

If you want to continue the conversation about topics discussed on the show or start new ones with like-minded people, join us at the Tia Time Lounge on Facebook.

Thank you for listening. See you next week at Tia Time!

+ Transcription

Tia Time with Artists, with guest Michael C. Hanna - recorded on 11/20/2020

Tia Imani Hanna: Welcome to Tia Time with Artists, the weekly podcast where we discuss the methods, challenges, and real-life experiences of living our creative dreams. What kind of creative warrior are you? Musician? Filmmaker? Painter? Choreographer? Poet? Sculptor? Fashionista? Let’s talk about it right now. I’m your host, Tia Imani Hanna.

Tia Imani Hanna: Welcome to Tia Time with Artists. And today, my guest is my cousin, Michael Hanna, who is an amazing singer and interpreter of jazz standards and other tunes. He is here today, coming all the way from Ottawa, Canada. Hi Michael. Welcome.

Michael C. Hanna: Thank you to you. Hi, how are you?

Tia Imani Hanna: Thanks for coming. So, I wanted to just talk to you about all the different influences that you've had and the different things that have made you the singer that you are today? For instance, we're going to get the elephant in the room, out of the room. You are the son of Sir Roland Hannah, my uncle, your father, and he was a world-famous jazz pianist. And why not piano? Why singing?

Michael C. Hanna: Intimidation. [laughter from both] In a word, intimidation. Yeah. Like you said, to move the elephant out the room. His life was devoted to 88 keys and what is that 187, 190 strings of chords that stretched throughout the piano, and the devotion took him to places that I just didn't feel I could go. So, I felt it necessary to forge my own direction. Tried about five or six different instruments, including the piano. And his mastery and tenacity with practice and perfection, like I said, were very intimidating. So, I wanted a relationship with my dad. [chuckles] And so, it was necessary for me to find something else, which he respected. He definitely respected my love for other things. And that was cool. That was the cool thing about it.

Tia Imani Hanna: He also played cello. Now you weren't interested in the strings at all.

Michael C. Hanna: I was. As a matter of fact, the cello is probably the instrument I stayed with the longest. And have stayed with. He bequeathed the cello to my daughter, Natalie, who also played the cello and I continue to retain that cello until such time as I get the opportunity to ship it to… or Natalie comes back to get it, but it's a very fine instrument, it is. I have pictures of Natalie and Roland practicing together, which is actually pretty cool. Yeah. Yeah, it's good. It's a very fine instrument. I love it. I probably played the cello with intention for maybe five or six years. So, every now and then I still pull it out, tune it up, practice it. Then put it away.

[laughter]

Tia Imani Hanna: Yes. I understand that. I do understand that. Yeah. I've got several instruments that I do that with as well. I have a bass that I do that with, and it's okay, I put my sunglasses on and pretend that I'm rocking out. And I put on some old funk record and rock my head and then I go, okay, that's enough of that.

[laughter]

Michael C. Hanna: The beauty of singing is it's an instrument that you carry with you, even in the shower. I was able to just do that and with much wanton abandon and it became something that I just became a part of me.

Tia Imani Hanna: Well, you definitely got the ears from listening to all that stuff that was in the house growing up and the musicians that came through there. Now, did you have a lot of folks coming through the house to practice and rehearse?

Michael C. Hanna: Not through our house, but I spent a fair amount of time with him. When he was on the road, he made it a point of taking both my brother and I with us, on various different occasions. The small, interesting little story is that probably around age 15, maybe, we came, he and I came to Ottawa and I believe he performed at Carlton University. I have pictures standing in front of Parliament. Very young. I had absolutely no imagination that I would spend my years here in this wonderful city, but yeah, we had an opportunity to do that. So, to answer, specifically the question. Teaneck was an amazing town. As a matter of fact, there are a couple of people who are starting to do documentaries on the number of musicians that lived in Teaneck.

Tia Imani Hanna: Teaneck, New Jersey.

Michael C. Hanna: And the reason it was so wonderful, it was 10 minutes away from New York City. So, musicians could work and then live outside of the city. And it was a Jewish enclave. and consequently, our Jewish brethren were a little bit more welcoming to black people and then the surrounding communities. So, Teaneck became a place where musicians of color wound up, if they were doing well in their craft, they could wind up raising families there. I lived near Ray Barretto and the Isley Brothers. The Adderley’s were there. Thad Jones lived there. It's just crazy. Eddie Locke the drummer. It was an amazing town.

Tia Imani Hanna: It sounds like an amazing time, too, just to be with all those guys in the same place.

Michael C. Hanna: Yeah. It was to be able to just, roll up on 'em on a regular basis. I, Nat Adderley, Jr., and I went to school together. I'm familiar with them and, yeah, I used to call… was able to call Sarah Vaughan my aunt. It was an amazing time and something I don't completely appreciate because I was a kid then, but yeah.

Tia Imani Hanna: You didn't know to spend more time with them if you could.

Michael C. Hanna: Yeah, exactly.

Tia Imani Hanna: Singing was something you could carry with you and you could do that easily. Did you study it, specifically? Did you have a teacher, or did you just sing on your own?

Michael C. Hanna: No, I, for the most part, singing on my own. I think one of the… one of the beauties also was that my father had a particular passion for types of music. There's some things he did not like and…

Tia Imani Hanna: The Beatles.

Michael C. Hanna: For one. He didn't really much care for any pop, if you will, in the early days, he would… it would create a… and you can probably reflect on the image of your father and his disgust when he came up on something. That same Hanna image translated across all of the Hanna men's faces when they were disgusted with something.

Tia Imani Hanna: Yep.

Michael C. Hanna: You know, but then I could take my singing or my little radio or whatever, and I could go someplace else. And it wouldn't bother him. I wouldn't have to worry about disturbing him. So, I got exposed to a whole lot of different things, including the pallet of music that he exposed me to.

Tia Imani Hanna: Yeah. I once had a conversation with him about… he was still disgusted with… this is probably in the early two-thousands, late nineties, early 2000s, and he was talking about how he just hated The Beatles because they took all his jobs away.

Michael C. Hanna: Yeah. Yeah. It became the popular thing, but eventually, he got his groove. He found a groove himself, specifically in the eighties. I think his hey days were in the eighties and I remember a time, briefly, when I went to college and I discovered a group called ‘Take 6’ and fell in love with them. They were everything I wanted singing to be. A male group, acapella, harmonies, dissonance, the whole thing, and singing for the Lord. And I discovered them and had a conversation with him one day about them. And he had heard them too, and also gave them mad respect. I found this convergence starting to happen with him and I, musically at least. He's long down the road, but I'm at least touching his ‘aura’ every now and then with some affirmation, so it was good. It was good.

Tia Imani Hanna: Well, you became an engineer. So, instead of doing music, was he like nonplussed by that or what was… what did he think about that whole thing?

Michael C. Hanna: He was pleasantly engaged in it. It was exciting to him that I chose to take that one. I had a love for cars early in life. We could do stuff as a family and I'd be doing little dumb things like calling cars and I'd do that for years. He knew I loved cars and respected the fact that as time went on and I became good at certain things, especially related to engineering, then he accepted the fact that was something I was going to go ahead and do. I pursued something that I enjoyed, and I think that's what he respected and enjoyed seeing come out of me. So, he didn't have a problem with me not pursuing music. And later on, when we did the album together, he gave, he gave me props for being a ‘fine singer’. I felt affirmed.

Tia Imani Hanna: So, what came about that you did do the album together. For so many years, he was doing his own thing and you were doing engineering and you were doing music on the side pretty much as a, like a side gig.

Michael C. Hanna: My mother, Ramona. My mother was always involved on the sidelines with me singing and was always involved with me pursuing other things too. Cause I think she had a perspective on being a musician's wife that she may not have wanted to, she may not have wanted me to carry on. So, I would say she encouraged me to do some of the other things, but then at some point in time, we realized, hey, we need to do something together. Cause she writes, he plays, and I sing. Then they also came up with the idea of creating a label, Roland and Ramona created a label called RMI. And a publishing company called Rihanna Music and published all of his music. And then also started recording young up-and-coming musicians. And I was an album in that series. He did about four or five albums with several of the sons of the Aomori family. Wonderful bassist saxophonist, cellist. And the father, Aomori, was a bassist as well, and then my album. And so, we did about five albums on the RMI label and that's how we got to record together.

[Playing music from the CD, Michael Hanna Friends and Family, “Colors from a Giant's Kit” by Sir Roland Hanna]

Tia Imani Hanna: Now are those recordings still available?

Michael C. Hanna: They are. My album is available. I'm not sure. I don't think it's on iTunes, but I have been giving some thought to re-releasing it in the digital format so that it's available. And then the other four albums. This was back in the time when the CD was actually king. We hadn't moved into a place where digital media was the order of the day. So, much of that can be re-released, but it's not in digital format right now.

Tia Imani Hanna: I also know there's a lot of music that Roland didn't actually get a chance to produce because it was… he did a lot of writing for string ensembles and orchestral-based type music that he did. Now is that on file someplace?

Michael C. Hanna: I am the curator, is the best word to say that. I'm the curator for his book of music and so, the publishing company is now under the management of Deacon Blue LLC, which is the company that I started, and in the process of re- publishing. I also manage the website for Rihanna Music. So, he has music that's out there, that is in a chart form. Some of which is in transcribed sheets. There's one book that's available called “The Collections of Roland Hanna.” And I was encouraged by a young man who called me, or emailed me, not too long ago, who would like to get a pack. He wanted to order all 24 of his preludes. Those were recorded. One was on CTI back in ‘77, I think. And then another one was done somewhere around ‘89, between he and George Mraz. Those are the only two recordings. They were never transcribed and published in sheet form. So, I'm taking on the project of releasing a book of his 24 preludes.

Tia Imani Hanna: Fantastic. I want to see that. And I know I had the job of transcribing a lot of the handwritten stuff back before Ramona passed. So, I know some of those are done, so that's good. That’s there. But I'm glad to hear that's out there, so the legacy continues. Are you doing a current new CD right now? because you have the album with Roland.

Michael C. Hanna: I have, since I've been here at Ottawa, gotten connected to a couple of very fine musicians. One of them just called me right before I talked to you. His name is Pete Forêt and he's a guitarist and very fine musician. About my age, kind of old school rocker kind of guy, and we sat down, and he had an album that he had done, but he's not really a singer. So, he talked to me and had me to sing one or two of the songs and I was like, okay, this is cool. And then he liked the two songs so much he said, “Yeah, here's two, three more.” Eventually. that all grew to about 11 songs and we finally released the album, the CD and digital, this past August. It's called “Marvelville” and it's a collection of what we like to classify as ‘adult music’.

[laughter]

Tia Imani Hanna: Okay. What does that mean?

Michael C. Hanna: It's music that reflects a variety of different themes that you might have gotten 20, 30, 40 years ago. Some Fusion, some Funk, a little bit of Calypso, just a variety of different kinds of things that he wrote and some of the very nice pieces that are really cool. Yeah, hearkens back, so when I say, ‘adult music’, it's for people who are probably in their fifties to 65 and it brings back some memories of Chicago and Steely Dan and those kinds of things.

Tia Imani Hanna: Okay. that's all right. The youngsters can appreciate it too.

Michael C. Hanna: They will appreciate it because there are a lot of young folks who will spend time digging through the oldest stuff because they weren't exposed to it. And it was new, and it was a progenitor for a lot of the sounds that they are producing today. Yeah. Neo-soul and some of the Hip Hop pieces and the constructs they harken back to Tito Puente and sometimes, James Brown, or like I said, Steely Dan, Chicago. You hear that in some of their music now.

[Playing “Gravity” from the Pete Forêt Project CD]

Tia Imani Hanna: How has your interpretation of music changed over the years? What did you start singing and then, what have you moved into?

Michael C. Hanna: That's a good question. I think my palette of music has always been pretty open, and I say that to say I'm pretty much on a continuum. I'm not… I haven't moved from one thing to another. I’m from what they call the’ freeform generation’. I've said this before in a conversation I had with somebody is that, when I was in college, at the time ‘freeform’ radio was the order of the day. So, you could find a station on a college campus and they would play everything from Rachmaninoff to Frank Zappa and everything in between. And so, consequently, I kinda locked in that. I could appreciate… I found joy in listening to all of that kind of music. I was just listening before I got on the phone with you. I was listening to a piece that somebody sent me which was a Scottish song, called “The Fields of Athenry,” sung by two young guys. It's a very melancholy piece but is beautiful. It's just wonderful singing. A duet, two guys, one guitar in a school hall. So, the sound is very ethereal. Yeah. So, my palette of music has grown. Now what I sing is based on what I CAN sing. There was a time when I could sing a whole lot more than I can sing now. What I can do and what I listen to are two different things.

Tia Imani Hanna: But it all influences what you do now. Do you have a daily regimen that you work your voice with or keep it up to snuff?

Michael C. Hanna: No, I don't have a daily regimen, but I have found that over time I am aware of the fact that I sing, hum, whistle, improvise just about 20 hours of the day, even to the degree that sometimes I think I'm humming in my sleep.

Tia Imani Hanna: I've been known to do that myself.

Michael C. Hanna: Even to the degree also that sometimes I will wake up in the morning and a random tune will fall into my head. It has no… it may or may not be something that was written, but it's just a random arrangement of notes and I'll spend time in it throughout the day, to the point where I'm frustrated. Like, why am I singing this? What is this about? So, I don't have a stark, strong regiment for practicing, like a violinist or a cellist, but I find myself in it pretty much constantly. The times that I do sing on a structured basis is mostly relegated to church. I'm still doing concerts, some of which are virtual, some of which are single voice in a room kind of thing. So, I still get the opportunity to do that, but, yeah, I'm not one who have been predisposed to a regiment.

Tia Imani Hanna: When you're singing through the day, when those things, those ear worms drop in there, are you composing?

Michael C. Hanna: Probably.

Tia Imani Hanna: Have you written any of those down or voice-memoed them or anything?

Michael C. Hanna: I have voice-memoed a very few, but I generally do not. They are gifts that only I enjoy.

[laughter]

Tia Imani Hanna: It's interesting because I remember going to an International Association of Jazz Educators, or the IAJE conference, and Horace Silver was there. And one of the things he said that every day he had a cassette player, and he would get up every morning and he’d play something into cassette player and then he’d just throw it in a box. And then, then maybe once a week, he pulled one of those out and develop it into a song.

Michael C. Hanna: Yeah.

Tia Imani Hanna: I said, okay, that makes sense. Because he's ‘I don't know what to do with this, but it keeps coming’. And so, he would just do that. And then that's how his… it was like a regimen for him to just get those ear worms out.

Michael C. Hanna: Yeah. Yeah. I started doing that with the phone. I do a voice memo. Hit it one day when it just stuck with me and I've got a couple of them. I've got probably in total, maybe 20, 25 on my phone, but I guess I… because I haven't considered it a serious development, I probably haven't treated it with that kind of respect that I'm going in to develop it. I am technically not a trained musician. Some of my frustration is that I'll get that and, okay, what do I do with it? Oh, it's okay. It's just this series of notes. And how do you craft this into something? Yeah.

Tia Imani Hanna: I'm going to, I'm going to task you to think about that a little harder. Cause I think you’ve got a whole bunch of gifts you're getting and just trust yourself. You can do it.

Michael C. Hanna: Give it a shot. Give it a shot.

Tia Imani Hanna: Yeah. You don't know until you try. Cause that's… I know that's how it comes to me. It comes, it'll be like [singing random tune] and then Oh, I like that. And then I'll just keep singing it all day long and then, eventually, I'll put it down cause I can't develop it anymore that day. So, put it on a memo and then sometimes I've got stuff from three years ago and I'm like, Oh, and then I craft it in one day. Yeah, because it's been there for three years and in the back of my head. Okay. So, you just never know. It's worth trying because the lyric writing is the hardest part for me. Cause I'm not a lyricist, but I can do the melodic stuff.

Michael C. Hanna: Yeah. I find myself the same way. I went to Japan twice, one with Roland and one in memory of Roland. And the second time I went, I performed with the bassist that he toured with, guy by the name of Eiji Nakayama. And on my way there, big plane 10, 12 hours. There was this song called, “A Morning Sunrise” that he and Eiji played and it's stuck with me. So, I crafted, for the first… my very first time, I crafted words to this song and sang it in Japan. Only time I've ever sung the song that I wrote the lyrics down and did the, what they call, the old school, copyright. Put it on an envelope, addressed it to myself, and mailed it to myself. So, now I at least have this envelope of one song that I've written.

[laughter]

Tia Imani Hanna: Okay. That's how you do it. You did it once you can do it again. It’s like rinse and repeat

Michael C. Hanna: That's right, rinse and repeat.

Tia Imani Hanna: That's how it happens. Yeah, cause sometimes you get some real gems and it's just like a muscle, if you exercise, it'll get bigger and stronger.

Michael C. Hanna: Yeah, you're probably right.

Tia Imani Hanna: I entreat you to. Cause I want to hear the music that comes out.

Michael C. Hanna: You and I will probably be spending a little bit more time together because there are things that I'm still trying to transcribe since our cousin is no longer capable. I'm going to refashion the website and convert some of this music to a digital format so that people can download it rather than having me mail it to them, but some of those songs will turn into written pieces that, eventually, somebody like including myself and my son is going to sing.

Tia Imani Hanna: Good. Good. Good to hear that. I was like… I've been running through my mind for years is we've got to get the “Hanna-cubed” session going on. You, me, and Myk’l.

Michael C. Hanna: We've got a couple of dimensions on this thing.

Tia Imani Hanna: Yes, we do. Hanna Cubed plus Wells and Shamborguer. [laughter] I just think that would be pretty awesome, but I'm trying to get everybody in the same place at the same time, especially now with COVID is much more difficult, but we can do it through the magic of digital studios if we plan it out properly. So that's,… I'm just throwing that into everybody's mind so that when we get to that point, we can do it.

Michael C. Hanna: You know what? We all have to. I'm on my way down that road. I did a concert with TD Bank here in Ottawa. We did the TD Jazz Festival and, at the time, Myk’l, my son, was here in Ottawa. So, I went and bought a digital interface and spent some time on Garage Band. And he's already pretty versed in Garage Band. And we crafted a song that we sang at the TD Jazz Festival.

Tia Imani Hanna: I got to see that actually. Yeah.

Michael C. Hanna: Yeah, it was actually pretty cool. So, I'm like, okay, we can do this, man. We can do this.

Tia Imani Hanna: And we should do this. Okay, good. So that's good that I've got two of you on board, now to get the other two and Kyle (Hall) too.

Michael C. Hanna: Kyle. What we probably wind up doing is, we collect the music collaborations from all of the musicians and then give him an opportunity to do some mixing.

Tia Imani Hanna: And for those of you who don't know, Kyle Hall is my nephew and world-renowned DJ who does amazing work. Wild Oats is the name of his label. So, hopefully, we'll get him on the show too. And sometime soon. So, this is a tremendous idea. I think if we're doing more traditional stuff and then we throw in some Hip Hop and some… I don't even know what the names of the different genres of DJ stuff is because there's a whole background in that, but I just don't know the history of, and I'm going to ask Kyle about that when I have him on the show, because he can talk at length about all the different genres that have passed through it and the different styles. And there's so many that it's so deep. I just don't… I know what I grew up with. It's like ‘House’, but there's so much beyond House, Techno, and all of that kind of thing.

Michael C. Hanna: And Detroit is the progenitor for techno. It's in and of itself.

Tia Imani Hanna: We're on the same page there.

Michael C. Hanna: Man. I’m still walking down the road. I'm not going anywhere. The Lord has given me enough energy and strength to keep on going so far.

Tia Imani Hanna: Keep on going. Keep doing it. Make art. Make art.

Michael C. Hanna: Yes.

Tia Imani Hanna: That's the bugle cry.

Michael C. Hanna: Make art.

Tia Imani Hanna: I know. That might be the t-shirt.

Michael C. Hanna: Yeah. No, that sounds like a t-shirt. In so many different ways, art is being challenged as a valuable resource or commodity or element of society. We keep pushing it away because we cannot, we don't try to monetize its value in our society. When, in fact, our society would be like rocks without art. We'd just be a collection of people walking around for the purposes of moving rocks. No. Art gives it meaning. We find artistic… as humans, we find artistic elements even in the quote, unquote, non-artistic elements of our existence.

Tia Imani Hanna: Of course, the artist is… it's not the tool, it's not the tool. It's the artist. We're using different tools and, the older I get, the more that I go into different tools, because at some point, I might not be able to play the violin anymore, just because of arthritis and whatever else. At some point, my voice won't be able to do the singing that I want to do, but I can still do other things. And I'm just expanding the tools that I use. In 2017, I got a chance to go to the California Brazil Camp. And it’s all Brazilian music, and I met several Brazilian artists that came in to teach and to participate in creating music. And a lot of the folks from Brazil played ten different instruments. It's just not even the concept of ‘I'm just going to play this one thing’ like we have here. There they play. They just pick up everything and just play it and they just work at it and play it all. And this one guy, he's an amazing guitarist. He's a songwriter. He's a drummer. He was a… he could play the piano. He could play the mandolin. He could play the drum, the little percussion instruments. I can't think of all the different names of all the different percussions that they have in Brazil, but there's tons of them. And he was playing all of those like it was nothing.

Michael C. Hanna: Wow!

Tia Imani Hanna: And we have the same thing here in country music. A lot of the time, a lot of folks play a lot of different instruments. And I don't know why, because of the Western classical tradition, ‘you play one instrument, you play that well’, as opposed to just playing everything and then just being the artistic influence that goes through those tools. So now it's, okay, I'm older now. It's going to be harder for me to do that, but I am doing it because it opens up the way you look at the world.

Michael C. Hanna: I agree. I agree. No, that sounded like an amazing time getting to be with people with that kind of talent. This is amazing.

Tia Imani Hanna: They look at you and they say… I took my mandolin that year and handed it to, um, his name is Alessandro Penezzi, if you have a chance, Alessandro Penezzi . If you have a chance to look him up. He is an amazing guitarist, like fantastic, really sweet guy. And I gave him my mandolin and he just started playing the hell out of it. And I was like, wow. And he said, “Yeah, I don't play mandolin. The only time I get to play it is maybe if I come to this camp.” So, he hadn't touched one in a year and he was just like, boom! I was like, wow! And it's completely different than playing a guitar, is the same setup as a violin.

Michael C. Hanna: That’s crazy.

Tia Imani Hanna: So that amazed me.

Michael C. Hanna: Started rollin’ on it. Yeah. We'll find that if we leave the confines of our own environment, environs, people do some pretty amazing things outside of what we think they should be able to do. They just do. It's like the bumble bee. The bumble bee doesn't even know he can fly.

Tia Imani Hanna: This is just how we've… This is how we do it.

Michael C. Hanna: That’s right. That’s right.

Tia Imani Hanna: With your children, when they were growing up, how did you present the arts to them?

Michael C. Hanna: Unconsciously. Art. I don't, I'm sorry. I can't say that. I presented art to them unconsciously. My wife, who is an incredibly thoughtful individual, was very conscious about presentation in that she had a love for things like museums and art shows and things like that and thought it not robbery to make sure the kids got to go to those places. So yeah, they… we spent time and outings were museums and art shows and so, the kids got exposure like that. And we traveled as a family. We were pretty much a very close-knit family and we'd go places and art was a part of what we went to see, or do, or be a part of. Yeah, it was a part of life. And that's why I say it was unintentional for me, but my wife made sure that we would include it in a part of raising our family. And they all appreciate a variety of art and are very, very critical. They are critical. They recognize people who are playing at something and playing with something, right. And will let you know when they think that somebody is playing at it. Yeah. But they have a strong appreciation for a variety of different arts, but most of my kids, if not, all of them are pretty left brain. Even though my oldest daughter is a finance major, but she loves marketing and she's a fashionista. So, she loves that part of marketing and finance, making things look a certain way. Yeah. My son, he's a musician. My youngest son is also in finance but has a real passion for kids and sports. So, it's deep in him. He fights it, but, yeah, it comes out every now and then. So yeah. And then my youngest daughter, she's a radio person. She could be doing exactly what she… if she could find a resource associated with it, she would be doing this exact same thing. Adesse loves being in front of the… and talking about things and she isn't… she likes to get emotionally engaged in conversation.

Tia Imani Hanna: We'll have to have a conversation then, hopefully she’ll put up a podcast too.

Michael C. Hanna: Yeah. Yeah. And she started down the road to one, but life happens.

Tia Imani Hanna: Sure. So, now that you've got… speaking of life happening, you've got grandchildren. So, what do you want to impart to them about the arts?

Michael C. Hanna: To make it a part of their lives. I think because of who we are, meaning, the family, the arts will be a part of who we are. Natalie will make sure that Simone and Miles… matter of fact, Miles Pembroke was named after his grandfather, great grandfather, excuse me. and so that piece of it, he will always have to inquire about, and she'll have information for him. It's a little tougher when the kids are away, apart from you, and you've got to rely on the parents to do that. But, whenever they are exposed to us, that conversation will be had, things that we do. We'll engage them. Deuce and Jackson… or William the second and Jackson are in Florida. Both of whom are... they have… you can see it and hear it in their behavior, but I really don't know how they're getting exposed to the arts.

Tia Imani Hanna: That's where your… I guess your company is… your LLC. Deacon Blue. That's where that comes into the mix because you can create things that can be passed down, a trust, Hanna Trust, so to speak, of your father's music, your mother's music, your music, and all those compositions. If they start to be produced and you have that whole book to pass down to them.

Michael C. Hanna: Yep. that is part of my work. My work is to try and preserve the legacy in the best way I can. We've gone in the direction of trying to find an archive and we got close with the Lionel Hampton School of Music in Spokane, Washington or it’s in Moscow, Washington, University of Washington, but that fell apart some years ago. And so, we're, we're pursuing it again, but…

Tia Imani Hanna: I guess it would be interesting to see if any young ensembles that are already out there might want to just do a few pieces here and there and you guys start doing compilations.

Michael C. Hanna: Yeah. Yeah. You're absolutely right. As a matter of fact, a young pianist here, name is Clayton Connell, sat down with me when we were doing….this is pre-COVID, and suggested that very thing. He said, “It'd be kind of cool to host an NAC, National Arts Center, a program of Roland's music and identify several musicians to perform his work and make it a performance. There's also an art organization called the New York Philamusica, which you're probably familiar with, Ramona may have mentioned a couple of times in the past. And there's a guy by the name of Johnson and Johnson was a progenitor for the Philamusica, which was a chamber group. And that chamber group performed, commissioned them to perform, some Roland's work. So, it's right for that kind of stuff.

Tia Imani Hanna: I bet there was even just quartets that would just do, even just, say here's 10 pieces for this quartet. Would you do them? Even if it's just, like, their production of it, they go and work it and then you produce it, which is probably not as expensive as you think. Just to start getting all that stuff recorded. Cause there's a lot of stuff that just wasn't ever recorded.

Michael C. Hanna: Yeah. Yeah.

Tia Imani Hanna: And then we, we get the entire family to invest in it. So, maybe. And we can do a Go-Fund Me and all that kind of stuff, have it be an ongoing project because there's… he's written so much music.

Michael C. Hanna: Yeah. And I'm discovering more and more every day, some of which has not been… I have to work on the whole copyright too, cause I opened boxes that are like, okay, this isn't in the catalog. [laughter] Yeah, no, you're right. It's a, there's a lot there. There probably will be some discoveries long after I'm gone.

Tia Imani Hanna: Yeah, it's actually pretty exciting though. Cause this is like a treasure trove. Instead of, like, writing your own music, you can just write that stuff. I don't know. As things bother you like that, those ear worms come in, and you don't know what to do with them. And you say, ah, “Let's put this aside. Here's a piece Roland did.”

Michael C. Hanna: That's right. That's right.

Tia Imani Hanna: Is there anything in music that you haven't done that you really want to do before it's all over?

Michael C. Hanna: Oh, you know, I have a lament. I do have a slight lament and whether or not I'll be content with it before my day is done is questionable. I don't know, but I do want to play an instrument. I wrestle with that process because I'm older now and stuff doesn't come as easy as it used to, but no, I do. I would love to be able to perform something with an instrument, be it guitar, cello, piano, harmonica. At one point in time, I told myself, and it wasn't really a bucket list item, but I had told myself, okay, I'm going to give myself a year. Pick up something I've played before and start working on it and plan to perform that piece, that work, at a particular time. So, giving myself a goal so that I can play it in and/or sing it, sing along with it, so that's something that I, yeah, it constantly comes back to me. When I believe I'm content then that, “Hey, what have you thought about the fact that you haven't played an instrument?” That's where I go and so, like I said, I guess I will do that before my day is done. That's my desire.

Tia Imani Hanna: All right. Let's hope that they happen sooner than later.

Michael C. Hanna: Yeah, sure. And I just don't want to… I don't want to pass up those things as the abilities start to change. Spend the time doing the things I start. Probably in my fifties, I picked up the guitar. I'm like, wait, guitar can’t be that hard and started playing guitar, playing around with it, and realized I didn't have one, but at the time I had access to one, and then I started making excuses.

Tia Imani Hanna: Ah.

Michael C. Hanna: Ah, yeah, year. It hurts your fingers. It doesn't have… it's got steel cords instead of… steel strings instead of nylon strings, so they're harder to play and you make stupid excuses. And you go off and put it down and do what you've normally done, through making excuses.

Tia Imani Hanna: Good. Good. I'm looking forward to seeing that recital. It might be a digital version, but that's all right.

Michael C. Hanna: That's all right. That's all right. I'm cool with that. I ran across a lady who's 85 and made her first album, something she's wanting to do all her life.

Tia Imani Hanna: Oh, fantastic.

Michael C. Hanna: Beautiful singer. She was a wonderful singer, 85 years old. She made the CD and then went on home to be with the Lord.

Tia Imani Hanna: That's fantastic.

Michael C. Hanna: Hey. That's my hope I'm going to try and do that.

Tia Imani Hanna: I want to see it before you get that far.

Michael C. Hanna: Yeah. I’m hoping so too.

Tia Imani Hanna: That would be better. Yeah. Because you'll be able to enjoy it, at least.

Michael C. Hanna: I just want to be able to sit back. Yeah, yeah. I had that conversation. It was like that album. The album literally was in the process for ten years. We started in 1989 and finished it in 1998.

Tia Imani Hanna: Wow!

Michael C. Hanna: And for a variety of different reasons, which we can talk about in a whole other podcast.

Tia Imani Hanna: Actually, I want to. I was going to ask you about that. The purpose of this podcast is to expose artists that people may not have heard of, to the bigger world. To also just to expose the way that artists think and how we approach problems and how we move forward and create art. So, what would be those things that stop you? What would be those things that like, cause I know you had as a person, you've had these things that may have stopped you for a moment, but then you kept going and you work through them. And what are some of those things that you've done to stop the roadblocks.

Michael C. Hanna: Oh, there's a saying in my profession, in engineering, “Every now and then it's time to shoot the engineer and start production.”

[laughter]

Tia Imani Hanna: Yes.

Michael C. Hanna: The engineer is not unlike the musician because the musician or the technocrat, if you will, spends time refining and trying to find the absolute best. And as they do that process iteratively, it consumes time, and deprives others from being exposed to your creative energy. After a certain particular time, there's a period when you're only satisfying yourself. You're not satisfying the mission and you have to satisfy the mission. And the mission is to get stuff out there, some stuff out there, so that people can hear and appreciate what it is you're thinking. Hence, “Shoot the engineer. Start production.” You start… my father started the idea. Yeah, we need to do a CD. He gave it to my mother, who is the engineer also in crafting and she started crafting the idea, but it was in the iterations of putting the songs together and aligning the songs and putting the album together and piecing it. All of that got lost. In addition to the fact that I went away and started raising a family and we just… life happened. And somewhere around the… I think it was around the time that we moved to Delaware, which was in 1997, we moved closer from Detroit to my parents. And my father said, “Bomb the dykes, full speed ahead. It's time to get this done. We've been farting around with this thing for so long. You're close, I'm close. We're going to get this done.” He took the reins and we made it happen. And at that point in time, he pushed my mother with some decisions. He made some executive decisions about what we are going to do and what we're not going to spend time worrying about. And then, yeah, and in '98, a year later, project was born. So, life did get in the way, time, distance, money, emotions, family, all that kind of stuff got in the way, but the project, it was a desire. I would also say that Roland, around ‘97, ’98, probably had a call on his life because he had cancer. He contracted cancer and went in the hospital the year that the album was released, ‘98. Licked it. Beat it. And spent time doing that. As soon as he finished up with his treatments and so forth, he got back busy, just doing Roland, but the project was done. So, I guess what I'm saying is that, because he had a call on his life, there were things he wanted to finish. One of them was a musical project with his son. Yeah, you don't want to get to that place we're talking about with the muse, with instrument, where life all of a sudden say, “Okay, you ain't got but so long here where… Five-minute call.” You don't want to get to that point, but sometimes that's what happens, you get it, you get a five-minute call and I'm like, “Okay, I'll be ready in a minute.”

Tia Imani Hanna: I think the world got that call. COVID happened. I think that is definitely been that. I know in a lot of ways it has been that for me. And also, prior to that, in 2017, like, I think, I lost my dad. I lost my grandma. I lost a bunch of people in the family died in 2017, 2018, 2019. And so, that was a call for me too. You only have so much time left. You need to do all these things that have been on your list for a really long time. So, I think part of it too, is just, you just have to make that decision that this stuff is priority because I'm here to do art, so do it. Even if it's not perfect, too bad, it's out there.

Michael C. Hanna: Exactly. Yeah. And that's the thing. We will constantly tweak at it, but we eventually are only doing that for our own satisfaction and not for the satisfaction of others. So, we have to get to a point where we decide, okay, this is good. This is good. The next one might be even a little bit better, but this one's good enough. You get some ideas from what I'm thinking with this. Make it happen. So, you're right. You're right. You just have to do that and try not to subject yourself to abject poverty in the process.

[laughter]

Tia Imani Hanna: Oh, yeah. yeah, that's the given one. I still gotta eat. There's nothing wrong with having a day job. And after that, you know that one's paying the bills and then work on your other one so that it will pay bills.

Michael C. Hanna: Yeah. Yeah.

Tia Imani Hanna: There's nothing wrong with that. Cause I think a lot of musicians have had to do that. A lot of painters and sculptors and writers have had to do that. It also gives you a baseline of how to structure your time.

Michael C. Hanna: Yes.

Tia Imani Hanna: Which I think is really important. If you don't have that, a schedule of some sort, then you have no push to continue and finish a project.

Michael C. Hanna: Yes, for sure.

Tia Imani Hanna: Too much freedom, too many choices, makes it difficult to produce anything.

Michael C. Hanna: Yeah. You have to set some goals. Yeah.

Tia Imani Hanna: Thank you so much for being on Tia Time today. Is there any place that we can find you online?

Michael C. Hanna: I do have a Facebook presence. My Facebook presence for music is Michael Curtis Hanna. I have an Instagram page, “Deacon Blue.” Currently, I steer clear from Twitter. But I, and then every now and then you'll see things that show up on YouTube. My wife pastors a church here in Ottawa. And, oftentimes, at Fourth Avenue Baptist Church, I'm singing. So, I'll sing four services. I do conduct business with Deacon Blue, LLC and doing business as Rihanna Music, Inc., which is the publishing company for Sir Roland's music. Those are my current exposures. There are… there will be other things. Please look up the “Marvelville” album, it's being promoted by, again, a guy by the name of Pete Forêt Project. Forêt spelled as F O R E T a and he goes by The Pete Forêt Project. And yeah, we're… that album is out there. It is out now. It's currently available and you can order. You can order the CD. It's what they call ‘adult listening’. Old school listeners, people who still buy CDs.

Tia Imani Hanna: Thank you so much, Michael, for being on the show today. And thank you for your heart, your energy, and your time, and your willingness to talk about ‘all things Hanna’, thank you for being on Tia Time.

Michael C. Hanna: You're welcome. And good to talk to you. I can… I am listening to you and can't believe how much you sound like your cousin, Cheryl. [laughter] It's just amazing. I'm like, golly, this stuff gets flown between genes. It's amazing. It's been great. It's been great to have the opportunity. I'm glad we had the time.

Tia Imani Hanna: All right. Thank you.

Michael C. Hanna: All right.

Tia Imani Hanna: Thank you for joining us this week on Tia Time with Artists. Make sure to visit our website, tiaviolin.com, where you can subscribe to the show in iTunes and never miss an episode. Please leave us a rating wherever you listen to podcasts. We really appreciate your comments, and we'll mine them to bring you more amazing episodes.

I’d like to thank this inaugural season's sponsors: The folks at Jazz Alliance of Mid-Michigan or JAMM, Michigan ArtShare, a program of Michigan State University Extension is a partner in supporting the Tia Time podcast, and Shambones Music. Without their support this podcast would not be possible. Thank you so much. If you would also like to contribute to the show, you can find us on https://www.patreon.com/TiaTime1.

If you want to continue the conversation about topics discussed on the show or start new ones with like-minded people, join us at the Tia Time Lounge on Facebook.

Thank you for listening. See you next week at Tia Time!

+ Transcription

Tia Time with Artists, with guest Gayelynn McKinney - recorded 10/23/2020

Tia Imani Hanna: Welcome to Tia Time with Artists, the weekly podcast where we discuss the methods, challenges, and real-life experiences of living our creative dreams. What kind of creative warrior are you? Musician? Filmmaker? Painter? Choreographer? Poet? Sculptor? Fashionista? Let’s talk about it right now. I’m your host, Tia Imani Hanna.

Tia Imani Hanna: Welcome to Tia Time with Artists. Today's guest is Gayelynn McKinney. She is the phenomenal drummer. arranger, composer, Kresge Artist Fellow, the daughter of Harold and Gwendolyn McKinney, icons of the Detroit jazz scene. And now she is a Detroit icon herself. So, welcome Gayelynn.

Gayelynn McKinney: Thank you. Thank you for having me Tia.

Tia Imani Hanna: So, I'm so excited to see you here. We got a chance to play at the Detroit Jazz Festival this year as part of the Sister Strings project. So, that was really fun because we’ve worked together many times, but that was like one of my ultimate moments and we got a chance to do one of your tunes. So that was really great.

Gayelynn McKinney: Yeah. Yup, yup. You made it sound good too. It was fun. I really enjoyed that concert. I hope we I hope we get to do that again soon.

Tia Imani Hanna: Oh yeah. Let's… hopefully, we'll get to do it live next time.

Gayelynn McKinney: That would be better.

Tia Imani Hanna: [laughter] That would be the goal! But so, I just want to ask you some general questions, like. You know, growing up in a musical family that you did, what was it about the drums? Cause your dad played piano and your mother was a singer. Correct?

Gayelynn McKinney: Yes.

Tia Imani Hanna: What was it that led you to the drums?

Gayelynn McKinney: I honestly, I don't know. I think I was just born to do it. And, you know, my mother said I was always very busy with my hands even before I was born. So, she said I was always moving around in there . Then at about two, I started to just beat on things, you know, notably my mother's dining room table with my knife and fork. Of course, that didn't go over well. So, I think that inspired them to get me a drum set when I was about two years old. And I still remember that set. It was an orange sparkle, yeah, orange sparkle kit. And it was real tiny, like for a two-year-old and it had real drumheads on it. Wasn’t no cheap, little plastic heads. Now the cymbals were cheap. The cymbals were little trash can cymbals, which I think I cracked those up in about a week. [laughter] And the snare drum head. I think that was the only head that was not… that tore up too. And he ended up just… dad ended up getting just some real heads for that snare drum. And I played on that kit really until I was like nine. My father was like, okay, we gotta get you something a little bigger.

Tia Imani Hanna: They supported you right away. You have a proclivity to play this instrument, so let me get you a real instrument. Let me get you something that actually has tones to it. Like real heads. We're going to have real tones as opposed to plastic things that will break and that don't really have a pitch, and I think a lot of parents don't realize that with drums, that there's tones and there's pitches and with the snare, there's that whole band of elastic underneath.

Gayelynn McKinney: Yeah. They’re actually called ‘snares’. Yep.

Tia Imani Hanna: Yeah. Okay. So yeah, people don't realize that there's all these different parts of the kit in that the level of the quality of the equipment that you give to the child is going to make a difference in what kind of sounds they can make. And that, in turn, makes a difference as to them pursuing it. That's right. It's a real passion because if it doesn't sound like anything, they're not going to pursue it.

Gayelynn McKinney: Yeah. They're going to lose interest in it because it's not gonna, it's not going to inspire them.

Tia Imani Hanna: When you were playing, did somebody show you stick technique?

Gayelynn McKinney: Not at first. First of all, Dad… my father had rehearsals almost every day in the house as far back as I can remember. And so, a lot of times I would sit in and be around them listening. Well, I really didn't start paying attention to the rehearsals until I was really about four or five. Before that I was just banging, just figuring the drums out, but at about five is when I started… actually, the first drummer that I saw, his name was Jimmy Allen. And he passed away a little later, like a year or so later. And then George Davidson came into the picture. And at that time, he had this nice green sparkle kit, which I think he still has to this day. And I used to sit right by his feet, so I could see everything he was doing. And he told me this often when I got older, he said, “I was always so nervous about you sitting so close to my high hat. Cause your nose was right here.” and I'd be…

[laughter]

Tia Imani Hanna: Oh, no!

Gayelynn McKinney: But I was so curious about… I wanted to see how everything was work working. I wanted to see his feet. I wanted to see his hands. I just wanted to see everything he was doing. And then, of course, after rehearsal, I would wait patiently and he gave me a hug, “All right, sweetie pie. See you later.” And he would leave his kit there. And so, I wait, and I watch him walk out the front door… and I wait, look at him get in his car and wait for him to round that corner. As soon as he round that corner, boy, I was running to them drums and jumped on them and start playing them. And, one day, my dad was watching me play. And I said, “Dad!” I said, “Daddy, I'm George Davidson!” And he said, “That's nice sweetheart, but I want you to be Gayelynn McKinney.” And I said, “Okay, I'm Gayelynn McKinney.” And that was him telling me, I want you to be your own. You gonna be your own person on the drums, you know?

Tia Imani Hanna: Okay. So, you're learning your drums from George Davidson and other luminaries that came to play at rehearsals. So, at some point, did you actually get physical lessons, like real lessons, from a teacher?

Gayelynn McKinney: My first teacher was one of dad's drummers, came from Danny. A matter of fact, there's a video on YouTube with my mother and father. It’s black and white. And I think it was Detroit Black Journal from like 19… I don't even know, it might be 1960 something, like 69 or something like that. And Danny was playing the drums on that video. So, Dad started asking him to teach me, teach me the drums. And that's when I started getting fundamental stuff like rudiments and things like that, kind of getting knowledge about, how to play the drums. But by that time, I had developed quite an ear. And it picks up a lot of stuff just from watching George and listening to records and stuff like that. But he just kinda… he kinda directed me towards the rudiments. Cause I had not been dealing with rudiments before he came into the picture.

Tia Imani Hanna: Yeah. I know like a lot of singers… I talked to Naima, Naima Shamborguer, for those listening who may not know my Aunt Naima, jazz vocalist, and she talks about drummers a lot and she works with George a lot. George works with her or they work together, I should say. And he knows… still knows how to use brushes.

Gayelynn McKinney: Oh yeah.

Tia Imani Hanna: And most drummers don't have any knowledge of how to play with the drums because it's like a lost art. It was starting to become a lost art because they don't make them anymore or something like that.

Gayelynn McKinney: No, they do. They still make brushes. It's just that, unfortunately not as… that's funny you mentioned George cause that's who I learned brushes from, was from George. And even just like about three or four years ago, he was looking at me. He said, yeah, he gave me a pointer about my left hand and said to “lay it down more,” you know. And I was like, “Oh yeah. Okay.” He said, “Yeah, cause you're holding it up. And that's gonna make all your wrist tense and stuff and less relaxed.” And, and that was just like three or four years ago.

Tia Imani Hanna: Right.

Gayelynn McKinney: But he's yeah, I got my brush technique from him. But they do still make brushes. The problem is the kids, they're not really learning the brushes. Because jazz is such a, I don't know if it's corporate America, when they started coming out with smooth jazz and all that, nothing against smooth jazz, cause I like some of it. I like to some of the smooth jazz. But a lot of that kind of jazz didn't use brushes. And a lot of getting into jazz and having anybody to even tell them about using brushes and all the kids are going into rap, R&B, and that kind of music, they don't use a whole lot of brushes, if any. So that's why you'll see kids with stick pads, a lot of them don't even own a pair of brushes, you know.

Tia Imani Hanna: And there was like these new wire things that look like eggbeaters I saw that people are using and that doesn't have the same sound.

Gayelynn McKinney: Yeah. I don't quite know. That's just for you to play quieter, but it's not brushes.

Tia Imani Hanna: Right. There's this particular sound that I've always appreciated, especially in ballads. I forget the name of the drummer that Shirley Horn used to use. And that guy was a brush master. She would play these slow… because she plays slower than slower than slow to do her ballads. And he would just put this nice palette of brushes underneath it. And it's such a beautiful sound. It's the same kind of beautiful sound you hear behind Miles Davis with music trumpet, that kind of a sound. And so, I'm glad that you have that knowledge because it's not lost.

Gayelynn McKinney: Yeah, it's funny. Cause I was just working with a student yesterday with brushes. He was trying to figure out how to play his two-beat with the brushes and I gave him some instruction on that, you know.

Tia Imani Hanna: I want to hear someone do, I guess some kind of a hip hop or rap but using brushes.

Gayelynn McKinney: Yeah. I mean, it's definitely doable.

Tia Imani Hanna: There's a little hint. If you do some more hip hop-ish kind of crossover fusion kind of stuff.

Gayelynn McKinney: Okay. I'll take you up there. Actually, one of the songs that I did on the record that's coming out in January. I didn't use brushes. I wish I had talked to you before that, cause maybe I would have. I used the cross stick, you know, ballad, but that would have been nice actually with brushes.

Tia Imani Hanna: So, you know, the new, the remix. Yeah,

Gayelynn McKinney: Yeah.

Tia Imani Hanna: Anyhow, you got your technique, you're taking some lessons, so when you hit high school and stuff like that, were you playing, like, in the school band or out in real gigs or what?

Gayelynn McKinney: In fact, when I hit sixth grade, I also picked up the saxophone, the alto saxophone. My father actually took me to the store and got me a nice Yamaha saxophone, which I still have down there. Unfortunately, my armature has gone now, and I could still play everything I remembered, so I can only play it for like five minutes, whereas before I could play for hours, which is so funny to me. But I was playing saxophone from sixth grade to 12th grade, but in the concert band and the marching band, and then at home, I was still playing the drums. So then, when I got to high school, I actually joined a band called “Foresight.” That was the name of the band at the time and I was playing saxophone. And my friend was playing drums. And actually, we ended up playing at a club that used to be down near downtown called La Cave. And I played saxophone on that gig and actually got a nice… happened to be a reviewer in there that night and I got a nice little write up about me playing saxophone in the paper. Go figure. But once I left high school and went to Oakland University, which the reason why I ended up at Oakland was because my father was teaching up there when I was 13. And I used to go up there every… once a week, I would ride up there with him cause he was doing the private jazz piano instruction up there for the Jazz Department. And there were three big jazz bands up there, beginning, intermediate, and advanced and I would always sit in with saxophone with the beginning jazz band, and one time Dizzy Gillespie came through there and I’m sitting in with the big jazz band with Dizzy playing. I was like, this is neat. At 13 that made a big impression on me. And I said, yeah, I'm going to Oakland University. That's where I want to go. Unfortunately, by the time I got there at 17 Doc Holiday, who was the jazz director was… he was pretty much getting ready to retire. And he was tired of fighting with the other department about the jazz program. So, he was on his way out. The bands had gotten only one… it was only like one big jazz band. And so, at that point, someone heard me play the drums. I don't know why or how, but they decided that they wanted me to play drums. And so, that was the moment, when I started college was when I put the saxophone down for good and just became strictly a drummer.

Tia Imani Hanna: Okay.

Gayelynn McKinney: Yep. So yeah, the saxophone. I could very easily have been a saxophone player for a while there. I was actually… I think that's where I was really thinking I was gonna head too. But for some reason, the drums decided to, I guess that was God’s will, wanted me to play drums.

Tia Imani Hanna: There was no like real decision-making in it for you other than like somebody else said, “Hey, play drums” or just felt, did it just feel more relaxed to play the drums as opposed to playing the saxophone? Or it just felt more like a more natural fit or what happened?

Gayelynn McKinney: I…, it was just… it really wasn't any real conscious decision. Except for, once I started playing the drums, there was… no one asked me to play saxophone anymore because in the group that I was playing saxophone with, they had broken up. They weren't playing anymore. So, the drums just became the focal point of my attention. And, of course, while I was in college, I started getting a lot of gigs playing drums. So, that's pretty much why the saxophone just got put down and taken home and put up. And that was that.

Tia Imani Hanna: There's definitely some economic involvement in that, because in that decision making, because it was easier to get a gig. Now that's one of the things that I've always told students of mine. I said, “I'm glad that you'd love to play the violin, or I'm glad that you love to sing. But if you played the base or the drums, you'd work all the time.” [laughter] Think about it.

Gayelynn McKinney: Or, but the other thing, other side of that, though, is if they really want to stick to the violin, you just do what you do and what Regina does and just put your own band together.

Tia Imani Hanna: Yeah. Put your own band together. That's the other, yeah, that's the other option. I try to save them that route.

Gayelynn McKinney: Yeah, that’s a lot.

Tia Imani Hanna: That’s a whole other skill and exercise, as you know.

Gayelynn McKinney: For sure. Yes.

Tia Imani Hanna: So, was there any moment that you said, ‘Okay, what do I do now? I'm going to become a professional musician, period.” Was there a decision there, like, okay, this is what I'm going to do, and this is how I'm going to pursue it. Or did you just fell into it because people were calling you for gigs?

Gayelynn McKinney: No, I knew from an early age that I wanted to do this for a living. And that's probably because that’s what my parents did. They play music for a living. And so, I could not… I didn't really see myself doing anything else, other than playing music for a living. For a long time, I was really not interested in teaching either. I just wanted to play, but teaching kind of crept in there too because, of course, dad was a teacher and so was my mother. They had their own teaching programs and workshops and stuff that they did. Soon, they caught up with me and I started teaching as well. But yeah, I always knew I wanted to do this for a living. I never had thought about doing anything else, except for I did, at one point, want to go into computers because my last year of high school is when they introduced computers to the young people, which that was us graduates at 17. And it was a big, bulky thing with black screen and green letters. I was so intrigued into the buttons. I was like, “Ooh, what is this thing?” It was an afterschool class that they were offering to people that might be interested. I was interested. And so, it was a computer program class and I really enjoyed doing it. I really enjoyed that class and actually aced it. And when I went to college, I was actually going to try to do a double major in music and computers, but unfortunately, I'm not mad at him at all, he just didn't see the value in computers I don't think, then, because nobody knew what was happening with them. Nobody knew that this thing was going to become this, what we're doing on here now, and become the major communication and part of everyone's life that it is now. No one knew that's what that was going to be. So, the advice he gave us was, “No, just stick to music. You know? Cause I don't know about this computer thing, you know.”

Tia Imani Hanna: Is this your dad that you’re talking about?

Gayelynn McKinney: No, this was my college counselor.

Tia Imani Hanna: College counselor. Okay.

Gayelynn McKinney: Yeah. Cause I was talking to him about doing a double major and he, he suggested no, don't do that just to stick with music. So, I took his advice, which I'm kind of sad, cause I probably could have really had a great career in computers too, which would have funded my music.

Tia Imani Hanna: Exactly. Exactly.

Gayelynn McKinney: But yeah. Music, yeah, music. I just never thought about doing anything else other than that. And, after, you know, after the computer thing went south, I stuck with the music.

Tia Imani Hanna: I get it. So, at some point though, you and Marion Hayden and Alina Morr, I guess she was Eileen Orr at the time, and Regina Carter and formed Straight Ahead. Now, how did that come about?

Gayelynn McKinney: Yeah, so that started happening before I graduated from college. Mickey Brayden, who was a fantastic vocalist. She had acquired a gig at Burt's Place, when it was on Jefferson. And it was a Monday night gig, which is really a horrible night to have a club date. No one wants to go out on Monday to a club. They trying to… you know, first day of work, they trying to get ready for the next day of work. Right. So, she said, I have this gig and all the guys are busy. And so, I was going to see if you, I got… I talked to Marion; she says she wants to do it. And I also got Alina Morr, and I'm asking you if you want to do it. And I was excited! Cause I said, “You got Marion.” I didn't really know Marion that well then and I just knew that I was excited cause there was a female bass player walking around and I wanted to play with her, and I was like, “Yes, I want to play with her.” I immediately said when she said she had Marion and I'm like, “Oh yeah, I want to do… I would love to do that.” I started… we started doing the gig at Burt’s, and it was just me, Marion, Alina, and Mickey, because Regina wasn't in town yet because Regina was living in Germany at the time. And we started that gig and, girl, the first day we started it, it was like two people, maybe three in the club. I don't know what happened. I don't know a word of mouth happened, but at the end, by the end of the month, we have of playing there. We had a line going almost outside the door at Burt’s for people trying to come and see this all-female jazz group. It was like this phenomenon, “Man, you got to see these girls!” You know, we weren't tiptoeing through the tulips, you know, we was hitting. So, people were intrigued by that and they wanted to see it. So, we… that began our journey into a long career with Straight Ahead. And after a while, Mickey went to New York to perform and she started performing in musicals and plays and productions out there in New York. And that's when we acquired Cynthia Dewberry and she was the one that we ended up doing the recordings with. And, by at the time, of course, Regina had come home from Germany and we pulled her in and that be the beginning of the real serious journey, recording journey and touring journey, of Straight Ahead.

Tia Imani Hanna: Amazing group. You guys were performed for let's see, you had four or five albums.

Gayelynn McKinney: Yeah, well actually we did. We have… yeah, we have four. We did three for Atlantic records and one we did independently. No, we have five actually. We did two independent, yeah.

Tia Imani Hanna: So, you did the recordings, you got chance to tour a lot, I take it over that time. We're talking like what a 15-year period?

Gayelynn McKinney: Yeah, about 15 or 20 years. We toured for a good 10 of those 15 years. And then, Marion got married and had Tariq and gained a family and then Regina, of course she went solo and moved to New York. And so, we just became… we still were traveling. We're still doing do some traveling because we went to Germany and Australia just couple of years ago, last year, actually. But, yeah, people still knew who we were, but it wasn't quite as ‘out there’ as when we were touring and doing the Atlantic days. Yeah.

Tia Imani Hanna: So, what was that like? I mean, cause that's one of those things that musicians always want to get on a record label and that's the model that we were used to, that’s all changed now, with the digital world and all of that, but what was that like? Was that… how did you end up getting on the record label in the first place?

Gayelynn McKinney: Ha! That's an interesting story. What happened was, we had gone to… we were on exchange program with Montreux Switzerland's festival. Our festival used to be called the Montreux too.

Tia Imani Hanna: Right. Montreux Detroit Jazz Festival.

Gayelynn McKinney: Uh huh. Montreux Detroit Jazz Festival. So, we were like the sister festival to the Montreux of Switzerland. And I wish, I, I wish I could figure out how that happened, but anyway, so we had an exchange program. So, somebody from Switzerland came to our festival and Straight Ahead went to Montreux, Switzerland for their festival. And we ended up… we were supposed to just be doing some little club dates in Switzerland. Um, nothing, nothing on the main stage or anything, just some club dates. And somebody heard us rehearsing, and when we got done rehearsing somebody came and said, “Oh, so yeah, there's been a change. You're still gonna do the club dates, but you're also gonna be on the main stage now Opening for Nina Simone.”

Tia Imani Hanna: Oh, wow!

Gayelynn McKinney: That's what we said, “Wow! Okay.” And it was a really interesting thing that happened because we did that show, it was scarier than the mug because we were on that main stage and there was a sea of people out there. And they were all standing, there were no seats, and they were just staring at us like, “Who are these people?” [laughter] It was, like, really intimidating. As Claude Knobs got up there and introduced us and everything said something in French and all we understood was “Straight Ahead.” We played like our lives depended on it. And when we got done, there was a, like a, two second silence where everyone was staring at us. And then they erupted, all of a sudden, scared of Jesus out of everybody. Yeah. [laughter] They erupted into this thunderous applause and stomping, and they was stomping and clapping and poor Claude Knobs, he was trying to announce that it was time for the next act to come on. And for about five minutes, almost 10 minutes, he couldn't talk because they were screaming and clapping, and they wanted another song. And he said, “No, we’ve got to go along with this show. They will be playing at the clubs tonight.” After he finally got them to calm down, “Now they will be playing at the clubs later.” And so, out of that, we gained a video. I had a copy of the video. And I don't know if Marianne had a copy. I don't know, but I know I had a copy. And so, it was in my car and for some odd reason, I was riding around with it a few weeks after the festival and ran into Sylvia Moy at the Big Boy on Jefferson. For those of you who don't know Sylvia Moy, who don't know who Sylvia Moy is. She was a writer for Motown. She wrote “My Cherie Amour” with Stevie Wonder. So yeah. A matter of fact, she might've wrote the whole song if I'm not mistaken. But anyway, ran into her at Big Boy and she said, “Hey, you know, I've been really hearing good things about Straight Ahead and what you guys are doing. So, I’d like to take you to… I'd like to shop you for a record deal.” I said, “Oh really?” And then she was like, “Yeah.” And I said, “Oh…” She said, “You got some video?” And I chuckled, I said, “Well, it just so happens that I have a video in my car.” And she said, “Really?” I said, “Yeah.” I said, “Yeah, we just got back from Switzerland a couple of weeks ago and we played the festival, and we got a video.” And she said, “Oh, can I have that?” And the reason why I was hesitating because it was my only copy. So, I was like, “Oh yeah. Okay. But, but, but this my only copy, that's just all.” “Yeah. Okay. Don't worry girl,” she said, “I will make sure you get this back.” I said, “Okay, okay, I'm gonna go get it out of my car.” So, I went and got the video, and I was handed it to her. You know how you know, you can kind of hold onto it. She started laughing. I promise, you will get this back. I said, “Okay. Okay.” So, I gave her the video and, maybe a month later, she did give me my video back and she gave me that along with telling us that we were getting ready to be signed to Sony because she had given us our video tape or either a copy of it to the ANR guy at the tailors. His name was Kevin Woodley. And so, we was on our way to get signed to a Sony. But, as fate would have it, he was leaving Sony and was going over to Atlantic. So, he took us with him over to Atlantic and that's how we ended up getting signed with Atlantic. Yeah.

Tia Imani Hanna: Wow! Fickle Finger of Fate. That's amazing.

Gayelynn McKinney: Yeah. Yeah.

Tia Imani Hanna: It worked out for you. That that's really wonderful. So, what is being… this is the stuff that nobody knows… what is being ‘on label like? Once you've done it and you signed on the label, so what happens next?

Gayelynn McKinney: You get signed on the label and then… which involves a heck of a whole lot of paperwork. And then after that, you start the process of making the record. And so, they found us a producer and that producer was Lenny White, the drummer.

Tia Imani Hanna: Oh wow!

Gayelynn McKinney: Yeah, the drummer that used to play with Return to Forever, famous drummer. And so, needless to say, I was pretty excited about getting ready to meet Lenny White. And I was like, Oh my God! They picked a producer for us. They picked the studio. We went out to Hartford, Connecticut. It was a really cool studio. We actually, one thing about these record companies, you get this budget. So, we stayed at the studio. We actually…they had living quarters upstairs from the studio. And so, we stayed there and every day we get up and record songs for the record and it was an interesting experience working with Lenny White. He got on my nerves just a little bit. [laughter] The ‘upside’ is, I learned a lot from that man about production and learning what audiences might like as far as what they want to hear or whatever. And because I remember he said, “People don't want to hear a whole lot of drum solos.” This is coming from a drummer, “People don't want to hear a whole lot of drum solos on a record.” And I was… I remember being so offended, but now I understand what he was talking about. They'll see it live, but they're not necessarily trying to, when they listened to music in their homes or cars, wanting to hear a whole bunch of drum solos. Not necessarily, unless… unless you really like drums. And I think most people like melodic instruments. That's just the truth of it. That is why I make every effort to be a melodic drummer.

Tia Imani Hanna: Understood.

Gayelynn McKinney: So, I learned a lot of things about, you know, production and how producers work in the studio. So that was the upside of things. You know, I, I do really appreciate that experience and wouldn't trade it for the world. So, then they got the record together. And then after that, it was basically getting the album cover done. That involves some stylists and hairdressers, an all-day kind of thing. And then after that, it went into production. Now, that was all a nice whirlwind, and it was going in and out in New York and we played at B. Smith's in New York. That was one of our first shows off of this record and stuff. She's, you know, B. Smith just recently passed away too. She was cool. But he downside of the record thing was we should have… we were… I guess we were unaware of how the money thing was working because we, basically, did not make any money off the record itself. We made money off the tours and the producer made lots of money, but we… everything was recoupable. So, the photo session and the stylist and staying at the studio that, they pay for it, but that comes out of your record sales before you ever see a cent. By the time they spend however many thousands that was to do that and the producer, you don't really see your money. You don't see, you don't see anything from record sales unless you sell and… we sold a nice chunk, but we talking about R&B money. You sell a million copies, now you're going to see some money. But in the jazz world you’re not getting them, unless you’re Kenny G. Then you’re not going to see a million dollars in record sales. You may see… in fact, I remember somebody saying, “Y’all did good. Y'all sold, like, 50,000 copies.” So that was good for us apparently, but it did not equal to us seeing any money.

Tia Imani Hanna: How has that changed for you now? Because as you're producing your own stuff now and all the stylists and all of that kind of stuff was… because they put you in situations where ‘this is how you guys are going to look’. It sounds like it took a lot of the control away of what you're… how you're going to present your music and what kind of music you're going to present, which ones you're going to do. And so now you've done, like, you've done a tribute album basically to your father for “McKinFolk,” the album just did with his originals and your arrangements and his arrangements. So, you produced that as well as organized everything.

Gayelynn McKinney: Right. Yeah, that was a big undertaking in and of itself, because that's why it took so long. It took five years for me to do that record, because this was coordinating people and, Kevin Mahogany, I had to catch him while he was at the festivals, so I didn't have to fly him here. I had to catch James Carter and Geri Allen while they were in and Regina, caught her while she was in town. So, the time was the… I had to wait for people's schedules to be here in Detroit because that was going to save me money. I didn't want to spend money on flying people in, but it worked out, thankfully, it worked out where people were coming in and out of Detroit. So, I would catch him while they were here. Now, the thing about it though, I did the music, but I actually gave that record to Detroit Music Factory. So, I was signed with them for that record. So, a lot of stuff I didn't have to do. But it was the same scenario as far as seeing some serious dollars from it. But it was helpful being signed to them because I didn't have to do all of it, but this next one that I'm putting out in January, I'm doing that all myself this time.

Tia Imani Hanna: Okay. What's the name of that one?

Gayelynn McKinney: That one’s called “Zoot Suit Funk.” Yeah.

Tia Imani Hanna: Now what was that? Because I know… I've seen some of the pictures of you in the Zoot suit and that is so hip. It's funny, I was like she grabbed that idea because I had that idea years ago to do the same thing, but it never happened, you know, I said, “First I gotta find a tailor who could fit the suit to me.” It was like all these different things because I was just starting on my journey. Cause I had that idea back in 1995.

Gayelynn McKinney: Oh wow! Ok.

Tia Imani Hanna: But it's…

Gayelynn McKinney: That's about the time the Spike Lee movie came out, right?

Tia Imani Hanna: Yeah, probably. Probably. It's just kinda funny. Zoot Suit Funk. So, is that one the title track? is there a title track with that name?

Gayelynn McKinney: That is the title track. It was weird. When that song came to my mind… I mention the Spike Lee movie because when that song came in my mind, that image came in my mind with it, of them stepping in them Zoot Suits and I was like, wow! Ok.

Tia Imani Hanna: Malcolm X, I think.

Gayelynn McKinney: Was it Malcolm X?

Tia Imani Hanna: I think it was Malcolm X. Yeah.

Gayelynn McKinney: Ok, so It wasn't “More Better Blues?“

Tia Imani Hanna: It might've been, I think he was… there was Malcolm X in the early forties, he was wearing a Zoot. Him and his partner were walking down the street.

Gayelynn McKinney: Oh, that's right. You right.

Tia Imani Hanna: I think it might've been Malcolm X.

Gayelynn McKinney: Okay. You might be right. I think you might be right about that. Well, that was the image that popped in my head for some odd reason. And I just said, “Oh, okay. Well, I think I'm just going to call it a song that, yeah.” So yeah, that's the title track and it's an interesting track. Matthew Wade Shapiro really described it perfectly. He was like, “It was a mixture of a Motown, Funk and a little bit Jimmy Hendrix.”

[laughter]

Tia Imani Hanna: That's about right. That’s about right. I like it a lot. I like it a lot and now you sent me a couple of tracks from your new CD.

Gayelynn McKinney: Oh, I sent you “Space Goddess” and “Styling.”

Tia Imani Hanna: All right.

[music playing – “Space Goddess” by Gayelynn McKinney]

Tia Imani Hanna: All right. So, who's in this band?

Gayelynn McKinney: Okay. So, this was such a big difference than the “McKinFolk” McKinFolk took me five years. This one took me one day. And that was because I did it at a studio, kind of a private studio and it's in the house of a guy who used to be a musician, but that's not where he made his money. He actually made his money in robotics. So, he has this beautiful, like million-dollar studio in his basement. The only problem is you have to be on his time schedule, and he likes to use this engineer from Indiana who, you know, who he has to be on his time schedule. So, I did not have like a couple of days to do things like I would have liked. I had to pretty much record the whole CD in one day. So, I had Ibrahim Jones on bass, I had Demetrius Nabors on piano, and Alex Anest on guitar, and Rafael Statin on sax, and my girl, Trenita Womack, from The Funk Brothers on congas and percussion.

Tia Imani Hanna: Fantastic. Fantastic.

Gayelynn McKinney: Yeah.

Tia Imani Hanna: What is “Stylin” about? Is there like an image or a story that came to mind when you did that one?

Gayelynn McKinney: Yeah, “Stylin” looked and felt like somebody, you know…

Tia Imani Hanna: They can't see the video, so we have to use words.

[laughter]

Gayelynn McKinney: Okay. Oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, ok, I thought this was actual video. Ok. Well, so in other words, you know, somebody is prepping and priming in the mirror and they got the nice clothes on, they nice clothes on and they looking good. They might be getting ready to go somewhere and, so, they ‘stylin’. That’s what the song…with that song, that’s what I felt like you know, it's a little funky, little groove.

Tia Imani Hanna: And listen to that right now…

[music playing – “Stylin” by Gayelynn McKinney]

Tia Imani Hanna: Straight Ahead was Grammy nominated. So, which album was that?

Gayelynn McKinney: That was “Look Straight Ahead.” Our first CD was nominated for a Grammy, and actually “McKinFolk” was nominated for a Grammy too.

Tia Imani Hanna: Okay. Now, are you, or any of the members of those bands, members of the Grammy Academy?

Gayelynn McKinney: I know I was at one time. I'm not so sure that I still… I don't think I am still. I think I fell off on that, but I probably should rejoin at some point. I think we got joined through Atlantic is how that happened. So, I don't know how that process worked exactly, but I could probably just go to their site and if you go to the grammy.com site and they'll probably tell you how you can join.

Tia Imani Hanna: What is there that you want to really want to do that you haven't had a chance to do yet?

Gayelynn McKinney: Um, it's a couple of things. One, I definitely wanna tour under my own name. I've never done that before. I've always been touring with other people under their name. But one of the things I would like to do is be able to tour under my name. I would really like to write, write a movie soundtrack one day. Yeah. Yeah. I've always wanted to do that too. Yeah.

Tia Imani Hanna: Desert Island disk, if you're on a desert Island and you really could only take three. Which ones would you take?

Gayelynn McKinney: Wow. Hmm, three records. Oh, I like so many things.

Tia Imani Hanna: I know! It’s hard, isn’t it?

Gayelynn McKinney: I would probably take one rock record. I would probably take “Yes.” And then I would probably take, let me see now, jazz records, there's so many, uh, what would be my favorite? Uh, that's hard. That's really hard to pinpoint.

Tia Imani Hanna: It is!

[laughter]

Gayelynn McKinney: Wow. Well, maybe some… some old, cause I am… I was a fusion buff; I probably take some old “Return to Forever” or something. I probably would take a… I’d had to take an R&B record, “Parliament Funkadelic.”

[laughter]

Tia Imani Hanna: Yep. Yep. I hear that. I hear that.

Gayelynn McKinney: Yeah, “Parliament Funkadelic,” that would probably be, you know, what I would take. And if I didn’t take the fusion record, I definitely would probably take some either Art Blakey or Max Roach, something from them. Yeah. Yep. Yeah. See, that would be if I could take four records.

Tia Imani Hanna: Yeah. That would be my thing. Be like, ah, I don't know if I could just take three.

Gayelynn McKinney: Yeah.

Tia Imani Hanna: That, that would be hard. Same thing if I was going to try to pick a movie to take, what would I take? Oh my God.

Gayelynn McKinney: Yeah. Oh, Lord. I don’t know.

Tia Imani Hanna: I don’t know what to do.

Gayelynn McKinney: Yeah. Yeah.

Tia Imani Hanna: So, where can people find you online?

Gayelynn McKinney: Okay. I'm on Facebook, under Gayelynn McKinney. I am under… I'm on Instagram, under Gayelynn McKinney, G A Y E L Y N N and M C K I N N E Y. I'm on Twitter too, but I don't do too much over there cause, I don't know, I just… Twitter just doesn't appeal to me that much. So, I usually am mostly on Instagram and Facebook and also, I have a website www.gayelynnmckinney.com. And also, if you want to buy the single “Space Goddess,” because I released that a couple of months ago… you can find “Space Goddess,” the single, on Band Camp.

Tia Imani Hanna: You talked about so many wonderful things in your journey and I really appreciate the time.

Gayelynn McKinney: Yeah. And by the way, you're a very good interviewer. You asked really good questions.

Tia Imani Hanna: Oh, thank you. Thank you. Thank you so much for coming and sharing on my show and…

Gayelynn McKinney: My pleasure.

Tia Imani Hanna: And I'm looking forward so much to the new album is “Zoot Suit Funk” coming out in January 2021?

Gayelynn McKinney: Yes.

Tia Imani Hanna: Okay. So, we will look out for it and we'll have you on again and we'll talk about that. And thank you again so much for coming to Tia Time.

Gayelynn McKinney: You're very welcome.

Tia Imani Hanna: Thank you for joining us this week on Tia Time with Artists. Make sure to visit our website, tiaviolin.com, where you can subscribe to the show in iTunes and never miss an episode. Please leave us a rating wherever you listen to podcasts. We really appreciate your comments, and we'll mine them to bring you more amazing episodes.

I’d like to thank this inaugural season's sponsors: The folks at Jazz Alliance of Mid-Michigan or JAMM, Michigan ArtShare, a program of Michigan State University Extension is a partner in supporting the Tia Time podcast, and Shambones Music. Without their support this podcast would not be possible. Thank you so much. If you would also like to contribute to the show, you can find us on https://www.patreon.com/TiaTime1.

If you want to continue the conversation about topics discussed on the show or start new ones with like-minded people, join us at the Tia Time Lounge on Facebook.

Thank you for listening. See you next week at Tia Time!

+ Transcription

Tia Time with Artists, with guest Kevin Richardson - recorded on 11/03/2020

Tia Imani Hanna: Welcome to Tia Time with Artists, the weekly podcast where we discuss the methods, challenges, and real-life experiences of living our creative dreams. What kind of creative warrior are you? Musician? Filmmaker? Painter? Choreographer? Poet? Sculptor? Fashionista? Let’s talk about it right now. I’m your host, Tia Imani Hanna.

Tia Imani Hanna: Welcome to Tia Time with Artists. My guest today is Kevin Richardson, who is an amazing photographer who's been doing a lot of work with dance photography, but he also is a champion natural bodybuilder, a nutritionist, a Ninja, a conflict resolution specialist, and on. There's so many things that this man does, and he's a superhero. One of my superheroes. So welcome Kevin to the show.

Kevin Richardson: Thank you so much Tia and I'm really happy to be here.

Tia Imani Hanna: Kevin and I met each other probably, 15 to 20 years ago, I think now when I lived in Brooklyn and he's still in Manhattan, working away creating a world that superheroes can live in. So, tell me about that. The photography came out of the work that you're doing, or you were always doing photography, or were you doing bodybuilding first, or what was that progression for you?

Kevin Richardson: It's an interesting story because growing up, I hated photography. I've never taken a photography class. I've never gone to school for photography. It's not something I ever did. It always had this idea about some of the artistic images that inspired me to be a bodybuilder when I was a kid, which came from the pages of comic books. And I had this idea of trying to recreate it, on some level, when I came to New York. When I first came to New York, from Trinidad where I'm from originally, I was blown away by the skyscrapers and all the scenes that serve so much as the backdrop for so many of the comic book characters who, who I grew up reading about. So, whether it was Metropolis or Gotham or New York City, everything was set in this place where I actually was. And my idea was to try to superimpose, initially it was going to be me jumping from rooftop to rooftop, doing like backflips and stuff, and taking pictures of that. Having someone take pictures of that while I did it, while I was body painted up like superheroes, and that was really this burning idea I always had in the back of my head. I didn't have any way of realizing it. And so, I started trying to do it. And my, my future wife was one of the key people who said, “No, you can't jump from rooftop to rooftop. You're going to die. And there's things like gravity and stuff like that. And the other superhero rules are a little bit, the physics are a little bit different.” So, I put it on the side. And then I had… I have a personal, my personal training business and I needed to take some pictures of my trainers for the website and I'm a ‘do it all’ person. I do the web design, I do everything. And I figured, you know what, I'm not gonna hire a photographer. I'm just gonna buy a camera and do it myself. And it was really hard. It was exceptionally hard, using flash and color balance, all those things. I had no idea how to use a camera. I had no interest in it really. I spent a lot of time in front of the camera as a bodybuilder in photo shoots for so many times, so many occasions, but actually being the one to take pictures was totally alien to me. But I did it. I didn't really like it, but I realized it was one with have something outside of my regular, kind of, personal training schedule that was a little bit different, a little bit more artistic, a little bit more creative. And so, I just started taking pictures. Nothing too monumental and those pictures are getting noticed. People would see my pictures that I posted on Facebook and you know want to buy it. And I figured, okay, maybe there's something here. And then I came back to that idea I had about the superheroes in New York City. And one of the things I realized, that if you look very carefully at a comic book superhero, be it Spiderman, or Batman or Superman, or Wonder Woman. When they moved, a certain grace, at a certain poise, there's lines. There's a certain way the hands are for gestures that they have when they're actually in movement that comes from dancers. And I'm pretty sure that the artists were looking at dancers for their inspiration for how Spiderman should look when he is swinging from one building to the other. And so, I had this idea, you know, I'll take pictures of dancers. That's a lot less life risk-taking than me jumping off rooftops and I'll see how it goes. But again, I had no experience working with dancers. I had no experience doing photography, so I would have dancers come to my apartment and I would shoot them and try to figure out how to get that timing, how to know what to look for, how to work with someone, how to really do that. And then one day I got some light stands. I went to Coney Island and I did my first shoot, and it was horrible. The wind blew down light stands, almost, you know, crushed the poor dancer. I really had no idea what I was doing in terms of how the lights should be and everything else that were outside. And so, I got some assistants who helped me hold the lights and everything else and I just kept on doing it. I kept on doing it, kept on doing it. I shot every week, probably nonstop once the weather was good for a good four years nonstop. And then, so I got good at it. And that was able to really take that vision that I had and, in collaboration with these wonderfully talented dancers, who… again, I started it off with people asking people to come to my apartment to take pictures. And then when people started seeing the photos on social media, I had more and more dancers applying to the point now where we've had, I think we crossed like 2000 applicants and it's some of the top, literally, some of the top talent in New York City. And it really allowed me to be able to have this idea in my head and then not only just work with dancers and recreate it, but also give something back to the dance community and to artists in general, because it was really important when I saw that most of the dancers couldn't afford the type of photographs that they needed for their portfolios, that I was able to provide that for them. And then, we kept on expanding it. We… I started doing headshot sessions for them because I realized a lot of them needed headshots and couldn't afford it. So, any member of Dances Art would have these several times a year, like free headshot sessions, for them to come in and get professional headshots. And that's where it started, and it's really blossomed into something much bigger than what I expected. And I keep on getting asked are you a full-time photographer and the answer is no It's really just a passion and a hobby that I have been doing for a while and it took off.

Tia Imani Hanna: So, all of that development and just to have the ‘stick-to-itiveness’ of going every week out there. And when you start it and doing it horribly. So just… like that takes a lot of skill and a lot of determination and I think in any art form that's true because you have to be willing to go out there and do it really badly over and over and over and over again to get to the point where you've learned all these different things from those moments of failure. To get to, “Oh, that's what I was trying to get to. I got it now I know how to do that one thing. Now let's go 10 more times and learn this other thing and then build on that.” It's good for people to see artists at work and to know the stories of how we get to the point where we're creating these amazing pieces of art and that they don't just come out fully formed the first time. So, I'm excited to see that's it's come so far for you and you're doing so well with it. Because when I met you, I think you just started the bodybuilding video that you did. And I think it was you and Lafrae [Skye] in the studio, and there was like one light. And it was a great video, but it was like, you just did it, and you can say, it's like, oh, was like, “Okay, he did a video. That's all right.” Because most people don't just do it, so, just do it, put it out there, keep going. And that has been inspirational for me to see you do that. So, just know that what you're doing makes a difference and that it affects other people in a good way. Because that’s…this podcast is ‘throw it out there; keep going.’ It gets a little bit better. So, yeah.

Kevin Richardson: I think that's… I think that's always been my motivation in that if I was not touching so many people's lives with that, I wouldn't keep on doing it. I'm not very much someone that can be that satisfied by doing things solely for myself. It… there has to be some external, meaningful… meaningfulness to it. Even my body building career. Bodybuilding is a very egocentric pursuit. It's you building your body. It's you eating well for yourself and that's a little bit too superficial for me. If that was all it was all was about, then I wouldn't be doing it. But when I was able to see how many people, I was able to inspire by my own example. To help people realize that, yes, by failing and spending years and years of toiling away at something and getting very little feedback in terms of results, that it would help others, you know, along the path as well. That's my motivation. That's what keeps me going. And with that says, all right, it was really about realizing that not only was I helping the dance community, I helped some truly tremendous artists land fantastic jobs because they had these great photographs in their portfolio that really showed what they could do. But then also too, just the audience response to people seeing the photographs and especially now with in New York city being so much different from what it was before, it's like a rallying call. It something that brings a bit of light to New York at a time when things are a little bit on the dark side, especially for the dance community.

Tia Imani Hanna: Just the arts community in general, especially if you're looking for foot traffic to come to live performances and that sort of thing. Yeah. Even places like The Strand bookstore just put out a big call for people to buy books because they were going to have to shut down. So, people are buying books from The Strand like crazy to make sure The Strand stays.

Kevin Richardson: It's right next to Forbidden Planet, which is the comic bookstore that I went to every single Wednesday and plotted to make sure that they stay open and there's always a line to The Strand. And so, I've always been happy to see that line because it meant that with so many stores that shut down here in New York City that at least that one was up and going. And that's a really important store for me as well, it’s where I buy my books. I'll see a book at Barnes and Noble, I'll see a book on Amazon, and I'll go to The Strand and buy it just to make sure that I support the stores that I want to see stay open, especially in these times.

Tia Imani Hanna: So that, yeah, that call, I just saw that on Facebook about an hour ago is I said, “Oh. Gotta buy from The Strand.” I'm in Michigan and I still love The Strand. So, it needs to stay there. It's been there since 1927. In Detroit, we have John King Books, which is our version of The Strand and they haven't been there that long. They've been there since the… I think the sixties, but still.

Kevin Richardson: That's pretty monumental.

Tia Imani Hanna: Yeah. And it's got four floors and now he's got another store and so, there's some history there. So, we got to keep our bookstores up.

Kevin Richardson: We do. We really to.

Tia Imani Hanna: We really do. A call out to all the artists listening. Support your bookstores.

Kevin Richardson: Go to The Strand.

Tia Imani Hanna: Go to The Strand. Go to the John King. Go, wherever you are on the planet, go support your local bookstores because we need to keep those alive, we can't… it can't all be digital. It just can't. You need to have real books too. A lot of younger folks don't get it, but there is something to touching paper, smelling paper, reading holding a book in your hand, reading the words, turning the pages. Same thing for looking at photographs. It's if you're looking at it digitally, it's not the same thing as looking at a piece on your wall. It’s not the same as holding a photograph in an album in your hands or in a book in your hands. So, we definitely need to keep that art form alive and well. Anyway, end of commercial.

Kevin Richardson: I think, especially as a photographer, people… they tend to see my work digitally to see it on Instagram or the website or Facebook. And it's nice on a screen, especially if it's a really big screen. The reality is that it's something much bigger than that. It's too bad that the listeners can't see the artwork in the background, on the walls. There's something about it seeing it printed number one, the way that artists want to have it printed with the color is exactly as you want it to be with the small touches of paper being a particular way and everything else. And also, the scale of it as well. It invokes a certain feeling that, looking at something, especially on this a screen of a phone, just simply can't duplicate.

Tia Imani Hanna: Correct. It pops out at you. It's you're… it really is like looking out of a window out into another world and it's just on your wall. I have some giant photographs in my house that I just constantly, I… they just strike me, like I had to buy them. And I don't usually buy anything unless it's I have to have it now. That's the only way I buy those kinds of things, but I've had this one for years and it just… every time I see it just makes me happy. And I'm looking at that world at that moment in time, these real people we're doing this thing on this part of the planet and I get a snapshot of that. And that's amazing to me, it's magic, caught in the photo. Anyhow. You’ve got your project now with the dancers. You're in what iteration of it are you in? You started out doing this, how many years ago now?

Kevin Richardson: This is the sixth year I'm going into; it's been six years now. I'm still doing it. It's even more… I think it's even more poignant now than it was when I started, especially given the fact that I probably say as much as 90% of the dancers who were part of the project are no longer in New York. Because part of the idea of the project is to also bring attention to the fact that the arts and artists, in general, have a very difficult time living in New York, and this was before COVID-19. Now there's just nothing for so many of them to do and they have to leave the city and we're losing what makes New York. New York isn't the same if there's no Broadway, it's not the same if there's no ballet, not the same if there's no Alvin Ailey. It's kind of part and parcel of what we are as a city and a city without that backbone of culture that's just a place on the map. It's not a city. It's not three dimensional. It's more two dimensional. And I think that there are so many dancers right now who aren't able to dance and I'm able to at least give them an opportunity to go out into the streets and still be relevant, still feel relevant, still be able to do what they do and show the world what they're capable of doing. That's been really meaningful for me right now, these past couple of weeks, but it's difficult because the social distancing and masks on at all times and making sure that we maintain all the protocols we have to maintain. We weren't able to shoot for several months because of the lockdowns and productions. Any kind of location productions were prohibited until… I believe it reopened in July, it's only July, so we missed pretty much the entire spring, which is when we really got the ball rolling. And then the fact that so many dancers are gone, not in New York anymore. So, just trying to keep it going.

Tia Imani Hanna: Well, are you thinking of shifting to any other art? Starting a different project while that's happening?

Kevin Richardson: I have. It's been a very interesting metamorphosis being in lockdown as photographer and a bodybuilder, because I've had to… I have Naturally Intense, my personal training business and I need to have pictures of myself. I need to be doing that. And it's probably the hardest thing for me to do is take a picture of myself. I'm really not comfortable in front of the camera. And you would think that… it's been… to spend 32 years of me doing this that I get used to it at this point, but it's still that I’m just be more comfortable in front of the camera, behind the camera, in front of it. Sorry. And it's something I've worked on. And, again, it's that realization that I hate posting photographs of myself. I hate to doing photo shoots with myself, but people see it and they're inspired. Especially the fact that I'm a natural bodybuilder, like a really lifetime natural bodybuilder. There's so many people out there who use drugs and are very prominent in the fitness world. And there aren't that many real true examples of what it means to be someone who spent their life eating a certain way, training a certain way, and following that path. I try to be an example in a lot of ways. So that's something I've been doing, but I don’t think I'm interesting enough to go beyond that. I think that is always going to be, as long as there are dancers in New York City, I'm gonna be shooting them. At some point in time, looking at myself like, ah, all right, I'm done. I don't want to.

Tia Imani Hanna: No, I understand that I do. It's the same problem that a lot of musicians have, was we don't want to do a solo album because it's just me, and some more me. And it's like, who cares? I don't want to hear me. So, who else is going to want to hear it? It's not true…

Kevin Richardson: But I think is who wants a picture of me? Come on. My kids are shaking their head, “Ah, Dad, you're in your underwear again.” [laughter]

Tia Imani Hanna: What about taking pictures of other bodybuilders? Have you had a lot of requests for that?

Kevin Richardson: I used to shoot. Some of the work I did ended up in the bodybuilding magazines and that's actually, when I first started off, that was pretty much what I was doing because I understood the angles, I understood posing. I understood what it takes to capture a physique, which is a very… it's, it's an art in and of itself. I work. My staff, they are bodybuilders. So, I do take photo shoots with them, but outside of that, not really. I just think that… I think that the bodybuilding world is one where the kind of physique photographs that I would want to do would require a certain degree of athleticism. It's not necessarily part of the repertoire of a modern bodybuilder. I just… you think in terms of inspiration as well. And I think that when it comes to physique and fitness photography, what has become, especially female physique photography, has become pretty much more like a T&A. And I'm just not interested in it. I had a request from a very prominent individual to do some photos with them and I turned it down simply because I look at what they do, and I look at the fact that you hold yourself to a standard and the standard you hold yourself to is the one that exemplifies the world you would like to see. And I wouldn't want to see my daughter looking to those pictures as a model of what and how a woman should be portrayed. And so, I'd rather just not do that. It's a little difficult. And I think that somewhere along the line, there's a problem with art, in terms of, at least here in America, there's a line where the human body is very difficult to be perceived as a piece of art. It's difficult to be perceived as an athletic accomplishment. It's tends to be objectified and sexualized so easily and so frequently because there's not enough education exposing people at a young age to the idea of the body as an art form. Or, if a woman has muscles, for example, it's an achievement you're looking at. You're not looking at her behind. You're not looking at her cleavage. It's an aesthetic that I think that you have to learn. And if it's not something that's learned, or if someone takes the time to learn, just becomes this ‘look at me’ a spectacle. I think that's where the fitness world is right now. There aren't really any prominent photographers in the fitness industry who I've seen really been pushing that. And then on the men's side, there really aren't that many natural bodybuilders out there. Very few people who really don't use drugs. I could… there's some fantastic ones, but they're few and far between. and they're not easy to access and they're not really… they're not basing their lives on profiting off of their physiques the way that a lot of people on drugs tend to do. So, there aren’t that many of them. So, it's not, I don't know. I think I would love to be in a place where things were different and there was more of an artistic acceptance of the human body, but even with the photography, with the dance as art, I always try to make sure it stays as athletic as possible. It doesn't go over into that other realm. And I also don't… I don't like, as well, with dance when, you have a dancer who may not necessarily be the perfect performer proportions, whatever that is. I don't Photoshop my dancers as far as their physiques are concerned. Whatever they have is whatever they have. However, they look is however they look because it's part of the beauty. I think that beauty is something that you look at and it looks back at you. And if you don't see, it's because you're not looking hard enough. And I think that it's important as art is not to have to bend to that kind of commercial…’you can get more people looking at your work if you show it a little more of this or show a little more of that or tighten up people or chose people who are a little… had a particular look all the time. I think that kind of degrades generally. It's what… it’s what someone is able to do. And I think same in music. Just because a particular form of music is commercially successful right now and popular right now doesn't necessarily mean that's what you should shift your expression to. Your expression is your expression. What you do is what you do, your truth is your truth. And I think that it just goes back to that idea of being true to yourself. And if you're really true to yourself artistically, you don't tend to be commercially successful. Sometimes you can be. I'm really surprised. I am so fortunate to have been able to have exhibited, done solo exhibits, to have license for much of my work, to be able to just finance it because the whole thing in of itself, it's a pretty expensive undertaking, but it's been able to support itself and that's a huge blessing to have that, and then be able to share that blessing with others as well by giving something back to the community. But, if you really and truly want to be successful, the last thing you're thinking about is Instagram. That's the least important thing. What really matters is that you're true to yourself. And that the vision that you have is the vision that you're putting forward.

Tia Imani Hanna: Now, with all of that work that you've been doing just to help even just to finance yourself, have you developed teams that you work with, that you have to reach out to different groupings of people or find virtual assistants… or? Because, you know, you've got a family, you've got your Naturally Intense nutritional and training program to work with. That's a whole other business. So, how were you managing all of this plus COVID-19?

Kevin Richardson: I have a team of assistants. It's usually a team of two. It started off with my wife and my son because…

Tia Imani Hanna: They were there.

Kevin Richardson: My wife's an artist as well. She's a remarkable artist, so that was really easy to work with her in terms of she understood a lot of the things that I was trying to create when I first started off. And, interestingly enough, my son, my oldest who's he's 25, turning 26, he started off holding the lights and he is now a very talented photographer. Yeah. He wanted this. I was surprised when he wanted to study photography in school., I was like really, study photography, where did that come from? Oh yes, I'm a photographer. Oh, yes, of course. Okay. So that's been, it's really heartening to see him following in the photography tradition as well. It's really... he's really good at it too. And I'm not saying that because my son, because I think that all of my kids know that I don't lower the bar for anyone. If it's good, it's good, and I'll say something. If it's not good, I just won't say anything. [laughter]

Tia Imani Hanna: Yeah, you have to be a little bit judicial about that. A little quiet in those areas. Oh, that's fantastic. Now, I understand the not wanting to do the bodybuilding because of the aesthetic and what people are looking for. What about the martial arts? Because the Ninjitsu, was that what you studied or is that what you teach?

Kevin Richardson: Yes, I've been teaching Ninjitsu. I got my teaching certification back in 1993, I believe, I think ‘93, somewhere around there. And I've been teaching… I used to teach outside in Prospect Park. I think when you met me, I was teaching in Prospect Park and we would be out there. If it was snowing, if it was raining, subfreezing temperatures, we'd be out there. And Brooklyn changed and it became much more gentrified. Prospect Park was a very dangerous place to be in, especially at nighttime, if you're there between 12:00 AM - 1:00 AM, which is why we were there, because there's nobody there. It was perfect. But now, you go to Prospect Park and there’s hundreds and thousands of people everywhere and they're picnicking, and everything is all…. it's overrun and there's so many rules now that I couldn't teach outside the way I used to. So, it became more of an inside, but thankfully we have an apartment big enough where we could train indoors. It's not exactly the same. But as the years go by, it's become more and more difficult to be able to do it, but I still do it. Then when COVID-19 happened, there's no way to have in-person classes, one-on-one person classes with an actual number of people here, it's my home as well. So, what we did is we have, there's this project I started two years ago where we would have free classes, it was actually in the gym that I was training, out of my personal training, Complete Body gym in Manhattan. And I would have… you would rent the backspace out and we would have a free class with the community on self-defense. It was always the first Friday of the month and it was something that went on for quite a while. And when COVID-19 happened, I took those classes online and we've been doing them online ever since. It's not the same of course, but at least I can impart some of what I've been so privileged to learn and picked up over the years, studying what I've studied living the life I've lived and surviving some of the things I've survived, and trying to pass it on. But I think for me, it's really about, after so much amassing information or amassing experiences, but finding some sense of meaning and passing it on so that others can benefit from my experience as well.

Tia Imani Hanna: My question is, have you taken photos of the martial arts?

Kevin Richardson: Oh no. Oh no.

Tia Imani Hanna: No. Why not? Because you'd have all of that movement, like the dancers have.

Kevin Richardson: Right.

Tia Imani Hanna: It has all of that skill. It has that superhero thing that… all those things you look for in your comics, but you haven't taken any pictures of those or even those movement practitioners that do the Parkour and the natural, what do they call it? Animal movements or, like Ido Portal kind of stuff. I'm surprised actually that you haven't because I see the dance, but that's also more of what you were talking about in the comic book type style of movement, that grace and that elegance and that strength and that power. And they have the shape of a bodybuilder because they're moving their own bodies in all these different ways. And I'm actually surprised you haven't done that.

Kevin Richardson: I think I took one photograph of me holding a sword. I think that's just about it. I think once, it was just one once, holding a sword. I think that, in retrospect, there's always that part of you that you want to keep private. And I think it's… there's always that idea of, “Oh, it's getting too close now. It's this is just really too close. Really too close.” And I think that just personally, for me, the idea of pictures of myself in that mode would be something I’d have to get used to. The same with bodybuilding, that video you were talking about. I had never had anyone take a picture of me when I was training before. I had never had anyone film me before. It felt like a… almost like an invasion that I had to get used to, like an occupying force. It was that powerful a sensation because when I was training that was… when I'm training now, it's my time. It's really my time. When you see people in the gyms who are like filming themselves working out. I get it's a generational thing perhaps, but I have no idea what that must be like. Cause I would shoot myself the very few times that I've had to, film stuff for social media. It feels, it just feels really, you're like… almost like you're using the bathroom and taking a picture of it. It's such a private moment for me. And I guess some people don't see it that way, but for me, I do my martial arts training it's really that way as well. It's something that it's such a defining aspect of who I am. It's what taught me the resilience. It taught me the idea of hard work equals results and that you don't strive towards results, you strive towards mastery comes through practice repetition. That all those key concepts and ways of looking at the world come from, I'd say my martial art background. If you asked me, like, in my personal self, how do I define myself? I'd probably define myself first as a martial artist. And everything else comes somewhere down the road on that scale. But photographing martial arts is difficult because there's an interesting phenomenon that happens. I think when someone moves, and different people move different ways. When a dancer moves, there's a deliberate, there is a deliberation to every single component of where the body is and how the body is. And when I say ‘dancer’, I'm saying someone who's, let's say, classically trained or someone who is heavily contemporarily trained. And it doesn't translate into all forms of dance. And it was someone, a break dancer, for example, they look fantastic as a whole in a video, but if you freeze just one frame of that video, it looks almost epileptic. You don't have that same sense of, “Oh my God. look at that perfect moment of time.” Whereas with dance, when you freeze everything at one two-hundredth per second, you're able to see a world that you're not really aware of. It’s like these micro-moments that you miss that first time when someone jumps and they get to that Apogee where, gravity is just about to start bringing them back down and everything is in suspension. And with a martial art, Ninjitsu, and Ninjitsu is about conservation of energy. So, it should look like you're not doing anything. It's not going to be flowery. There's no big, beautiful movements. It doesn't look like you're…. it's very much not designed for the movies. If I was going to… if I was going to choreograph or someone came to me and said, “Hey, I'd like you to choreograph a fight scene for me.” I’ve actually choreographed fights scenes. I have to think outside of how I was taught, which is very much efficiency, which doesn't translate into very much in those micro moments the way let's say dance does. Doesn't… having worked with so many, I've even worked with some… so many people would do more urban dance and trying to find a way to promote them. It's not, it wasn't for lack of trying, it was really just a realization that photography wasn't the medium to express the greatness of what I was seeing. And I think it's that thing, if I'm not able to really take that feeling that I get from seeing someone move, and put it through the camera sensor, and create something that projects that as well, then I'm always going to do more. I think that martial arts is like that, from what I've seen so far.

Tia Imani Hanna: That makes sense. I don't think I've ever actually seen Ninjitsu performed is, like in kata or any… I don't know what you call it if it's not kata. Cause I studied karate, so that's all I know is kata, but I've never seen it done outside of a movie, which is never what it is. So, I don't even know what it looks like.

Kevin Richardson: And there's not really kata, in that sense. There's no, you don't have any… and again, when we say the word Ninjitsu, it's such a broad, such a broad umbrella of different things. It's a traditional Japanese martial art, which is designed to be done with partners. So, one person is the attacker, and one person is defending and vice versa, but it has to have another person. It can't really be done without a context. It's not like a sword movement where you're cutting the sky. Even the sort of movements the way I was taught. It's really about cutting. You have the sword to cut, to actually cut something. You learn to cut. You cut. You cut. You learn how to not cut, how to mess up your cuts. How to do horrible cuts? And one day those cuts become effortless and maybe taking photographs of me cutting a bale of straw, a makiwara would be interesting perhaps, but I don't know. I think I'm just not there yet.

Tia Imani Hanna: It would be one of those projects to play with. It would be interesting to have somebody film you do it and from different angles and then you can see if there's anything worth capturing,

Kevin Richardson: And therein lies the problem as well. The control freak being filmed by somebody else. Oh my gosh! How is that even possible? That could never happen. I look back and, even looking back at the photographers I work with when I was a bodybuilder, when I was much younger. I don't know how I stood still because I really like to be in charge of how things come out and everything else. But again, back then, I couldn't care less. I really didn’t care. I was… I cared about composition. I cared about art history, but actual things like photography, not so much, not really. But today, no. It would be very difficult to do that. And the person would have to have the same vision I had, which is not easy. Every photographer, you can take two photographers and shoot the same thing, and each person brings their gear, and each person brings their lights or no lights, whatever they shoot, and you get two completely different images of the same scene. Because photography, at least for me, it's not a representation of what's in front of you. It's more a representation of what I feel about what's in front of me. And I think that's how it is. And it's interesting that, at the end of the day, I'm a very… I'm still that shy kid that I was when I started bodybuilding all those years ago and I've worked to keep myself that shy kid. Because I kind of like that shy kid. I don't wanna let go of that shy kid. That shy kid keeps me humble and it makes me aware of the fact that I'm no better than anybody else. And that it's just so important to be aware of the quiet person in the room and not always be the loudest in the room. I think I like that aspect of who I was and who I try to still be. So, it could just be simply that I'm shy.

Tia Imani Hanna: It's interesting that you say that because, how tall are you? Six foot?

Kevin Richardson: Yeah. 6-foot, even.

Tia Imani Hanna: Okay. So, you're six feet, and you have these muscles, and you wear a superhero T-shirt. I'm sorry, but somebody is going to see you and look at you in stare, probably, “Wow! Look at those muscles. He's really tall. Wow! What is he wearing?” I'm sorry.

Kevin Richardson: Therein lies the conflict therein lies the conflict. I only wear the superhero outfits when I train my clients and every year, whenever spring came along, and the weather started to get a little bit warmer. It was always that one day when the coats come off and I'd be on the train and usually I'm monitoring my laptop and I'm working on an article or writing something, and everyone is staring at me and I'm wondering, “Why are they staring at me? What's so strange? Why are they staring at me?” Then you realize, wait a minute, I'm dressed in a Superman, Spider-Man, Batman, Black Panther outfit, skin-tight, muscles popping out. Of course, they’re staring at me! But you get so used to wearing a coat over everything for most of the year that you're moving around, and you forget about it. But when it gets too warm to be able to cover everything up, you have to deal with those moments. So, sometimes I'll put a t-shirt on over everything. If I'm thinking, I just put a t-shirt on. Just to be a little bit less.

Tia Imani Hanna: It's just funny. Cause there's a part of you you're mostly shy, I get that, but there's a… there's another person inside of you. It's ‘look at me now’.

Kevin Richardson: Oh, definitely. Definitely. It's huge. This huge… this huge polar opposite. Somehow, they have to find a way to meet in the middle and not drive me completely crazy in some ways, but it works. Listen, if you're onstage in your underwear, no matter how shy you are, there is part of you that wants some form of attention. There's something in there. You can't say it’s not in there. It's there. It's definitely there, but I think that what I like, and I think the superhero thing that maybe something that I always related to is the idea of you get to take it off. Like when I come home, I'm just dad and dad’s just goofy. That's just dad. Yeah. dad has muscles and everything else, but he's just dad, I think that I kinda liked that. And I remember I used to work in social services, and I would purposefully wear clothing that obscured my physique, so you couldn't tell that I was a bodybuilder. It was so extreme that if I competed in a competition and was featured in the magazines, I'd go to the magazine store on the corner and buy every single issue that I was in, just in case one of the people who live in the building I was working in walked over there and was looking into the magazine and saw it, just in case. I'd really go to some extreme measures to make sure that I kept that identity separate. And I think that's how I've managed a lot of things and might have it like separate identities because it's interesting when someone sees the muscles, and they see the muscles and they react to it, it's great and it’s inspiring, but I'm not sure if it's all I am and how I define myself. If I close my eyes, I don't see muscles. I just see Kevin and Kevin is a little more than muscles, I think.

Tia Imani Hanna: Of course, you're a lot more than that. I think that it takes so much dedication just to do all these things that you do. I think it's inspiring, but at the same time, it's like just doing the one thing, just being able to stay fit and nutritionally sound and all of that, takes so much effort and I think you've been writing articles about that stuff for a long time is really helpful for people. It helped me out a lot. I've gone way off the bandwagon. I'm trying to get back on. But yeah, it helped me a ton. Because when we were working out together, boy I was super strong. I remember doing squats and then with a weight, 50 pounds, a 50-pound weight and jumping with it and having hit my head on the ceiling because we worked out and I was like, “Wow!”. I remember working out we did a row and then the weight was ridiculous, and it was so hard that I cried while I was doing it, but I felt so good that I could do it, it made me cry. I was like, oh my gosh, I didn't know I could do that. And you pushed me beyond my limits. And that was really great. It scared me in a way, cause I didn't think I could do it and then I did do it, so that was amazing. You just have a lot of dedication and determination and you're able to help other people see their own greatness. And I thank you for that. Keep doing what you're doing.

Kevin Richardson: Thank you. Thank you so much.

Tia Imani Hanna: I'm really pleased that you're expanding out into the photography world, but I do think, I really think it'd be interesting to see your take on taking photos, even if it's not you, taking photos of martial artists, taking photos of the Parkour guys, taking photos of the natural movement or nature movement people. I think that would just be another realm where you're still hitting those same places. Cause they do some amazing stuff, skate boarders, the ski guys. You have… I don't know how you'd do that cause you have to be out on the ski mountain to do that, you know, but that kind of stuff was aerialist or… aerialist would be cool. Cause they know there's some places in New York where people do that.

Kevin Richardson: I shot aerialists before. Yeah.

Tia Imani Hanna: Have you? Okay.

Kevin Richardson: Yeah. We actually… we got a rooftop overlooking the Empire State Building. We did some work over there with some really fantastic photographs. But I think that I missed… I think I missed, in some ways, I missed my photography age by a couple of years. There was a time when photographers were flown across the world to shoot and there were these huge budgets for all these fantastic photographs. We look at things like Life magazine back in the day. They had these wonderful photographs in all these exotic parts of the world. And you'd have a photograph of, let's say an actor, suspended by a string on a helicopter and the other photographers, another helicopter picture with the lights on the other side. It's really high budget stuff and I'd love to do stuff like that. And I think that sometimes the scale of my imagination is such that I think that I need to be able to afford to realize some of the ideas I have in my head, but I could possibly see some of those things being done one day. I'm pretty sure. I'm only 46 and I only started shooting seven years ago. So, in a way, I see myself very much still in the child's phase of my artistic expression. I have a long way to go and there's no telling what I would end up being. When I was seven, I didn't think I'd be a bodybuilder. When I was 25, I didn't think I'd be a photographer.

Tia Imani Hanna: And you didn't even like it. So, you've come so far since then and I can just see it. There's going to be things that hit you in the face and you’re going to go “Oh shoot. I could do that.” And then it'll be there. It'll be this new, amazing thing. I see that you make things happen. You set plans into motion. You've branded yourself really well with Naturally Intense that can become anything that you need it to be because you've branded you, which is huge. You're marketing yourself. You're out there. People know your name and they're starting to know your photography. So, congratulations, that you've been doing so well with that. And where can we find you online?

Kevin Richardson: You can find Dance as Art on Instagram @dance_ as _art, ‘dance as art’. And again, and the bodybuilding and personal training is at Naturally Intense, naturallyintense.net And on Instagram it’s @naturally_intense. That's my personal training / bodybuilding Instagram. So, if you want to see pictures of Kevin taking pictures of himself and feeling really uncomfortable about it, that's where you go. But I make sure I say something inspiring every single time I post. There've been people out there who've looked to it for inspiration. And with photography, I try to inspire with my photographs, whereas with bodybuilding and personal training, I try to inspire people with the photographs, yes, but also with a little bit of words. Absolutely more difficult because a photo really is worth a thousand words and getting those thousand words in can be difficult at times, but I just try to inspire people. And when someone says, “What do you really do?” At the end of the day, I think what I really do is I look around, try to see how can I help with what I've done? How can I help make the world a little bit more the way I'd like it to be? And just keep on doing that.

Tia Imani Hanna: Fantastic. Thank you so much for joining me today and sharing your expertise and your shyness and your wild man at the same time. Thank you again, and thanks for being on Tia Time.

Tia Imani Hanna: Thank you for joining us this week on Tia Time with Artists. Make sure to visit our website, tiaviolin.com, where you can subscribe to the show in iTunes and never miss an episode. Please leave us a rating wherever you listen to podcasts. We really appreciate your comments, and we'll mine them to bring you more amazing episodes. I’d like to thank this inaugural season's sponsors: The folks at Jazz Alliance of Mid-Michigan or JAMM, Michigan ArtShare, a program of Michigan State University Extension is a partner in supporting the Tia Time podcast, and Shambones Music. Without their support this podcast would not be possible. Thank you so much. If you would also like to contribute to the show, you can find us on https://www.patreon.com/TiaTime1. If you want to continue the conversation about topics discussed on the show or start new ones with like-minded people, join us at the Tia Time Lounge on Facebook. Thank you for listening. See you next week at Tia Time!

+ Transcription

Tia Time with Artists, with guest Tariq Gardner – recorded 10/23/2020

Tia Imani Hanna: Welcome to Tia Time with Artists, the weekly podcast where we discuss the methods, challenges, and real-life experiences of living our creative dreams. What kind of creative warrior are you? Musician? Filmmaker? Painter? Choreographer? Poet? Sculptor? Fashionista? Let’s talk about it right now. I’m your host, Tia Imani Hanna.

Tia Imani Hanna: Welcome to Tia time with artists and my guest today is Tariq Gardner, who is an amazing drummer and composer and arranger and all-around amazing instrumentalists. So welcome to Tia time. Thanks for being here today.

Tariq Gardner: Thank you. Glad to be here.

Tia Imani Hanna: I got to see you working with my Naima Shamborguer on her “Young Lions” project. Tell us a little bit about how that came to be.

Tariq Gardner: Well, it came to be… she really wanted to do something as an homage to Geri Allen. She was a fantastic Detroit legacy pianist, and she was very much about…Geri was very much about, you know, bringing on the… bringing on the newer generation, the younger generation under her wing, giving them opportunities. And Naima is right in the same alley. So, she just got together a whole bunch of us young musicians from the city and really just wanted to see what we have and put some of our music out there in the world.

Tia Imani Hanna: Okay. Was there any particular tune that you composed that was on that CD?

Tariq Gardner: Yes. On the CD a composition of mine, entitled “See A New Day” was on there. I wrote that as a kind of like a suicide awareness song. I wrote it in honor of one of my friends who passed a few years ago in my freshman year in college.

Tia Imani Hanna: Hmmm…And that was a suicide, huh?

Tariq Gardner: Yeah.

Tia Imani Hanna: So, what did… “See A New Day,” what was the message that you were trying to get across. There weren’t any lyrics to this song? So, what was…

Tariq Gardner: Right.

Tia Imani Hanna: So, what was…

Tariq Gardner: What it signified, really, for me was trials and tribulations come on the day to day, but it's important to be able to see what comes next because the farther things spiral down the higher than they could also spiral up. It's always a two-way street in terms of life. So, I try to keep myself reminded of that and anybody else is struggling with that type of thing, mental illness.

[music from “See A New Day” playing]

Tia Imani Hanna: Okay. So, what kinds of things, like, I know during Covid, a lot of us have been, or pretty much all of us have been, locked down and a lot of the gigs got canceled and has this been…

Tariq Gardner: Indeed.

Tia Imani Hanna: …a time to write more or to just to fight depression? Or what kinds of things are you doing to keep your mental health strong?

Tariq Gardner: Yeah, a lot of my time just to kind of keep things, keep things on the up and up mentally. A lot of it has been writing music and I've been doing some more producing. A lot of ideating with a couple of my, like, closer friends that are kind of in my germ pod to play and make some music together. And, honestly, I got back into exercise a lot heavier during Covid. It really does… its really done me a lot of good in terms of keeping my mind clear and just, like, keeping the ideas that I want for when I want them to come out, instead of they're just them just La-La, just rolling around in there.

Tia Imani Hanna: Okay. Sure. So, what does a day look like for you right now during COVID? Yeah, walk me through a day.

Tariq Gardner: See a day right now. I'll get up before afternoon, mostly before noon. I try to be good about that. And I'll hit some exercises, do some burpees. Myself sweating and then get to the drum set and I start, start warming up, start my warm-up and I might have on… I might listen to some stories. That's another thing that I do, is kind of like pass the day by a little bit, listen to some stories. Then, I live with my folks, which is great living in an artistic household. I talk to talk to my mother and my father. My mother is Marion Hayden. She has a bassist. I'll ask her if she needs any assistance with certain… with her teaching or musical responsibilities. I'm on deck with support. Basically. I get to do some of that. And then, with my father is an abstract painter and a sculptor. So, a lot of my work from him, I ended up going to his studio, moving just a lot of wood around or cleaning stuff up. So, that'll be a pretty good time. Then I might eat a lot.

Tia Imani Hanna: I can see that. Are you a healthy eater or are you a junk food junkie?

Tariq Gardner: I try to try to keep things balanced. I tend to try to keep my… I try to keep my earlier in the day eating just pretty much limited to, like, apples or just fruits and vegetables, so that I can just eat terrible food late at night. I can just Coney myself to sleep.

Tia Imani Hanna: So, are you a true jazz musician? Are you a true night owl, or do you try to get up before noon? Do you like the late night better than morning?

Tariq Gardner: Yeah, I really like the late night. I'm really, like, nocturnal, especially in terms of things like riding and ideating. Cause I find that's when a lot of my music tends to come and especially when you really get started working on something, the night can just melt away really quickly. You can just be on an idea and putting harmony to a melody or putting a rhythm together and all other things and you just look up and it's 4:00 AM.

Tia Imani Hanna: Oh yeah. So, are you when you're writing, are you writing in one of those programs… one of the orchestration-type programs, or are you just writing by hand and recording things? Are you doing… how are you doing it?

Tariq Gardner: I do a pretty mixed bag, but typically I have software. I use Sibelius. But typically, I use that for things like things like transcription or really after it's like down on paper already. I normally will hand write something first and then put it into my software after I have it basically complete. Or then, I also sing it to my phone, use voice memos, but then there's a whole process of actually putting it down and I'm like, “Was that really what I was trying to do?” And I have to flesh it out. It’s pretty varied. It does good for the whole neuroplasticity thing.

Tia Imani Hanna: Oh, for sure. Do you find that you do this every day? Do you write every day or put voice memos down every day or is it just more of a ‘when the muse hits’ kind of a thing for you?

Tariq Gardner: A lot of times, it's when the muse hits. I'm not as super structured about it at this point, but I do feel like I'm pretty consistent in terms of having a few ongoing compositions that I have in the works. There's a few… like right now for me, my newest challenge is starting to do things like, like song writing and like lyric writing. That's never come very easy to me. So, stuff like that is a little more ongoing, cause I'm just out here trying not to be corny. You know what I'm saying?

Tia Imani Hanna: Yeah. I always struggle with when people say ‘corny’, cause I never know what that is because, I dunno, when I was coming up, people would say ‘corny’, if it actually did have meaning, or if it was sweet, or if it was about something beautiful, they thought it was corny. And then as they got older, then that wasn't corny anymore. So, I never know, you know, what ‘corny’ is? I’m just… what in your definition is corny at this point in time?

Tariq Gardner: To me it's pretty subjective. But, but it's along…it’s along those lines of what you said a little bit. I don't know. I for sure believe that it's important to have music that is sweet and meaningful, but I think that, like, at the point… for me, at least at this point in time, I think the need for that is also… it’s necessary to have, like, several maybe strings of meaning I enjoy, like, I feel like ‘corny’ to me it’s just not clever enough maybe, or there might not be enough double entendre or… or there's like maybe the sentiment can be used in a more, more contemporary turn of phrase, this kind of like within the zeitgeist more technically.

Tia Imani Hanna: Okay. So, with more within the current zeitgeist, is that what you mean? Like, it's more current phrases and things that you could use.

Tariq Gardner: Yeah. Cause corny… cause there's nothing to Stevie Wonder…there’s nothing that Stevie Wonder has ever wrote that’s corny, but they all… they all speak to some deeper things and some deeper meaning that's like kind of trying to cut into that crust of what that is for me as a songwriter.

Tia Imani Hanna: Is there any… do you think of a topic first or do you just hear a melody or rhythm? Is it a moving meditation? Cause I know when I write, it tends to be because I'm walking down the street and then I have a rhythm that I'm walking to. And then that creates a baseline, and then that creates… or it's just a melody and then I build from the melody. But for me, I know if I'm walking, I'm going to get something.

Tariq Gardner: Yeah. I like that.

Tia Imani Hanna: How does it hit you?

Tariq Gardner: It can hit me in a few different ways. Like, in terms of like lyrics, it kinda, it just kinda has to like pop into my head. And, you know, it’s normally just starting with like a phrase or something like that, but, but that's still something I'm fleshing out in general, like lyric writing. But in terms of something like compositionally, like, starting from the piano, I typically will go from harmony first. I'll go from like chord changes first. And from there, like, I can make a melody. And from there think of how I want it to show itself by virtual rhythm. I have a few compositions that are just like, it started as just neat voicings I was doing. And then after so long, I was like, “You know what? This is like a whole song.” Or also every time… I tend to write songs, like, for people. Like, I have a lot of my songs are ended up being dedications. So, when I think of somebody, like, what comes to mind or, like, how would they do this? Like, I'm really into… especially like writing songs for some of my musician friends too. Cause I have them… their playing in mind. I think about like a melody that they might like, it was a few different ways. Sometimes it might just come out of a dream. Sometimes it might be because I'm just exhausted and a little bit delirious.

[laughter]

Tia Imani Hanna: I've had that happen. Not always bad. I know there's stories of famous jazz composers who they'll go to sleep, and I can't remember who it is right now, but he told the story and, he… was somebody like Horace Silver or somebody of that, you know, that stature and he went to sleep, he had a dream, he heard this beautiful melody. He wrote it down and then he went back to sleep so he could develop it in the morning. And then he came back, and he was so excited about it and he's playing it. And he says, “Oh man, I thought this was a new song. This was like… this was “Autumn Leaves!” or something like that. So, it was… that does happen. That's happened to me too. I thought I wrote something beautiful and then found out that some other songs that I already was playing or something like that, but it's just in there. Yeah. So, no, that's great. So, you come from harmony or melody or chordal structure first, but it doesn't ever come from rhythm as a drummer first.

Tariq Gardner: Yeah. And a lot of ways… and a lot of ways I feel like that that aspect can always be generally added. And the melody aspect always inherently has had a rhythmic aspect. So, for me, it's just like choosing my flavor because there can be… any song can be had and so many different types of fields. And so many fields can feel right for a song. Like, especially coming up, with so many songs that can like, you know, swing songs can speak just as much in a Latin vibe or even as a ballad. Or a certain song sound just as good in a hip hop vibe as they do in a swing, in a swing circumstance. So, I leave it up to who I'm collaborating with at the time and like what their strong suits may be as for, like, how I'm going to interpret it. But typically, if I'm thinking about, like, maybe something going into the studio, I definitely will have something specific in mind. But there's a lot, a lot of options.

Tia Imani Hanna: You’re in an artistic household, for sure. So, does listening to, hanging out with mom growing up, was that like, “Oh, I'm gonna play these drums so I can play with mom” or what, what pushed you to the drums as opposed to like playing the bass? Or playing the piano or a horn or something?

Tariq Gardner: It's just, the drums always kind of seemed like that option for me, oddly enough. Like, I would always be… when I was, like, a very small child, I'd be, like… I’d be sitting on the drummer's lap when we were in rehearsals. I guess they were giving my mother a break because I was a clingy baby out here. But I'm just used to like that point of view of being in front of the drums or being behind the drums. And just moving your limbs. And I just really love how much that feeling communicates. And Gayelynn McKinney gave me my first drum set at the age of three. I don't know what I did on it, but I've always had… I've always had drums around me and some rhythm and rhythms to imitate. Then, like, a rehearsal kid, all my life going to rehearsals and going to concerts. Might not have known, like the gravity of some of the concerts that I had attended, but just being there and soaking it up, I've always known, you know, what I wanted… what I wanted to play, how I wanted to deliver as the rhythm keeper.

Tia Imani Hanna: It's a testament to good example for parenting and the village raising a youth because you had these aunties around and uncles around and who came and played music in your house or you were there at their houses or at rehearsals and concerts and lots of exposure. You also had your dad with the art and everything. So, I'm surprised that that's not happening too. You're not like painting and playing with one hand and drum sticking with the other and… it still could happen. It still could happen.

Tariq Gardner: It's definitely a possibility. A definite possibility. On that side, I feel like a lot of what I ended up getting from my father and his art is, like, the aesthetic… is the aesthetic process of, like, how best and why, like, art can be… how much can be said through, like, movement. What is the shape and what is the line? What is the texture. That's a lot of ways of speaking to me through his art and, of course, I do doodle in my free time. But so, between the him and my older brother, I just feel like there's enough visual art going on around me… around this household.

Tia Imani Hanna: So, you had to represent on the other side. Yeah. Yeah. That's good. That's good. What projects are you wanting to do that you haven't had the chance to do yet?

Tariq Gardner: Well, this year I was planning on recording my first album as a leader. So that ship blew off with the wind there. But I'm really excited to get in the studio and record that when the time comes. Because I have about 15 to 20 compositions. And so, I'm excited be able to narrow it down a little bit to figure out what I want to record with my group. I'm really excited to be doing things with my group again. To see a couple of venues are opening back up. I have some songs that I do in different versions, different reharmonization. So, I'm pretty… I'm really looking forward to having that out there and just hearing some of the cat's interpretations of it, as far as my group goes. And then, otherwise, I'm just really excited for a couple of other groups that I'm in. I'm in a really good friend of mine, Mario Sulaksana. I'm on his album. We actually recorded that. We actually managed to hammer that one out in January, so that's going to be coming actually pretty soon, before the end of the year. So, I'm excited to see what comes with that. And I'm working with a really great artists out of Ann Arbor and her group, Dani Darling. And we’re going to be getting in the studio for one of her newer projects and the next couple of months and I'm really looking forward to that.

Tia Imani Hanna: What's the name of your group? It’s “Evening Star?” or is that the group that you’re…?

Tariq Gardner: Tariq Gardner’s Evening Star.

Tia Imani Hanna: All right. I think you sent me a track. What's the name of that track?

Tariq Gardner: I sent you the track entitled... I think I sent you a couple. I sent you “Angel Girl.”

Tia Imani Hanna: Okay. Is that the Evening Star group?

Tariq Gardner: These are some of my produced tunes. I also… I produce on Logic. These things can be found on my SoundCloud. That's, that's on my SoundCloud, Riq Passion, R I Q Passion.

Tia Imani Hanna: Okay. All right. Well, that's a different project. So, so you're producing through Logic. What does that mean? It means it's just you and the computer or you and keyboards, or how does that work?

Tariq Gardner: So that's a door. That's the software that I'm using for production. And so typically I'm using… I'm just using a mini converter just to plug my computer directly into the keyboard and I'm just hammering out just from some of their sound samples, their sound library, I'm making melodies and chords and beats. And then I've also taken up this year recording some live drums just in lieu of everything becoming virtual. So, there's a couple of tracks that are going to be coming out that I've made. One is called “The Fugitive” and that's going to be released very soon, where I created the track and I'm just, I'm just playing some drums over the whole composition. I'm excited for that one.

Tia Imani Hanna: Yeah, that sounds like it's pretty exciting work to do. So, you're going there, you're working at home, you're finding melodies and finding rhythms that work, and then you're able to just put the whole thing together yourself. That's basically how that works.

Tariq Gardner: Yeah.

Tia Imani Hanna: Okay.

Tariq Gardner: So, it's, it's very empowering, at the same time, like daunting, I have complete creative control and all these options. And it's also, like, “I have complete creative control.”

Tia Imani Hanna: Yeah. Yeah. When, when the choices get unlimited, then it's harder. You have to actually create restrictions. You have to create a box to stay in so that you don't go off into too many different directions. So yes. Understand that. Are you familiar with the artist named Jacob Collier?

Tariq Gardner: Yeah.

Tia Imani Hanna: Yeah. Because it just brings that to mind. Cause he's, he goes online, and he does all of those sessions. I don't know if it’s Logic or what he's doing, but he's just throwing… he just records whole pieces with layers and layers and layers and layers and layers. And it's unbelievable. It’s like “Wow.” So…

Tariq Gardner: Yep.

Tariq Gardner: [unintelligible] I'm like, “Good on you, mate.” It’s very inspiring to see a cat like him out here. Just being a protege of Herbie Hancock in the 21st century. I've seen him a few times in the Quincy Jones documentary, which that was also very inspiring for me during this time was the documentary on Quincy Jones. Just the amount of work ethic and just self-determination. Really that's really all it boiled down to. All the grace. That cat… that cat, like, had like a blood clot on stage and he didn't fall over. I'm like, you never catch slipping. You've never catch Quincy Jones slipping...

Tia Imani Hanna: Yeah. He's amazing. Was it Jamie Fox in one of those biographies that talks about… and you showed up at a party and Quincy was like, “Oh yeah, meet all these famous people?” And he's… and they're just in his living room. And he was like, what? You know, it's like, who knew that life was like this? Or could be like this?

Tariq Gardner: Yeah, exactly. It is very… just very casual. Just, I think I'm going to invite Barack Obama and Michelle Obama. Yeah. That.

Tia Imani Hanna: To have that kind of swagger and be able to back it up. That's amazing.

Tariq Gardner: Exactly. Just to see like the fruits of your labor, just over the years. It's fantastic. So, this is a big inspiration for me, especially in my age with being a 20 something millennial as an artist can be a… it's a different time. It's a different time to be a 20 something.

Tia Imani Hanna: That’s true.

Tariq Gardner: I think. It might not be. I feel like it is.

Tia Imani Hanna: It is. It definitely is. You're dealing with things people didn't have to deal with, but my generation, what, probably 30 years ahead of you, something like that, maybe 25 somewhere in there, but we had AIDS to deal with.

Tariq Gardner: Yeah.

Tia Imani Hanna: And we still have it. It's not gone away, but it's at least at the time when I was coming up, it was a death sentence.

Tariq Gardner: That was like novel at the time. It was just a whole new disease.

Tia Imani Hanna: Yeah. That nobody knew anything about it. Nobody knew how to work with it, but now there's drugs and people have survived for 30 and 40 years now with AIDS, full blown AIDS, and HIV. But back when I was coming up, that… everybody was dying left and right. Crazy time for people. So, it was kind of, it was COVID of the day.

Tariq Gardner: That's a daunting reality.

Tia Imani Hanna: Yeah. And the social dilemma was the part that it was in the lesbian gay BI community more, is where it was showing up first. And so, there was a whole stigma against it and against getting treatment because they said, well, it's just a gay disease, so therefore we're not going to help you. That was the sentiment of the time. So, there's some parallels to what's going on now with COVID and the Black Lives Matter movement and all of that. Every age has their fight.

Tariq Gardner: Yeah, definitely. It's true. It's true. You know, also another thing that I'm pretty excited to get back into again is, for several months during the summer I was protesting in Detroit with “Detroit Will Breathe” on the streets. So that was… I felt like I was doing something very, very important to work over there, being on their drum line and everything. And following the chant was like a very, very much unique thing as a drummer. It’s different from any marching band that I've ever been in because we were not setting the tempo per se, we're following the chant. And so, we're following, like, the rhythm and language first. And so, all we're doing is just stirring things up so that everybody can keep moving forward with knowing full well what we're here for. You know, it keeps people, like, pretty much on focus for the cause that we're doing, that we’re doing, you know. There’s so many different chants and so many different rhythmic phrases that are coming out every time. So that's also another thing that's pretty much kept me inspired during this time too.

Tia Imani Hanna: It's like it's so needed for people to be out there marching and protesting and fighting, but at the same time, there's a lot of fear around that because we don't want to lose you. We don't want to see another young brother hurt or harmed or killed, you know? So, making that choice to go out there and do that, you know, it takes a lot of courage. So, I appreciate that. I appreciate that. When you work on your music in future or even presently, are you taking that into account? Is that part of your psyche you think when you're writing? Are there more songs of protests in there or are there things inspired by protests and the fight for justice lately?

Tariq Gardner: Well, I've found that it's very holistic, the way it's seeped into my head. The way that it's seeped into my subconscious and everything. It was very intense. The way that I've ended up finding it is just through…just in the back of my head, the way a beat might come to me, the way a rhythm might be played, like, literally. And also, where am I… the way I might react to certain things when I'm playing live as well. But it's just honestly given me a lot of context for those that came before me. And you know how tough it must have been, how tough it must've been for generations before me in the 20th century. I have a whole different perspective and I'm just thinking about really making art that's conducive to biomes of, like, biomes of safety, biomes of cleanliness, because I feel like that's just one of the most important things. When you're out here as a person of color, as a woman, as somebody in the LGBT community, feeling that… feeling like every day, when you go out of your house that you might be looked at or discriminated against. Just making it a happy place, a safe place for someone to feel like they could call it some sort of home or some respite.

Tia Imani Hanna: Yeah. That's a worthy thing to do. I feel like that's our place as artists is create a culture of a world we want to see and by just creating that vibration out into the world in either it'd be a color vibration or movement vibration or a rhythm vibration, or a writing, or a spoken word vibration that creates that culture into reality. And then we just keep doing it more and more. The more we make, the more that's out there, the more the world changes. And people might say that that's ‘magic’, in the sense, but it's also just pure science because it's sending out a vibration that's vibrating everybody else at that vibration that you're at, as opposed to, if there's a lower vibration then everybody goes there, then we're in trouble. So, we have to raise the vibration higher because music is going to bring things up. It does not bring things down. If you vibrate something at any pitch at all, it's gonna vibrate everything in the room at that pitch. That's just science.

Tariq Gardner: Yeah, it’s going to resonate.

Tia Imani Hanna: Yeah, it is. So, if we resonate everybody at a higher level, it's going to happen. So, every artist I see or talk to I just say, “Keep making art. It makes all the difference in the world.” And people don't think, in the United States especially, they don't like to fund us, as a country. But we have to keep going anyway and just make art because we make art because we make art. That's what we do. But if we have that added purpose of, ‘I'm changing the vibration of this world to be raised up’, then we're, you know, we’re going to do great things. So, I see that you're doing that, you're using that pathway and thank you for doing that.

Tariq Gardner: Thank you. It’s what we have to do is just like how a Mockingbird tweets or how a Woodpecker pecks wood. Just is natural. It’s what we have to do. Make it so no matter how the career has unfolded itself or how whatever benchmarks of capitalistic says we want to achieve; the art going to take care of you the art is going to take care of itself. And I feel like it was always gonna take care of the person. So, it’s always going to take care of the artist.

Tia Imani Hanna: You keep taking care of your mental health, your physical health. We’re going to keep working on the social health, working on the cultural health. It's, all going to be a better world. As far as projects that are on your bucket list, do you have anything that you've said that” Oh, I have this thing that I'm going to do someday, no matter what.” Do you have something like that on your mind or in the back of your mind.

Tariq Gardner: I'd really love to see some of my work, like, featured with the Metropol Orchestra. I think that will be really dope. I love to make music with Nicholas Payton or Robert Glasper. I love to be one of their, become one of their proteges. That'd be awesome. Honestly, that's all I can think of right now. I know as soon as we stop recording, “Oh, you know what, I wanted to be in… I wanted to star in a feature movie for Pixar or Jean Michel Basquiat!”

Tia Imani Hanna: There used to be a television show many years ago on public broadcasting and it was called “Meeting of the Minds” and they would have different characters from history have a dinner party and they talk to each other. So, they would have, like, Robespierre from the French revolution and Joan of Arc and Thomas Edison all sit down at dinner, and they'd be in costume and they'd talk. So, if you were going to have a “Meeting of the Minds” dinner, who would you have at that table?

Tariq Gardner: My dinner…

Tia Imani Hanna: Could be anybody living you're dead.

Tariq Gardner: Wow. So, I would definitely love to share a space with Elvin Jones and John Coltrane. Really, especially somebody… if I could get him to talk, I love to get somebody, like, really compelling, like Phineas Newborn, the pianist, just to hear some of his take on things. Especially, as well, like, philosophers, I'm really into philosophers and historians. Like Dr. Francis Cress Welsing. I’d love to share space with her. And, and somebody like, like John Paul Sartre, that will be my iconoclast. I want to go there and just…and it's all over my head and I love it.

Tia Imani Hanna: That would be an amazing conversation for sure. You'd rather have a tape recorder in the room or, you know, your phone or something to record that sucker. That'd be great. So, along those lines, Desert Island Discs?

Tariq Gardner: Okay. Okay. That’s gonna be tough. Okay. So, we have “We Three,” Phineas Newborn, Roy Haynes, and Paul Chambers. We have also “See No Evil” by Wayne Shorter. We also would have… which was… not “Dinner Party.” God, it is such a tough one. It's such a tough one. The most recent “Chris Dave and the Drumheads” album, “Smoke Stack” by Andrew Hill. And “Working Together,” Lawrence Williams, Marcus Belgrave.

Tia Imani Hanna: That's… that’s awesome. Yeah, that's awesome, cause some of those I've never heard. So now I've got a new list. That's good. That's good. There's so many, there's so many. And so, you get stuck. You're like, gosh, I can't even remember the name of that particular one, but that one where this guy was playing this thing, because after a while the stuff gets in your brain and it's all mixed together, when you're, especially when you're creating.

Tariq Gardner: Right. And especially in like really youthful days where there's just so many amazing, like, live concerts that are not… you're not going to find anywhere else but You Tube.

Tia Imani Hanna: Exactly. So fantastic. So, tell us again about your new project that's going to be coming out soon.

Tariq Gardner: Yes. you can look for “The Fugitive” on my YouTube, Tariq Gardner. On my SoundCloud, “Reed Passion.” And on all my other social media, my Instagram “Royal.Riq,” and my Facebook “Tariq Gardner.”

Tia Imani Hanna: Thank you so much for talking with me today and being on the show. And I'm very excited to hear the new work that you do and to watch you continue to make good music and create culture in the world. So, thank you for being on Tia Time.

Tariq Gardner: Thank you for bringing me here, Tia. This was a great time. Really glad we got a chance to chat.

Tia Imani Hanna: Thank you for joining us this week on Tia Time with Artists. Make sure to visit our website, tiaviolin.com, where you can subscribe to the show in iTunes and never miss an episode. Please leave us a rating wherever you listen to podcasts. We really appreciate your comments, and we'll mine them to bring you more amazing episodes.

I’d like to thank this inaugural season's sponsors: The folks at Jazz Alliance of Mid-Michigan or JAMM, Michigan ArtShare, a program of Michigan State University Extension is a partner in supporting the Tia Time podcast, and Shambones Music. Without their support this podcast would not be possible. Thank you so much. If you would also like to contribute to the show, you can find us on https://www.patreon.com/TiaTime1.

If you want to continue the conversation about topics discussed on the show or start new ones with like-minded people, join us at the Tia Time Lounge on Facebook.

Thank you for listening. See you next week at Tia Time!

+ Transcription

Tia Time with Artists, with guest Penny Wells - recorded on 10-31-2020

Tia Imani Hanna: Welcome to Tia Time with Artists, the weekly podcast where we discuss the methods, challenges, and real-life experiences of living our creative dreams. What kind of creative warrior are you? Musician? Filmmaker? Painter? Choreographer? Poet? Sculptor? Fashionista? Let’s talk about it right now. I’m your host, Tia Imani Hanna.

Tia Imani Hanna: Welcome to Tia Time. This week, my guest is Penny Wells, who is an amazing singer, songwriter, producer, and counselor, and my sister. Welcome Penny.

Penny Wells: Hey sister! Thank you so much for having me.

Tia Imani Hanna: Thank you so much for coming on the show. So, I am just really glad to have you here so we can have a nice conversation and the folks out there get to listen in a little bit. So, here we go. So, I wanted to ask you… we grew up in the same household. We know some of the same stories, but even though we're the children of the same parents and lived in the same house. We have different stories to tell. So, I wanted to hear your take on what gravitated you towards singing, as opposed to… because you also play the violin, and you play the piano.

Penny Wells: First off, I'm the baby of the family. And so, I got a chance and opportunity to watch my older siblings be musical. And as I came along, I got to… our brother, [Shawn] played the saxophone and oboe and piano, and then you were playing the violin and piano, and Jeannette [sister], flute and piano. And so, I got an opportunity to see how you all were on your instruments. And one of the biggest things… we talk about singing, but singing wasn't my first voice. Even though I sang, I wasn't really considered a singer until much later. But it was you Tia. It was… my big sister was playing the violin and I wanted to be just like her.

Tia Imani Hanna: Aww… [laughter]

Penny Wells: And so, I really got my musical ears from listening to you. And when I tell you Tia, you're a ‘bad’ girl and have always been very proficient in everything you do. I was like, okay, so how can I be like that? Cause I was the younger sister just messing up every step of the way and, really, music was just, it was so ingrained, like you said, in our lives. I can remember being out on our swing sets in the backyard just being free. That was like the greatest moments in my life, thinking back. We were free and we were singing and making up songs that didn't make any sense and harmonizing and, just music. Dad playing classical music through the house. Mom playing the guitar, singing Joan Baez songs on the stairs. I don't know if you remember that kind of stuff.

Tia Imani Hanna: I missed that. I don't remember that.

Penny Wells: Yeah, she would sit on the stairs and she was playing “Kumbaya” and just beautiful songs and it was just ingrained. Yeah, but I specifically remember me and you swinging on the swing set, making up songs, and then Jeannette might've been there too.

Tia Imani Hanna: Yep. Jeannette was there.

Penny Wells: But we would make up the funniest, kooky songs. And that was so freeing. I said, I knew that I wanted to do this, and I want to do music, period. It's just, what is life without it?

Tia Imani Hanna: True that. Well, we used to be on the swing set. I remember Dad gave us one of those Fisher-Price wind-up music boxes, and it just played one song over and over, and it had a little picture wheel that went around when it played the tune and we were singing on the swing set, we'd just be singing it back and forth, “Raindrops Keep Falling on my Head” [sung in a child-like voice] over, over, and over.

Penny Wells: That is hilarious. I didn't realize that. That makes sense. Okay.

Tia Imani Hanna: That's the song that it was, it's just so funny because you recently recorded that song. So, let's have a listen to it right now. [Penny Wells singing “Raindrops Keep Falling on my Head”] and hear it go being free on the swing set was really a riot and PBS was another thing. I know we used to watch the show called “The Big Blue Marble.”

Penny Wells: No, I don't remember that one. Now that was probably before me.

Tia Imani Hanna: We were all there together there was a song, and we sang that on the swing set too, but it was about the earth being a big blue marble. It was like an ecological show, you know PBS, but we liked the song. So, we just sang the song over and over, but you were really little, but we did sing it.

Penny Wells: Do you remember how it goes?

Tia Imani Hanna: [singing] “Big blue marble finds us when we're going far away will something… dah, dah.” [playing PBS version of “Big Blue Marble” song] We would sing it over and over.

Penny Wells: Oh, wow. That's so funny. I remember the song “Free to Be Just You and Me.” Now, that was one of those, I think it was a PBS special or one of those shows. [singing] “For you to be just you and me,” The word ‘free’ for me, it's so synonymous with my childhood and with music. Freedom. I might… I don't know if you know this, but my personal symbol is the kite because it signifies freedom and just allowing myself to be. And for so long, growing up, I was… I felt restricted. I felt judged. I felt so many different things as an artist, as a musician, as a singer. It wasn't until I was able to find my voice that I felt that freedom. And so, even fast forward, my very first CD and single is “Free to Walk Away.” So, that word has a lot of meaning for me, as I'm even talking to you, I see where I feel so much joy and happiness from knowing that I can be free. And freedom is really a state of mind. I work on that in myself all the time and so that, I hope, comes through in my music. But yeah. Freedom. Being free. {Penny Wells singing “Free to Walk Away”]

Tia Imani Hanna: Now, I wonder what is it you're being free from?

Penny Wells: Constructs. Judgments. Because as an artist, it's everything to be free, to be creative, to do exactly what's in your heart to do, as opposed to lining up with the commercial music, what's out there. Following this formula that everybody says is ‘the formula’ to being, to get a hit record. And that's… that had to go out the window for me, because I was, like, there is no satisfaction in that. I would not re-record something because some executives in industry said, “Oh, try this. That's not right.” No. If it doesn't resonate with you, it doesn't resonate with you. But this is my creation and I have the freedom… I've created this and take it or leave it. And that's where I am in my musical journey at this point in time. Which, it took a long time to get there, but that's where I am right now.

Tia Imani Hanna: Let's talk about that journey a little bit. So, you were more into playing the instruments because of watching us ahead of you coming up, but what happened that you differentiated off into really just being a singer?

Penny Wells: Yes, that's a great question Tia because that was a pivotal moment in my life where I changed from being an instrumentalist into a singer. And like I said, I was a late bloomer with singing. I went all the way through… I did some singing with choirs and such in elementary school, middle school, did a couple of solos, but nothing to speak of. But when I turned around, I think I was like 13 or 14, I was a part of a group called “Teen Profile.” And they really nurtured young teens to communicate. And to… it was a TV show. We did a radio show, and we had a TV spot on Channel 62. [Detroit] and I was a part of this community of students. So, Channel 62, WGPR. Channel 62 on Jefferson in Detroit and there were Dr. Mary Wilson, Dr. Wilkes, and Sylvia Moy, who was a prominent producer of Motown music. She was actually a co-writer on Stevie Wonders' “My Cherie Amour” and “You are the Sunshine of My Life.” And she decided that she was going to take some of us students that were in this communications program that had more abilities, and so I was a violinist and she heard me play, but she took some of us to record in her studio and it was amazing, cause this was a Motown studio where lots of greats recorded and we had the opportunity to go to her home and record. And so, that was an amazing thing. But at that point, my vocal skills had not reached the level that some of the other students had. Yet, she still gave me the opportunity to record. But knowing that I was a violinist, and she thought that was amazing, she really wanted to support me and tell me to not give up on my violin. And, but I, as a 13-year-old, mistook that for saying, you're not really good enough to sing. You probably should stick to your violin. And probably unbeknownst to her. She has since passed on and I said I was going to have a conversation with her. I never had that conversation, but her words to me did change how I looked at my singing versus playing. And I wanted to sing, I love to sing, and I really wanted the opportunity to. And I never wanted anyone to tell me that I shouldn't do it. And so, I was thinking, that's what she was saying, who are you to tell me? And so, I'm stubborn like that. Don't tell me what I can't do because then that's going to be the thing that I do. And so, from there, I actually started pulling away from the violin, not practicing as much, and singing a lot more. But, actually, I didn't really do a professional gig until I graduated from high school. Developing my voice that whole time and singing background, doing sessions. My first professional gig was… I shouldn't say first because I…

Tia Imani Hanna: Okay. I didn't mean to interrupt you too much here. I just have a question about how did you get to background singing on gigs for anybody in high school. What happened? Somebody said, “Oh, sing background for us.” What did… or did you seek out auditions? How did you get to that point?

Penny Wells: There was a community of musicians from high school that I ran into and we worked together on small things and it wasn't like a top tier background kind of work. It was just people trying things and recording, going and doing things and asking if I could come in and sing with the choir and do some background parts on this. And one of my friends, Ron Mitchell, went to high school with, who has since… he's really well in California and he put together a band and I was one of his background singers. And hence, I actually met Al McKenzie through that band because Ron Mitchell was in… what was the name? I wasn't a part of the program, but it was a program that was in Detroit and it nurtured young artists… “Festival.” “Festival.” And it was… they employed young artists in the City of Detroit and they actually got paid to perform. They would go down to Hart Plaza and have groups. They had dance. They had music of course. And I think there was acting, theatrical performances, and these kids actually went in and got paid to do this. Our parents, of course, wouldn't sign off on the paperwork to do it. So, I couldn't be a part of it. But there were so many people that came through that program. And so, Al McKinzie was one of those people that I met through Ron Mitchell. And yeah. How did I meet? It's just a, it's a network of people that are doing music. You're doing music. Come on, do this with me. Tia Imani Hanna: Ok. Cause we're talking about high school level, right? So that was…

Penny Wells: Right after high school.

Tia Imani Hanna: Ok, right after.

Penny Wells: I graduated from high school.

Tia Imani Hanna: I see. Okay. I was just trying to get the timeline to understand how that worked out. Because people listening don't know how people start. Folks always tell the same story, “I was waiting tables and then I was a star!” And then you're like, wait, what happened in between there? If you were like me, like I'm stuck here right now, what do I do? How do I get from where I am now to where you are? And so, what was the progression? So, thank you for sharing how that community was building and what was going on from there.

Penny Wells: Yeah. Even before that. My first band was… there were people from Cass Tech and from Mumford [both Detroit high schools], where else? I think it was just Cass Tech and Mumford. And we had a band during the summer, and we got together because I don't know if somebody knew somebody. Oh, Stacy Williams was my good friend from junior high and she went to Cass and, me and Lori, Lori Adams, Lori Kizner now, we went to Mumford and Stacy brought the two worlds together. And so that she was… Stacy said, “Oh, there's a band and they're looking for singers out of Cass and are you interested? There's a wedding they have to prepare for.” And Oh, my goodness. Randy Pertite would pick each one of us up, one by one, in his big station wagon every day in the summer of, Oh my God, ‘87 or something like that. 1987. And picked us… we spent almost the entire summer together and he would pick each one of us from the East side of Detroit to the West side. He had this whole route that he would follow every day and it would take… it would take two hours to pick everybody up. And then we would rehearse at his house. He lived on the borderline of Dearborn and Detroit. So, you can imagine, but we had a ball! That was the best summer ever! And I met these amazing musicians. Mark Magruder on keys. Greg Freeman on drums. Who else? It was Randy Pertite played trumpet, and then it was ‘the ladies’. And so, we just had such a ball, and we met these guys, and we had our first gig. His sister's wedding was a gig, and then we started performing at The Cellar. It was a club in downtown Birmingham. And it was actually down in the basement in this cellar. And there were probably five people there. Yeah. So that's how it happens. It's like we… young people are creating their own opportunities and just coming together, that energy, that synergy, that just created momentum because initially it was just the wedding that we were preparing for, but then since we had been prepared, why not try to do other things? And so, we reached out and got that, and then we ended up going to Michigan State [University], you know…

Tia Imani Hanna: I remember seeing you there. At the Kiva.

Penny Wells: Yeah. And Ron Mitchell was there too singing.

Tia Imani Hanna: I think there was like four people there too, but it was nice, I was like, “Aww!” I told everybody I knew, and I was there and was like, I felt bad there wasn't a bigger audience, but you guys were great.

Penny Wells: We were really excited. Ooh, we got out of Detroit!

Tia Imani Hanna: So yeah, it was a good show. I remember that.

Penny Wells: Yeah. Wow!

Tia Imani Hanna: I was at school there at that time. At this point, were you taking private lessons with anybody or were you just developed the singing more? Cause you had that stubborn streak to prove Sylvia Moy wrong.

Penny Wells: There is a point around this age, 18, 19. I had not had any formal training and I started to branch out on my own and my… Al McKenzie… he was the one that always pushed me, cause I was singing mostly background. I would do maybe one or two lead songs, but he was like, “You need to sing more.” Okay. And, in the paper or something and they were looking for a singer. And it was a band called “Jamask” and it was two guys and two girls, two black, two white, and we hit like the hotel circuit. And I was singing like, [Penny singing] “Do you wanna ride in my Mercedes boy?” [laughing] Oh my God, hilarious. We would go to Joann's and wear these, like, cheesy outfits with the puff sleeves and the bolero jackets. But I mention all of this because that was formative, and I blew my voice out. I was singing in the clubs they had… they turn their music up so loud and I just wanted to please, I was like, this is my first real gig, and I was singing five nights a week. And this is before they took the smoke out of the clubs and things. There was smoke in the rooms and yelling into this microphone, dancing, and just so exhausted that I started to ruin my voice and I noticed I started getting a huskiness and my speaking voice was affected. And so, I did that for about a straight year and I grew nodules. Okay. So that was major, like, identity shift to have your voice taken, just gone. And couldn’t sing and so I went through a depression and I had to completely stop. Luckily, the damage wasn't too bad that I had to have surgery, but then I was referred to a speech language pathologist, which I was like, “What are you doing? Oh, my goodness. That's amazing.” And so, she shared with me about good vocal hygiene, the technical term. But I wasn't drinking water. I was… the smoke was drying my folds, my vocal folds. So, and the singers, as you might know, they need more water than the average person, because that's your instrument. You need water to fill those folds, so that when they close then there's not friction, they need to be supple. And I didn't get all of that. That was an education for me. And so, I learned about ‘easy onset of voice’. You know, how to… because Michiganders have that hard glottal attack, [makes sound effects here] and I learned about ‘yes, no,’ [uses vocal sound effects] and learning about that created a new style of my singing and I wasn't [nasal singing sound]. You know, I was smooth. And then, that's when the training became imperative. So, I gave myself a year break from singing and then actually I did some gospel stuff. That was a lot… that's when I started getting more to the spiritual side of singing because it didn't demand so much on my voice. And I did some musical things and background and choir stuff. But yeah, then I started getting training because I thought it was really important. I hated the way I felt not being able to sing. I felt like I had no other purpose and if I don't have my voice, then what is there? Really lost. So, I did start with a couple of people. I tried out this guy named Eric Bruner, and I was with him for a short period of time, but he talked about speech level singing and you probably have talked or heard about that. There's a whole… like the stars use this method, pretty similar to singing the way you speak. And I did some things with him and that was fine, but it wasn't exactly what I was looking for. Then I found ‘The Diva’. She changed my life. Wayne State's vocal director, Francis Brockington. Because I was working for Wayne State. She was right there. I had access to her, and I went… I used to go on my lunch hour and go and work out with her. And she had me sweating and I've never heard… why am I sweating? Why is sweat running down my legs while I'm singing? Because she had me ‘working’, you don't just sing. There's an active process that's going on to support this instrument. And she really shared that with me and so I really overcame those nodules. And I have to be very cautious, even to this day, because once you have them, there is a likelihood if for them to reemerge. So, you have to be cautious, not to shout, not to strain. So that's always in the back of my mind.

Tia Imani Hanna: Now, is that part of your daily practice today? Do you do a vocal warmup every day?

Penny Wells: No. [laughter]

Tia Imani Hanna: Okay. [more laughter]

Penny Wells: You know what? You wanted me to give you a profound answer. [more laughter]

Tia Imani Hanna: You gave me such a great story about that. I thought that you must do this every day.

Penny Wells: Knowing is half the battle. And so, I use my… it's muscle memory and because I sing often, my voice has moved into that mode where it knows what to do and if I'm finding that I'm having struggles, I do work through some of my warmups and… but I'm really cautious about dairy products that kind of cut my things where that can clog me up and cause drainage or any of that kind of stuff. So, I'm very aware of that. I know I'm supposed to drink more water. So, Francis Brockington gave me a formula… “0.006 times your weight in ounces of water.” Francis Brockington. She would always 0.006 times your weight. That's what you should be drinking daily. Okay, so that's Francis Brockington. Yeah. I hope I'm quoting you, right? I hope it wasn't 0.06. [laughter]

Tia Imani Hanna: Well…

Penny Wells: Drink water. Just drink water. That's the narrative.

Tia Imani Hanna: That's the thing. So, you met Al and then, eventually, you all got married. So, you knew him for a long time before you got married?

Penny Wells: Yes, Al McKenzie became my mentor, my musical director, my friend, and just that a very valuable person in my life. I think that people are here in your life to teach you lessons. Whether it's… whether their presence was a negative thing or positive thing. I think it's all positive because you learn from each interaction that you have with people. But Al McKenzie was such a positive. I mean from the very onset I told you that he would make sure that… he said, if you want to sing, don't play around. Don't act, like, if you want to sing lead, you gotta sing lead. If you're going to be a background singer, then just sing background. So, when he would play sometimes with Millie Scott and Orthea Barnes, he would have me… he would ask their permission. They'd be at Pegasus, down at the Fisher Building, or at Club Pinta, no matter where he was. And I’d go and visit and watch them. He would ask if I could come up and sing and he would have me sing "Get Here." And that was our favorite song to just play. Cause he was actually the first person that recorded my demo. Yeah. And he was the very first person to record my demo, which I recorded “I'm Coming Back.” I'm not coming back. No, it was a Layla Hathaway tune. But “Get Here” was one of the songs that we recorded. So, no matter what he said, “I know she knows that song so, she can't say no.” Come up here and sing the song. So, he was very motivational for me. Always believed in me. And we hadn't seen each other maybe 15 years when we ran into each other again. And Al McKenzie had recorded some great music and he was… his music was being played on the radio. And I heard it one day and I said, “Oh my God, Al McKenzie's on the radio. Ah shoot! Let me find his number.” I went in my phone like, “Oh, I hope this number still works.” And I called him because I was so excited, cause you know, I knew that he was… he always was in my corner and I called him, and he picked up the phone. And you know what? I didn't think anything of it at the time, but later on, he told me, he says, “It's just a miracle that we connected. That was the home phone number. I never answered the home phone number.” And at the time he was on the road with The Temptations, he was the musical director of The Temptations and he was gone maybe 320 days out of the year.

Tia Imani Hanna: Wow!

Penny Wells: So, for me, it was just like, ahhh, ‘it was meant to be’, and we never lost touch after that. And like the very next day he came over and he's, “What you doin? Show me what you're doing. Let me hear what you're doing.” And I had just recorded “Free to Walk Away” with Randy Scott. Randy and I had done that production together and, for whatever reason, it stopped there. And I was really looking to… I wanted to record a whole project. And it was Rosetta Hines. People were asking… they wanted more of the song. They were like, “Who is this girl singing Free to Walk Away?” They thought I was Mesa. They thought all these kinds of things like, where can we find her music? And so, there was this push for me to record more music. And so, Al came in at the right time and he says, “I got you. Let's do it. Let's create a project around it.” And that's how the story of “Shine,” which was our very first CD came about. And I was working that, St. John's Hospital on the east side of Detroit at the time as a clerical person and he would drive, come up at lunch time, and bring me some music to “Listen to this. What do you think of this?" And I would put that music in my headphones at my lunchtime and I would just be with it and it was amazing… it was an amazing time. It was… “Shine” to this day is my very favorite. It's my heart because of what it meant, to be free. We talked about me and freedom. To have a voice and actually have someone to allow me to be creative and it was just an amazing time. And if you haven't heard it, you got to get it. “Shine.” That whole CD is FIRE, if I can say that.

Tia Imani Hanna: You could say that. You can say that. It's all right.

Penny Wells: In my heart it's fire, I've been told.

Tia Imani Hanna: A lot of that album was your original compositions, correct?

Penny Wells: Yes. All of it was.

Tia Imani Hanna: All of it was.

Penny Wells: Yes. Every single one. Every single one. From the heart.

Tia Imani Hanna: Fantastic.

Penny Wells: Yeah. Free to walk away. That was my permission song, that I could walk away from whatever. If it wasn't right, I can go. [Penny Wells singing “Don’t Give Up”]

Tia Imani Hanna: From background singer to lead singer. You perfected your vocal talents and skills. You healed yourself from the nodules. You wrote and produced your own CD. And then what happened?

Penny Wells: More of creating. There was a downtime because I… in between time… so I have a whole another, the personal side of my story. I was a single mom. I raised my son and then I got married to my daughter's father. But there was a lot of understanding that, as a single mom, I had to be more. I had to work hard to make sure that we could eat. In our family, education is important. So, I started to seek out education more. I was working for Wayne State University for much of… my son… my son is 29 years old now. That's amazing to say.

Tia Imani Hanna: [laughing] Yep. We're getting old, getting old.

Penny Wells: He was one year old when I started at Wayne State University. And that was my first independence. But Wayne State offered me the opportunity to get an education. They paid for it because I was working as a full-time clerical staff. And, so in between the music, I get… I love the music. The music is always gonna be there, but I have to find a way to make sure that I can support my family, whether there's a man there or anybody else to take care of me. And I always believe that education was important. Cleopatra Jones was our grandmother. Lifelong learning. That was her thing. You're never too old. You're only as old as you believe you are in your mind. And so, that really stuck with me. And so, I got my degree in communication disorders because I wanted to be a speech language pathologist. That's what I said, when I met my speech language pathologist. I was like, “What are you? And what do you do? And I like this. And I think I want to do this.” That was what I wanted to do initially. And I was like, “Then I'll be a voice coach for the stars.” That was my thinking, but that didn't work out because Wayne State only took 30 students a year. That's not gonna work. And I was number 200 on the waiting list. But in the meantime, I had a chance to deal with students one-on-one, teaching them about students with speech impediments, stuttering and even stroke patients and swallowing disorders. So, all of that, and it really makes… it's a connection to what I do musically. So, it was cool. But that didn't work. So, I said, “What master's level program can I do that's similar.” Being with people, helping people, speaking with them. And so, counseling came up. So, then I went to Wayne State's counseling education and I got my master's degree in counseling. So, I was like, okay, this is now, you know, how I'm going to provide for my family and now I can maneuver even more in my music. So then, in between time, I got married and I stayed married for a while. And then I got divorced and then I was married to Greg for 17 years, officially. But Al was in… he was always in my musical world, in my life, and leading and guiding me. Like I said, he was The Temptations musical director. I got an opportunity to open for The Temptations in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. And that was amazing. So, a lot of doors were opened by him and, I know I said there was a lot of pieces there that I moved from that I wanted to touch on, but the education was key in terms of me, once again, gaining ‘freedom’. Freedom. I needed to be empowered. And it's always my story. How can I be empowered? So. I am now.

Tia Imani Hanna: You're empowering people now with your… is it a weekly meditation or a daily meditation? I forget which.

Penny Wells: It is my Monday affirmation. Yes, it’s weekly.

Tia Imani Hanna: Okay.

Penny Wells: I'm excited about it. It was born out of the COVID pandemic. And actually, I would say even before that, because there was always a nudging on my spirit to share with people about what's going on. And I have a daily practice where I just, I stay still in the morning and I wake up and I just let, you know, things ‘be’ and let things come to me, and I breathe through it. And I'm just so amazed at the conversations and the thoughts that pop into my mind. It's my time with God. Whatever you want to call it, but it really is sacred for me. And so, after losing my husband, Al, and we got married and then that's a whole long story. But we married, but he passed in 2019 summer. And so, there's been a lot of angst for me being alone once again. And my mentor, my friend, my confidant is now gone. And how am I going to… how am I going to exist outside of him? Because he was such a powerhouse in my musical life. And he really protected me from the musical world at large. So, he made sure things happened. I didn't really have to. Which, you know, that can be debilitating at times. But I found that it was… it really, his passing forced me to be something that I have not known myself to be. And so those voices, that meditation, was a practice that I said, “Okay, I have to encourage myself. I have to… what is, what do I need? What is it that the universe is telling me?” And coming up with… I don't… I can't judge any of this that is happening because there's a purpose and a plan for it all. And that, if you can get that in your life, it was hard at first, but there's a purpose and a plan. Not that it was intended for you to learn this lesson, God did this so you can learn. No, that's not… I don't think that's how it works. It's just, these things are happening. Who are you going to be in the face of these happenings? And so, then the pandemic comes, and everyone is like, what the heck is going on? So that already happened to me in summer 2019, I'm going, “Whoa.” So, I've already been going through this. And so now I'm kind of coming out of that, but I understand that now people are needing healing. They need some hope. They need something to hold onto. And a voice tells me that, “Penny, this is your time to share your voice. You've been through this stuff. You know what it's like to have uncertainty, to have death, to have… not knowing what's going on, how you're going to exist. And so, share your voice, not only your singing voice, but your vulnerability, what you've experienced.” And as I counsel with people that is a major piece in allowing people to heal is, when you have groups, is sharing your story because sometimes you feel like you're the only one going through something. And when you realize that you're not so unique, it makes you feel like, “Oh, okay. Everybody goes through this and now I can normalize that and still exist and be and move in this plane.” And so, that was that was the charge, “Share your voice Penny.” And so, Facebook is this great platform and I… it doesn't seem like it, but I'm a shy person. I’m shy. Shy for speaking, not necessarily shy for singing, and I was like, “Oh my God, I got to talk on Facebook. Oh God, that's scary.” But the deeper mission superseded my fear. And so, I'd share, and I want to be vulnerable. That's my gift. Is I have the ability to be vulnerable and it's okay. You can't hurt my feelings because I'm in my feelings all the time. [laughter] And I’m going to tell you about them. I’m going to tell you about them. Here you go. And while my sister might not be able to share that vulnerability so that I can share it for her or my brother or… and share that part so it resonates with them. And this is what I've been told, I'm finding, but not only the speaking, the musing, the meditation, but the musical underpinning to put it all together. I always say when you go to church, the message is great, but it's that music that puts it all together. It opens the heart right up. And so, we can give a good message. But we need a receiving heart to really have it marinate and to sink in. So that is what my musical affirmations, “Listen to your MA,” is all about.

Tia Imani Hanna: “Listen to your MA,” that's really cute.

Penny Wells: Yes. M A.

Tia Imani Hanna: So that happens on Facebook Live. Mondays.

Penny Wells: I don't do it live. I record it.

Tia Imani Hanna: Okay. You record it. So, it’s on Mondays. Is there a particular time of day people should look for you?

Penny Wells: I try. See, there's the kite and me again. I like to fly. So, it's on Monday. It could be in the morning, it could be in the afternoon, but look for it. I don't take it down so you can always… you can see all the past ones and. I am establishing my YouTube page, where I can just put that there. And my latest gift is that I'm going to be writing a book by the same name, “Listen to your MA,” and it's going to have musical affirmations. And so that's going to be a project all by itself too.

Tia Imani Hanna: Oh, that's a great one. That's the first I've heard of that. That's really exciting to hear.

Penny Wells: I wrote the forward last week.

Tia Imani Hanna: Ok. Good job. That's great. Really exciting. So, is there anything coming up as far as on the musical, are you working on a CD right now or a recording project?

Penny Wells: Yeah. I have been… there's a few people that have been reaching out to me to work. One in particular, he's charting smooth jazz, and actually both of them are on the smooth jazz charts right now, LeShawn Gary. He's a local Emmy Award winning producer, pianist. We are working on a tune right now and which I will be on his project and then we've also talked about a full-length project for me. Also, I'm working with Gil Johnson. I love his story. He's amazing. He's probably in his mid-sixties and he owned a car dealership. And he's friends with our cousin, Tyrone. And he knew my music from years ago. He knew “Shine” and all that, and he loves my voice and wanted me to work on a project with him. He's since sold his dealership and is pursuing his music career. So, he’s already released a single and it's charting on the smooth jazz charts. Gill Johnson, if you ever want to look him up and he's amazing. You're never too old to pursue your dreams. And I love that it's never too late. So, I'm doing… I did some background for him and we're talking about doing a duet, so I'd love to be a part of that. That's amazing. This with these amazing artists. And of course, “Listen to your MA” is going to be a full CD. So, that's it,

Tia Imani Hanna: So where can people go online to find you?

Penny Wells: I am on Instagram, which I'm learning to use. I throw things out there. Penny Wells underscore Shines (PennyWells_Shines) and Facebook of course, Penny Wells, Roman Numeral Two (Penny Wells II). Yeah, those two places, my music you can get on Amazon. Or you can get on iTunes, most digital outlets.

Tia Imani Hanna: Thank you so much for spending your time and your energy and giving us all that beautiful, affirmative, affirmative action…no…[laughter]… affirmative affirmation, for doing your arts and for freedom. We really appreciate what you do and so glad to have you on my show and sharing that with my audience. So, thank you so much.

Penny Wells: Thank you sister. I'm so proud of you. You're doing a great job.

Tia Imani Hanna: Well, thank you. We'll look out for the new book and when you get that up and published, we'll have you on again.

Penny Wells: Yeah, all right. Thank you.

Tia Imani Hanna: So that'll be great.

Tia Imani Hanna: Thank you for joining us this week on Tia Time with Artists. Make sure to visit our website, tiaviolin.com, where you can subscribe to the show in iTunes and never miss an episode. Please leave us a rating wherever you listen to podcasts. We really appreciate your comments, and we'll mine them to bring you more amazing episodes. I’d like to thank this inaugural season's sponsors: The folks at Jazz Alliance of Mid-Michigan or JAMM, Michigan ArtShare, a program of Michigan State University Extension is a partner in supporting the Tia Time podcast, and Shambones Music. Without their support this podcast would not be possible. Thank you so much. If you would also like to contribute to the show, you can find us on https://www.patreon.com/TiaTime1. If you want to continue the conversation about topics discussed on the show or start new ones with like-minded people, join us at the Tia Time Lounge on Facebook.

Thank you for listening. See you next week at Tia Time!

+ Transcription

Tia Time with Artists, with guest Alina Morr, recorded on 10/24/2020

Tia Imani Hanna: Welcome to Tia Time with Artists, the weekly podcast where we discuss the methods, challenges, and real-life experiences of living our creative dreams. What kind of creative warrior are you? Musician? Filmmaker? Painter? Choreographer? Poet? Sculptor? Fashionista? Let’s talk about it right now. I’m your host, Tia Imani Hanna.

Tia Imani Hanna: Welcome to Tia Time with Artists and today's guest is Alina Morr. She is one of the founding members of ‘”Straight Ahead,” a jazz pianist, in her own rite and part of Detroit, and international realms of jazz. Welcome so much to the show today.

Alina Morr: Thank you so much Tia. I'm really glad to be here.

Tia Imani Hanna: So, we met many years ago, through Marion Hayden, and I was just starting to learn how to play improvised jazz violin and I think Regina Carter had just left to go independent. It was like, “Oh, you should come play with us.” And I was like, “That'd be great. But I was, like, I don't know what I'm doing.” So, I came to your apartment, I think. It was curious because I said I can play, but I can't improvise yet. So, I've come a long way because of you guys, because that kind of kicked me in the rear and got me going. I'm glad to say I'm still doing it and that you’re still doing it. And, so anyway, I just thought I'd share that bit of history with you.

Alina Morr: Thank you. Thank you for mentioning that. And I do remember that and, of course, everything is perception. And so, I actually remember it very differently. I remember being really excited to know about you and really enjoying meeting you and I thought that you had this beautiful tone on the violin. And I was just so glad to know that there was a person like you on the planet. Influences are really important for people, and when, if you can look around and see someone who's at least vaguely, somewhat like you doing what you're doing, like not that many women, playing a professional jazz, or ny type of music other than classical, which is a really protected environment, is very nice. So, if I was able to be even a small part of being one of your influences to study your music, I'm just honored. So there's that.

Tia Imani Hanna: Thank you. Thank you.

Alina Morr: Yeah.

Tia Imani Hanna: So, tell me like, what was it about piano and particularly improvisational or jazz piano? Did you start out playing an instrument or did you start out singing or did you start out just… How did you happen to cross the piano in the first place?

Alina Morr: It's really interesting because it happened really quite early in life. I remember… I was born in Massachusetts. I come from a big family in Chicago, but our family moved several times before we settled in the Detroit area and how my family got here, was my dad was in the automotive industry and that's where it was. So, that's how I moved to Michigan. But, after leaving Chicago, my family moved to Massachusetts and that's where I was born. And I remember the first time I really heard a piano was I was at a party and there was this lady, and I was looking at the piano and I am… I was little. And, she said, would you like to see that? And I said, yeah. And she… a very clear memory for me. She actually picked my little self up and put me on the piano bench. I remember, like, touching it with my finger, not like pounding it like kids do, but just like touching and hearing these sounds and just something just zoomed in and connected with me. And I just said, that's what I want to do. And, from that time until I was nine, I just bugged my parents mercifully for us to get a piano and then finally my grandparents did buy one. But it's interesting that you would ask about the singing to connection because the connection to singing, because the voice is the original instrument. And right about that time, I started singing as well because my mother was very musical. She didn't have the opportunity to become a professional musician, she was a depression war time baby. And people from south side Chicago didn't really go into singing opera or whatever she thought she was gonna do. She became a nurse and married my dad and provided a wonderful musical home for us. But we used to sing and from a very early age, she knew I had a very good ear because she sang soprano and I could always sing alto. I could just always do that. And then, when I was about six, then we, started going to church and singing in a church choir. So, I learned how to sing parts and singing ensembles really quite early, that's really embedded in me. And then when I was nine, we got the piano, and I went on from there.

Tia Imani Hanna: Did you take, private lessons or group lessons or study at church?

Alina Morr: Yeah, I had the typical… I had the typical piano lessons. I had a teacher that came to our house and she was very good, very simpatico, but it was basically that was just, “Let's get the John Thompson books and read through those.” So basically, I was just reading and playing classical piano up until my teens. And then, in the meantime, in terms of my listening life, which is very important. We listened to… we always had music on at my house… so just a wide range of things. My mother loved opera. My father liked light jazz and then, we grew up with Motown and everything that came after that. So, I didn't really have a chance. And then a lot of other things happened in my life. And so, I wasn't really able to get back to playing the piano seriously and even begin to find ways to find out how to play jazz and how to improvise. So, I'm actually started again at the age of 26, which was pretty late considering where everybody else in my age group was. I used to just cry and cry.

Oh my God. Everyone was ahead of me. I just want to do this so bad. Like it was very tough. So, what I did was, since I was thinking, I want to play jazz. It's a black art form. I'm coming from outside of the culture. And I need to start somewhere because I don't have the chops of my contemporaries and I love the blues anyways. So, I just was able to get on the scene and meet some people and ended up playing with someone who was very important to me in my life and in music, was like a grandfather / godfather to me in jazz. I ended up playing for a number of years with Bobo Jenkins, who was one of the great Jazz, one of the great blues players in town.So then I was able to be around him and his contemporaries like Willie Warren, Eddie Burns. I never got a chance to play with John Lee Hooker because he was already in California by then. But he was from that same meleiu. Juanita McCray, Washboard Willie, Chicago Pete. So, I was able to gain knowledge of the music and perform and then be around a lot of very charismatic people that were playing the music. So, I think that from where I came from, it was a really good fit for me. And then from there, I was able to improve my technical skills and my background knowledge of the music, and then dig more deeply into playing jazz, which is what I really wanted to do.

Tia Imani Hanna: You ended up doing a lot of practice on the bandstand, or just woodshedding in the house, or combination of both things?

Alina Morr: A combination. Basically, I was just teaching myself to play all over again because I'd had a hiatus. And teaching myself how to play scales again. But, of course, you're… there's no way that you're going to do this unless you do a lot of self-study and then you do… that excellent point that you made… you do really learn on the band stand because this type of music is what they call the ‘Art of the Moment’. So, no matter how well-prepared you are, and of course you have to prepare, you can't insult yourself or your music or the music or your fellow musicians by not preparing, but you get on the bandstand and something changes and you have to really turn on a dime. So, that's where the really focused listening comes in and being very present in the moment, listening. Especially like in my early days. We've played with a lot of these guys that were really American originals, and at some point, the blues got formulated into a 12 bar form, which is what it does now, but a lot of those guys were really following the voice and the lyrics, because originally, again, going back to the vocal component, this was sung music, and then people got instruments and we were able to accompany. So, a lot of these guys… and it was a young back-up band, so we were all just really crisp and ready to go and we wanted to play? And we were always taught by Bo and all the other guys just follow the vocalist. Where the vocalist goes, that's where you go. If they slid into the next change earlier, or if they extended a phrase later to where they didn't change the chord, quote unquote “on time,” we just slid right in there with very seamlessly, so that they would be comfortable because we're there for them, to support them. And that happens all the time in jazz, in any art form, something can happen, and you have to, be very aware so that you can go with the flow of the music. And that's what a lot of your preparations about is to give you the tools and the vocabulary to just… to go with the flow.

Tia Imani Hanna: Did you get stuck with a lot of vocalists when you first started working on the band stand so that you didn't know what key things were in? Did you have a lot of vocalists would come in and not know what key to play in and then you just had to figure it out or things like that would happen?

Alina Morr: Not so much in the blues cause they knew where they were or like, it's called ‘catching your key’. It’s like sing a few bars and we'll catch your key. It just that. I've done that. I think more later on in jam sessions and jazz, just like vocalist, I don't want to vent, going up and not knowing what in the world they're doing and why they're doing it or how they're doing it and then want to blame you when they don't have a successful experience. We’re not going to go there. Normally in that situation, I don't recall that being a big issue. It was just more like… and then we knew these guys and we loved them. They're these older guys, had all the stories, we were… we wanted them to be happy all the time. It was never an issue in that world.

Tia Imani Hanna: You went from blues playing to more straight ahead stuff and more Latin feel right. It was a journey for me. So, I started. At that time the jazz scene was very active. I lived in Wayne State University in the Cass Corridor, which is not the same Cass Corridor they have now, but it was a really lively place. There was a lot of people around, a lot of people playing music, Cops Corner, The Sun Shop, the new joints, tons of places. I was on the scene just every night, all the time. If there was some music, I was listening to it. I started just absorbing the music. And then, of course, doing a lot of self-study, a lot of listening, a lot of transcribing, a lot of listening. And then actually the jazz led me to my next experience, playing in the Caribbean. I played with a wonderful… at a number of jazz trios around town. And a woman I've worked with by the name of Kathy Caesar, who was a really great classical oboe player who now plays with The National Symphony in DC, was also really quite a jazz player. And she had studied with, Ali Jackson, Sr, the father of Ali Jackson, Jr., the great jazz drummer from here who played for many years with the Lincoln Center Jazz Orchestra. Just has an amazing career on his own. Anyways, so she also played jazz. And so, we had a jazz trio, flute… jazz flute, jazz piano, and bass. And then when we could afford a fourth person drums and she got a residency in… with her classical group… in the Dominican Republic and in a beautiful town, right in the center of the island called Santiago de los Caballeros. It was a beautiful. It wasn't touristy at all. It was just, like, no beach there. So, no outsiders wanted to come. It was just, oh, it was such a beautiful place to be. And they had a cultural center. It was, a big, beautiful marble building. One floor for dance, one floor for art, one floor for music. And so, they had a year woodwind quintet of classical music that she played with got a one-year residency there to concertize and teach in the country. And then, my best friend is leaving the country and so she said, “So come and visit. So, I went. I landed in the Santa Domingo Airport in middle of February. It was 85 degrees and there's bougainvillea plants spilling over the wall. I'm like, “Oh, I'm so here.” So, I visit her for a month and then I came back and started furiously studying Spanish. And I said, “I'm going to go back there.” And, subsequently the following year, we actually did end up going back and getting a residency to teach in the same cultural center. And then, at some point, she went back to continue. She wanted to audition for classical orchestras and I wanted to stay because I'm meeting everybody in the whole country and playing with everybody. So then, I moved to the capital San Domingo and ended up playing with a lot of people there. And that was a real formative experience in my life because so often these days, I feel that technology is a blessing and a curse because you can hear anybody at any time just with the pop of the button, but hearing and participating in music is really experiential and there is a different impact on the brain when you are in the same room with people playing music. And I'll say that from my, about myself, in terms of Latin, Blues, Jazz, everything. I've never backed down from any environment, anywhere, anytime there was some music that I wanted to hear. And being in that environment and hearing all the Merenge and Salsa music, it was… it just made a profound impact on me. So, that was how I got that into my playing.

Tia Imani Hanna: I am familiar with some Latin music, but I never understood, like, some of the differentiations between Merengue and Salsa, as far as there's Montunos and all these kinds of different things that you play. Did people sit down and explain that to you? Or they're like, you just play with different groups that played these different styles and that you just had to learn it by osmosis, so to speak?

Alina Morr: It again, it was a little bit of both. I didn't have that advantage of sitting down somewhere in some college courses saying this is how it's done. Pretty quickly off the bat, I could tell the difference between merenge and salsa because they're just two really different rhythms and they come from different parts of the Caribbean. But, I got a chance to, again, it's just if you love it that much, you're going to go where the people are that play and you're going to ask them questions and figure it out. And so, one of the great experiences that I had that was an offshoot, because there’s an interchange, because everybody, not everybody, but a lot of the musicians in the Dominican Republic, they knew about jazz and they wanted to play jazz and they did jazz. And there's a tremendous, as tradition of great instrumentalists in these countries, especially Cuba, Puerto Rico, and Dominican Republic, and, also Panama. Those areas where it was a combination of Spanish and African, and it's a very different culture from if you go to islands like Jamaica or Barbados that are either very African or very British, but there's not… they haven't developed a culture from the mixing of the two and how this came about, my friend, Ozzy Rivera, who's a great musicologist brought this point to me that the reason why there was more of a blending of the cultures on the Spanish speaking islands was because these cultures were already used to mixing in southern Spain in northern Africa. They were already used to being around each other. That kind of set a tone of communication. And another thing not to go off the bat, but just historically speaking, in terms of when the Europeans came over and colonize the islands, they basically, I'm not trying to diss anybody, I'll just state the facts that I learned from doing an intensive studying on this, is that they basically came over and used the islands as just places to grow their food and send it somewhere else. And the British normally did not settle in the original days. They just kept small colonies and didn't really mix with the rest of the people. Where is in the Spanish islands, they came more with an intention to stay and not only built homes, but cultural institutions and things like that. And it just lent for a more organic blending of people in general and then cultures and so that's why when you hear like Salsa music or Latin jazz, any of these things, you clearly hear the African element in the predominance of the drumming, but those unique rhythms were blended with what the Spaniards were doing because they have their own sophisticated music as in flamenco, so that was all in play. And then, of course, the European instruments and approach to playing. So, it's really interesting. But getting back to your question, Yeah. I wanted to play with cats, and they wanted to play with me. I could show some stuff on jazz or they would show me some montunos and I had a chance to really nail that down because also musicians that I knew from the Island, I got an opportunity to play on a cruise ship, so I was able to play with them on a cruise ship for six months. And it was a really great time. It was before cruise ships got really all commercialized and corporatized and we played several sets of music per day. So, we played jazz during the day and then we got a chance to rock out on some salsa and dance music at night. So, it was a really nice time. I remember those guys showing me a lot of the montunos that I've shown them some stuff. So again, it's just like an interchange. You got to show up and be around other people that do this if you really want to get information.

Tia Imani Hanna: So yeah, now in the age of… in the age of COVID and the age of computers that reaching is you're not in the same room, but you can have some communications with people who aren't in the same space with you. They can maybe share some ideas, but it's not the same thing.

Alina Morr: Oh, absolutely. Absolutely. And thank God that people keep devising new ways for us to be able to reach out and be together, especially now.

Tia Imani Hanna: Especially now. Wow. You've covered it like a lot of geographical reasons, as well as musical regions in learning your music. Are there mentors that you had that you never met, but that you studied them voraciously, the recordings?

Alina Morr: Oh yeah. because I had… because I played so much blues and I had such a strong feel for the blues and deep love of it, still do, when I started playing jazz, the first piano player that I really resonated with was Red Garland because I used to listen to those Miles Davis records. And Red had such… he had such great chords, but he had a really bluesy inflection that really resonated with me. And he was such a fine player. So, I really listened to him a lot. Of course, I loved McCoy. But then, being around Detroit and hearing all these guys talk about the great musicians. I did quite a study of Tommy Flanagan for a while because I really wanted to get those lines, those beautiful lines and that beautiful touch that he had. I would say that those were the three that really got me started in terms of who I listened to when I was about teaching myself to play jazz.

Tia Imani Hanna: I know when I was starting out, no one told me to listen to violin players. I had to go search for them. The only one I knew about Jean Luc Ponte, because that was the one everybody in Detroit knew about because WJR or...

Alina Morr: WJZZ.

Tia Imani Hanna: Yeah, WJZZ would always play Jean Luc Ponte. So that was the only one I ever knew about. So, I listened to a lot of horn players, a lot of piano players, and did not listen to violin players. So, were there other instrumentalists that you really thought of as well, besides the piano players that you listened to?

Alina Morr: To be honest with you, I listened to the horn players and stuff, but I would say, for me, that the other people that were… that just wildly captured my imagination or listened to a lot were Eddie Jefferson and Betty Carter, who are just bad to the bone. Just really, in that realm of unparalleled masters of the art form and their phrasing, their dynamics, their concept… that was who I listened to. And of course, the cliches in jazz, all the vocalists want to sound like instrumentalists and all the instrumentalists want to sound like horns because you want to get that singing style in you're playing. And I can understand it from your perspective because… so you didn't really have a lot to draw on. Jean Luc Ponte is a great player and produced some great music that has inspired many people and there weren't a lot of other people to listen to. You had Stuff Smith. Who else? And so, the instrument is just what it is. It's an instrument that you speak through, that you express your musical thought through. So, it doesn't… because if you're getting in the realm of pure thought, you just want… how do I get those lines to sing? What's the correct way to play on, dominantly or whatever, so you just listen to somebody who knows how to do that. One of my things is that I need to go back and let's listen to some more Bird just because it's… his lines were so perfect.

Tia Imani Hanna: Okay. So, desert island this then. What is your desert Island discs for Charlie Parker?

Alina Morr: [blows bubbles]

Tia Imani Hanna: [laughing] I get everybody with that one.

Alina Morr: Probably Parker with strings. Probably Charlie Parker with strings because he just soared above that wonderful background. He just… Oh God. Hmmm. Whew! You got me with that one that made me revisit.

Tia Imani Hanna: It makes you want to pull out your music collection again.

Alina Morr: I think that's going to have to happen. And I do still have a turn table. Yes, I do.

Tia Imani Hanna: Oh yeah. Hey, the records are back.

Alina Morr: Yeah, for sure.

Tia Imani Hanna: But never left for some of us, right?

Alina Morr: Yeah. Yeah.

Tia Imani Hanna: Now, you went through the touring stages. You were in Dominican Republic. You then you came back to Detroit and then, at some point, you met Marion and Gayelynne and “Straight Ahead” started. Now what's your take on that story? How did that start?

Alina Morr: I went to San Domingo one time, then I came back. Then I went the second time for a year, then I came back. Then I worked on the cruise ship and then went back to the Dominican Republic. Then I felt like I really wanted to bump my knowledge up some. So, actually moved to Boston and went to Berklee College of Music for a year because I was just trying to… I never really had that really good music school experience. I always felt I wasn't one of those people that went to Cass and yeah, I was… my life theme is I always feel like I'm catching up to everybody. I'm just running to catch up. So, I did that and then I came back and let's see now, I knew Gayelynne and Marion in an ancillary way from seeing them on the scene and stuff like that. And how the band actually started was it was actually started by Mickey Brayden. I don’t know if you know that. Mickey Braden is a wonderful vocalist who has moved to New York, several decades ago and it's doing very well there. But she was actually the one who started Straight Ahead. Since I'm talking too much anyways, I'll just tell you the story of that. So, she was doing Bert's on Jefferson… was the… was really the spot to be, and they had the Monday night jam session. And so she was in a trio with Earl van Dyke, Muriel Jones, and I forget who the bass player was, but it was one of the classic groove brothers rhythm sections, and they got a job at the Fairlane Club doing a five-night-a-week gig. And I think that it wasn't an option for them to bring in a vocalist, but they took this, this gig and she just said, I'm going to do you one better, I'm going to keep the gig on. And then, just to show you I really don't need you, I will hire an all-female band. So, she called Marion… she called Marion and Gayelynne and they accepted and, I’m going to tell the truth, when they called me, I didn't really want to do it because I just said, what is this, The Go-Go’s? And you know it's going to be a gimmick. Why would you do an all girl band? That's so corny. This music was created by black men. Let's just give credit where credit is due. I'm trying to integrate myself on the scene, not put myself in another box. It's hard enough as it is, coming from another culture and I just really didn’t want to do it. And Ray McKinney, who was a great bassist and poet and philosopher, who was a very serious mentor and friend to me at the time, he said, why not? They invited you, why don't you at least try? I got off my horse and I went to the very first rehearsal and I could see that, between Mickey and Marion and Gayelynne, there was such a wealth of music and there was such a wealth of things that I could learn from being in their presence, that I completely changed my tune and I said yes. So basically, we performed. And Mickey was real nice to rehearse with. Talk about it prepared a vocalist. She really knew her stuff, and then she played piano. I think that, just as an aside, because you were asking me earlier about vocalists, like, not knowing their key or whatever, and that leading to communication problems. See, with Mickey… a lot of times vocalist know what they want to hear, but they haven't learned the instrumentalist language. They didn't know how to tell you. And they get the Billy Buggs syndrome. They just lash out because they don't… when Mickey was just the opposite, she could sit down at a piano and say I want it to sound like this and I'd say, “Oh, okay.” So, it was just great. So, we rehearsed a lot and we ended up doing a recording and we were doing some gigs and then we got… we actually sent a recording and on the basis of that we got onto the jazz festival here, which at the time was the Detroit Montreux Jazz Festival. And things were doing really well. Then Mickey got real busy. She was doing the stage play “Lady Day Sings the Blues,” and she was on this extended tour and decided that she wasn't going to come back. She was going to go straight to New York and pursue musical theater. So, we were a trio. And then, in the meantime, Regina Carter had been living in Europe. She came back to Detroit and then we approached her and she agreed. And that was the original “Straight Ahead.” Before it was straight up trio and that it became the large group “Straight Ahead.”

Tia Imani Hanna: So, you guys did the Montreux thing. I think Gayelynne told me about when you guys were thrown on the stage to open for Nina Simone. And what was that like for you?

Alina Morr: It was amazing. Again, it's like being open to all experiences because how we got over there in the first place was that they had, at the time, there was an exchange program between the Detroit Festival and the Montreux festival where every year, each country would send out a group to represent that particular country to the other festival, this sister festival.

And so we had made another demo with Regina and I called the festival office and I just said, “Will you send us over to Montreux, you know, this year?” And they said, wow, there was like ten other people that want to go and the groups that want to go. My approach to problem solving is never just either/or. I always have ‘and’ in there. So, I just said, why don't you just submit everybody that wants to go and let them make their pick. And so, we just lucked out and got selected to go that year and, of course, it was just an amazing experience. But yeah, talk about being rough and ready because how that festival is organized, there's really about seven different sites where music is played. There are outdoor festivals, and then there's a nightclub, which is no joke because all the great people play there as well. And then there's the main stage, which is in this place called “The Casino,” seats a couple thousand people. And so, we were there to play the nightclub, but we were happy about that. Shoot, Roy Haynes had played the night before, so that wasn't any dis. And then, we got there, and they put us up for a week. So, we just had this beautiful time. So, we'd been there for a few days and I just said, we really need to practice. So, we asked the Festival organizers, “Is there a practice room that we could get to?” And they hooked us up with a practice room at our hotel and this sounds like something happens and I movie, but it really happened to us. So we're in this practice room having a rehearsal and little beknownst to us, the main festival organizers were out on the patio having lunch and they heard us and they said, wow, this sounds even better than what we thought they did. And so, then that's when they approached us about our opening for Nina Simone. Within 24 hours we had this tremendous experience. And it was another example where I had to stick up for my guns because they had this 10-foot grand piano there, which I just knew I was going to play. And then they said, we can't move everything around, so you have to play a keyboard. And I just said, ‘You know what? No. I just have to refute, or I have to retain my right to refuse to do this.” You're not going to put me up there playing some lousy keyboard because at the time I wasn't really as cognizant of how to make that adjustment as I am now. And I just put the pressure on them, and they backed down and they got the piano back out and I was able to play it. So, it was a thrilling moment. We walked on stage and everybody just screamed. They just couldn't believe it.

Tia Imani Hanna: Oh, that's fabulous. That's such a great memory. I wish I would have been there.

Alina Morr: Yeah, me too! I would have loved to have had you there!

Tia Imani Hanna: Well, I just wanted to be in the audience. I didn't even have to be on stage man. I just want to be in the audience. That would have been great. Because we were, in Detroit, we were so proud of you guys when you first started, your first album. We were so proud of you. It was like, Oh my gosh, they're so great!

Alina Morr: Thank you for that.

Tia Imani Hanna: That in and of itself was amazing. So ,you guys got a Grammy nomination for the first album, I believe. And then you went on to do several more albums and got to do several tour, is that right?

Alina Morr: We got to do a fair amount of traveling based on the three records that we did for Atlantic. And that was a good thing. And then another thing that this really good about our group is that we've never left it to just… we learned pretty early that you need to manage your own career in your own direction. We did a lot of traveling with the group and then at some point we started doing more and more of the management ourselves because we realized that we could do that. So, then we started going to the Caribbean a lot. We used to go to Jamaica, we had a residency, and we went to Jamaica once a year to play a beautiful festival down there and then as happens in life, people start expanding. So, we've always had Straight Ahead. It's almost like our sorority. and then we started doing other things and, the music world is so vast. So, everyone started, in addition to Straight Ahead doing other things in life. People started teaching. I know I went off more into playing a lot more Salsa music. Another one of my great loves is Gospel music and had a chance to play in a really great church with a great choir, just a dream come true. An organ, drums, and me on piano and a 50-voice choir. That is ecstasy. That is ecstasy every week. I get a chance to do that and just continue to play and grow and learn. It's just one of the things that's beautiful about music is that there's always something to do. There's always something to build on and you just have to keep showing up. You just have to keep showing up and not let the music business pollute your idea of what it is to be successful in music. Because, I heard it. I'm going to take a little left turn on you, but I hope it's all right. I listen to a very interesting…

Tia Imani Hanna: That’s ok.

Alina Morr: Thank you. I listen… I live in Southwest Detroit, right by the bridge, right in Mexican Town. And so, I listened to a lot of Canadian radio, which is far superior to most of what we have here, including NPR. And I listened to a very interesting interview with a woman who goes by the name of story, S T O R Y. And she has put out some very good music as a real good vocalist, singer-songwriter with also some rapping in it. And she has some pretty disturbing things happen to her in her younger life, which I won't go into, but she made a very serious correlation. She feels that the music industry is very closely related to the sex work industry. And, just hear me out, in terms of how women are viewed as commodities and how often their looks and sexuality are used to sell whatever it is you're selling. And I think that how this relates to women in music or to anybody in music, you can look at the… Do you know, the meniscal part of one percentage of the people on the planet that can actually become world famous or whatever that is in the music industry. If you compare yourself to those people or those entities, first of all, you have no idea what their inner life is really like. You just see a picture of them that's been polished to present a certain way. But if you hook into the bedrock of all the people on this earth that are doing music, if you're one of those people, you're successful. Because there's no way you can do music unless you have focus and self-discipline. There's no place you can be in groups unless you have some people skills can go get along with them and can show up. And I think that people, everybody, and myself included, you need to constantly be evaluating yourself and not letting this marketability factor creep into the decisions you make about the kind of music you want to play, or how you want to live your life, or what someone else thinks of you, or like what some things of your body image or whatever it is. That is really not what music is about. And I think that in this age of videos and YouTube and I G and all stuff that people have to… you have to keep pulling yourself back into, you know, that sacred space that music comes from and keep on being from there and just say, if you're doing music, you're already successful, because look how many people quit. And if anyone's listening to me that quit, get back up and get back on it. I did.

Tia Imani Hanna: That's right. I think that the music industry in general does the same thing to men too.

Alina Morr: They do!

Tia Imani Hanna: I think it's I think it's just that it's almost more accepted of women than it is of men, but men use it as a badge of pride. Whereas women feel like they have to be put there. I think that's the small distinction, but I think the industry is an industry for a reason it's run that way,but because of things like our technology and the internet, we're able to move away from that.

Alina Morr: Absolutely!

Tia Imani Hanna: If we want to. And I think that's a lovely thing about the growth of technology because, back in the day, I couldn't have my own show.

Alina Morr: Right! And your show is amazing, you know.

Tia Imani Hanna: Thank you.

Alina Morr: Thank you!

Tia Imani Hanna: So, I'm really grateful for the technology and how things are changing because the music industry has changed too because of this. And COVID has really put, tied the knot in the boat, so to speak, is that now everybody is in the same boat. We're stuck at home. You don't have your studio. You don't have all your fashion plate designers and everything to make you up. You have to do it all by yourself in your own house. Granted, your equipment might be better. Granted, you might be able to hire somebody because you have more money cause you're famous already. But… but we're all coming from the same place. Nobody's getting gigs anymore or not as much, anyhow. Nobody's got arenas full of people.

Alina Morr: Yeah. Yeah. So, everybody just goes to where the action is, which now is online. And it's pushing us to to use these because these technologies are here to stay and we have to deal with them whether we want to or not. And as you mentioned earlier, that these technologies are great because they do allow us to communicate with just about anybody in the world, And I think that, for myself, I think that we've learned a lot from the Hip Hop generation because they were always self-starters because they came out, they weren't even trying to get with records. They were just really outside of the box and it was, you talk about a badge of pride. Back in the day, like if a guy had a record deal, he didn't want people to know about it because he would lose street cred. They would still be putting their stuff on little scratch tapes and things like that because that made them… because that gave them credibility with their community. And, they moved on, they created a whole genre. What did JayZ say? “I'm not a businessman. I'm not a businessman, I'm a business, man. I'm a business.” Every one of those… and they've had such an influence on music, on fashion, and on how to use technology. They bring everybody in. When you look at some of those Missy Elliot videos and she gets off that cartoon that shit is funny as hell. I don't know if I can say that on the air, I try to keep it clean, but you know, that's where we are. It was like Harold McKinney used to talk about the democratization of jazz. Just like, anybody can learn how to play jazz. It's just, like, the democratization of the whole music industry, and bear in mind that everybody is looking for content. So, what you're doing as a content creator, you're in the top echelon because everyone is stuck at home and they got new brains in their head and they are looking for interesting content of which there is a lot. You taking the initiative to do something like that puts you right up there and my hat is off to you.

Tia Imani Hanna: I appreciate it. I just… it's just a lot of fun. I have always wanted to have a salon, like once a month, at my house. And just, what are you working on? What are you doing? And show us a bit of play you're writing and here’s a bit of my film and people just don't do that anymore. So, this is a way to do that, and talk.

Alina Morr: Yeah.

Tia Imani Hanna: So, that was the idea. I saw that you were doing some solo work at the Blue Llama back in, was it January before COVID hit? Or was it more recently in July.

Alina Morr: It was in the summer. You know what, I want to give a shout out to Dave Sharp, who is a wonderful bass player and a composer/arranger on his own, but has taken on the duties of the curator of the music program at the Blue Llama. And so many people were forced to stop doing live music, first of all, because they were closed. Or secondly, just because the restaurants, not because they're just taking a beating to be in compliance with all the restrictions that we have to observe just to stop the spread of this terrible disease. The Blue Llama was one of the few places that was actually able to keep it going, but they did. So at some point, Dave reached out to me and asked me to do some solo piano at the Blue Llama, so I did. I did a few sessions over there doing that.

Tia Imani Hanna: Are there any new recordings or compositions? Now are you a writer as well? Are you a composer?

Alina Morr: Oh yeah. I'm working on a recording right now that, with a number of my original compositions and always working on music. I just have music floating through my head all day, every day, all night, every night.

Tia Imani Hanna: How do you… how does, composition come for you? Do you do like a meditation, or is it when you're washing the dishes or, or do you just sit at the piano and it comes to you, or do you dream about it? How does it come to you?

Alina Morr: I can sit down and just write something, but I find that my best ideas, they just come to me and they just really come. Usually, it's fairly fully developed ideas. And so, at that point, I don't feel like I'm so much writing them as transcribing them. That's how they come to me. And when you speaking about writing at the instrument, I don't really do that because I don't want my vocabulary or my technique to influence the thoughts. So, when I get a song like that, I'll usually jot it down or maybe, record it in some type of way so that I remember it, but I don't really sit down to play it because usually I get the main idea, the main body of the idea, then there's always some work I have to do at the end to complete it. And I don't really do that until I've just let it, just wash around on my head for a few days. I want it to get it really. I want to have a very solid thought form and then I will sit down and play it and start doing things with it. It just comes to me as pure thought. I wish I could say I'm like Wayne Shorter since the piano eleven hours a day and write songs. I don't do that. They come to me from a different source.

Tia Imani Hanna: Okay. Everybody wants to be Wayne Shorter.

Alina Morr: I’m just a woman trying to play the piano.

[laughter]

Tia Imani Hanna: Do you think some of it comes from just your daily practice? Do you have a daily practice of how you approach your music or the form of your life with music?

Alina Morr: I strive for a daily practice, but I find that even in… I find that even in the present circumstance of the quarantine, a lot of times my schedule is dictated for me by what I have to do. Because one of the things, you know, I'm just getting back into being like a bandleader and doing my own projects again. Recent experience that I had as a band leader is that on 24-hous notice, I produced a concert for the Concert of Colors that was broadcast on their website and on channel 56. Here's an example, I'm sitting in my house and minding my own business and I get a call that the Concert of Colors was canceled this year, but they wanted to still do it in some form or fashion. So, video recorded all the acts that were scheduled to be on the concert and broadcasted them, so the concert could still take place, although late and virtually. And I got a call that a Latin group that was supposed to perform and had to drop out because too many of their significant members couldn't do it. So, they knew that I do Latin music as one of my sub-specialties. So, I got a call to put a Latin show together. And I had a lot of charts because I ran my own Latin band for about 10 years and played with a lot of other groups, Francisco Mora Catlett, Ozzie Rivera, Eddie Carabio. So, 24 hours, I got together 10 musicians and two dancers and videotaped a show. That means providing all the music, getting all the musicians, dealing with this festival committee, getting other paperwork, and explaining everything to everybody, getting everybody there on time, giving everyone music and actually getting these things performed. This is the kind of things that happened to you when you're playing music. At this point, the daily practice goes out the window because, all of a sudden, it got knocked aside by something else you have to do. Then you play with different groups. I play with Straight Ahead. I play with Johnny Lawrence. I still play with my wonderful gospel group, other folks that call me, so then they drop a book on me, and I have to learn this. So a lot of times, in terms of my regular practice, is always something I'm working on, some transcription I'm working on, just some ideas that I'm working on or just keeping my chops up, just running through some of the basic chord changes to the keys and things like that.

Tia Imani Hanna: Now, your new album, you're going to get in the studio maybe next year or later this year?

Alina Morr: Yeah, later this year. I'm just doing a lot of the preproduction here in my house because I have recording software on my computer and I certainly have the music.

Tia Imani Hanna: And is there anything, any place online that we should look for you where our listeners can find you?

Alina Morr: Look for me on Facebook and then alenamorr.com will be up and running very shortly.

Tia Imani Hanna: Is there anything else you want the listeners to know about you that we haven't asked today?

Alina Morr: No, I feel complete. I think this was a very good interview. I think that you asked great questions. You gave me space to speak and you allowed me the space to take some little side turns when I felt that they were cogent parts of my story. So, thank you.

Tia Imani Hanna: Thank you so much for being on the show and sharing your wisdom and your experiences with us. I really appreciate that. And hopefully I will get all of your schedules together and try to have you, Marion, and Gayelynne on together to talk about the core membership of Straight Ahead.

Alina Morr: Alright!

Tia Imani Hanna: Thank you so much for being on Tia Time.

Alina Morr: Thank you so much, Tia. God bless you. Take care of now.

Tia Imani Hanna: Thank you for joining us this week on Tia Time with Artists. Make sure to visit our website, tiaviolin.com, where you can subscribe to the show in iTunes and never miss an episode. Please leave us a rating wherever you listen to podcasts. We really appreciate your comments, and we'll mine them to bring you more amazing episodes.

I’d like to thank this inaugural season's sponsors: The folks at Jazz Alliance of Mid-Michigan or JAMM, Michigan ArtShare, a program of Michigan State University Extension is a partner in supporting the Tia Time podcast, and Shambones Music. Without their support this podcast would not be possible. Thank you so much. If you would also like to contribute to the show, you can find us on https://www.patreon.com/TiaTime1.

If you want to continue the conversation about topics discussed on the show or start new ones with like-minded people, join us at the Tia Time Lounge on Facebook.

Thank you for listening. See you next week at Tia Time!

+ Transcription

Tia Time with Artists, with guest Andrea E. Woods Valdés - recorded on 10/16/2020

Tia Imani Hanna: Tia Imani Hanna: Welcome to Tia Time with Artists, the weekly podcast where we discuss the methods, challenges, and real-life experiences of living our creative dreams. What kind of creative warrior are you? Musician? Filmmaker? Painter? Choreographer? Poet? Sculptor? Fashionista? Let’s talk about it right now. I’m your host, Tia Imani Hanna.

Welcome to Tia Time. I am so very honored to have Andrea E. Woods Valdés on my show today. Thank you for coming to join me. She is a choreographer and a dancer and a videographer and an assistant professor. Welcome to the show.

Andrea E Woods Valdés: Thank you.

Tia Imani Hanna: So, I wanted to just talk to you about just experiences and inspirations and things that got you started in the arts and things that keep you going in the arts and, like, why do we do this stuff? Start back at the beginning, was dance the first thing? Or was there music first? Or was there writing first or poetry? Or what was it that kind of made you think ‘I might want to be an artist someday’?

Andrea E Woods Valdés: First of all, very happy to be here, especially in these kinds of times. It probably makes us think more uniquely about how we can still connect to each other and find each other because we're separated on demand now. So, I'm so appreciative that you reached out to me. But yeah, so the beginning seems like a long time ago and sometimes it seems like just yesterday, but my parents I think is where it all comes from. My mother grew up in the fifties in central Pennsylvania in a pretty conservative environment in that there wasn't musical theater and the opera and living in a small town, those kinds of things. The library and books brought the world to her and she had a vivid imagination, even though she wasn't really traveling, or her parents weren't traveling and those kinds of things. So, she moved to Philadelphia from Williamsport, Pennsylvania, which is considered the big city. It was like when I grew up in Philadelphia, I graduated and for me, all I could think of is I got to move to New York. I got to move to New York. So, Philadelphia was her New York then. My father when she met him, was an artist, a painter, a sculptor, and most of his, a lot of his friends, were jazz musicians or people who were involved in the arts. I couldn't speak for her, but I'm sure she was drawn to his artistic nature. And she went to nursing school, finished nursing school. They got married. Three kids come along. And so, my father is a contractor and an electrician and does things with his hands artistically, but his soul is still that of an artist, a working artist. He still painted at home every once in a while. And my mother took us to see black musical theater, like “Purlie,” “Don't Bother Me ,I Can't Cope,” “Your Arm’s Too Short To Box With God,” “The Cotton Club,” when Judith Jamison said was in it. And those things had a huge impact on me. Back in the old days in the seventies, we had I think two televisions in the house. My father repaired televisions. So sometimes he'd be working on a client's TV, so we would have three or four TVs in the house if he was working on TVs and testing them out. But PBS, the public broadcasting station, was a big deal. And so, if Alvin Ailey, or ‘when’ Alvin Ailey came on PBS, my mother would come running through the house, “Girls! Come on!” She would gather us and that was a big deal. I think of it now, like you can just use your thumbs and one, two, three, see footage of pretty much anything you can imagine, you can hear or see at the tip of your fingertips. But those were momentous events in our house that, first of all, somebody black was on TV doing something credible and encouraging and not buffoonery or… I love comedy though, but not comedy, but so to see Alvin Ailey that was a company that I would never see in Philadelphia at that… at late, later, I did get to see the company, but Philadanco was our hometown, black dance company. We had Opera Ebony, black opera company come through. And my mother insisted on taking us to see Opera Ebony because she wanted our first experience with the opera to be black opera so that we could realize we own and claim our Leontyne Prices and singers and actors and theater and all of this as well. It was “The Marriage of Figaro,” and I didn't understand anything. I didn't know what was going on. We were in the last seat in the theater where our backs, and most people have never seen what the wall looks like in the theater, our backs, my head was like on the wall. We were up on the third tier and my knees were up in my chest. There was almost no space between the seat in front of you and your seat. And we scuttled past everybody into our seats with winter coats pushed under the seats and my mother insisted on those experiences for us. So that was happening very early as I was taking ballet classes, say a typical kid, a lot of us do the Saturday morning ballet classes, but the ballet was my mother's idea. She was an avid newspaper reader, the free newspaper, the regular newspaper, and the black community paper. And she saw an ad for a ballet school, Jean Williams Germantown Dance Theater, Jean Williams School of Ballet. And she said, “Look, Ani, you want to take ballet?” And I think that was really her desire that if she was a young girl, she would have loved to have taken ballet. So, there was a strike in the Pennsylvania school system. And my mother was a school nurse, and that was one thing she would not stand for, us as us being home and not getting our education. And so, I can imagine what people going through COVID-19 are dealing with their children right now, being home. It's wonderful if you are a homeschooling, active parent, and that's what you do, but if you're just trying to figure it out for your children, I don't have children, but I can imagine if you're trying to figure it out between what are they doing online? What am I responsible for? How do we… how are they home and at school at the same time. These kinds of things. So, my mother had to work all day. So, what are we going to do? So, she found a private school for… there are three of us, brother, sister, I'm the middle and a little sister and my big brother. And she put us into, I think my sister was still in when you go to the babysitter, not preschool, but like daycare, I guess. My little sister was in daycare. So, my brother and I went to a private school, they had a on the list of activities. Pottery sewing, cooking and karate. And I was like, “Yeah, I want to go to this school. Cause I saw karate. I was like karate, I'm gonna do karate in school.” I liked this idea, and it was a parent teacher run school. So, the parents participated. The parents were often the teachers. The parents, you had your weekend where we had to clean the school. You participated in the running of the school. It was that type of atmosphere. Our parents were very integral in what went on and I think the karate was somebody's mother or father probably taught karate and that's how there was a karate class. But when I got there, there was no karate. So, I spent eight years waiting, like when is the karate teacher coming? When am I going to learn karate? So, I had this idea about karate. So, when my mother came to me with the ballet thing, I was like, okay, until I get my karate on, I could do… I could try ballet. I guess it's all the same. I'm going be in a class doing something. So eventually the karate, like, drifted by the side. I lost my, you know, thrill for karate. But my dance teacher, I studied at that school from age eight to 18 until I went to college and she was integral in also helping me find an appropriate college when I needed to transfer in my sophomore year. So, my teacher worked with my parents, in her way, not directly, but in her way of understanding that expectation for my parents was not that I was going to go to Vegas and be a show girl. It was that I was going to go to college and get a college education. And I remember my teacher, she said something. I was tall for my age as a teenager. I think I'm still a tall woman, almost five eight. And my teacher said, she had a background in the circus and showbiz as well as classical ballet. She taught everything, clogging. She was white, Irish, German, English woman. We were introduced to jazz music and Scott Joplin and Anansi stories from Africa. And she had this very eclectic sense of what we were doing. Bach cantatas and just, just the whole world lived in that studio with us. But at one point she said to me, “With legs like those you ought to go straight to Vegas. You'll make a killing.” [laughter] I don't know, I was about 16. And I looked at her and I said, “Jean, I think my parents want me to go to college.” Cause I gotta consider… I was like, “Ooh, Vegas. Alright let's do it.” And I said that my parents want me to college, and she paused to a very vivacious, very vivacious woman. She paused and looked at me and she went, “Oh, okay.” And it was like, I could see the lens that she put on me shift. And she was, like, I see where your destiny… I understand what your parents want for your destiny. And she began, I think, to look at me differently from that point on. So, those are the roots of some of it. There are other things in there where the arts peeked out at me, but it was always dance from… I guess I started with her around eight or nine and by the time I was 11 I got to perform in my first show, which was outdoors at the art museum in the Azalea garden in Philadelphia Art Museum. And that was… there were, I guess you could say ‘stairsteps’ in the company, so I was a little girl, and we did a thing where we walked around with flower with water kettles and we just had basically a move to tiptoe in, take the water kettle and pretend to pour water on one of the dancers who was, like, balled up on the ground and they would blossom, and they would do this dance of flowers. And so, our job was, like, we woke the flowers and then we tiptoed off basically, like a little parade of teeny kids. And I was in heaven. I was in heaven and I… only thing I had to do was bring my ballet slippers with me. And I wore my tights. My mother and father came. We did not live downtown. It was a pretty long drive. And when we got to the museum, you get there a couple hours early. I realized I left my ballet slippers at home and I was devastated, I was crushed. What am I going to do? How am I going to tell my teacher? My dad got in the Chevy Nova and drove back home to our house in Germantown, found my ballet slippers. And the whole time I'm there, like trembling, like I won't be able to be in the show and my teacher's going to be mad and whatever, and he comes back with my little ballet slippers. And after that moment, like my dad has been my hero. Like he is the ultimate. Nobody tops my Dad. Cause he came back, just in time with the slippers, and I did the show, and nobody shouted at me and so I have, that's the small, the micro metaphor for him seeing me go on tour and be in Brazil and Japan and Germany and go to Africa and him being so proud of me and watching me teach and coming to visit me when I got a position at Duke. I'm an associate professor. I'm chair of the department now. And my parents came to visit me, and we took pictures outside the dance studio. They have had a lot to do with it. I always thought around college age that they were going to say, okay, the fun and games are over. Not that dance was fun and games, but they were going to say, now you better think about… is it journalism? Is it real estate? Is it economics? Is it political science? Is it literature? What are you going to study? And they let me be a dance major. I convinced them that I was going to study health and nutrition and economics at the same time, but I knew I wasn't. I'm getting in there and I'm changing the schedule. I’m go right to the registrar and changing schedules, so this I got. Which is what I did. I danced all day and all night. I think I took, psychology philosophy, French, some other courses, but those are the beginnings. There's a lot more, but…

Tia Imani Hanna: That's what I wanted to know. Thank goodness for those parents that you had and the teachers that you had, the ones that they help find for you. That makes such a difference. So, for any of those parents out there listening, you do matter, you do count, keep doing what you're doing because you end up turning out amazing artists like Andrea here. So, just keep that in mind, parents that might be listening to this show, pass this onto your kids. Keep at it. Don't give up.

Andrea E Woods Valdés: Yeah. Yeah. And my mom, she always says, being in the public schools, being a nurse for 35 years, she sees a lot of parent-student dynamic and she would say things like, “You become what you're told you are”. So, when a parent says something like, “Pick that up stupid!” That ingrains something in a child's heart and in a child's mind and it's so painful to hear, but we witnessed a lot of that growing up in a working class… not necessarily, I'm not talking about my neighbors in Germantown, but we're in the black environment, we witnessed a lot of that. So, that positive reinforcement, which was ‘everything you do is perfect and good’. It was definitely not like that. We had a very critical high standard, you know, about the way we're supposed to conduct ourselves and the things that were expected of us. But my mother always spoke well of us in front of others. And to us. She fed that back to us, like you're worthy. You're just. her father told her, “You're just as good as anybody else who comes down the Pike.” And that meant the Pennsylvania Turnpike. You're not better. You're certainly not worse. You just as good as anybody else. So that really had a lot to do… cause that spirit, you may have witnessed this or experienced this too. That spirit gets broken when you leave home. There are so many forces out there that start breaking that down and it shouldn't… they shouldn't have been able to do that to me. But they did. And then you rebuild. And you are a stronger person who can help others. I guess there's a reason for it to happen, but I was surprised at how, when I'm… the further… the more time I spent away from home, the more challenging I felt it was to be a woman, to be an artist, to be black, to be all three, and feel sometimes as somebody was trying to cut you down at the knees before you even got started. Yeah.

Tia Imani Hanna: Yeah. You have this incredible background that you started out with, and then you develop that even further. So, tell me how you transitioned to be a principal dancer, for Bill T. Jones, Arnie Zane Company at some point. So how did… where did that happen and how did that come about?

Andrea E Woods Valdés: Yeah, I love it. We don't call ourselves ‘principal dancers’ in the modern dance field, but I love it. I’ll take it. Yeah. So that was a long, circuitous route. I've never been… so I went to college and I was a dance major at Delphi University where I graduated from graduated Magna Cum Laude, and education has been the key for my career that a lot of what I did was out of education or for education. I love teaching and higher education. I started teaching when I was 14 at the YWCA. I did gymnastics and I was the coach’s unofficial assistant. Like she would… she was always late, so I would warm up… she gave me the job. Like, “You warm them up, I'll be there in 10 minutes.” And so, then it became an official thing and she paid me, I remember $4, to do that. I was like, “Ooh, I like this warm up, come on, get in line, stretch to the right, stretch to the left.” So, that was my job quote-unquote to warmup the team and put us through our calisthenics. My dance teacher also taught me to teach. One day, I guess I was probably an intermediate student and she pulled me aside and said, “Next week you come in early.” And there was a little teeny studio upstairs and she said, “I'm going to give you, four or five.” It was really like three or four of the beginner baby students and she taught me how to teach the first elementary basic movements that you do at the bar: plea, etendue, little movements. And then at the halfway point in the class, we would all go back downstairs and join the big class. And so, she taught me to teach. And I had a similar circumstance... I didn't talk about how I got into Bill, but when I did get in, Bill noticed, I think, that I was very systematic about the way I prepared for rehearsals., I would come in, I would do my exercise, my warm-up exercises, which were the same. And one day he said, “Why don't you do the warmup for the company before rehearsals?” And so, then he gave me some commentary about the things I were doing. They weren't quite all adequate for the company. And so, he was, in his way, apprenticing me for how to teach a professional company, how to warm them up. Would be like, if you had the orchestra, you don't just let anybody come in and say, “Let's practice now.” It has to be someone who understands the repertory, someone who understands the development of a musician, how long you're going to be playing, how not to, you know, blow up everybody so that by the time you're ready to really dance, that they're all exhausted or hurt or something. So, that went on for a while. And when a dance company goes on tour, you have to do a lot of residency activities. So, we get to Oshkosh, Wisconsin and Kenosha and Green Bay. And we did a… I remember a six-week tour through Wisconsin. And we do classes at schools, classes at ballet schools, classes at public schools. And so, we divide up as a company. Two people… like as a team, two people will go to each, you know, school and then we probably have rehearsal and the show in the evening. But when Bill would go to a school, he said, “Andrea, you come with me.” And so, I was watching the master, so to speak, how he conducted a masterclass, how he interacted with people, how he taught it's about his own work. And so, I was riding on the heels of Bill T. Jones, learning that process. And that's what developed me as a teacher. By the time I started working in the university system, I had this real, practical experience, not necessarily a book learning, how to teach, pedagogy experience and not a coursework experience. Mine was live. And it happened from my first years being 14 and working at the Y WCA and then they gave me a class of teaching exercise. They wanted a teen to teach teens. That was their… one of their, campaigns was young people teaching young people. So, I went to a training course for that to teach my peers. I did that in high school. I taught my own high school. In high school kids don't respect each other. When a teacher leaves the room, you can’t say, “Stand in line and do the exercises” with boys and girls. That's like ridiculous. But I had the command of the class, I really did. And they knew not to mess with me. I knew what I was doing, and I would tell them, “Shut up!” Or whatever. I did my own discipline, but I had that class because I had to answer to my teacher when she came back, she wanted to see what we did. I had to answer to Bill T. Jones. He wanted to see what the company… that everything was in order. But I got in the company because someone saw me perform, one of the company members saw me perform. And that was back in the days before cell phones and one of the company members saw me perform and he went to the phone. I love the story. Went to the rotary dial phone, like [makes sound of phone ringing] area code first. [makes phone sound again] He called Bill and said, “I just saw…” like 10 minutes later, the phone pick up. He said, “I just saw this beautiful dancer and you should see her.” And Bill said, “Invite her to rehearsal”. And so, the dancer, Arthur Aviles, I call him my godfather, ran to the dressing room, and knocked on the door and said, “Hi, I'm Arthur Aviles. I dance with Bill T.” I was like, “I know who you are.” Be like if Michael Jordan knocked on your door, “Hey, I'm Michael Jordan.” So that's who he was for me in dance. I knew who he was. And I had previously auditioned for the company and been cut. I don't even think Bill knows that I was graciously cut. He says, “Thank you very much” when he cuts people, he sometimes he touches you on the shoulder and says, “Thank you very much.” So, I had been ‘thank you very muched’ out of an audition earlier and so he said, “Come.” And at that time, I was almost 26, or I was 26, and I had been in New York for about three years doing a lot of things. I won't go into all of them cause it's a very long story, but I'm freelancing, teaching, a few jobs that I didn't like waitressing and bus girling, bus boying and hostessing in restaurants, but mostly I tried to teach because it was better for my spirit than for me to be at the service of other people. I was not really meant to do that kind of service, but not that kind of service, babysitting and that kind of thing. I have… was really burnt, close to burnt out, at that point, after being in New York for about three years, doing… I worked with other small companies that was fulfilling, but they just weren't consistent. And I really want… I really had that concept of myself as being a company dancer on tour, 100% saturated with that lifestyle. And so, I was… my spirit was tired at that point. And so, I had actually stopped going to class, which is, class is where life is for a dancer. It's like a musician who doesn't practice; and this is not a forgiving field. If you don't… if you don't go to class, you start looking crazy, you can't do it. So, I had found other classes to take. I would move to myself from my peer circle. I didn't really want to see my friend base. I started being critical about what the dance field was. Some of it was race-based. I'd go to all the auditions and see the same people and the same type of people chosen and the same type of people not chosen. And that wasn't always black, but a lot of the times it was, or it was people who didn't have a typical Western European look about them, whether they were black or white or Asian or Latino, which there were not very many. It was mostly white, some black, and even the companies that professed some kind of multiculturalism or an eclecticism in terms of the personnel, it was still the same old thing over and over. So, I pulled away from it and I actually made a little, not little, I made a piece of choreography of my own. And that piece was by music by Sweet Honey in the Rock. And I made something and that was very close to my heart and very dear and very personal to me. And that's the piece that my friend, that Arthur saw. He didn't just see my choreography. He saw something personal about me. It was… the piece is called “No Images.” An east side Maria Barnwell, with the woman in Sweet Honey with a very deep voice sings the song and it's by a poem by Warren Cooney, so that set the tone for how I entered Bill T. Jones. I entered as a choreographer. I entered as someone who had a personal voice. I was not chosen from an audition, which is very much like… the mentality at an audition is ‘pick me’’, or ‘I'm better than the rest’, or ‘I really want this’, or ‘you need me’. There's this, like, supplication feeling in an audition proving yourself. But that was not my relationship with Bill or the company. And I went to the audition. They were working on an opera at the time, a separate project from the company. And so, Bill asked me to do some stuff on the side. My friend Arthur taught me some moves and I did it. And then Bill changed the, like, texture and the tone of it. And I did it. Like that. And then we sat down in this little window box seat and he asked me a couple of questions. One of them was, “How old are you?” “Are you married?” and “Do you want to be in the company?” And I was like, “Sure.” He was like, okay, go downtown go to such and such address and fill out the paperwork and start rehearsing, start rehearsal. And a few weeks later we left for Germany and then Brazil. And I was like, “Wow!” And I felt, like, when I tell my students this story, I say, “Basically, I packed my suitcase. And for six years, my suitcase was in my bedroom. And all I did was come home, replenish my shampoo and conditioner and toothpaste, wash the clothes, pack them back in a suitcase. And then I was gone again.” So, it was like six years of a whirlwind of being on tour and so that's that.

Tia Imani Hanna: That's amazing. That's amazing. So, you came in more as an equal choreographer then as a dancer then in that point?

Andrea E Woods Valdés: Yeah, I wouldn't say ‘equal’, but as a choreographer. And bill considers himself, he's a choreographer for sure, but he's also a director. He does musical theater, and he was a theater artist when he was younger before being bit by the dance bug with his partner, Arnie Zane, and their collaborative partner, Lois Welk, in the, I think, early in the seventies. Yeah, I came in the company as an artist, you would say, and that's the type of people Bill likes to work with. There are still people who graduate from college and are like the hot, young, spunky thing and are very open in that way. And he likes to work with dancers like that as well. There are multiple different types, but I was a type who was forming a voice and who had a sense once we had a rehearsal and I contributed something to the class that I taught, and he really liked it. So, when we had rehearsal, he said, “Andrea, what's the movement you were doing from class?” And he put it in the piece, and it was one of the signature movements in the piece. And I was like… but in that rehearsal, we name things, in modern dance, you name stuff. I guess like in sports, like you have a play like ‘Kick the Bucket’ or run downtown or I don't know, I don't really play football, but I know that they have names for the plays. So, in dance we have the same thing. We have… cause it's not like ballet, where stuff has a specific codified name. So, we name our passages. So, we might name something like the ‘Janet phrase’ or we made up something and Ringmer, England. While we were in England, Ringmer, England, and we call it ‘Ringmer’. So, if you say ‘Ringmer’, everyone knows just jump into ‘Ringmer’. You don't have to say, ‘kick to the left and kick to the right and jump around’. So, he said, what are we going to call it, the thing that I made up? And my nickname in the company, it’s a long story, but my nickname was ‘Toots’. So, one of my friends was like, “Toots. Toots on Parade” or something funky . And everybody laughed. And Bill, who didn't have the kind of sense of humor that the company members had… he had a sense of humor and he was still dancing, still a dancer in the company… he paused and made everybody stopped. And he said, “Andrea, never let anybody make fun of your poetry.” And it was like an E. F. Hutton moment. Ooh, Andrea's deep. Don't mess with Andrea's poetry, which they probably made fun of that for two weeks about anyway. So, I don't remember what we called the thing, but I do remember that moment to never be self-effacing. To… which is still, I struggle with that. I still struggle with that… to take myself seriously and assume that everyone else is taking me seriously to not underestimate my contribution. So those are the kinds of things that were growing in me while I was with Bill. I would say the potential for that, and the seeds were there, but that had definitely not formed in me. And if I had been in a different kind of dance company, I would've… you're basically a dance company, it's almost like military. You take orders, speak when spoken to, and you don't really contribute. Modern dance, we have more of a collaborative, contributive nature in the way our companies work. Not always, but quite often. So, I was fortunate in that I landed in the place where my soul needed to be. Alice Walker says, “What is the w the work my soul must have?” And I landed in the place where I could do the work my soul had to have and everyone in the company didn't have that relationship. Everyone who finds a dance company as a job, I had a job, a full salary with benefits job does not have that relationship. And sometimes those relationships are fraught with a kind of tension that makes it impossible to be in. But I didn't have that, working… I always say Bill was my Alpha and my Omega. When I left the company, in 1996, I was the rehearsal director. I had been injured and then Bill asked me to stay on as the rehearsal director, which I did. I should have recuperated longer. I didn't. So, I had back pain and I was the rehearsal director on tour, teaching the choreography and… but eventually that healed, a long healing process. And I think, maybe you and I were working together through some of that healing process when I left the company and started doing my own choreography and meeting you in Brooklyn and us making, doing collaborative pieces of video, and working with Giselle Mason and me directing and choreographing. So, that was all part of my healing process. It was a long, that was like a five-year process. Now I have other things in my body that are breaking down, by my back is ok.

Tia Imani Hanna: I wanted to let you know that you speaking about your work was something that is very inspiring to me. Watching you do a couple of different interviews; I think I caught that you did. And I was like, “Alright Andrea, you got it going on.” Cause you… it made me so proud to… “I know her!” because you were, it was that quintessential thing, watching PBS, “See! That should be on PBS. She's a PBS person. She's got it going on.” Because you were very clear and very determined and very eloquent about what you were doing and how you thought about it, and that you had spent so much time thinking about it. That was the thing that got me. It was like, “Oh gosh. If somebody asked me that question, I wouldn't have an answer.” And, but you had really thought about it and developed an idea and a vision, and you were able to articulate that so clearly. That was like, “Oh, that's okay. That's my next level right there. That's my next level.” So, thank you for that. So, thank you for doing that work because it really inspired me to do the same.

Andrea E Woods Valdés: Okay. I got to live up to my own… the bar I set, okay.

Tia Imani Hanna: You have definitely. So yeah, it was… we were working together on the pieces that we worked together and then you created your Soulo Works company. So, during that time, I don't know how long you had the company by the time we started to work together, but you developed Soulo Works. So, tell me how that came into view. Is that because of the recuperation time?

Andrea E Woods Valdés: Yeah, no. And the interesting thing is, so much goes back to Bill. If it's not my mom, it's Bill or Jean, my teacher, but the… while I was in the company, I had a… I wouldn't say reputation, but I was knighted as a choreographer, as were other of the company members. I was not the… I don't want to give the impression I'm the only one, but… so Lincoln Center had a summer series, they still do, Lincoln Center “Out of Doors,” hopefully, COVID related they will come back. And the… if people know what Lincoln Center looks like, it has that fountain in the middle of the three buildings, the State Theater, The Opera, and Avery Fisher Hall. And they cover… they turn the fountain off and cover it with a platform and there's a… they put a stage out there and chairs on that outdoor Plaza. It’s quite beautiful and they have free performances in the summer, music, dance, maybe theater too. So, Lincoln Center did a series where they wanted major choreographers, to have the company members who choreographed sort of their offspring perform. I don't remember exactly what the series was called, for Lincoln Center Out-of-Doors, but Bill said, “Oh, Seán Curran choreographs, Arthur Aviles, choreographs and has a company quote unquote, and Andrea makes work.” And so, I was like, I think Sean and Arthur were involved in putting that together. I don't know all the nuts and bolts of it, but I was brought into that fold with the two of them, which is exceptional in that the choreographers who come out of most male identity companies are other males. And that's just the way it goes. That's something that I work for is mentoring and supporting women choreographers, particularly women of color and black women, but, put their name out there. There's always more than one, but you'll see one name and that's it. And there has to… there have to be more people making work. There have to be more people doing this. This is an aside. We can go back to Lincoln Center and Bill T. Jones, but I, for women's history month, I curate and produce with the Hayti Heritage Center here in Durham, North Carolina, a production called women at work. And its spelled W I M M I N at work, Wimmin@Work, with the ampersand and it's to celebrate women's history month for interdisciplinary, black women, artists, performers, and the work that they do. Many of us, like yourself, are educators, but we're also artists. So, for instance, if you were at Wimmin@Work, I would ask you, like, what is the work your soul must have? Maybe it's bringing your children's ensemble, but maybe it's you, working elect… maybe you want to work electronically with a vocal piece that you hadn't tried, that you’re afraid you might fall flat on your face in front of people trying this. Just bring it to Wimmin@Work. What is the thing you want to do? And bring your audience and bring your peers and bring your students and have them in the audience to celebrate you. So, that's what I want to do, is build audiences for black women's work. That's the integral thing that my soul must have right now. I want everyone to see our work, but I want us to do our work in front of black people. That is the rare, rarity, I think for us, when you leave the nest of the community, which I love and will never want to part from, but I want to be everywhere, and I especially want to be in front of black people. That was 1994, I believe, when I did the piece with Bill T. Jones, 92 or 94. And that's when I formed what I consider a company. That's when I formed what I consider Soulo Works. And I did a solo to Randy Western's music, and we formed a long-term relationship based on my work with him. And I did a quartet with live music by David Pleasant. Carolyn Web, percussionist. And I think Robert Jackson. David brought the three of them together as percussionist and a friend of mine, Andrea Michelle Smith, as the vocalist who read a poem that I wrote. And we did those pieces, and I got a beautiful review in the New York Times for my own work, my first review, in that way. And so that kind of… when I went to do more work, I asked the dancers in the piece, the choreography, were they available and they all said “Yes.” And so, then I think that's what made me think, “Oh, I think I have a company because the same people keep saying yes to do more work.” It's called Soulo Works. S O U L O works because originally, I thought it would be a solo company. I did one solo concert, and I was miserable. It's so lonely. It's only back in the dressing room by yourself. And if you mess up, you have no one to say, did you see me mess up or if you do something good? You have no one to say, did you see out how fierce I was? And if you are bored, you have no one to say, “Let's crack some jokes.” It's so lonely back there and I didn't feel the need to be the only voice on stage. So, what I decided is I would make solos and develop other solo artists. I work with Pleshette. She was one of the early artists that I worked with and I saw her as a person who could hold her own onstage. She could dance with me in a duet. She could dance at a company work, but she could also hold her own. So, the solo is not only doing a solo, but like in jazz music, when you take a solo. So, the dancers in my company, I always wanted everyone to be able to have that spotlight moment where they take a solo, whether it's embedded in the choreography, whether we step back or sit out, or something. But I love working with people one-on-one. It's a certain type of… it's like a marathon runner or a swimmer, people who do individual sports. You have to develop a certain type of discipline and a certain type of relationship with yourself and the work when you do something as a solo. And it's that mental, cerebral, spiritual, kinetic time that you have to put in, besides working with the director and the choreographer. And I like coaching people through that. There's a solo company called Annabelle Damson and she does is an Isadora Duncan early turn of the century, modern dance works. And I had seen some of those pieces and I knew some of the dancers, and I think I wanted to emulate like a black soulful version of that. So that's how the Soulo Works came about, but what it really developed into was more group than solo ideas. But I have restaged some of my solos on other dancers and that was very difficult because the pressure. What I found when they perform, they were not happy. The way that I'm happy doing a solo. The way that Coltrane is happy, doing a solo. The way that Nina Simone is being on stage, doing a solo, like having the band layout, laid back. They were not happy. They were stressed. One of my dancers was like trembling and her hands were cold, and we were backstage, and I touched her hands, and she was just like, I was like, I'm really making this person suffer. So, I held back on that, but I still see a future for that. There might be a future for what that can be, coaching solo artists, but people have should… maybe I should have people come to it rather than me go to people and say, “This is something I think you're capable.” I haven't really worked that out, but everyone who dances with me does a solo at some point, whether it's eight counts of eight or a piece that you do, but the solo still in there. The last big project I did is called “The Amazing Adventures of Grace May B. Brown.” And it's the name of a sort of entity or character, Grace May B. Brown, and it's Grace May M A Y middle initial B Brown and that's a piece that I wrote. It's a music theater piece and I wrote and published a small book, and my dancers perform the work. We were at the National Black Theater Festival in Winston-Salem, North Carolina, which was a dream of mine and very few dancer choreographers have had the work that they've written. I think Nina Freelon would be another I’m familiar with, there might be a few others, but black theater, musical theater, non-traditional theater isn't really appreciated and developed the way that I think it could be. I think that's something missing as a genre within the black arts that's not strictly musical a musical. “The Color Purple” is a musical, but this is something that is still hybrid in terms of theater and musical and dance because its dance driven. It's not vocal, like it's not vocally driven. The vocals are important, but the dance is the vehicle.

So, like Ntoshake Shange's “For Colored Girls…” would be another example, but that's also very text, text-driven and narratively driven, but the dance and the movement is important. But, as you could see from the televised version, you could still make the piece and make the dance sort of a special event that happens periodically, that doesn't drive the drama. So, that was one of the last big projects I did. And being at the… my mother came down from Philadelphia to Winston-Salem. She loves theater. So, she was like, “My daughter is in the theater festival!” She was so happy. But, yeah, so that… I think those theater tie-overs from the type of work we did with Bill, my love of literature and writing, my love of music, playing music. I play the banjo in the piece, that's important to me as a black American, maybe with some mysterious Cuban roots that we're not sure of, but I just… I claim black America. And my ancestors, my family, my father's family is from down here in North Carolina, five generations back. We have our cemetery where our matriarchal, enslaved ancestor, Harriet Doula, our family really honors and respects that history that we know of. So, those things are integral to my work, to being a black American and claiming this space, like where is black America? Where is black America? We have to claim it and we have to say, “It's here. It's just Doula Town. It's Lenore. It's Philly. That's black America.”

Tia Imani Hanna: And you've worked through lots of different versions of what that is and just with your pieces that you've done. The piece that we did was “Love Letters,” which I thought was an amazing piece and I’d love it to see that redone.

Andrea E Woods Valdés: I forgot about that. Go Tia, the archivist!

Tia Imani Hanna: That was a great piece because had you had the multi… you had video, you had live action and spoken word and, of course, all the dance and then we had live music. And all of that was such, it was such a beautiful piece. And I kept saying, “Oh gosh, I want to see that on PBS, I want to… I want that collection.”

Andrea E Woods Valdés: It maybe needs a reworking.

Tia Imani Hanna: It does. It does.

Andrea E Woods Valdés: That work with David, him playing the banjo was very influential for me and he played harmonica in another piece for me and a woman, Ti'Ye Giraud. I don't know if Ti'Ye was one of the first women percussionists that I saw, and Madeline Yayodele Nelson and women of the Calabash. I worked with them for a while and they were like, Andrea, you can sing, you sing. And I was like, I don't have a beautiful voice. That's not something I can do. And she put, she put me in that place and didn't allow me to disclaim it. She didn't allow me to cut myself off. And so, all of that, I think has been a trajectory, like somebody threw a ball way ahead of me and now I'm, like, following the path of… not always following it exactly, but following the path of where that ball was thrown, and sometimes it's bigger than I even imagined. But yes, “Love Letters” and those beautiful letters that were from my ancestors and from… we collected, and we went around and did workshops and collected them from people. And that was the email just started. And somebody had a letter, it was from @yahoo.com and the audience would laugh that the love letter was from an email. Yes. Yes.

Tia Imani Hanna: Yeah. So, it's… now it's texts.

Andrea E Woods Valdés: Right. Right.

Tia Imani Hanna: And Instagram, but so what, it's just the evolution. So, it would be reworking of that would be amazing.

Andrea E Woods Valdés: Black love. Black love. Black love. Black lives matter. Black love matters. Yeah.

Tia Imani Hanna: And just the focus of it being love.

Andrea E Woods Valdés: Yeah. Yeah.

Tia Imani Hanna: And there's so many of the things that I've seen you do. The “Maybe Brown” piece, I believe it's up on YouTube, and I didn’t get to watch the whole thing, but I watched a good part of it and it's still surrounded about love and that's one of the things as artists, that least that I always try to profess to be, it is to always bring the love and the hope back into the world, because we create the culture. So, trying to do that, and I see that in your work. And that was one of the reasons I wanted to work with you in the first place. Cause it's, “Oh yeah, she's got it going on.”

Andrea E Woods Valdés: That's mutual Tia. That's mutual . You bring that too. You're very hopeful, positive person. You… I learn from you. That's mutual.

Tia Imani Hanna: Thank you. Thank you very much.

Andrea E Woods Valdés: Love is my anchor. My little “Me and Mary Jane” sticker. A sticky memo.

Tia Imani Hanna: Yep. Love is my anchor.

Andrea E Woods Valdés: Love is my anchor.

Tia Imani Hanna: That's right. You're definitely expressing that. And, and I'm excited to see more work coming out of you in. Eventually, I do still have some pieces I want to send to you. I have to record them.

Andrea E Woods Valdés: We have to do something. And I have the CD that you gave me. But that's a project that has to happen. There's still more, or there's still another project in there for us, but more projects for sure. For sure.

Tia Imani Hanna: So, is there anything else you want to share with the audience today, like where they can find you, where they can find Soulo Works Dance Company?

Andrea E Woods Valdés: The reality is the company works on a project basis now. So, I've reconfigured what Soulo Works is. It's not, it never was, a dance company where I salaried people. We had a couple months of tour. “Love Letters” was a tour. We did international. We went to Russia, Poland, and… but Soulo Works is now for me, an umbrella. And it's an umbrella for collaborative projects like you and I might do a project. It's an umbrella for scholarly forums, which I haven't done yet, but I'm planning to do. It's an umbrella for wimmin@work, audience development. It's an umbrella for another company I have called Calabasa, which is with the shekeri and shekeri as played in other countries. And I wanted… COVID cut it off. I was planning to go to Hawaii and look at it as IPU, and in Ghana and Cuba, and look at the gourd instrument, the Shekeri, and the dance and the music and the spirituality around it. So Soulo Works is now an umbrella for other projects because I've seen myself grow as a scholar. I'm working on my PhD, a PhD in dance now. I'm in my third year. I just finished my qualifying exams the summer, which is a big deal for me. And of course, work and going back to school. And I do that and work full time. Yeah, so you can… I have my website, Souloworks.com, but really finding me through Duke university. That's where my scholarship and other entities and other projects take place and mentoring students and mentoring other artists. That's where those kinds of things are happening. But I don't have any one thing, for me, it's a continuum. Every once in a while, there's a big, like, bang thing that happens like a show, a grant, or whatever. But what I find, if somebody asks me about secrets or words of wisdom, is that you have to keep doing the important work, especially when nobody's looking.

Tia Imani Hanna: Yes.

Andrea E Woods Valdés: So, when you don't see me, you can assume Andrea somewhere working on something, somehow. I just started learning to play the fiddle and the violin. So, I'm like, okay, give me about three years. And I'll be like, “Tia come on. We got to do a duet now.” Maybe about eight years, but …

Tia Imani Hanna: I'm looking forward to it.

Andrea E Woods Valdés: It'll be a sit-down project. But anyway, Yeah. Yeah. It's a continuum. That's where you look for me, in the continuum.

Tia Imani Hanna: Okay. thank you so much. I'm just thrilled that you were able to come on the show and it's so great to talk to you and to see you. And so, let's not let it be so long next time.

Andrea E Woods Valdés: And we'll just… to be continued, right? All right. Thank you, my girl. Do good. Do good work. Do good work. I know you will.

Tia Imani Hanna: Thank you for joining us this week on Tia Time with Artists. Make sure to visit our website, tiaviolin.com, where you can subscribe to the show in iTunes and never miss an episode. Please leave us a rating wherever you listen to podcasts. We really appreciate your comments, and we'll mine them to bring you more amazing episodes.

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+ Transcription

Tia Time with Artists, with guest Michelle May, recorded 9/26/2020 Tia Imani Hanna: Welcome to Tia Time with Artists, the weekly podcast where we discuss the methods, challenges, and real-life experiences of living our creative dreams. What kind of creative warrior are you? Musician? Filmmaker? Painter? Choreographer? Poet? Sculptor? Fashionista? Let's talk about it right now. I'm your host, Tia Imani Hanna.

Tia Imani Hanna: Welcome to Tia Time with Artists! Today's guest is bandleader, violinist, coach, and Kresge Artist Fellow, Michelle May. Thank you, Michelle, for joining us today.

Michelle May: So glad to be here Tia.

Tia Imani Hanna: I am so glad that you're here. I enjoy your work so much and I'm inspired by what you've done with your group, Musique Noire.

Michelle May: Thank you.

Tia Imani Hanna: And I'm excited that we've had many chances to play together because of that group. Just what started you, first of all, playing your violin? What was it that brought you to that instrument?

Michelle May: So interesting. My mother is a concert pianist and my father, he was a percussionist, and he's sang, among other things. And, so I started young, playing piano and I was like probably five, five years old, five or six years old. And then, music was very prevalent in the schools back in the day. And I don't mind telling my age, I'll be 58 in November. So, this is the late sixties, early seventies when I'm in elementary school. So, one day a woman came to our elementary school classroom. I think it was fifth grade, fourth or fifth grade. And she had brought with her, like, a violin and cello just entice the kids and I'm going, she had just gotten hired. She was going to be teaching and I just thought that was so fascinating. And in the back of my mind, I was like, I already know music because of my mom, and having… I knew how to read music from playing with her and studying with her. So, I went home and asked my grandmother. At the time. I actually, I was living in my family home right now. And I said to my grandmother, I said, Oh, I would love to play. I don't know how I said it, but I would say teachers coming and I would like to play violin. And I remember she got teary-eyed and she was she was like, “Oh, absolutely.” She was so excited because, back then, there was the Ed Sullivan show, it was, and she had said that she saw someone, years later I found out, that what she saw was someone… years later I found out that what she saw was someone playing “Meditation from Thais” and she thought that was just the most beautiful… it brought her to tears. I don't know who it was she saw, could have been like Itzhak Perlman or someone like that. He was a regular guest on those kinds of shows, who knows. But anyway, so she went out and she bought me a brand new violin, which was funny because like on the inside, they don't make them like this anymore, it had this bright yellow shag interior, and I do mean shag. Okay. So, yay, seventies, right? The seventies. So, it was crazy, but it was real bright. And so, when we came to the first class with the teacher, everybody else had to use, like the school instruments that were scratched up or whatever she brought or whatever. And I opened up my instrument and it was like, almost literally, because it was like this bright yellow interior. Student instruments are made, student violins anyway, the string instruments are made a little sturdier. And one of the things that they do is they put a lot more varnish on them. So, it was like really shiny. So, I was getting a lot of hater looks, you know, whatever, like, “Oh, you got a new instrument.” So anyway. But I studied, I studied for a year in school and the teacher, she was really just trying to get us to play. And so, she wasn't real particular with the technique. And so, I wasn't really holding the… my setup wasn't really right. I wasn't holding the instrument and all of that. So, what happened… So actually, I'm a violinist and a flutist. And so, my story of how I got to the flute, really quickly was, in a nutshell, Michael Jackson. So, I was totally, this is early seventies, totally and completely in love with the Jackson Five, as many young black girls were, and I had Michael Jackson plastered all over my wall and everything. And so, one day, because I live in a historic district in Detroit, I actually live in the same historic district that Barry Gordy lives in, who of course is the founder and CEO of Motown Records. And so, my father said to me one day, because literally, Barry Gordy’s house is one, two, three blocks down from me, the big mansion or whatever. And he said that to me, he says, “Barry Gordy lives down the street.” And I was like, what! I'm just like, Oh my God. That means that mean that… this is my 10-year-old brain thinks, “Oh my God! That means that like Michael Jackson is going to come and visit him and then I can go down there and marry him.” Whatever, I don't know. That this was my thinking, seriously. So anyways, here I am scheming trying to marry Michael Jackson. Actually, one of my… so at the time, one of the people that my mother was actually mentoring was a writer. Her name was Penny and I can't think of her last name right now, her first name was Penny, but she was a writer and arranger she played guitar, piano, flute, and she had a great voice and she, basically, kind of like freelanced at different places, but Motown, of course, was still huge and still in mid-Detroit. This was before they moved to LA. And so, she was a writer, arranger. They had teams of people that were working for them, and a lot of unsung people at Motown. And she was one of those people. So, I knew… and I tell you Tia, to this day, I don't know why I picked up on flute, but at that time, the Jackson Five only had three albums out. And the third album, I believe, they had an album called “Third Album,” but the second one of them was called “Maybe Tomorrow.” That was the name of it and on that was the iconic song “Never Can Say Goodbye.” And if you listen to that tune, there's a beautiful flute oblogado that goes throughout it. To this day, I don't know who was playing it, probably one of those handsome funk brothers or whatever. But I guess I've always been a smart, precocious kid. So somehow, I made this connection that if Penny could teach me flute, and since flute was on this record… because I had started violin and I knew I wasn't good enough to join a band or whatever in violin, but maybe flute, maybe flute would get me to marry Michael Jackson. So, I could learn the flute. I swear to you, honest to God, it's a crazy, true story. And so that's how I ended up playing flute. So, moving through I, of course, I never played for Michael Jackson. I got to play for some famous… I got… about the closest I got, I guess, was Stevie Wonder, but that was on violin and that wasn’t many years ago, that wasn't that too… not too long ago. But anyway, I had also been exposed to the Detroit Symphony Orchestra because our teacher, our school, we would have field trips there when they would do the young people's concerts. So, I knew what a violin was, and I saw it in action on stage, and I just kinda thought it was cool. And then just to have an opportunity to learn it and play it just seemed a cool thing to me. So, it was a lot of fun. It was a lot of fun. When I played for my flute teacher, my flute teacher asked me one day in the lesson, she said, “Oh, you're playing violin. Let me hear it.” She could play that too. She was very talented. And so, when I pulled out my violin and I wasn't like set, my technique was all wrong. She smiled at me and then what she did was, after my lesson, my flute lesson, she went to my mom and she says, “If you really want her to learn to play violin, you need to get her some good teaching because she's not playing it.” And so, at the time, in Detroit, there was a school. It was almost like, actually it was like a conservatory, called the Detroit Community Music School. And it's where like Regina Carter started and many other great violin players that are actually coming out of Detroit, but it was a whole school. And so, my mother was actually studying there. She was already at a very high-level piano playing, of course, but she had her teacher and coach was there. And so, she had seen all of these little kids cause the Suzuki method had just hit Detroit. And this again, this is early seventies. And so, she saw all these little kids with their instruments and stuff. And so, she thought, you know what, maybe I'll just take her there to study. So, I did my audition there. I never auditioned or anything like that. I was scared to death. My knees were knocking, the whole thing. And not realizing that I'm not… I'm just playing the way I know how to play or whatever. And so, the lady who ran the place, at least the string department, Jeannie Rupert was her name, and boy she could be very tough, but she was really sweet to me. And she said, something to the effect of, “I don't want you to feel bad, but basically, we're going to have to teach you how to play all over again.” And I was like, oh my God, really? So anyway… but she, she got me straight and I had some wonderful experiences down there studying with her. I studied with her, not one-on-one, I think it was like the high-level kids got to study with her, the ones that were the semi-prodigies, really talented folks, the Regina Carters and my good friend, Sylvia Davis, who's now Sylvia de Lessor, and now she's in Chicago. Fabulous violinist. She and Regina started together at that school when they were four. So here I am, 11 years old, basically starting over again. So, I really do consider myself a late starter, but my experiences there were phenomenal because it really was run like a conservatory. We were really… we were taught, the expectations were high. It was wonderful also because I had Phyllis Fleming who was a black teacher. And I've said this many times in many interviews that I've had, that I'm very thankful for my classical experience here in Detroit, because it was full of black string players and people who played classical music and things like that. That's the beauty of Detroit being a black city, a majority black city, from that time until now, in that later, many years later, I was running into people from outside of Detroit and outside of Michigan who were black string players and had a completely different experience. They were always the only one or one of two. I was one of 25, so it was just… I didn't know that it was an issue until I started playing at other places. So, I never… I'm very thankful for that… I never felt self-conscious… what I felt self-conscious about was the fact that I didn't know you could start really young and I always felt like I was behind. And so, I really, in my teenage years, in my early college years, I've worked really hard. In my mind, it was like I was catching up, like I was trying to make up for all this lost time. Of course, you really can't do that. But it also affected my self-esteem around playing, and I've struggled with that even today, but not nearly as much anymore, but a lot of it is from that, running into… like, Regina and I met when we were teenagers, but we were introduced by Sylvia. Her family lived down the street from me. And the first time I met Sylvia she was already… I think we were like 12. So, I had only been playing maybe two years, but she'd been playing since she was four. And so, when I came in and boy, she was practicing, I don't know, Vivaldi or something like that. And I was like, “Oh my goodness, I'm nowhere near this, you know, what in the world?” So anyway, that's really how I got started and it's been great. It's been great.

Tia Imani Hanna: You thought you were behind, so you're constantly working to be further ahead than you think you are. In reality, you probably weren't as far behind as you think you were. We've worked together and I've seen you still have that same thought, like not quite there. And I'm, like, looking at you going, “Shoot. I can't play that.”

Michelle May: Exactly. and we are, we're our own worst critics and everything, but, and I'm working, well, I won't say I'm ‘working’. I am changing. By being a personal coach, which we'll talk about that later, but I really do try to ‘walk the talk’ and I know what it means to have those kinds of doubts and things like that. And I talk to my clients and my students and everyone. We're human, those doubts are going to come. You don't need to sit with them. And so that's what I'm doing. That's what I'm doing. You'll hear me say those things, but I'm going to go ahead and do it anyway. You and I had just played at the [Detroit] Jazz Festival and I, that for me was like, okay, I played the Jazz Festival so many times, but not like this. We were up front and I was always in a jazz orchestra, playing second violin or whatever, and that's fine and dandy, but there was never the kind of prominence that we had this time, with our group “Sister Strings.” So it was, yeah, it was really awesome. But, of course, immediately, I'm like, “Oh my gosh! Okay. Now!” But you know, I really said, “t's not like you could walk off the stage. It'd be like, you know what? Never mind, I'm not going to do this.” No, if this is your opportunity, you play well. You do what you're… You have a good tone, you have good ideas when you're playing and I've stopped comparing myself to other players who may be more advanced or have more knowledge about jazz or things like that. A lot of what I do, I'm not real versed in the theory of jazz, but my ear is very good. My rhythm is good and I let that work for me. And so, yeah, so it creeps in, but I don't let it stay.

Tia Imani Hanna: And you can tell. You sound really good. And I enjoyed your solos at the Jazz Festival. It was fun to be there together doing that.

Michelle May: Thank you.

Tia Imani Hanna: And we all do definitely have those fears as jazz artists at all. The improvisation aspect is you're constantly jumping off a cliff on purpose.

Michelle May: Yes. Yes. Absolutely.

Michelle May: This is where we live, so I commend you for jumping off that particular cliff.

Michelle May: Thank you. I will continue to jump, every chance I get. I'm just going to go into the deep end and do what I do. That's the only way you get better. That's the only way you get better. And truly whether it's jazz, classical whatever genre, the more you do it, the easier it gets. So, it may always be that sense of apprehension every time you get ready to start. You're never going to conquer that apprehension if you don't just walk through it or do it. The analogy I often use is like when you're teaching a child to tie their shoes. You're not going to teach them to tie their shoes by doing it for them or telling them, “Never mind, I'm going to just get you Velcro snaps.” Forget it. That's not gonna work. You want them to struggle with it, figure it out. Eventually they get it. That's how we all learn. That's how we all learned it. Now, you can tie your shoes without even looking, so it's important. You're right. You're exactly right. It's important to continue to push ourselves and then sometimes I also talk about the vocabulary of how you're doing it. Sometimes. I don't especially… pushing yourself sometimes seems like you're, like, really struggling and so I have also changed my viewpoint about that. It's… I'm not struggling with this, I just… I'm learning every time I approach the instrument and, quite frankly, I don't call myself a jazz violinist. I am a violinist that plays jazz because I want to respect those that really, really are more versed in this than I am and that's not a comparison thing, that's just reality. But it doesn't diminish in any way what I bring to the table when it comes to jazz and other genres that I play in. That also, even just saying that I feel a lot better than just, “Oh, come on. Really gonna push myself to get on that stage.” And doing it for me, doing it that way brings up some tension. And it recalls a struggle, which I'm re-imagining all of my vocabulary and encouraging my clients and my students to do too. You don’t want to struggle; you don't want this to be a struggle. Because it's also about the journey, not just the destination. You learn so much in the journey and you want to make sure that you're paying attention to all the opportunities and the little things along the way. Even the little bumps help us to get where we want to go.

Tia Imani Hanna: So, let's talk about that a little bit. So, you have most recently just started a coaching service.

Michelle May: Yes. and actually, it's not really new. My sister and I, my sister, Dr. Angela Celeste May, she is a vocalist and a musician too, and she's also a Doctor of Psychology. And so, she and I, back in 1996, started our private practice. And that was a clinical practice. We were doing… Angela was doing psychological evaluations and I was doing counseling and we were running groups and we were doing consulting too. We'd had some consulting contracts and we would go do like diversity training. This is in the nineties, diversity training was really big back then.

Tia Imani Hanna: And you have background in this? Did you have training? You're a licensed counselor or a psychologist?

Michelle May: Yes. Yes. I have a master's degree in counseling and my undergraduate is in teaching elementary education with a minor in music. And then I did some post bachelor work in music for two years down at Wayne State. And then I got my master's degree also from Wayne State University in Detroit in counseling, and then I have my… I’m a fully licensed counselor. So as a counselor, and there's schools of thought about this, but the counseling and coaching, they have some similarities, but there's some specific differences. And my counseling background gives me coaching experience. There's some people that feel like you've got to get certified as a coach, but really, and even the American Counseling Association endorses the fact that they don't disrespect coaches that get certified, but much of what we are as counselors we can bring to the coaching. So, I consider that my certification. So anyway, we had our business going strong up until the recession. So about 2006 so for about a good 10 years, we had a big contract, where we were providing services with a state agency where we were doing, in addition to the other things we were doing, it was, it was going very well. But then, like I said, the recession hit and then we lost that contract and things started to diminish. We had a wonderful office in downtown Detroit. We had to let that go because not as much revenue was coming in, but Angela was doing teaching and consulting and then I was counseling at one of the local community colleges that's just north of here in Oakland County, the county that's just north of where Detroit is. And I actually started being adjunct there when we opened our business. So, in 1996, my life was my private practice, adjunct counseling at the community college and then all of my music, with teaching, I had a pretty full schedule. I had about 20… I could take up to 25 students, and then freelance performing and things like that. And so, what happened was last year, and I know you maybe bring this up, in 2018, I became a Kresge Artist Fellow, which we'll talk about that, I'm sure. But being around the other Fellows and in that environment really showed me, like, really big possibilities with my creative work and other things, just other things. And I started to realize that what I was doing at the college, cause at this point, in 2012, I became a full-time counselor at the college. And full time for us, it's not 40 hours, so it's 34 hours. But anyway, it was getting in the way of the other things that I wanted to do in addition to being at the college. The work I was doing was wonderful. I loved it, but I wanted to do more of it and also reach a much broader audience. So, I kind of felt like I had grown out of it that way. So I said to my sister, I said, let's re-launch our business, but I started to realize that the virtual world, especially because we want it to reach a worldwide audience if we could, with the type of services that we have. And so last year we made the decision that we were going to launch in the virtual world. Surprisingly enough, this was pre… nobody knew anything about COVID-19. We weren't even thinking about COVID-19. We just wanted a location independent, a version of our business. And that we might have an office, a virtual office, or a temporary office, if you're going to see clients face-to-face. We were working all that stuff out. So, in the process of reimagining our business, I realized, I said, every day at the office when I'm at the college, I'm actually not doing therapy with my students because what I am at the college is a personal, I do personal counseling, academic counseling, and career counseling. And really, the personal counseling is not therapy because we're not set up to do that. We don't have the HIPAA stuff and the insurance, and then that kind of stuff. Because if we get a student who really needs something really deep, we have to refer them out, but we're able to do some things. And the somethings we're doing is really coaching. That's what we're doing. I'm doing that every single day successfully for almost 30 years now. So, I'm just like, this is really coaching that I'm doing. So, I thought, you know what, that's really what I wanted to jump into in my own business. The coaching is… we had not done that in our business before we were really doing the clinical stuff. And so that's what… in March of this year, we reimagined and relaunched our business, A. M. May & Associates, Inc., which is our business name anyway. As of right now, it's a coaching and consulting firm. We will eventually bring on the clinical stuff, but right now that's what we're doing. And so, I provide personal and career… personal development and career coaching for creative professionals and that’s actually a pivot that I recently did. I started off, really, I can work with anybody, but I actually have a business coach myself. And so, that’s how I also know that coaching works if you put the investment in it because our business coach helped us get to where we wanted to be much faster. We were spinning our wheels about how do you do this online and how do you market yourself? What do you do? She's a young… she's a millennial rocking it out here, doing it and has been doing it for a while very successfully. And, working with her really got us where we needed to be in record time, because we would probably still be trying to figure this out and maybe not doing it as successfully as we have. And, so anyway, so in March of this year we relaunched as a coaching and consulting service. And my business coach was saying to me, “You have such influence in this creative world that you're in.” She's not even here. She doesn't live in Michigan. Our business coach is now living in Connecticut. And she's like, the influence you have, I'm noticing the engagement in your social media sites and all of that. She was right because I started noticing the discovery calls I was doing. A discovery call is basically like a pre-call that you do with a potential client. And it was mostly coming from creative professionals. And so, she says, why not? If you want to do this other stuff later, you can do that. But right now, that seems to be your warm audience. Market to creative professionals. And a lot of the things that I've been successful doing in the creative space and in the mental health space, it was all helpful to… very helpful to a lot of creative professionals and a lot of the calls that I'm getting regarding, you know, they're saying, “We're seeing that you have been so successful in your creative life, doing Musique Noire, launching this coaching business and presenting the concerts.” The house concerts. I have my own house concert series. All of those kinds of things have been attracting my ideal clients. I've been attracting those types of calls, which is great. And so, the clients that I’m working with, I have one, actually I've had two writers. I haven’t had any musicians yet, but I've got two writers that I'm working with and they've been… it's just been phenomenal. It's really been phenomenal. So, I really like this new pivot and so that's what we're doing now.

Tia Imani Hanna: That's a huge pivot.

Michelle May: Yeah. It's great. It's good.

Tia Imani Hanna: It's fantastic! You're doing the pivot to the coaching and stepped away from the teaching as much, as far as violin lessons and that sort of thing.

Michelle May: Yes.

Tia Imani Hanna: Were you teaching flute too?

Michelle May: Yeah. Yes. I was teaching flute and violin lessons up until, geez, about, I'd say about six years. It's been a little while. It's been about five, six years that I've had a full studio. And right now, with all the things that I'm doing, that's something I'm not really looking to do. What I have, I have a niche in that too. I have… I seem to be attracting adult women that want to play. And actually, really, I actually had a couple of men some years ago too. But it seems to be, like, adults who, which I never knew that there was this term, but it's called ‘recreational playing’. So, these are recreational musicians that used to play years ago and they're coming back to it or they've always wanted to play, and they picked up. So, over the past six years, I guess it's been about six, almost seven years now, that's exclusively what I've been doing, but I've been limiting it. I really have cut way back. I'm only taking like about five students. Right now, I actually only have three. I have a recreational women's group, called the ‘Violin Divas’. And, these are all women, same thing, they're not really trying to audition and do all those kinds of things, but it's a way for me to get them together for musical fellowship and fun. We can't get through the rehearsals; they’re laughing so much. It's hilarious. It's also a teaching group for me because I bring them music that's challenging for them. I would say they were… probably the range would be advanced beginners to maybe beginning advanced, but mainly in that intermediate range, but it's been fun. We've been together… I've had like actually three, including my sister, three of the ladies have been with me since the beginning. I think we started this in, ooh like, 2003. So, it's been going for quite some time. A lot of fun. We've had some ladies come and go, but like I said, I've had three cause my sister studied violin for 15 years. She really… vocal was really her thing. That was her thing. So, this has been wonderful for her because not only did she pick up violin in this, the ‘Violin Divas’, but I tried her out on viola, and she took to it like a duck to water. She plays, actually, viola in the group and sometimes she alternates back on violin. So yeah, it's great. But viola is not me. A lot of people will switch back and forth. It's heavy. And I was encouraged, actually, by Joseph Striplin, who is in the Detroit Symphony. He's one of the, actually, he is the first African American violinist in the Detroit Symphony, and he encouraged me back when I was a teenager. You really should pick up viola, you get a lot more jobs if you can do both. It just never took for me. It just never took to me. But yeah, so that's what I do. So yeah, I have a limited studio right now, but teaching is still in my blood. I've been a teacher all my life. When we were little, and we would play with Barbie dolls. Barbie had to go to college and my mother bought me a chalkboard. I come from a legacy of teaching and that really informs a lot of what I do, a lot, that teaching background definitely does.

Tia Imani Hanna: As far as teachers in the Detroit area, I studied with Emily Austin and Morris Hochberg.

Michelle May: Yeah. So did I, both of them. Yes. I had him. I had Emily for years. I had Emily. I probably studied with Emily for about seven years.

Tia Imani Hanna: Okay. I had her for one year, but it made a difference.

Michelle May: Yeah, and actually, Morris is the opposite for me. I studied with Morris just briefly because he was down at Wayne State. He did my audition. I think I actually really had a couple of coachings with him, but I mainly studied with Emily. Emily Austin was the first, I think she was the first woman in the Detroit Symphony Orchestra, and I got her because my friend Sylvia was studying, had studied with her for many years. And when it was time for me to get a teacher. I actually, this was during the time that I did the post-bachelor's work in music at Wayne and one of the reasons I went to Wayne State University because they had a roster of DSO musicians you could study with. And although I had very good teachers, none of them were in the DSO. So, I was like, oh, this would be a great opportunity. So that was one of the reasons I went. And the other reason was because I did a lot of study with chamber music. I love chamber music, even over orchestra music. And so, I had a lot of opportunity to study chamber music and perform chamber music. So that was awesome. Yeah, really awesome too.

Tia Imani Hanna: I'm going to have to come in and play with the Divas thing because I never got to play chamber music at all. I started playing jazz. Which that was the closest to chamber music that I ever got. So, I never had that opportunity.

Michelle May: We would love to have you. They would love to have. They would love to have you.

Tia Imani Hanna: That's fantastic. So yeah, it's fun to hear that we had some of the same teachers too, because I always wondered who people studied with in Detroit. So, that's fabulous. So, you've got all of this background and it's fun to watch you create your life the way that you've been creating your life.

Michelle May: And it's fun to do it!

Tia Imani Hanna: Did you ever think you were going to be where you are now?

Michelle May: Absolutely not. No, absolutely not. I did not. I was fortunate that I grew up in a very supportive household. The whole ‘you can do whatever you want to do’ kind of thing. Although my grandmother was like, within reason. She didn't like, she didn't want me to go to like pop music and jazz and things like that because in her mind there was a lot of pitfalls with that. Which there are. She was absolutely right. And her main thing was drugs. She just, it wasn’t not rooted in reality. Not like every jazz musician was on drugs. That I was a little bit naive and they kept me sheltered and so, because to the point that, like, I never went away to camp. My grandma. Yeah. They… that overnight stuff. They weren't having it. If it wasn't a day camp. I got a lot of good teaching. Oakland University had a great day camp. Wayne did too. But Interlochin? Absolutely not. No, I'm not. Nope. Nope. Nope. If you couldn't be home in your own bed at the end of the night where she could keep an eye on you, wasn’t happening. And so Blue Lake, none of those things, none of those kinds of things, but it's like I said, that speaks though to the wonderful artists, artistic community, that's here in Detroit because I didn't have to go away. I got phenomenal training here because there were teachers that ran day camps like at Oakland University and at Wayne State University and other places too. Looking then, I was watching, like I said, I told you I met Regina Carter when we were teens. And that was, it was right when she was starting to really do jazz. It was at the beginning of when she knew she wanted to do jazz, and had seen Stephane Grappelli, and really wanted to do this stuff. And what happened was, the way we met. Because like I mentioned, Sylvia de la Cerna was her good friend. One day, back then you could get your driver's license at 16. And Sylvia was just a renegade. She had no fear. She would just do whatever. So, she was like, she came to called me one day at the house and she says, “Listen, I want you to meet my friend Regina. She's doing like some wild things on the instrument and, check her out,” or whatever. I was like, okay. So, hopped in the car. We went over there. She lived in another beautiful historic district, the University District, home on Oak Drive, I think is was... her mom's house was. And I walked in, it was her… she had a band, it was her and William Banfield and I don't even know who else. And they were like jamming and I was just, and she's playing, and I was blown away. I was like, hey wait, okay. I'm already feeling insecure in the classical world and now there's this! Yikes! At this point now, I'm never thinking I'm going to do anything like this. That wasn't even in my mind. And, of course, that’s as a teenager and I just… I don't really even know what I thought. I, and now that I'm thinking about it, did I want to play the violin so I could be a soloist or play in an orchestra? Some people think those kinds of things. I don't know what I was thinking. I don't know. But I know that later, before Regina officially, like before she went to Germany and in New York and all that stuff, she was still playing around here in various groups. And I remember when, for the Detroit Jazz Festival, some of our iconic Detroit jazz musicians, like Donald Walden and Marcus Belgrave and Kenny Cox and all of them. Early on in the late eighties, early nineties, they really wanted to have strings as part of their… the things that they were writing and producing and things like that to present at the jazz festival and otherwise. And the initial group of string players in the late eighties, I wasn't in those, but in the early nineties, early to mid-nineties, I was… that's when we were playing at the jazz festival every year and other places. And so, Regina was often, although she was doing some traveling, her base was still here. It was right before, ‘Straight Ahead’, the group ‘Straight Ahead’ and before she had joined that and that had been formed. So, she was still playing here. And I remember that she would say to some of us that were doing this, she said, “I'm out here on my own. It'd be nice to have string players that want to learn jazz.” So that I remember her saying that and because we were watching her and that was my first time thinking, wow, that would be so cool to be able to improvise and do those things, but never thinking that I was going to really actually do that. And then… but we were… we did learn some technique obviously because we were playing licks and backgrounds and things like that. But Marcus and Donald would talk to us about the technique and not using so much vibrato and swing eights, all of those kinds of basic things. Nothing major. We didn't talk about the theory of things, but they really wanted us to really, of course, get the style, the stylistic kind of things. And so, she would come and, oftentimes, she would be the concert mistress of the jazz or string orchestra. And then, of course, when. during the solo sections, they would hand her the changes and she would solo over him and stuff like that and I just thought that was amazing. And so, at that time also I was friends with, Gwen Laster, these are black string players in Detroit who have gone on to have prominent careers. Gwen Laster, Marlene Rice and the two of them also started doing jazz and things like that. And then eventually they ended up leaving Detroit also and making homes elsewhere, Gwen is on the East Coast. I know Marlene… I know was down in, I believe in Savannah for a while. She might be back on the East Coast. I'm not sure. But anyway, so we were just watching them, but not, again not, totally not thinking I'm going to lead a band or any of that kind of stuff. So how that came about was actually, we performed at… I was performing. This was probably maybe mid-to-late, no late nights. I think I did a… we did a set in the string orchestra at the jazz festival and my friend, Patricia Moore, Pat Moore was the violinist who was living here. I don't think she's living here now, but we did it, like, two years in a row. And I think instead of Regina coming back, Gwen was now coming, actually one year was Gwen as the concert mistress. The other year was Marlene Rice. It's like bringing the Detroiters back home to lead the orchestra or whatever. And Pat looked at me and she says, “We can do this. We can learn to do this. We don't have to be sitting back here all the time. Let's do this.” So, we… Pat and I started trying to figure this stuff out ourselves, finding people. I remember Regina used to tell me, “You don't have to have a jazz violin teacher. You can learn from pianists. You should learn from pianist and saxophonists.” Because she did. Vocalists, all of that kind of stuff to have a broader range. And so, we started seeking out people like that. We studied for a short time with Eric Nordin who has a band called ‘The Strange.’ It turns out Eric's sister, Michelle Nordin and I went to high school together, so we studied with him. I actually met Diane Monroe of the Uptown String Quartet. When I was involved with the Sphinx organization, which is a wonderful organization in expanding diversity in classical music. She was a juror for this competition one year. And so, we got to talking. And I told her, I said, “I'm at a point in my life where I do think I would want to learn jazz. I want to learn to improvise. I want to play.” And she said, “If you're open, I'm willing to teach you if you want to come to Philadelphia.” And I was like, that was a no brainer. I was like, “Absolutely, I'm coming to Philadelphia.” So, I went to her house. I flew to Philadelphia a few times and we studied together and developed a friendship too. She's a wonderful… oh, she's an amazing player and an amazing pedagogue. She really can teach the instrument too. And just… I loved her style and her personality and just everything. She's a wonderful person. And I haven't seen her in a long time, but every now and then we, as a matter of fact, right after I received the Kresge Fellow Award, within a month, she received a Doris Duke award, big one. Yeah. So, we connected on Facebook. I was like, “Guess what?” And I was like, “Congratulations!” It was just awesome. She was congratulating me, but that was really nice. But, and so then I started, one of the things that… I can't remember who taught… was Marion Hayden, the bass, great art, our great friend and bassist Marion Hayden who said to me, “This is great doing all this studying,” she said, “But where are you going to learn is getting in a group. You got to get… you got to find a group. Get a group.” So I'm like, okay, how is this going to happen? But it's funny because when you… know another lesson from this that I learned, and then I teach my talk to my clients and my students about is, you can have an intention about something, but you need to be convicted in that intention. That's what propels you forward to your goals. And so, I became, okay, determined that I was going to find a band. And so, I was in a couple bands. I was in one with Malik Allston. Malik has really known in like the techno house music world a little bit and from Detroit elsewhere too, but he wanted to start bringing a lot more live strings or live musicians into the things that he was doing. So, he does a hybrid, like his sound is like house music, but it's really from live instruments. And so that was interesting. And that was my first chance to play the Movement Festival downtown and being up front, so that was wild. I remember, my dad used to love that Movement Festival. And we surprised him. We took him down, then he just loved it. Boom-a-Boom-a! He just used to love that stuff. And it was all ages go down there. So, he, my dad, probably was in his seventies and so I had my brother take him down there. I said, don't… this is when I'm playing… don't tell him I'm on stage, and he was like, that's my daughter up there! It was crazy. It was wild. So, I was with that band. Then I was with another band. They were a group of guys who were playing like a lot of Motown stuff and older soul things and some newer things too. And so that was great and that, but it wasn't, and no shade to any guys that are listing, but they're just, I don't know. It was just guys work differently, some of them do. And especially this particular group, they were mostly getting together to get away from their wives because the rehearsals wouldn't start for an hour after they had talk about sports and they did their beers. And I was just like, can we just play please? So, we did. That was good experience because it wasn’t like there was a string section, it was me, along with the guitars and all of that kind of stuff. It was helpful. But I really got to a point where it was getting to be, like, a waste of time doing that. It was my sister who kept saying to me, “You need to start your own band. You need to start your own band. You're not going to find what you want. Start your own thing.” I resisted. I was like, oh no, cause again, I'm like, me a leader? No. But I hit a wall. I was just like, okay. Something’s got to give, so let me start my own band. So, that's… Patricia funny, because she had also tried working with some guys too, and she was experiencing the same thing, and this is the group she was with. So, she and I got together, and I brought in Leslie because I knew Leslie was an improviser, since she was a teen like Regina, so I knew she was experienced with this thing. And then also I met Jovia, Jovia Armstrong, our percussionist. And by the way, I'm saying these names… Leslie DeShazor, who is a jazz… classical and jazz violist. But Jovia Armstrong is the fabulous percussionist from Detroit. She relocated to Chicago and now she's in L.A. or out west in California. But she and I were in Malik's band together and both of us were just like, we would go to these rehearsals rolling our eyes, like, Ugh. Because the guys would be arguing over absolutely nothing and it was just crazy. So, I said, “I'm thinking of starting something.” The other thing about starting this group too, was that the music we were playing with the other groups, it was okay, but we had a broader interest, that world music aspect a lot of us really liked, because Leslie was doing African dance and, of course, Jovia was doing very sophisticated world music and she wasn't just doing Latin percussion. She was doing all kinds of stuff, poly rhythms and all of this kind of thing. And I wanted to… I started to see that I really wanted to bring that into it. And I specifically, when I really sat and,… I'm a very spiritual person, I'm a Christian… and I just really think meditating and praying. If I'm really going to do this, I really want to see this. And it came to me that I wanted it to be different in terms of not having a drummer, like a full kit and not having, like, keyboards and singers. Everybody's got that. So, I wanted our sound to have a very specific sound, which it does now because we are strings and percussion. And then we have, we have a guitarist usually, so there's no, like, keyboards or that kind of thing.

Tia Imani Hanna: It’s a good old-fashioned string band.

Michelle May: Yeah. Basically. Right. With a little world music, a lot of world music influence. Exactly. So yeah. You're exactly right. But years ago, if you had told me, I think… It's funny you should say that Tia. Because sometimes, every now and then, I do think that if I had told 16-year-old me that this would be your life? I don't know. I see it as a good thing I did not. I'd probably been scared to death then. Oh no. Because that was who I was at 16. Just still be in the background or even at 21 or 25 or whatever. It really wasn't until in my thirties and forties that I started making this shift into ‘maybe I should be stepping up’. I've always been told I was a leader. I resisted it for many years, but I'm here now. And I accept it and I embrace it. And, yeah, this is a great journey.

Tia Imani Hanna: Therefore, the birth of Musique Noire.

Michelle May: That's right. That's right.

Tia Imani Hanna: So where did the name come from?

Michelle May: So, the name came because, since we were going to have these world music influences in there, I don't remember whose house we were at, but it was at Pat's house where we were having a rehearsal when she was one of my first members. I said, with all these worldviews and influences, I feel like we need to have a name that's not English, like an English name. And I thought about, we did a lot of thinking about it and I said, “The underlying theme of all of our music is that it's based on the black experience. There's always that groove, that spiritual center. All of it comes from… everything we're doing is coming from black music. We're not doing anything that’s from other places.” We've done, like, our song “Shrug” is from Morocco, That's just, even when we stepped outside of that, it's still, we still put our soulful, because that's my interpretation of blackness is soulfulness, too, it's been put on there. So initially I said, somehow, maybe we can call ourselves, I don't know, music and black. I don't know how it came about, but the thing is, so we were trying to do it in maybe an African dialect. And Leslie, she's got a lot of colleagues and friends, people that she knows that speaks the language, the various languages they have in the diaspora, at least on the continent. And nothing was working. It just… cause the other thing is you want to have something that people can ‘kind of’ pronounce when they introduce you, you know ‘kind of’, and this stuff wasn't rolling off the tongue, so then I said, no, I don't speak Spanish, but I know Spanish pretty well. And so, I was like, Musica Negra, but I don't know if we can do that. So, I said, maybe let's do the French version. So, I had a student at the time, actually, she's one of my students that did went on to do really well and she was very fluent in French. and I said, how do you say black music in French? She said, Musique Noire. And she said in that context it’s feminine. I don't know a lot about French, but I know, of course, Spanish is feminine and masculine. And she said, “You have to make sure it's in N O I R E because a lot of people mistake and say N O I R and then you have to have that E on the end. So, for the most part, it hasn't been too bad with the pronunciation. We did one gig at a festival where the woman pronounced it, “music cue, no ire.” Okay. And my husband has no chill. My husband has no chill. He was… he did this big turnaround looking at her, “Are you kidding me?” And so, during the set, even after she introduced us, I kept saying it and hoping that she would pick it up and at least try to work with it, something. She came back at the end and said the same thing. “Let’s hear it for Music Cue, No Ire!” It's just wow! Wow! [Tia laughing] So that has been, that's been that. And then, so I was, it was interesting though, I was interviewed ,and I won't shout them out, but anyway, I was interviewed by an HBCU, that has a wonderful radio station or whatever. And the DJ at the time said to me, she says, we're trying to encourage everybody to have names that you could pronounce. So, I was trying to be nice, but I said, “But you're also at a college, so we're going to teach people that this is the language. These are the languages. And black people speak French.” And she was like, you got a point there. But anyway… but we haven't had, I think one other place. We did Concert of Colors. I think you were there. We did Concert of Colors. You were in our band. And I remember the woman that introduced us there. She had a rough time with it also. The American pronunciation uses Music Noir, but I try to just at least go in and say Musique Noire. And then I have another young man that I mentor, he's from Jamaica. He's an artist, fabulous artist that is fluent in French. And he always says it exactly the way it’s supposed to be and my other student, they say it exactly the way it's supposed to be said. But interestingly enough, on our social media, of course we have a lot of French fans, because some of them, I think, think that it's dealing with the genre of black music, but, but it's interesting. So, we have French fans and we also have a lot of fans from Africa that speak French, so a lot of those various countries have French influence. And so, it's been interesting, but yeah.

Tia Imani Hanna: I love that there's so many different entities that you brought together in that group. And the sounds are really great, cause there's a lot of original compositions too, because lovely Leslie’s written several pieces. Jovia has written several pledges. You've written pieces.

Michelle May: Yes.

Tia Imani Hanna: I think. Leah Celebi’s husband wrote a piece. Yes. Celebi sorry. Yes.

Michelle May: So right now that's okay. That's okay. So, she gets that a lot too, but yeah, her husband. Yeah, he's written one for us. He's written one and he's a phenomenal writer. And that's another thing, I never thought I'd be writing this type of music. Part of it is, and it's a challenge for me, because I don't have a lot of the theory and all of that kind of stuff. I write because… I wrote because we had to, we needed pieces, but it's been nice because I've been able to sit down and just think about what is my voice as a writer and music writer and things like that. So yeah, that is, we didn't want to be a cover band. That was the other thing. And I knew I had talented people in the group that could write and had written. And I wanted to showcase that too, and our original tunes have gotten a lot of great engagement and exposure and critiques. We've had some national critiques and things like that. And so, I love that. I love that our music is… our music… we call it World Jazz. Really, you have to call things sometimes, but I don't think, I know, but it's like, really? I don't even know. I was… the first interview that we ever did in print was done by a musician, Nadir Amawali, he goes by Nadir and he's a guitarist and he has his own band. He does the black rock thing and he's phenomenal, but he used to write for, it's now called Blac Magazine. That was… before it was called African American Family Magazine. So that was our first one. And I remember when he was interviewing me, he was like, I can't put my finger on what kind of music you guys do. And I hadn't even… at the time we were calling it… we called it ‘world fusion’. And then, which is, I know what it is, but I don't know even… it isn't like you would call “Twilight,” my song “Twilight” world fusion? It's a jazz, a semi-jazz ballad, semi I don't know. I… but anyway, we don't really worry about that. We've taken on the world jazz moniker and it seems to work for us to give people an idea of what they're going to hear. But I often, when I'm in seeing a show, sometimes I'll say that, we say ‘world jazz’, but you're going to hear a lot of different influences, including classical music in what we do.

Tia Imani Hanna: So, you have what, three, four albums now?

Michelle May: We have three. The first one is called “Good Hair.” That one was our intro. The debut. My intention for the debut, and these are all projects that I executive produce and put together. My intention for that one was just to show the breadth of what we do within Musique Noire. So that one has “Twilight,” the ballad. It has a funk tune. I actually, I wrote that one too. It has Latin tunes on it. We did two cover tunes. We did one, “La Fiesta” too by Chick Corea. And we also did “Eleanor Rigby,” the song that I've been following forever, that song, I just absolutely love “Eleanor Rigby” from the Beatles because it is the first and only, maybe not now ‘the only’, but it was the first rock song that was ever done just with a string quartet. That's all they've got. There's no drums. There's nothing else in there. And it was… I remember the first time I heard it I was rivetted. I was like, wow, I'm must’ve hearing it a bunch of times and I always wanted to record it. So, we did that. There's the breadth of that then, you always got to have a holiday release. That's “Evergreen.” Christmas is coming, put that holiday release up! The thing I noticed too, is that I'm also a member of the recording academy for the Grammys. And I always notice when the nominees and stuff, we would get the list of the nominees we're supposed to be voting for and all that thing, that there was always somebody that had released some Christmas thing that actually made it to the final nominations. So, that just kinda made me think, yeah, we should probably do something that’s a Christmas album. So, we didn't really do... I chose purposely not to do some of the… the Jingle Bells, those kinds of things. We didn't really do those. We did a medley of some… like O Little Town of Bethlehem and We Three Kings and that kind of thing. But I also did “I Wonder as I Wander.” That's another one, that's a beautiful piece. And we, actually, we may be releasing a single. I'm going to talk to the ladies about it because there's a fabulous violinist, Christian Howes. So, you may know too.

Tia Imani Hanna: Yes. He's amazing. Michelle May: Christian's amazing. Last year, last Christmas, he did a version of “Sleigh Ride?” I can't even remember what it was. It was crazy. And he's amazing. And his arrangement, he does all the voices on his instrument, the acapella, and he's… I think he plays guitar too, but he was doing the strumming on his violin. But anyway, Leah mentioned it. She said that would be like a crazy piece to learn. I said, “Let me reach out to him.” So, I did. And he was like, “Oh yeah!” Cause we've talked to before. And so, he actually, he arranged it for us, and I have it. It's tough. Cause we was like, Ooh, I don't really, I said, be careful what you wish for now here. We got it. so, I don't know. We might, I don't know. We'll just have to see. We'll have to see. Everybody's schedules are busy, but I think eventually we'll probably release it as a single. And then the last record that we released in 2017 was called “Reflections, We Breathe.” And that came about because of Jovia. Jovia said, “This time I think we should do something more focused, like a project, a release”. And so, as a matter of fact, we were in this room that I'm here right now. She came over and… behind the screen, there's a couch and we were sitting on the couch and we were talking like, what can we do what we do? And of course, it was always going to be woman centric. We were always going to make sure it was, that's our thing. We want women of all walks of life to be in the forefront. And we came up with the idea that we would do a song that highlights what I termed ‘Woman Warriors of the Arts’. And so that would be women who not only had fantastic artistic careers, but also were social justice warriors too. And that included us, all of us. You, too. We're always, our soul and our hearts are in social justice causes. We don't ignore these things. We speak out. We use our platforms to talk about these kinds of things. And so, my idea was that anything we wrote, we would have a muse, some sort of muse, if you wanted to do that. Like the song that I wrote called “She,” my muse was Alice Coltrane. And the idea was not to imitate or anything like that, but to be inspired by. And what I've took from that is one, of course, she was definitely into the social justice and the spiritual realm and all of that. But she, her, all of her music, even the chanting music that she did after she converted over and it still had that groove to it. You know what I mean? So, I, that was the thing that I wanted to, just at least capture in “She” with that. And then, so the, and if we did a song that was a cover, it would be of someone. So, we did the Nina Simone, which of course, you're very prominent on that piece, which we appreciated. It sounds… you did a fabulous job on that! Absolutely fabulous job on that one! So, pick up that CD so you can hear it, to everybody who is listening. So, you can hear it, hear the fabulous stuff the Tia did on that. So, Nina Simone. The “Reflections,” the title track “Reflections” is Jovia’s tribute to sculptor Elizabeth Catlett because one of Jovia’s mentors is Elizabeth’s son, Francisco Moore Catlett is Elizabeth Catlett’s son and Jovia studied with him for many years and she still keeps in touch with him and Ms. Catlett passed, or maybe Dr. Catlett, I'm not sure, passed away. She wanted to do something to honor her. So that's what “Reflections” is about. And even if you didn't have a muse, again, we're celebrating who we are. I don’t… it's… muses and I want people to always understand that there are people that are maybe well more well-known than you are, but you bring just as much to the table as someone that's a quote-unquote celebrity or icon, or those kinds of things. You just… there's a lot of things within you that are iconic, that are celebratory, those types of things. So, I didn't want this project just to be about the Nina Simone's and the more prominent people, but if we did something it's also about who we are as women and what we bring to the table for that. So, that was a wonderful project. I'm very proud of that project. It was one that not only had fantastic original music and interpretations of music on it, but the packaging itself is beautiful and it turned out very well. The graphic designers really interpreted my vision very well. On the album, on the inside, there are faded pictures of women's faces. And those were actually… my father was also a visual artist and he was a fabulous visual artist and he loved to draw women. And so, I've got, I don’t, probably about 150 or more pictures of women that he drew. Faces, body types, nudes, all kinds of beautiful work. And so, what I did was, I picked about, I don't know, maybe 10 of them or something like that, and had them faded in the background. It was my way of honoring him because he passed in 2010, but I thought that was beautiful, including he had done a picture of my mom. And so, my mom is in one of those, a drawing of him. The other thing that I really loved about that release is that I also had an opportunity to have a writer. And so, Marsha Philpot, who's also known as Marsha Music. She's a prominent Detroit figure here. She talks, she's interviewed all over the world all the time about music in Detroit, history of Detroit. Things like that. Her father owned a very prominent record shop back in the Black Bottom days when Paradise Valley. And that's the area of Detroit that was just a wealth of everything in the black community that, unfortunately, like in many cities got obliterated before the freeway system that went through. They just completely removed it. But her father, Joe's Record Shop, and he was one of the first to record Aretha Franklin when she was even in their teens because he was also recording her father's sermons. So, I really, I went to her and I said, “I want liner notes for this one.” And she was… her eyes got big and she said, “You have just fulfilled a dream of mine because I have always wanted to write album liner notes.” And did she write those notes! She's a phenomenal writer and so I'm very happy because the other thing I'm moving towards is collaboration. I want to do more things with other...

Tia Imani Hanna: Snaps to that! [Tia snaps fingers]

Michelle May: Yes. exactly. More collaborations. I have another group, yeah, I actually put together for a quick project that we did called ‘sisters’. I called it “Nina Strings” after Nina, Simone, “Nina Strings.” And it was just me and two of the ladies that I mentor, Alex Way, who's also a fellow, Kresge Fellow, was so nice to have a former student and someone I mentor get a Kresge Fellowship with me at the same year and Ashley Nelson. And so, we were... I was approached by another Kresge Fellow who's a dancer, Erica Stowall. And, I think I started pronounced it Stowwall and she wanted to have some kind of string something going on with this dance that she was choreographing for this presentation we did out in the field. It was at Eliza Howell Park in Detroit. It was beautiful. Well done. And again, I had set an intention even before that I wanted to do collaborations and here this opportunity came up, but it wasn't really, it… Musique Noire didn't fit for that. So, I said, you know what? I'm just going to, and I've been doing a lot of that too. And preaching this too, that ‘if you don't have an opportunity, you make one’. She came to me thinking that we were gonna use Musique Noire when she described what she wanted. I said it probably isn't going to fit. Not to mention, trying to get everybody's schedules together to do all of that. So, I said, let me do something a little different, scale down. And so, I did, I founded Nina's Strings, but Nina Strings really is, it's my thing that if I need something on the side, quick to do, it can be whatever I want it to be, whatever personnel I want it to be, whatever instrumentation I want it to be, but mainly strings. And so, we put together this wonderful presentation that we did, and it was just, it was so amazing. And so that's another collaboration. I've also released, Musique Noire has two music films. And they're not really video, I don't like to call them videos cause they're a little deeper than that. And so that was collaboration with filmmakers and cinematographers, which is something that I had wanted to do. And there's, in one of the films, there's a dancer, so there's more, and here we go again, collaboration with choreographers. So that was awesome too. So that… just amazing. Amazing.

Tia Imani Hanna: Where did you find the filmmakers?

Michelle May: There's always a story with me, so…

Tia Imani Hanna: Well, that’s good. That's what I want to know.

Michelle May: No, I know. I know. Okay. What really? God, all of this God, because I tell you, I couldn't plan half the stuff that happens, I can't… I just make my intention and just say… my prayers are always, “this is what I want, if I'm supposed to have it, make it happen. If not, okay, we'll move on to the next thing.” So, I can… Tia I swear to you, I don't even know other than, like I said, God. One day there was an event, they've had it for a couple of years, of course not this year due to COVID, but it was something called I forget what it has out of Detroit in the name, but it was basically like an opportunity for a bunch of vendors to get together at Eastern Market to do their wares and this was separate from the regular Eastern Market weekend, where everybody comes and shops and… Eastern Market, by the way, for those of you that are not in Detroit, Eastern market is one of the oldest open farmer's market in the United States since the late 1800’s. And so, every weekend, I guess it's open all during the week, but generally every weekend, farmers come and bring their wares, flowers, food, all kinds of stuff. And there are shops down there too. So, it's a wonderful historical place there in Detroit. But anyway, so they had this thing. And I think I was on the mailing list, I don't know, but I got it. I said, this looks interesting. I think I was just looking for something to do, but it was really probably God going, “Come on, you need a cinematographer. We're going to take you down there.” But anyway, so I went down there and I'm walking around or whatever at this one table was this young couple, they're Filipino, and they had a video showing like their… I guess it was a release that they'd recently done. It was beautifully done. It was beautifully done. I don't even remember what it was, but I just remember standing there being intrigued about it. And then I was like, we're going to be releasing… I'm figuring this in my head yet… we are going to be releasing a release. It would be nice… we’ve never had a video done, ever, so this will be great. So, I started talking with them and, of course, and immediately… it’s so funny. They’re are wonderful couple it's Eden and Thad. And their company is called Reel Clever Films. R E E L, like the reel, clever films and their personalities are the complete opposite. So, Eden is… she's on it and she’s talking to you and she's giving you this, we're going to do all this awesome collaborating and he's literally this [silence]. You don't hear a thing… absolutely silent most of the time. He's usually smiling. He does not speak, but he's brilliant at what he does because he's really the one that does most of the editing and all that kind of stuff. She's about the conceptualization, although she knows how to do all that stuff too, and she's definitely the mouthpiece for the two of them. But we really hit it off, and we started talking, and I kept her information and it took about a year to get to the fruition and maybe a little bit more than a year, but we finally got together and you've seen the videos. Their work is amazing.

Tia Imani Hanna: Yes.

Michelle May: Amazing.

Tia Imani Hanna: Really nice stuff.

Michelle May: As a matter of fact, they also were hired by Kresge Arts in Detroit as of last year stuff. And so, they're doing some of the Kresge Fellows’ films now, too. They're doing it again this year, too. But anyway, I couldn't have been happier and just even ‘vibing’ with them and we've become great. She considers me now a mentor, which is great, awesome. And it's just, it's great. So that's how I found them. It just, it happened, and it worked out so well.

Tia Imani Hanna: I love that you have a story for everything too.

Michelle May: It is. That is just, that's my life. That's my life, which has been crazy. Been totally crazy.

Tia Imani Hanna: That's fantastic. Alright, if you're talking to, if you're coaching one of your clients now, and you've got a new creative and say, they're already in their thirties or their forties and they don't know what to do. What kind of the things would you tell them?

Michelle May: Okay. First of all, it's very personalized, but I can tell you… cause I had one potential client ask me, like she wanted to know like specifically what would happen. And I said, that's not really how coaching works and it's actually not how therapy works either. This is a relationship, so you come to me with what your dream is, what it is you want to accomplish. Many of the people that I'm talking to are not, they're not new at this at all. There's a lot of… but a lot of them, they're trying to either trying to make a change or get something off the ground or that kind of… so I can tell you the overall pillars of things and I fit the specific stuff that they want into these things. And we adjust. It's flexible. One is ‘mindset’. That's the first thing. Most of the people that I'm talking to, they're talking to me because they know what they want to do. Although they always say, “I have no idea.” Yes, you do. Okay. So that's the first thing I'm trying to realign their mindset to one of power and one of control. I don't mean like you can control everything, but they come with this whole, “Oh, I'm overwhelmed. And I don't know what to do.” That doesn't serve your purpose and actually, in a lot of respects, that's not true at all. It's not true at all. You've leaned into this panic, but you know what I mean? But you really, when I break things down to people about the accomplishments they've had and just a lot of different things. A lot of different things I frequently hear, “Oh yeah, you're right.” You know what I mean? Kind of thing, because you're so leaning into that negativity and that panic, that you're not really thinking about who you are and what you bring. So that's one thing. Mindset is huge because if you don't... Even when I talked to my students at the college, most of them are talking to me generally about their academic path. But I always, before we get off call, or when we were in face-to-face before I let them out of my office, I want to talk about what's going on with you personally. How are you feeling? Because if you don't have this together inside your head and your body and ‘mind, body, and spirit’ that the academic plan or the career plan is not… it's going to get derailed. So, we do spend quite a bit of time with that. And then it's just as a matter, it really is just a matter of… another one of my pillars is like communication, being able to, communicate what you want, not only to yourself, but to others. So, because most of the time, the creatives that talk to me, I can say a lot of them are having projects that they want to release or writings that they want to do or whatever. Or maybe they want to pivot off of, because right now we're in COVID, there’s not a lot of performance opportunities. I've been very blessed that I've been able to bring on musicians because I have my house concert series, which we were able to still do in, not in the homes, but in back yards. And I also now am the music curator for a local coffee house. I’m talking about not waiting on other people, again this whole, there are no gigs for me. There might be if you are willing to take on more of an entrepreneurial mindset and present yourself in a certain way. When you have to communicate that, you have to communicate that, because you want to create excitement for the things that you want to do, not just for other people, but for yourself also. You can't gather excitement for other people if you're not excited about what you do. So that communication. And then also, just constantly attacking fear and that vocabulary around fear. I try to as much as possible. Actually, I do it because that's also something I'm removing from my vocabulary is ‘try’, I don't ‘try’. I do this. We talk frequently about, if someone says something to me in a negative way, I will say to them, “Okay, how can we say…” we do this in therapy too… “How can you say that differently?” or “How can we reframe that so it's more comfortable to you?” And then, “How does that feel once you do that?” One of the things that has come up a lot for some of the creatives I'm talking to is, like, pricing, their fees. Most of the folks are not charging enough. I have a client right now who, when we figured out what she was allowing someone else… she's a writer and she gets hired to do writing workshops, but other people hire her and tell her, “But we only have this amount of money.” When we broke it down, it turned out that the people that were in her workshop, she was basically getting paid $6 per person.

Tia Imani Hanna: Wow. No.

Michelle May: Six. She had… she didn't even think of it that way. She didn't even think of it that way. So, I said to her, “How would it feel for you to be able to put up, first of all, to be able to put on your own workshop and charge $40? Just this, just $40.” That's a substantial… and you got the same amount of people. That's five times you just got for this other thing. Just having people reframe. But see, that takes a mindset shift because what that means is now you have to tell that person, “I'm sorry, I can't take that workshop.” And you also have to be at a point where you can't let people dictate what your creative practice is going to be. We started that conversation talking about that because she was saying that they were… the thing that I like to say, they were like messing with her mind with this, “You're not really published that much. So, we can't.” First of all, she released a CD of her writing. Okay. A CD of her, she's a spoken word also. You're published. Okay. Boom. Yes. As far as I'm concerned. And then I also asked her, “How long have you been doing this?” She said 13 years. That doesn't sound to me like a novice. So, I said, so again, you're allowing people to define your practice and we… people don't get… unless you let them. They don't get the opportunity to do that. You have to decide how you want to present. So, we're working on things like that. That's been a lot of the things that I'm talking about, that we're talking about. As a matter of fact, some of these things are coming up a lot that my sister and I are going to be doing a workshop to help creative professionals, we're calling it a creative reset. So we're going to be addressing some of these things so that people can come and they can sit down and, one of the exercises I have people do, and it's something that I got from the coach that I work with, is to write about their ideal life and write about it not as if it's happening. Because I always usually have to work on that with my clients because they usually write it like this. “I hope to have this, and I would really like to do this.” That's not how we want to do it. It's “I am this. I have this. These are the things that are happening,” which is a much more empowering way to speak. And the other way you sound like you're apologizing, or you're not sure, or you're shirking, that kind of thing, and that's fine. That's fine. It was… I had never written like that before. It was a great exercise for me. And so, we do a lot of that kind of thing. So, we're going to be covering in this workshop… we haven't really worked everything out, but those kinds of things we're going to talk about is some mindset work. How do you price your services? How do you market your services? And just, how do you organize what you want to do, like how? What's a good way? And again, we're doing it high level because everybody works differently, but we want people to walk away with just a blueprint that they can adapt however they want as they're heading into the next year. So, we're looking forward to doing that. That's going to be our first virtual workshop. We're really excited about that.

Tia Imani Hanna: Okay. So, what is your new project that you're working on right now?

Michelle May: I'm very much into working intergenerationally. I mentioned collaboration and all of that. I'm very intrigued by what young people are doing, especially, Millennials and Generation Z. I'm a young Baby Boomer. I'm at the end of the Baby Boomers years. But we’re doing, at least right now, we're calling it an EP. We're not doing a full CD. And the idea is that I hand-picked three young people who are out here doing that thing with their music. They're very successful in what they're doing, and I wanted to challenge them. And so, I'm bringing them on, they're going to produce three songs for us, and then we're going to do three songs. We might end up doing four, that's why I'm thinking this might end up being, like, a full project. But anyway, what I said to them is that I wanted them to write based on their experience as a woman. Although one of the persons that I chose was Brendan Davis. Brendan is a phenomenal jazz pianist prodigy. I've known him for many years. He has a wonderful spirit. And even though he's not a woman, he was raised by a single mom and there's a lot of women in his life. And so, I asked him to write based on someone that he admires that's a woman or whatever. We’re always centering back on that woman experience. So, he's going to be on the project Alex Way is a former student of mine. She's a singer, songwriter, violinist. Fabulous. She was in my Nina Strings group. She's amazing. She's written some really wonderful music, in terms of not just, as I mentioned before, it's important that their social, their social justice radar, is on, like they're paying attention to what's going on and they're making statements about what's going on and all of that. And Brendan is definitely that way. Alex is definitely that way. She's written songs specifically about, the black experience and the things that we've been going through. So, I'm having her write a piece and then we have a harpist, Ahya Simone. She’s awesome. She also won the Kresge with me. She, Alex, and I are all 2018 Kresge Fellows. She's very well known. She's absolutely beautiful and socially conscious. She's done a wonderful… she's actually working on a series. I don't know if it's a film or a series, called the “Femme Queen Chronicles,” where she's showcasing beautiful, black trans women, of which she is one herself. And so, she's like the main character and it's wonderful. It's absolutely wonderful. And she's actually international. She has a wonderful community within locally, nationally, and internationally. And so, we're bringing these three on. What we're doing is a couple of things. One, we're giving them a writer and producer credit and I am paying them. So, they're, they're making, we're not just asking them to do this. And also, they get mentoring from us because we are talking them through their pieces. We're getting ready to… actually tomorrow… to go in and record Brendan’s piece. It's already done. It's fabulous. Alex has given us her piece. Ahya is still working on hers. But yeah, there's an opportunity for them to get mentoring from us and some of that music industry experience and things like that. So, I'm really excited about that. And the project is called “Intergenerational.” I just thought that would be a great way to just call it. We did do a crowdfunding for it, so that's good. A lot of this won't be out of my pocket, like the other projects have been, but which is fine, but, but yeah, we're really excited and looking forward to that. I'm hoping to release it. We'll see how things go with Covid. We could go into the studio because you can be socially distant and all that stuff. But I'm hoping to release it sometime next year, but “Intergenerational,” that's our new project.

Tia Imani Hanna: Fantastic. Love to hear about that. Where can people go to find out about you? What online, on social media, where should they look for you?

Michelle May: Okay. So, several places. So, you can start with our business website, which is A M May Associates Dot com. So, A M M A Y A S S O C I A T E S.com. And that has all the information about our coaching and consulting services. I also have my own website, which is Michelle May.net, M I C H E L L E M A Y.net, which actually branches off into the other ones. Then my group, Musique Noire, is musiquenoire.com. That's M U S I Q U E N O I R E.com. So, that's where they can find me. And then all my social connections are on there too. I'm mainly on Instagram and Facebook. We also have a private Facebook group for creative professionals, and it's called ‘Creative Professionals Thriving in Abundance and Authenticity’. And if you're a creative professional and you're looking for a supportive community of like-minded folks, you can join us there. There are three questions you have to answer to in order to get approved to go in, but we would love to have you and, yeah, that's where they can find me.

Tia Imani Hanna: Thank you so very much, Michelle…

Michelle May: You’re welcome.

Tia Imani Hanna: …for coming on the show and sharing all of this enthusiasm and history of Detroit and the history of your creation of yourself as a striving and celebrated and exuberant example of what you can be if you put your mind to it. So, thank you for being on Tia Time.

Michelle May: Thank you.

Tia Imani Hanna: Thank you for joining us this week on Tia Time with Artists. Make sure to visit our website, tiaviolin.com, where you can subscribe to the show in iTunes and never miss an episode. Please leave us a rating wherever you listen to podcasts. We really appreciate your comments, and we'll mine them to bring you more amazing episodes. I’d like to thank this inaugural season's sponsors: The folks at Jazz Alliance of Mid-Michigan or JAMM, Michigan ArtShare, a program of Michigan State University Extension is a partner in supporting the Tia Time podcast, and Shambones Music. Without their support this podcast would not be possible. Thank you so much. If you would also like to contribute to the show, you can find us on https://www.patreon.com/TiaTime1. If you want to continue the conversation about topics discussed on the show or start new ones with like-minded people, join us at the Tia Time Lounge on Facebook. Thank you for listening. See you next week at Tia Time!

+ Transcription

Tia Time with Artists, with guest Marion Hayden – recorded 9/25/2020

Tia Imani Hanna: Welcome to Tia Time with Artists, the weekly podcast where we discuss the methods, challenges, and real-life experiences of living our creative dreams. What kind of creative warrior are you? Musician? Filmmaker? Painter? Choreographer? Poet? Sculptor? Fashionista? Let's talk about it right now. I'm your host, Tia Imani Hanna.

Tia Imani Hanna: Welcome to “Tia Time with Artists.” Our guest today is Marion Hayden, amazing bass player from Detroit and someone I've gotten a chance to work with many times. And I love listening to you play. And thank you for coming to my podcast.

Marion Hayden: Thank you for having me Tia. Glad to be here.

Tia Imani Hanna: I am so glad you're here. So, we just came off of the Detroit Jazz Festival, together with “Sister Strings: Roots, Voice and Drums.” That's a mouthful right there. But I got it all in there. And that was a fantastic experience. I'd like to hear about what your experience was even just with that last COVID-influenced performance at the Detroit Jazz Festival, because you've worked that festival so many times.

Marion Hayden: I have… I'll make a couple of comments Tia. One, I'd just like to say that I thought that, under the circumstances, the Detroit Jazz Festival did an outstanding job on this festival. There were so many ways that could have not been successful and so many details that could have not been attended to that… but were, in fact, attended to. They attended to so many great details. And what's more important for us as musicians is that the sound and the camera work, since people have to experience the festival online, the sound, the camera work was magnificent. It was just excellent. It was par excellent. I can say that because this time, because I didn't have to run from one stage to another to actually hear people. I probably heard twice or three times as many live acts as I've ever heard when the festival is going on. Because usually by the time, say, if I do a set, then I have to pack down my things, and it's a big reunion for with other musicians. We sat around and talk. Next thing you know, I look at my watch. I've missed some performances that I've really wanted to see, whereas this time there was no missing performances. I pretty much looked in on every performance I wanted to see. I checked out all of my friends. I checked out a lot of some of the great guests that managed to make it in, which was wonderful, like Steve Turre, Renee Marie, Pharoah Sanders. Robert Glasper. That was just all fantastic, so I just thought that under the circumstances, the festival was really was brilliant and magnificent. Really. I really enjoyed it. And then I'd like to say, if you wouldn't mind me just rolling on it. I, know, that the Sister Strings project… it's killin'. and I am just so honored to be a part of it. I have to say that Naima Shamborguer, who you have a familial relationship with and a friend relationship with, is this one of this year's Kresge Artists Fellows and deservedly. Naima has been a brand vocalist and also someone who has been a self-starter on projects for years and I've been on the bandstand with Naima for a long time. She has invited me on the bandstand with her since I was a young bassist in my twenties. And she has always been someone who has been willing to come up with projects and create interesting opportunities for herself as a vocalist, and then make that project happen. Do performances. Record those things. So, Naima is really a fantastic artist and this Sister Strings, et cetera, project that she got a Knight Foundation grant for initially to do is…it has legs of its own now. And that's why we were able to go to the Detroit Jazz Festival and do that project, which people still are coming back to me on Facebook and social media and saying how much they loved that project. And I thought that it was a really smart move. When Christopher Collins, Jazz Fest president put the Justice Suite together, which was that really great suite of four different artists from Detroit all doing their own works, but they were all… all the works were concentrating on the theme of justice. We just lost Congressman John Lewis and we've been having such a moment in our country, in terms of people coming out and really talking about social justice issues and for us to start off that piece with “Kumbaya.” Okay. That was a mic drop and it was fabulous, and it really set a beautiful tone for the entire program. Yeah, that's what I felt about the jazz festival. I’m ready for us to come back in person, for sure. Yeah, for sure. We need to come. We need to come back in person, but just, I just thought under the circumstances, it was fantastic, under the circumstances.

Tia Imani Hanna: It was such an honor, even just to be on the stage. That's my first Detroit Jazz Festival, It's the first one that I've ever played. So, I was thrilled to be there.

Marion Hayden: High time Tia! High time! You sound fabulous Tia. You are such a great artist in your own right. High time. And I just think that performance, the “Justice Suite” performance and the Sister Strings performance we did were both completely riveting. I was just, I was really just in such a great place while we did them and after we finished. I think everybody was really high from that.

Tia Imani Hanna: It was also such a thrill just to be on the stage… there's five of you all there. Five Kresge Arts winners. Because you won… what year was it that you won that?

Marion Hayden: It was 2016 and then, Michelle May was I think 2018. Cause it's every other year for the music. Gayelynne McKinney was, I guess she must've been 2014. And who else? Oh, Naima is of course 2020. Yeah. There you go.

Tia Imani Hanna: And then Pam Wise…

Marion Hayden: Right, Pamela Wise and I were the same year we were both in 2016.

Tia Imani Hanna: Yeah. So that was thrilling in and of itself and you have all, it's all almost all women. Then we have Mahindi Massai. Fantastic percussionist. And just like the one male, but it was just nice… that it was all these strong, powerful women, these great players and all on stage together and we had fun! So that was just nice to see. We were serious, but we were having a good time and I hope that came across to the audience. So that was lovely.

Marion Hayden: I hope it did too, because certainly… there's just a lot of great camaraderie there and, of course, what's really great is that we all have that, each and every one of us on that stage, has already has had years of association in different bands or different ensembles that we've played together… each and every one of us.

Tia Imani Hanna: Leslie DeShazor. Yeah. And I didn't want to leave anybody out. Jasmine James was our new cello player that came to play with us, so that was really fun to meet her and work with her.

Marion Hayden: Yeah, I've known Jasmine since she was probably a teenager when I first met her. And then also, I know Jasmine's mom, who's an educator, a PhD educator with Wayne State and then also her brother is a couple of years older than my youngest son. And they both went to Detroit School of Arts together. So yeah, so it is, like I said, there's a lot of great use of association, which to me, that's like a quintessential Detroit ensemble. We have many ways that we connect, and we can take these different things that we do and regroup them into fresh ideas and have a different sound. Because for instance, what you do with this band does not sound anything like what you do with your band. And what you do… also when you work with Musique Noire. You reorganize the personnel, different repertoire, and then you have another beautiful sound. That's also very elegant, authentic.

Tia Imani Hanna: It's wonderful to just be part of this whole thing. When you did the 2016 Kresge, so what projects did that help spawn for you for in 2016? Did you have projects that came out of that?

Marion Hayden: Yes, as a matter of fact, I did. There was, just before Michelle and I got our Kresge, they had a sort of a thing they did, they had a program that they did for the Kresge's that was called Art X and Gayelynne was able to have one of those. That was a program where after you got your Kresge, maybe the following year, all the Kresge artists of that cohort did a whole presentation and it used to be down at the different venues. And it was actually very exciting. I participated in at least a couple of them. I think I did… I think I did Gayelynne’s and I might have done that… maybe Marcus Belgrave have one also, but we invite you, especially those of you that got that, or previous Kresge winners to do something they called Art X-Detroit. And to create some sort of an artistic piece based on the curatorial question. How has your community changed? So basically, we have to submit a proposal to do that, and so I submitted a proposal for a piece that eventually became a piece called “Highland Park, City of Ogun.” So, if it sounds strange, it's a little different because Ogun is the name of the West African Orisha. And that is the Orisha that is in charge of metal workers, people that work on motors, people that are iron workers, smelters, people that drive cars, truck drivers, if there's anyone that has to do with motors and metal, they are held sway by the Orisha Ogun. And so, I created that program, a musical suite to investigate “How has the city of Highland park changed?” Because that's where my husband and I have raised our children here for 25 years. And Highland Park is actually one of the first motor cities of the world. One of the first motor cities of the world. This is the birthplace of both the Ford Motor Company and the Chrysler company. And it is also, because that, is also the location of the very first mile of highway, which is the Davison freeway. The very first mile of highway in the country was laid, that pavement was laid right here in Highland Park. So anyway, Highland Park has a lot of deep history in the auto industry, and it also has a lot of really deep history in white flight and disinvestment. And so many other things that are, that we talk about a lot now, that the history is really right here, this is a microcosm for it. So, part of my program that I devised for “Highland Park City of Ogun” was to take interviews. So, I interviewed a little more than 30 people that live here in Highland Park about their history here. And I had a questionnaire and I asked things like, how long have you lived here? What was your best experience here? What is your worst experience here? What do you like the most about living here? What do you like least about living here? What are your wishes for this community? And so, people came, gave me some really just fascinating answers from those. And so, I wove those responses into music that I wrote. And so, it ended up being… and on top of that, I premiered it in a place called The Smith Shop, which is a blacksmith shop in Highland Park. So, it was really interesting. That premiered and, thank God, it premiered in October of 2019, because if I had waited any longer, I guess it would have to be a virtual premiere from here, but this was actually an in-person premiere. So yeah, I would have to say that Kresge has given me and other artists some really wonderful opportunities. It's a really great way to just give yourself some affirmation and confirmation of yourself as an artist and hopefully make yourself just a little bit bolder. Because that's what I really believe. I believe that as we mature as artists, we're supposed to get a little bit bolder. People always think the boldness is for the youth, but I beg to differ. I think that an over 40-year-old black woman is pretty dangerous, and it just gets more dangerous.

Tia Imani Hanna: Yep. That's right. We have more to offer.

Marion Hayden: That's right. A lot more. And you're a lot less afraid. That's what I say. I'm a lot less afraid. That's why… that's the reason why when people get up in their eighties and they say something crazy, and you’re like , “God, Aunt So-and-So just said something really crazy.” It’s like, yeah, filters down, filters all the way down. They just start going further and further down. And after a while you just start getting direct from the brain.

Tia Imani Hanna: That's right. That’s right.

Marion Hayden: Apparently, that starts. It does definitely start when you get over forty and it’s like...

Tia Imani Hanna: I feel like, what am I holding back for?

Marion Hayden: Exactly. Or you say things like “That's the last time such and such is going to happen. The next time such and such happens, and then I'm going to do X or I'm going to say X.” And then you do or things like, yeah, I heard this coming up. I saw that coming a mile away. I can tell you why because it already happened.

Tia Imani Hanna: That's fabulous. We… I appreciate the fierceness because it inspires me to continue to be fierce in the same way. Go past the boundaries. Do something different. We were just talking before we started recording about, okay, getting on Instagram. Wow. That's… trying to figure that out. Trying to figure out this whole podcasting thing. Trying to learn editing and all these different skills that I just never thought I would have to learn. But I'm actually quite grateful for the opportunities to do that because it wasn't available before.

Marion Hayden: Yes. Although I'll admit I'm complaining right now. Cause for real, I didn't really want to know that much about video and I really didn't want to know how long it takes to upload a video. That’s really something… that's some info I did not want to know at all. And super ups and props to videographers, and people that have to do that for a living. Cause obviously there's some magic going on with that thing. But me sitting there babysitting the uploads working in my kitchen and coming back and saying, oh wait another eight minutes. That can't be my life. I can't do that, but I will say, but you're right. The opportunity to get new skills. That's a good thing. And I think that's one of the things that really keeps people, musicians, artists of our ilk, vibrant people. That's, I think, that's the thing that keeps us vibrant for years is because we have a reason to be, right. We always have something to do. There's always something on your docket and your studio. Docket is always full. You have an agenda. This creativity really has no bounds, no end. That's a great thing,

Tia Imani Hanna: I know. as a younger woman, I constantly was trying to figure out, how can I have… I'd love to have my own TV show or my own radio show. And I found ways to do it. cause there was a public radio station when I lived up in Lansing. When I was at Michigan State, I graduated, and I stayed up in Lansing and I got to do the local radio station. So, I had a show on there for a couple of years. But it was just like one, a friend of mine just said, “Hey, you should go do radio show.” I said, “Oh, is that what you do? You just go do it.” It's yeah. So, I was like, I walked in and I happened to know the lady who was teaching the course at the community college. And she said, yeah, we will train you, come on in.

Marion Hayden: Wow!

Tia Imani Hanna: That's how you do it.

Marion Hayden: Was that an LCC, Lansing Community College?

Tia Imani Hanna: At Lansing Community College.

Marion Hayden: Yeah, that's a great school. My band, “Straight Ahead,” and I used to do some regular events with that school. They were just a really, at least at one time, were just a really integral part of that community there. Lectures, all kinds of outdoor concerts and all kinds of things. Yeah. I love that place. Yep.

Tia Imani Hanna: Yeah. “LCC Concert Under the Stars,” I think was my first solo performance as a leader. I should say Lansing Community College, and Ron Newman played piano for me.

Marion Hayden: Of course, I know Ron really well and Sunny Wilkinson and yeah, that's my folks up there.

Tia Imani Hanna: Yeah, it was a good place to start as a jazz performer. So, starting out in Detroit, it's scary because its Detroit listeners are serious listeners, and Lansing listeners are like, we just like it.

Marion Hayden: Yeah. But honestly, I went to graduate school at Michigan State and so that would have been in the early eighties, mid-eighties, and Lansing, one thing about… Jazz lives in all these little, small motor towns around the state. Jazz lives there. And Lansing has always had a really nice jazz community. When I was in school there, why, we used to go check out Betty Joplin. Betty Joplin was a fabulous vocalist from there. That's where I first met Randy Gillespie, who is one of the greatest drummers in the world. One of the greatest living drummers in the world who happened to plant roots there and make a family in Lansing, and then decided to continue to be one of the greatest drummers in the world, but do that from Lansing… and still tour and work in the clubs from there. Man, just some fantastic, just some, some fantastic… Eddie Russ, the great pianist Eddie Russ, actually lived in Grand Rapids, but he would come and work in Lansing quite a bit. There's just a really great cadre of musicians that used to come through there. I got some had some great experiences there, so I don't know how much of the listening audience is around, but jazz lives in Lansing, it lives in Jackson, Michigan, Flint, Saginaw, all those little places where there were auto industries and to get a lot of black folks. And then the black folks always bring their music. Black people always got their music with them, that's gonna come with them. And then if you got black folks in the community, you're going to have their live music. You're going to have some clubs where the live music is. And that's, to me, that's just a really beautiful texture about being a state like Michigan.

Tia Imani Hanna: It has historically, that makes perfect sense. I think now Jazz Alliance of Mid-Michigan is the jazz association up there. Lois Mummaw and Gregg Hill are the president and I guess treasurer of that group up there and they keep jazz running up there.

Marion Hayden: I know Gregg, definitely. Yeah.

Tia Imani Hanna: I guess Jeff Shoup has music on Tuesday nights, I believe at Moriarity's, which is not a jazz club. It's just a club, but on Tuesday nights, they have a jazz scene. So, there’s stuff always happening in that. That was a good place to be when I was starting out because there was a willing audience to listen to jazz. Even people who didn't necessarily like jazz or didn't know they liked jazz. And that was a nice thing to see. So, there is a large audience because it is a tri-city thing. People come in from all over the place to come to it. It's like, even just smaller towns like St. Johns and Jackson and Grand Rapids is further away. I don't think they come as far as that, but we do have that. They had a jazz festival there, a blues festival there. And that's happened since the nineties and it's been more consistent that way. So, I watched it grow because I was in college in the eighties and I watched it grow. We do owe a lot to the smaller communities keeping jazz alive. And I'm saying this to any of the artists out there listening, especially as jazz artists, support your local jazz alliances, wherever you are living. Join, be a member, be a participant, because you're helping to keep your own audience involved in the music that you are making and creating new listeners, because you always need younger people to hear the music and older people to know about you. Anyway, that's my commercial.

Marion Hayden: That's a good commercial Tia. Thank you for that. And you're right about that. And yeah, as I said, I love the fact that jazz lives in so many places. It's just awesome. When I was, even now certainly, but certainly when I was a young player, just starting up, I would get in my car, maybe if somebody would roll with me and a piano player, my roll together, or the drummer, and we totally would drive to Jackson, Grand Rapids, like I said, Flint, Saginaw, Lansing and do gigs, usually club dates too. Sometimes I think, but lot of times they have a club dates, maybe occasionally a festival or something like that. Kalamazoo always had a black arts festival. We'd roll up and go to that one. And, those things were, they were really important to the community. Loved that. And now we have these kinds of groups, like JAMM, Jazz Alliance of Mid-Michigan, where you know, that they can really be supportive of that. They can help.

Tia Imani Hanna: Yep. Definitely continue to support that.

[“Sumpin Like Dat” Marion Hayden track playing]

Tia Imani Hanna: So, tell me, how did you get to the bass? Did you start out with the bass? Or did you start on a different instrument first? Or was there music in the family? Or how did it start for you?

Marion Hayden: I'll just say this and anyone that knows me is probably heard my little story, but I'll just as some folks have not necessarily. So, I started on cello. I have… my family was not a family of musicians, but they were a family of music lovers. And one of the things I always say is that it's really important for us as parents or just family members… but if anybody that has, if you have young people in your purview, be sure to expose them to live music and recorded music. They will listen to the music of their generation soon enough. That's for sure. Once they cross into about 12 or so, the age of 12, they'll start listening to generational music. You don't have to worry about that, but before then, you have a lot of control over their little listening. If you take that control and you can infuse their atmosphere in your house or in the car, when you have them with you, with your music or music that you would like to expose them to. And so, my parents did such a thing. They did that and I'm sure they weren't necessarily doing it on purpose, but they were music lovers. So, my dad was a crazy jazz fan. I'm talking just stacks and stacks of albums, all kinds of records. Oscar Peterson, Thelonious Monk. He was huge. My dad played a little bit of piano. He was actually quite a good pianist, but not professional pianist, but Oscar Peterson, Thelonious Monk, all the, oh, the great Cannonball Adderley, all the, Miles Davis, all that was being played in my sphere of my house. My mother was a lover of classics. She loved Gershwin. So, I got a chance to hear a lot of Gershwin. Gershwin was already just embedded in my mind because she had a couple of albums that were Gershwin’s Greatest Hits records. To hear all that music on repeat, over years of my childhood. So, as soon as I went to my little elementary school in my neighborhood that I love so much, that my mom's house is still there, and my brother lives in that house. And so, it's still in the family and a little area called Russell Woods in Detroit, which is bounded by Dexter on the East side and Davidson on the South side. And I think a small street like Cortland on the… Davidson on North side, Cortland on the South side, and Livernois. So, this was just a lovely neighborhood of…a middle-class black neighborhood that I grew up in. And so, when I went to my little school, Burney, they said, one day they said, do you want to take an instrument? And I said yes. So, I went down there, and they had strings, they only had a string program. So, they asked me what I wanted to play. And the violins seemed way too small for me. Cause I was tall. That just way too little, I couldn't mess with that, but they had a cello. And I was, and I really wanted a bass because they had some pictures of basses. I said, I want one of these. And they said, no, we don't have any basses, you can take cello. I said, “Okay, I'll go for the little one, the small version.” And so, I played that small version until I got tall enough to play the big ones. The big guy when I switched to bass when I was about 12. And I started cello when I was about nine. So, I had about a good three, three and a half years, on cello, which was really a good time to learn it. I learned bowing. I learned how to read music and learned how to play in an ensemble, which I completely loved. And then, as soon as I got my bass, I started to take… I took my bass to my basement, got my little record player out, started getting my dad's jazz records out, and started trying to play everything I'd heard on the records that I loved the most, and that's how I learned how to play jazz first. That's how I learned.

Tia Imani Hanna: That's great. That's the… what get up and go, what enthusiasm for the art, your self-motivation that you had for that! So, once you got past the beginnings of that, did you have some teachers that you went to? Did you actually take lessons? Or how did that work?

Marion Hayden: I did. I had my mother and dad first. The other thing I have to say, which is, I always say that they never said to me, “Girls don't play bass.” They never had. My mother was a scientist. My mother had a degree from University of Michigan in chemistry. So, she did not know the bounds of what a woman should do or things of that nature. That was not something that her parents ever put on her or any of her siblings. My grandfather, my maternal grandfather, Douglas Ford, I considered to be a… he’s just an extremely forward-thinking person about women. And that's the kind of women he raised out of his household. He raised four daughters and they're all that way. And so, there was no one ever put that kind of strict structure on me. No one said, “Girls don't play bass or girls don't play jazz.” So, when I showed this real love and curiosity for the music, my father signed me up for a summer jazz program. And so, yet another thing, I will just digress for a moment, is that these kinds of programs we put kids in can have lifelong importance. They can be really important for a kid. Especially you put a child in the program at 12, 13, 14. I think I was about 13 or 14 when he put me in a summer jazz program that was run by Marcus Belgrave. And Harold McKinney and Ray McKinney, his brother, who was a bass player. And I think Jimmy Owens, who was the drummer in their group and Wendell Harrison. So that's how I met the cadre of musicians. They were like the young musicians at the time in Detroit. And that's how I came into this sphere through a summer program. And so, they just began to really just give us all this kind of music. They played a lot of music for us. We looked at… we read through a lot of charts. We learned the mechanics. We heard. We watched them play. They played for us. And that's how, that's really how I got my introduction into the practice of playing jazz, how it actually goes down. And then, and then on top of that, yet another thing, is like another sidebar. Another thing that's important is that Marcus Belgraves was a guest artist-in-residence at Cass Tech when I was there in high school So, there's yet another way that they were influential, that he could be influential because he came in during our school day and worked with us on jazz. And my piano theory teacher, who was just completely fabulous, Marilyn Williams, was the one that invited Marcus in. And Marcus was able to just come into the school day and work further on this idea of how you play jazz. And so that was really my first entree into it. And I feel like this was a really authentic way to learn the music and learning it through the mentor/protégé, which is a really a great way. It’s a very African tradition to learn things that way. And on top of that, I was used to learning that way anyway, because I sat at my mother's knee and learned so many things that way. I watched and listened and then I repeated what was shown to me. And so, that's how I learned jazz. It was not academic, but I like to say, it was rigorous because they did actually have rules and they taught you. Rules of harmony, rules of harmony and the practical rules of how you perform. And that's the same kind of thing that I teach my students in University of Michigan and Oakland University and Michigan State University, Community Music School-Detroit. So, my students get the same kind of lessons that I got, and they were really important lessons about how you play music.

Tia Imani Hanna: Yeah. Just the fabulous history just of Detroit at that time, because a lot of that music isn't there anymore in the school. It's just gone.

Marion Hayden: Yes, the music programs have diminished. They really have diminished, but some of these residency programs are still going on and I have to give a shout out to some organizations that have really decided to put their money where their mouth is and try to support, support, young folks playing, learning, jazz, and black music forms, in the schools. Let's say that university, actually, a group of students from University of Michigan that went to the Duke Ellington School for the Performing Arts, which is on the East Side [of Detroit] there in a second location. But back in, I'm going to say maybe that was 10 years ago. Now I had a cadre of students that went there and we worked with the kids after school and we were there twice a week and worked with them on playing Jazz with several students from the U of M Jazz Studies department. And now, since there are other organizations in the school, now the Detroit Jazz Fest has a cadre of six or seven that are artists-in-residence in Detroit Public Schools now. And we do the same thing. We've worked with jazz bands and I'm really pleased that this is a tradition that Detroit Jazz Fest has taken it upon themselves to fully support our residencies. And so, I've been in residency at Bates Academy over on the West side, on Wyoming, just North of Outer Drive for about eight years now.

Tia Imani Hanna: Okay. That's fantastic. What age group is that?

Marion Hayden: That's elementary, middle school. So, I have usually I have students from about grade six, six through eight, sometimes I get fifth graders, but I'm definitely usually six through eight. So, I get three good years, three or four good years with the students. And it's marvelous. It's really marvelous to see them. They're just, their minds are just so open to things then. And they love being in an ensemble. And it's just… and on top of that. I have a lot of girls because Bates has a really active orchestral program, as well as the band program. So, I actually… our Bates Jazz Orchestra, actually have several strings in there. I have violins, a cello player, which is really exciting, as well as horns, and drummer and piano. So, it's just awesome.

Tia Imani Hanna: That's nice. That is really nice. So, I would have loved to have learned some jazz when I was a kid. I loved learning classical stuff. I really did, but at a certain point, it's you're going to be a classical performer, full on a teacher. Or that's kind of ‘it’. A soloist and it was so limiting in that way. And that's why I ended up doing jazz. Because it was like, I want to keep playing. Because you know, the family was like, I have a musical family, but mostly they're just like, you need to go get a job. Music is not something you're going to go into. It is a side thing. If it's a hobby, I said, no, that’s not why I studied this.

Marion Hayden: That's actually surprising coming from the illustrious musical family that you have, because so many of your, really, honestly your family is just a legit music, family. Everyone in your family, you know what, and it's funny because it's on both sides. Because, of course, I know both sides and I know that your mother and, of course, Naima Shamborguer, your aunt, your mom's sister, both have beautiful voices. And then of course, on your dad's side, you have Roland Hanna and Michael Hanna, and you have just these terrific musical voices, one of us. I should say, Sir Roland Hanna, knighted, someone who was knighted and also noted in jazz history for being such a fabulous pianist. So, you come by it quite so naturally. I do understand that about families because you don't actually have another job that I worked for several years at the same time I did music initially. So, I do, I get that. If you look to the history books, you read some biographies, there are a lot of folks in jazz had other jobs. In music, period, I should say. Certainly, I read a lot of biographies of these people who have embraced jazz and improvised music, a lot of people had other jobs. That's not out of the box. I believe McCoy Tyner drove a cab, if I'm not mistaken. McCoy Tyner, the great pianist who just passed. this year, I think he actually drove a cab. So, people have had other jobs while they're doing this, but what you love is what you love. And it really, if you really love something, you'll do anything to support what you love. So, driving the cab and having some other job, no big deal. As long as at the end of it, you can get on that piano or get out of that violin, that bass, or whatever it is that you liked doing, you know.

Tia Imani Hanna: One thing I always like to tell young players coming up… it's like, they, especially now, they're saying, nobody buys CDs, and nobody does this. And the only jobs I can really get are working in video games and that sort of thing. I'm hearing that a lot from people. And I said, that's completely not true. You can have a job like that, but you can do other jobs like we're talking about to support yourself and support your music. At one point, I think my second CD, I had… I had my grandmother living with me. So, I had to quit my day job. And I was working at night, part-time night job, at McDonald's so I could produce my CD. I did a campaign fundraiser for it as well. But the first $5,000 of it, I made it McDonald's. Said it… never had to work at McDonald's before, but it was easy to do.

Marion Hayden: Legit. That's right. Do what you have to do. I just find that when you really, like I said, if you really start checking out people's biography, people start talking about their lives. People just did what they had to do at the time to make it happen, just to make what the thing that you want happen. And nobody really cares about that. Really, what it does is speak to your level of perseverance. And if you don't have any perseverance, not going to get anything out of life anyway, that's for sure.

Tia Imani Hanna: That is definitely for sure. So, you’re teaching at U of M, you're teaching at the Community Music School at Michigan State University, you’re teaching at Bates Academy… and then, in the meantime, you got married to an artist.

Marion Hayden: Yes. My husband is a visual artist, M. Saffell Gardner. My married name is Gardner. So, M. Saffell Gardner.

Tia Imani Hanna: So, you've got the artistic family happening here. And then your son Tariq.

Marion Hayden: Yeah, my son Tariq Gardner is a drummer and composer and, as matter of fact, he's a U of M grad as I am, and Tariq graduated from University of Michigan's School of Music, Jazz Department of Jazz Studies. As a matter of fact, Department of Jazz and Improvised Music in 2018, and I actually did have him as a student in one of my ensembles one year. That was just a little tricky, but I made a point when he decided he wanted to go to Michigan, which he decided some years ago, he really didn't want to go anywhere else. that there were probably going to be people that knew he was my son, but we have different last names. Because I use my professional name ‘Hayden’ and he used his family name, our family name, ‘Gardner’. So, I figured since we had two different names, then unless somebody knew exactly, that they would not necessarily know we were a mother and son in the department. So, I tried my best to allow him to have an independent experience and not to hover over him. I'm not too… come at my colleagues if I had an issue with them about stuff, I just tried to let my mama bear side, just go away. Don't go to them, go into the mama bear mode. And, and just, let them have the full experience of being a college student and I think it worked out pretty good. I think for the most part, it was not a known thing. And it probably was, but it wasn't, you know, as I said, I didn't really try to make a big deal of it. And I think he was able to have a pretty smooth time there. And then we also have my… I also have an older son, my big son, whose name is Asukile Gardner and also Asukile is a visual artist like his father. Yeah, so he is, yeah, so he is a graduate of Wayne State University, two degrees from Wayne State, undergraduate in art and a master's degree in art from Wayne State. And he graduated in 2018 and he is just fantastic. His area is drawing and printmaking. And I just have to say that child, they say, musical prodiges, soon as their kid was old enough to sit up in a music and a piano, you scoot them up and they started playing. That was the same way with Asukile. As soon as he was old enough to hold a pencil, he was drawing, and he was drawing things that you could actually recognize and made sense. And he had concepts. He was a huge consumer of animation. He loved animation, so the first things that he drew were animated characters. I have a couple of really great supermom drawings that he gave me that were just fantastic. I love them. Now I get these personal hand-drawn cards for Mother’s Day and my birthday that are just magnificent. He drew a beautiful picture of my mother, a lovely… just a lovely, picture. Matter of fact, it's a picture of my mother and I together, which I really cherish, as my mother passed in 2018. And we were just so close, and he knows my mother really helped my husband and I raised my kids there. She was so very influential. Just if you look up the best grandma online, she is… there's a picture of her there, she is the one. And so anyway, he drew a beautiful picture of my mother, painted a picture of my mother and I together. And then. And he's, he's just fantastic. He used to love One Piece. If anybody has anybody who's into animation and that kind of stuff. One Piece is these Japanese like anime, but they're novels and they read backwards. So, when you come in, you gotta go to the back and read it forward. This is going to mean something to somebody who’s into One Piece. So anyway, we had scads of One Piece at the house and, but I'm really proud of the work that he does now. He's currently working for the Kresge Foundation. That's just a new job for him, but he's also worked for DIA and his work has just really outstanding. And he really engages in a lot of protest work in his artwork. A lot of work that speaks to the conditions of black folks right now. That's something that's very… it's really present in his work and very powerful too.

Tia Imani Hanna: Speaking of Black Lives Matter. That is, as an artist, what is your take on that? Are you composing anything right now? Or are you just taking all of this in? Like, we're dealing with Black Lives Matter in the middle of COVID. These two juxtapositions of really terrifying circumstances in a lot of ways. In a way, it could be considered a cleansing, in another way it's considered… things are being stirred up so we can clean things out. And for some folks, it's food for thought and food for creation and other folks it's a shutting down. So how have you been taking that?

Marion Hayden: I'll tell you. First, I was just to say that I found the, the onset of the entire, the entire, pandemic, completely personally traumatizing. I was really traumatized when the thing happened. I just, I know some people said, “Oh, I was, I'm feeling very creative and I got this wide and feel any such thing. Everyone is going to experience this differently.” I was really afraid. I was. I just didn't really know what to make of the whole thing. They didn't have to worry about me going out because I definitely was not going out. I took the lockdown really seriously and I did a lot of cooking. I gained a lot of weight. My whole family gained a lot of weight. You and I were talking earlier about being on Instagram, so I just said, so this was my first year. This was my first entree to Instagram, early this year, I started in January and you look at my Instagram posts during that time. It was nothing but food. Everybody else was posting ‘this is me being creative’ and ‘Listen to this song I made’. Yeah. This is me being creative and listen to this song I made. I was like, I just made some shrimp and grits. Check this out. We havin' catfish today. Yeah. That was my posts for weeks and weeks. Nothing, recent weeks, nothing but food. Cause I was just cooking and then I was doing something real weird, like drawing my, drawing the blinds in my house. So, I had the house all dark because for some reason, I thought maybe if you kept the blinds drawn that maybe COVID could not come, carona could not come into your house. Hide yeah, exactly. We were… I was totally hiding, so I had to change people. Like, go and get some fresh air. And I was like, no, I'm totally controlling these shades, nobody's coming in. The corona cannot peek in there, as if it was… that I'm a super, I'm a super movie buff. I don’t know if anybody has seen the “The 10 Commandments,” that was like a super old Cecile B. DeMille movie from this… from the sixties. And when that, when the Angel of Death comes along, it comes to the city, it's a little mist. And everybody closes the door. Yeah, that's what I thought the Rona was, basically the Angel of Death coming around, a mist coming through other different through the city. And so, I had my door closed because of… cause I’m a crazy movie buff, so I was like, “Oh man! The Angel of Death is coming through, so me, I'm going to close these doors. We will not open the door and let that in.” But anyway, I digress. So, in terms of Black Lives Matter. Yeah. And, frankly, when George Floyd… Of course, that's the thing that really… not that we weren't struggling already, which, you know, the older I get, the more I have really understood the struggles of black folks. And especially when my mother passed, aside from being completely grieved and just grieving heavily, someone had, basically, shot a cannon through the entire midsection of my body. And then, as I describe it, rolled some skin over it. So, nobody really knew that I was damaged. And then it basically sent me out to the world that way with a huge hole, a cavernous hole in me, and I had to function with that I've been functioning with. But the other thing about it was, was that generation, which was also your grandmother's generation. Your grandmother was such a fabulous woman. I loved Cleopatra Jones. I thought she was completely… she was one of my heroes. I really… I totally loved her. She was an educator, and she was a scholarly woman to the very end. And my mom, my mother in 1949, graduated from University of Michigan in chemistry who by, really, if she was any at any other time, should have actually been guided towards research as a scientific researcher. She should have gone in and done a PhD, but who was gonna push a black woman to be a PhD at that time. And, go into research, right? That was the kind of mind she had. But so, basically, she had to be a high school educator, which was good because she certainly elevated whatever she did. So, in other words, my mind has been on this for the last few years. Anyway, probably several, many years it's been on that. So, when that happened to George Floyd, I consider that a televised lynching, that's all. That's what, that's what that came down to me. It just, I just felt like we'd all just seen a lynching go down and it just made me so angry. I just… I was so angry and then it just became really hard for me to want to really engage in a lot, to be honest. Yeah, and I think for me, it takes a while for these kinds of things start bubbling through musically because my music tends to be… I don't have a lot of angry music. I've written a lot. I don't have a lot of music that's written out of anger. My music has tended to be written out of joy, understanding, sorrow. Those are the kinds of things, more like deeper understanding. So, I expect it will come out, but it'll come out more as a piece of deep understanding and not necessarily a piece that sounds angry. Cause that's just not, it's just not really, really my nature. But I think about Black Lives Matter a lot. My youngest son has actually been engaged in protests quite a bit during the summer. He went on and did quite a bit of marching this summer and fall too. And so, he reminds me a lot, and we have a lot of discussions with my husband. And amongst my husband and my two sons and I, we have a lot of family discussions about the state of things and how, where black folks stand and all of us are involved in teaching, either through academia or we're involved in some sorts of institutions in so many different ways. We reflect a lot on institutional racism and the different ways in which we have to continue to struggle against that and be aware of the different ways that institutional racism operates, and it operates in a lot of ways that are not obvious to folks. A lot of ways that are not obvious but are very impactful.

Tia Imani Hanna: Wow. All of this stuff is… I can, you can hear it in your voice that it's distilling, like you were saying, it has to distill down through the anger. And both of us being Libra babies, we definitely have that in common in that there's a lot of anger. There's a lot of pain. But what you want to produce in the world is not that. You want to produce... It has to go through you, through the sieve, through the cheesecloth, so to speak, to get to the purity of what we do… and that's create beauty and culture in the world.

Marion Hayden: You got it. Exactly. You got it.

Tia Imani Hanna: So, then when we hear your music, that's what I hear.

Marion Hayden: I do hope so because that's, that is what I'm trying to project. And I do feel that one of the things I talked to my students about is that what we do as musicians is one of the most intimate forms of communication there is. Our music goes directly into people's brains. Directly. Hearing something, you see what goes directly into your brain and what you hear goes directly into your brain. That's all. That stuff is right in your head. That's the reason why it's in your head because it goes directly into your brain. And so, we have a responsibility to communicate… to communicate the truth. You have to have… you have to come with the truth. I'm not even saying that the truth is always pretty. For those that can communicate a lot of anger, they should do. I just can't. My anger has to be more filtered with clarity, I think. There's anger there, but I'm mostly… what I want you to do is see, I want to show you a picture here of what… why the anger is, what is it about, not just the pure raw emotion. There's probably some of that too, but what I want you to see someone that when I talk about my mom, when I want to talk about is not only the beauty of the person that she is, that she was, and her brilliance, but I also want to talk about the thwarted brilliance, right. That's the part that I want to engage people in. We do the world a disservice when we thwart people That's one of the most ugly things that we can do, is to thwart individuals. Black folks have suffered from that for a long time.

Tia Imani Hanna: That’s, again, one of the reasons I started this podcast. If I can make my own podcast, anybody can do this. I can teach myself how to improvise. Anybody can do this. It's the willingness to try. It's the willingness to be… to not be good at something for a long time.

Marion Hayden: Yeah.

Tia Imani Hanna: To get better. and just to stay with it. And the consistency and that is, I think, the hardest part of it is. People see performers and they think, Oh, you have blah, blah, blah. And you had this and that. And I said, yeah, but I made that happen. I did have help. I don't say that. I didn't do all this by myself. That's not true. There's been a lot of help over the years, but you still have to ask for it or look for it because nobody's just offering it up. Hey, you look like somebody who could do this thing. It's no, you have to decide that you want to do certain things. And then you have to figure out, how can I get in the right place so that maybe I have more opportunities to do this thing. And what does that road look like? And it sounds like you've definitely done that in your life and now you've got kids in the family and they're all doing that. So that's pretty cool. Incredible that you taught it to everybody and then they're all doing it. And you and your husband both taught it to the kids and the kids are doing it. And then eventually, there'll be grandkids and all that stuff. And then eventually, down the line, great grandkids. And then you've affected generations and generations. Plus, all the kids that you've already taught. So, thank you for doing that. Thank you for doing that.

Marion Hayden: Yeah, I'm glad too.

Tia Imani Hanna: It's enjoyable too. And then we get to hear your creativity. Because as you teach, then you learn, and then that shows up in your music and it shows up in your teaching abilities and what you teach other people. Things that you're working on right now that we should be aware of, places to go online for you? Can you tell us some of those things?

Marion Hayden: Yes. I'm glad to tell you. I'm actually speaking of progress; I finally launched my own website. It's like, all right. Thanks for taking a giant leap into the late 20th century girl. Awesome! So awesome! But anyway, late 20th century blast. I finally got a website because doing all those things that you were just talking about, yeah, usually taking care of these kinds of things for myself was always the last thing on the list. The last thing. So many recordings with other people, only two, maybe that are just my recordings. So anyways, so I got some catching up to do, I have to say so. I launched my own website, marionhayden.com. So please come check it out. It's just started, but I'm adding stuff, content, as we go along. Of course, one of the things I will say that happened during the pandemic is I, like many other people, went into my archival pictures and things, which is a crazy amount of stuff. And I began to start doing some sorting of things. When you start getting in there and finding what you have, it's like, “Oh my goodness, I forgot. I haven't had this…” There's this and that, so that actually has been really revelatory and a great opportunity to organize things. And so now that I have a website, I have a place to put them. So, it's someplace that I can put them. I have a gallery, so I can do that. So, that's been actually very exciting. I just finished a project with a fabulous artist in town, named Billy Mark. Billy Mark is a multi-dimensional artist. He's a producer of music and also a dancer. He deals in movement, just fabulous artist, multidimensional. And we just finished what I will call a film score, except that it's not really a film. It's actually a score for a walking narrative. So, I'm really excited about this. So, this will hopefully premiere sometime later this month, but it's a really great, interesting walking narrative where you will put on your earphones. You, click on this, this basically, I don't know if they're going to launch this as an app or is it going to be on a podcast type of form, but you launch this and they give you a direction to walk and a little walking route. And while you're walking this route, you're going to hear a story and my music and some interesting spoken word. And so, I'm super excited about this. This is a project that we were actually supposed to finish sometime just before the pandemic hit, but then the pandemic hit, and we just had to basically working along best we could until things opened up. So, I'm really excited about that. I just finished that studio project, which is… I was just excited to do it because, to be honest, one of the things I've always really wanted to do in my practice is do film scoring. And I don't, I don't have any experience in that, but I've also always thought of my music as films. And when I create music there’s always a visual component to everything I create. So, I always feel like there are already film scores that I've written, so I just need to get some training in how to actually score a film. That's something I would really like to do right now at this particular point in my career. I'm excited about that. There's that. I'm going to be doing a couple of days of residency, virtual residency, at Michigan State University in November, which I'm really looking forward to. Michigan State has a fantastic jazz program led by distinguished professor Rodney Whitaker, who is one of our great Detroit bass players and, killin’ and bass player, someone who's got a huge legacy of Detroit and, nationally as a bassist. And he has just a fabulous department. And while Michigan State is virtual, at least for undergraduate work, this semester, we're going to… we're figuring out something to do with, so I've got… I'll be doing a masterclass in the concert with students there. So, I'm really excited about doing that in November. And also, in this semester at Oakland University, where I teach, we're doing a Women in Jazz series and one of our guests. Yes. Our masterclass guest is going to be the queen, Sheila Jordan, who was the great vocalist from Detroit, originally a devotee of the music of Charlie Parker. She used to be one of the disciples of Lennie Tristano, great bebop piano player. Sheila Jordan is a National Endowment for the Arts jazz master. And she's over 90 years old. So, she will come, and she will come and address us. We'll have a great time talking to Sheila and Regina Carter is our artist-in-residence, a great violinist from Detroit, so she's resident artist at Oakland University. So, we'll be having Regina will be Zooming in with us this semester to take part in some panel discussions and some concerts. So, I'm very excited about that this fall.

Tia Imani Hanna: And we're excited for you. I'm looking forward to seeing that stuff and, since it's virtual, maybe we will be able to see this Sheila Jordan thing or maybe or Regina. I think we might be even seen Regina in concert for sure.

Marion Hayden: Yeah. Yeah. very much. So, then I should mention one other, one other really wonderful project that my husband and I and Tariq were involved in. And that is, we just finished a project called the Lit Walk, l-i-t… that's short for literary walk. And so, I just did a spoken word and a drum and bass presentation at Saffell's studio with Melba Joyce Boyd, who is a fantastic poet, an internationally renowned poet, and writer from right here in Detroit. She's a distinguished professor at Wayne State University. And so, we just had a great time doing 30 minutes of Melba's great poetry with a bass and drum accompaniment. So, that was really awesome, and I believe that's available on YouTube right now. If not, I know that we've got our particular program with the whole program is available. We plan to upload our portion of it pretty soon. So, people can check that out too.

Tia Imani Hanna: That's really exciting. So, anything else you want to say before we sign off today, just in general?

Marion Hayden: I just want to say thank you so much for having me Tia. Thank you for doing this. It's really important that we have black women voices out here in the podcast- o-sphere. We need you. We need to hear your take on things. We need to get access to your network of friends and folks we need to hear from folks that are from, I know this podcast is international, but we need to hear from folks from different parts of the country. You and I are both Detroiters and that definitely comes with a particular vision. Something that we know, and definitely something that we know about black folks and something we know about women from this area that I think is really important and it's important to hear voices from this area. So, I want to thank you so much for doing this and say, I support you as a sister and artist, and I love you and just much success to you with this endeavor.

Tia Imani Hanna: Oh, I love you too. Thank you so much for doing this show. I really appreciate you coming and talking to us. We could talk for hours because we didn't even get to talking about ‘Straight Ahead’ and we have to do a part two. We definitely have to do a part two. And I'm also wanting to invite you, invite your husband, and your kids, to do a family intergenerational talk. At some point we can do up to three people or four people at a time. So, this would be a really fun thing. So, I'm going to have you back, and that'll be awesome. So, thank you so much.

Tia Imani Hanna: Thank you for joining us this week on Tia Time with Artists. Make sure to visit our website, tiaviolin.com, where you can subscribe to the show in iTunes and never miss an episode. Please leave us a rating wherever you listen to podcasts. We really appreciate your comments, and we'll mine them to bring you more amazing episodes.

I’d like to thank this inaugural season's sponsors: The folks at Jazz Alliance of Mid-Michigan or JAMM, Michigan ArtShare, a program of Michigan State University Extension is a partner in supporting the Tia Time podcast, and Shambones Music. Without their support this podcast would not be possible. Thank you so much. If you would also like to contribute to the show, you can find us on https://www.patreon.com/TiaTime1.

If you want to continue the conversation about topics discussed on the show or start new ones with like-minded people, join us at the Tia Time Lounge on Facebook.

+ Transcription

Tia Time with Artists, with guest Deborah Klezmer – recorded on 8/28/20

Tia Imani Hanna: Welcome to Tia Time with Artists, the weekly podcast where we discuss the methods, challenges, and real-life experiences of living our creative dreams. What kind of creative warrior are you? Musician? Filmmaker? Painter? Choreographer? Poet? Sculptor? Fashionista? Let's talk about it right now. I'm your host, Tia Imani Hanna.

Tia Imani Hanna: Welcome! Welcome Deborah Klezmer of Deborah Klezmer Designs in Santa Fe, New Mexico. Thank you for coming to “Tia Time with Artists.”

Deborah Klezmer: Thank you for having me here. Nice to see you. Hear you.

Tia Imani Hanna: Okay. I haven't seen you in like way too many years. Deborah and I met each other in Brooklyn, New York back in, I want to say what 2002 maybe?

Deborah Klezmer: Time makes no sense, so whatever you say is fine.

Tia Imani Hanna: Because when I met you, you had just started to teach yourself ceramics on your bathroom floor.

Deborah Klezmer: Probably glass. Teach myself glass.

Tia Imani Hanna: No, it was ceramics. You were on that. You were putting stuff on the bathroom floor.

Deborah Klezmer: Oh! It was mosaic work. Yes. Oh yeah. That was the apartment on Carol, on Carol Street. Yeah. Yes.

Tia Imani Hanna: It’s been that long. Yup. It is an amazing thing because you were making a transition from being a writer to doing artwork. And, so you said, “Oh, I'll just figure this out. I'll just rip up my bathroom floor and put mosaic tile all over it and in the kitchen too.” I think you did the kitchen. You did the bathroom. You started doing glasswork. You started doing all those things. You said, “Oh, I'll figure it out. I'm cool like that. I'll just figure it out. I can just do this.” So, I was like, this is a woman that I have to know forever.

Deborah Klezmer: Mosaic people also get like that. Once you start doing mosaic work, you want to mosaic the entire world, you can't help it, So yeah.

Tia Imani Hanna: Okay. So, tell me a little bit about that transition. You were writing, you had done the editing work for, what was the name of the project that you had done? A lot of editing work for two or three years?

Deborah Klezmer: More than that. Actually, the big project was 10 years. It's called “Women in World History” and it's still available as a reference book online and in your library. And it featured 10,000 women from all over the world from the beginning of recorded time and we worked with 500 academics all over the world to do the project. So, that was pretty great. And, I had done editorial work prior to that as well, but that was the really big project that my co-editor and I did. And, yeah, my dad's an artist, so like weekend fun for my folks was dragging me around to museums in my stroller, pushing me around. I don't know that it was super fun for me at the time, but I do think that I really learned to appreciate visual language definitely as much as written. So that transition was what happened to me from editing. You don't end up as a jeweler unless you have OCD. You just don't, it doesn't happen. You can't set stones. It's not possible. So ,I think, from the editing for so many years, I just kept checking to make sure that the comma was in the right place, like a thousand times, and that was no longer healthy for me to keep doing. It was really nice to make a transition to a visual language and it seemed to come really naturally to do that. And my dad, he put a hammer in my hand when I was a very young kid, so I learned to use tools very early on, and it was really nice to start using my hands, more than my head, and stop thinking so much and just let things come visually. That was a great moment, actually, for me.

Tia Imani Hanna: I bet. Was it more, you say visually, but was it also just a physical thing? Because you're sitting at a desk, and you're writing or you're typing on a computer or you're… was it more just moving and getting physically active again? Was that part of it too? Or…

Deborah Klezmer: I think so. I think just using that hand/eye coordination is just such a different body function and I really enjoy that. And, I think it is also the fact that, at least for me, for your hands to work really well, your head needs to shut off a little bit and your body needs to figure it out on its own. That’s a kind of a letting go that's really nice. And then, your body takes over, so it's not that your head's not working. You're just not thinking the way you do all day long. So, yeah, definitely the physicality of that has been awesome. Except I don't recommend mosaics like on the ceiling. It's brutal for the body, so anything overhead… not a fan anymore. Nope, too old, so there you go.

Tia Imani Hanna: You started self-teaching yourself the mosaics and then you expanded into glass at certain point. What was the transition from? You went from writing to mosaics?

Deborah Klezmer: I actually went to glass first. Yeah. Yeah. Actually, while I was editing, in the early days of my career as an editor, I was teaching myself just stained glass. Then I started using some of those techniques, both in mosaic work and in larger scale works as well. So, it definitely went from editing to both mosaic work and glass work. I was doing both of those professionally in New York and then when I first moved here to Santa Fe. And then I first moved here, I had a studio gallery that I opened within 10 seconds of moving here. I had no idea what I was doing, because I really thought of myself as an editor, but all of a sudden, I had a store front… I don't know, you could call it that. Sure. I can think of other words too. It was actually quite frightening at the time and a big geographical move from New York to Santa Fe, as well. All of that kind of whole transition was all part and parcel of the same thing. There was this quote from Ray Bradbury that I had heard something to the effect of, “Go to the edge of the cliff and jump off. Build your wings on the way down.” And that's what I felt like I was doing every day when I walked into the storefront. I was like, okay, but people found me and started supporting the work I was doing, which was wonderful. I was doing really large-scale installation work at that point. Not much mosaic work anymore by the time I got to Santa Fe, more large-scale glass installation, steel glass, and bronze, and also always incorporating these antique objects. Starting with…there was a little antique shop in Brooklyn on Atlantic Avenue, and I started collecting stuff from them and also, yeah, “Good Old Things” in New York, I don't know if you know them. Oh, I think they're probably still there, out of anyone. They had opened up several more locations and it's all salvage, architectural salvage. So, antique hardware plates, other types of salvage and just a lot of antique objects. So, I was incorporating all of that into my work in glass. and then when the economy tanked, however many years ago that was. Yeah. In 2008, when the economy tanked, I was making these really large-scale installation pieces and, all of a sudden, getting funding for enormous projects was much more difficult once that happened. So, I started making glass jewelry, but I didn't want to glue on attachments. Glue is, just not a good word, so yeah, I took a metal smithing… a basic metal smithing class with a guy named David Gaussoin, who is a wonderful jeweler, amazing jeweler here in Santa Fe. I did that just to make attachments for my glass jewelry, but I found that I really loved the metal work so much that kind of felt like a coming home. I wanted to just be there. I continue to use antique objects in my fine jewelry, antique watch mechanisms, and things like that. So, all of that, you can see the line through… I think when you look at all the different things that I've made to getting to this point of becoming a jeweler. I hope you can anyway.

Tia Imani Hanna: I do want to talk about the jewelry in depth, but I want… I'm just interested in the transitions that you've gone through. Because I'm hoping to inspire people who are out there, who are searching for their art, in more than one way.

Deborah Klezmer: Definitely.

Tia Imani Hanna: Art is in the artist and not in the tool. I think you're a really great example of that because… so we're talking about the time when you were working and you had a company called “Through the Keyhole” at that time. And then you went from mosaics to glass to mosaic, back to glass, incorporating iron.

Deborah Klezmer: Not really iron so much, but definitely bronze and steel. And I found a… part of… I think changing medium has to do with the people you find along the way. So, when I moved here to Santa Fe, I had really just been working with glass and lead and antique objects. And then I met someone who is just a really incredible metal fabricator who worked a lot in bronze and a lot in steel, and she and I just started hanging out. Now, she wanted to know about glass, and I wanted to know, how do you fabricate in bronze. So, there was just this exchange that took place. I do think that has a lot to do with it. The people who come into your path along the way who can just even lead you to certain tools. Because what you said is so true, what you're using doesn't make you an artist, but at the same time, just knowing what's out there and what tools are available to you can give you a different sense of what might be possible. So, she helped me a lot. Then I started making bronze and steel surrounds for these large, installation pieces in glass. Yeah, I loved the metal work a lot, particularly bronze. It's just a beautiful material to work with. And if you're in Santa Fe, you gotta try your hands at bronze because you're in Santa Fe. So, it just goes with the territory quite literally.

Tia Imani Hanna: Are there big places where there's just raw bronze or just a lot of metal?

Deborah Klezmer: There it's just a really common material to be used here. We have a wonderful foundry here, right here in Santa Fe, for bronze casting. So, they're right here, and then you just have a lot of artists working in bronze. And, we have gorgeous sculpture all over Santa Fe that's done in bronze and steel. We have a lot of open space, so it's really nice to see artists using that space for sculptural work which is, I think, one of the things that is distinctive actually about Santa Fe. When you get here, you can't help but notice that.

Tia Imani Hanna: Yeah. Yeah, I bet. Yup. All those broad open surfaces and flat lands and then pieces of sculpture pop up all over the place

Deborah Klezmer: Yeah. And, then you have the mountains, the mountain ranges behind all that. So, it is truly beautiful. And also too in bronze, one of the things that I loved about bronze and steel as well. It's a little different with steel, but it was actually the patina work I love so much because A, you get to play with chemicals, B you get to play with fire, and then, you can create these very different effects of color and visual texture, depending on the combination of chemicals that you're using and temperature and all those factors. So, it's a process that’s actually not a hundred percent easy to control, which I loved about it, and the variation was just so beautiful, yeah.

Tia Imani Hanna: So, when you're working on these larger pieces, was it, “I have this concept in my mind, but this is what it turned into?” Or was it like, “Oh, you drew it all out and laid it out exactly how you thought it should fit together?” Because you were working in structural pieces, so I know you have to be pretty exact about some things. Was it like it fit together like puzzle pieces or was it more of, maybe I'll just do this whimsical thing over here?

Deborah Klezmer: I think, honestly, it was very much both. If you're doing lead came work in glass, the stuff has to fit like really well. So, everything does have to be… again, OCD is your friend in that situation. For me, like everything's just gotta be very tidy because a problem in the bottom left corner of your project, as you build, is going to end up being a very big problem in the top right of your project and then you, yeah. It's not good. So, actually, that work did teach me to start. I don't draw now really, when I work, but for all of that work I did make very precise drawings. But then, there were times that, because there are other ways in glass too, you don't have to use lead came. You can use copper foil. And that does give you a little more leeway, especially if you like the look of heavy soldering. All of a sudden you would just have this really improvisational thing that you could have go on and I was able to lay things out on the bench, and just see what comes. It's actually, in part, how I work now because you want the materials to talk, or I wanted the materials to talk to me, and lead the way. But then you might have to, once you found the way, you then might have to make a really good template to put this together. It definitely a combination of both.

Tia Imani Hanna: You were working on the really big projects, now you've gone smaller. Through the Keyhole transitioned in 2008, when the market kicked the rug from underneath your feet. And so, you said let's go smaller and started working on the jewelry pieces. How did you go smaller? Because you're working in these huge pieces and, by the way, are any of those pieces still available?

Deborah Klezmer: Still available? No.

Tia Imani Hanna: Sold out?

Deborah Klezmer: Yeah, we actually are. We have two pieces in our collection that I have kept, but that was it. And, primarily, they were… as I kept moving through the work, I moved more and more toward just commissioned work. So, they were designed for specific spaces and specific situations. But with the glass jewelry, I had moved. Yeah. I do change techniques a lot. I had moved from okay, so stained glass, and then the way I was using it is called cold glass work. Okay. Because it's not done in a Jone’s Saw, cold, but then, seeing some really interesting results that people were getting in the kiln and Santa Fe has an enormously strong glass community. Really big, really active. We have a bullseye resource center here, which is a major deal, and so I wanted to try and again, okay, so again, a person comes into my life who had been an art teacher. Who was a ceramicist who had a gigantic kiln and because he had five kilns, he wanted the space instead of the kiln? So, he's do you want to house this kiln? Then I had the tool, right, to begin experimenting. He just totally transitioned my work at that point. Once I got the kiln, I was able to start doing warm glass and I've been making some large bowls that I call ‘permeables’ because they had lots of holes in them. And I liked the idea of a bowl that had a lot of holes.

Tia Imani Hanna: No real purpose, but to be artistic right.

Deborah Klezmer: No, no, no! That you could put apples in it. You can put letters in it, you just couldn't put soup in it, but I loved what the light did through those negative spaces. Glass is all about the light, so it was just one more dimension to work with and I love negative space. I use it all the time, no matter what medium, no matter what I'm doing, there's always going to be some negative space there. What did you ask me? Something about something, I don't know. Jewelry? Yeah. Oh, okay. So, what I started doing was I was able to make these like kind of giant slabs, using, in part, dichroic glass, which is very popular for glass jewelry. People love it. It's actually used by NASA. They put dichroic glass… I don't know if it's actually glass or, I dunno, but NASA uses it around the spaceship so that when it re-enters the atmosphere, it doesn't burn up, it is that highly reflective. You get exquisite color from it and shifts of color and it's very metallic. It has metal in it, so I was using a lot of dichroic glass and with other glass-making, these huge slabs, and then needed to find a way to cut them up into small pieces because I didn't really love a lot of the glass jewelry that's out there. It's like a little form that's laid out in glass and then fired, so you have these, soft bullnosed edges and I like a really crisp edge, especially in a piece of jewelry. Like I want the edge to look very intentional. again, no matter what material I'm working with, very interested in the edge. Because edges have a lot of surfaces. They've got really three surfaces to work with. I had a tile saw from years and years ago and got a new blade for it that was specific for glass, all water driven, and I was able to start cutting up the slabs. But then you have this really, like, grody edge. The edge doesn't look so good. It's nice and crisp. but it's really cloudy and sandy looking. So, then the pieces, once they're cut, I would form them on a grinder as well, so I could get nice curves from that. Then I would throw them back in the kiln to just do what's called a ‘fire polish’ and a fire polish will keep my edge nice and crisp, but then it's going to give me a glass edge, it's going to look like glass and so that was just perfect. And given that I was going to all that effort to make these little forms, wearable forms, that's why I really didn't want to just glue up prefabricated non-precious metal bale onto it. I really wanted to have an attachment. I like attachments. I want it to look like part of the piece. so that was what began the next part of the journey, you know. But no matter what, at least this has been my experience in my life, no matter what materials I'm using, no matter what the tools I'm using, fitting is fitting. Period. You need to know how to fit to be able to do almost anything. I always refer to writing, actually. Writing is building a nice cabinet. People think of it like this mystical process. It’s not. It's that you want to build a beautiful cabinet. That's how writing should be. It should be constructed that way. So, I've always had that brain about how I approach whatever form it is. Yeah. You might have to learn to use a new tool. You might have to learn to see a little bit differently, but all the skills you've had in these previous endeavors, they translate, they're going to help you out. They're going to come through for you, so it's going to be a much quicker learning process as you change what you're doing, provided you don't cut your arm off or all the other wonderful things that can happen.

Tia Imani Hanna: All of the different things that you've learned are definitely showing through in your jewelry pieces. Now, the one on your website, which is “DeborahKlezmerDesigns.com,” right? You talk about your grandfather's radio and the piece that you made about the radio. Can you tell us a little bit more about that? I know I can send people to the site afterwards.

Deborah Klezmer: Definitely.

Tia Imani Hanna: Look at the video and see the piece itself. But what was it that you just said, Oh, I have this family radio and I just want to do something, a tribute, to him?

Deborah Klezmer: It was in part to, of course, make a tribute to him. My grandfather was a Holocaust resistance leader. He ended up in the mountains, leading a partisan unit against the Nazis and the Fascists, and he was the head of the unit. No one knew he was a Jew and, basically, he spoke seven languages, so he could pretend to be whomever he needed to be at any given moment. So, he road in the car with the ethnic Germans and he wrote a memoir when he got back and then the family worked to publish it, actually, after he passed. So, it's just this crazy story, oh I don't even know what, absolute heroism and determination, And so one of the things early on, in the early days of the war when he was in Poland and the Germans were coming into Poland, the order was for all the Jews to turn in their radios. Okay. So, of course, to cut everyone off from information, and he didn't turn in his radio. He kept his shortwave radio and he credited that one initial act of defiance with really saving his life because he was able to get information that allowed him to stay ahead of troop movements as he was trying to avoid detection. That always stuck with me growing up for some reason. I knew his story, knew him, and loved him, and then we have this antique radio that was always in our living room when I was growing up. And, somehow, even though that radio was definitely not a shortwave radio, but in my kid's brain, it's like that Faulkner moment where the kid says, my mother is a fish. These things just get put together. That radio became that for me in my kid's brain, and I have that radio now in my studio. So, as our political climate was changing, I have been personally incredibly alarmed by the all-out assault on the press, given my family history and what I just told you, that is a terrifying notion. I feel like I have seen, through my family, pretty much firsthand what happens when you deny people access to information, so I wanted to address that in my work. Also, too, I really wanted to see if I could make a form that really looked like the radio that I had grown up with. Actually, that piece is entirely designed in CAD on the computer. I love being in CAD. It's three-dimensional space. You can do things in there that you simply can't do at the bench. It's very exciting, very liberating. Awesome. “Lawnmower Man." So, it was designed…

Tia Imani Hanna: More literary references.

Deborah Klezmer: It was designed in CAD and then 3D printed in wax. And then from there, it's traditional casting process lost wax casting. and then it's set with quite a few gemstones as well. The text on the radio says, “We will never give up our radios.” And that was the message behind the piece. A friend of mine, who's a filmmaker, Kiersten Russell, came here. We shot a video about the piece. It's about my grandfather. It's also about the making of this piece. I just feel like no matter what I'm working on, no matter what material, I do feel like there are a couple things in this life that I want to say. So that always comes through no matter what material I'm working in. And I do use text a lot, As someone who's had so many years of a career as a writer and editor, I can't help myself, but it's short, and it may only be three or four words, but then you get the visual language that goes with it. Yeah.

Tia Imani Hanna: Isn't that part of the thing of being a writer too, is that you say the most things with the least amount of words? I have that it's like physics, it's like a math proof, elegant and simple, but it's not. There's so much depth to that sentence. No, it's all of that training and all of that work is… It's…

Deborah Klezmer: Distilled. Yeah. Yeah, definitely. No question about it.

Tia Imani Hanna: Yeah. It was the radio one, really, that caught my attention. So, you're doing that piece and you’re doing other pieces, and you’re creating other pieces for charity.

Deborah Klezmer: Yeah. Yeah. When COVID hit and all my shows for this year were canceled and believe me, I am not alone in this. We're all going through this. It was really an amazing moment to have to catch up to, but I just felt since I didn't know what was going to happen next and everything in my world had been just really just, I don't know, laid bare for lack of a better word. I have really… I had spent so much, obviously, yes, as we all do as artists. It's been years to get the business just to a place where I felt like the past couple years have been really wonderful years for me creatively and, yeah, it's just been great. So, all of that kind of got stripped in a single moment with all the cancellations. So, I felt, “Okay, everything's been leveled to the ground right now anyway. I don't know how I'm going to survive it?” But of course, determined to survive, always worked 24/7 anyway, so I'll figure out a way. But since that's happened, let me take this moment to do the thing that I've put off for so many years, that's always been in the forefront of my mind, which is, I want to use my work in service to some greater good. And there were, I had… Yeah, I didn't have a million excuses, I really only had one, which was always, hmmm, let me wait until the business is making more money. Let me wait until things are in a better place to do it. I will get there. And that's what I will use that for. Okay. And, I also was raised with the phrase, “If not now, when?” So, it was an ‘if not now, when’ for me moment. Oh, I feel like I've really altered the business model, so I'm definitely doing pieces that have charitable components, donating a significant portion. I’m not talking 5%. I’m donating to nonpartisan charitable organizations, so it's a way of saying, if you're coming out and you're supporting a small business, that small business is going to support other community endeavors and I feel so happy. If there's one thing that I feel like has been a really positive thing that's happened in the past several months, it's that transition has been made and I'm thrilled to do that, and I trust everything will still be standing a year from now, or whenever when I show up in person at shows again. So far, the response has been really wonderful. There are a lot of people out there who want to help and it's nice to be able. One of the frustrations I have is that I probably could have been a surgeon, period, but life didn't lead me in that direction. And my only regret about that is not because I want to be a surgeon. It's that really does help people with direct help, but I also know that by the jewelry that we wear, people have a very personal relationship to those things and a necklace can be a talisman for someone that gives them strength and gives them hope and all of those other things. So that is something, I've learned that is something to be able to help out in a certain way, to be able to do that and then have direct help go to charitable organizations has been the perfect combination.

Tia Imani Hanna: So, what are some of the organizations that you're funding?

Deborah Klezmer: The biggest project that we've just done, it's a necklace that says we are all related and it was done in concert with my friend Sky Red Hawk who was my first friend in Santa Fe. He is a Lakota Sioux musician. It was to raise funding for the Native American Relief Fund, which provides direct funding to help native communities during COVID. The native communities have been hit particularly hard, in part because many people don't have running water and those other kinds of basic necessities, so it has made grappling with this situation even more difficult. Sky is an incredible flute player, so we went up to the Galisteo mountains. the Galisteo Basin here and he played the flute, and I made a piece based on what he played, and we've donated a significant amount of funding to them. 50% of proceeds from the sale of the necklace have gone to the Native American Relief Fund, basically any dime that the studio made off of our 50% was donated back or not donated, but used for advertising the piece so we could sell more so we could donate more. So, that's just been really wonderful. I do believe we are all related. It's a good message. No two ways about it. It's a good reminder.

Tia Imani Hanna: Is there another organization as well, or just the one?

Deborah Klezmer: Yeah. And then we're also donating money to the Esperanza Women's Shelter, which is here in Santa Fe for people who are experiencing domestic violence. And there's a piece specific for that donation on the giving page of the website and also there's a donation component to the radio piece actually, which helps fund legal resources for student journalists. Yeah. Yeah. So, it's all… the content is related to the charitable organization that's chosen. Yeah, it's all part of a piece, for lack of a better way to phrase it.

Tia Imani Hanna: So, definitely, your website says that you're a designer, artist, writer, and activist. Activist is definitely in your resume.

Deborah Klezmer: Sure. Sure. I just… I kinda, I believe that we all should do what we can and there are so many things I can't do. So, the few things that I can, I'm trying.

Tia Imani Hanna: We appreciate it. It's a good example for us all. Oh, she can do that, then I can do that. That's a good idea. Again,and that's why I wanted to have these conversations with people because people are doing things. And, if we, if I can get other people to hear what other folks are doing then, “Oh, yeah, I never thought of that. Shoot, I can do that.” Each one, teach one.

Deborah Klezmer: It's so true, so true. And as much as a lot of artists, I'm not dissimilar from many other artists. My first choice is to be alone working away for 15 hours without getting up. But if being in the public a little bit more just helps me to hear what other people are doing and also share what I'm doing, I do think you're absolutely right. It's hugely important. And one thing I have to give a shout out for it to Santa Fe for that reason as well. When I moved here from New York, I didn't know what to expect in the artist community here. People are incredibly generous with their knowledge. Like, I have found that to be universally true. We all want to share what we're doing, and many people are doing these weird things, like, that are not very, it's not a traditional use of their materials, so that's exciting ‘cause, yeah, you want to push the boundaries of whatever you're working in, so yeah. Help is a good thing… to give it and to get it. Yes.

Tia Imani Hanna: Yes. I remember in New York it was… I had seven jobs all the time, and was like the old “Living Color” TV show… “You lazy Jamaican you only have seven jobs,” it was kind of like that? And, I did very little art in New York, but at the same time, I got a lot out of being there because I did get to meet a lot of artists and played with some different people that I would not normally have had the chance to. So, know there's a lot of goods in and lot of bads.

Deborah Klezmer: Yeah. Yeah. I love the fact that it's been as many years as it has been, and you and I are still… we're still doing it. And that's it's not a small thing, and I understand that maybe I had to get to my fifties to really understand what that is, but yeah.

Tia Imani Hanna: Fantastic. All right. I was trying to think, you've got all of these things going and then, we talked about this briefly the other day. You're writing your werewolf story.

Deborah Klezmer: Yeah. Not in a while, man, but I would like to go back to that novel, I definitely would, but I don't know. We'll see.

Tia Imani Hanna: What was it about, because that there is something, it was about lights and darks. I think we were talking about that because when you work in the glass and you're talking about reflections and how the light hits it. And then you have the negative spaces in the bowls with the holes and, there are lights and darks. And then you talk about the freedom fighting with your grandfather and not giving up your radios now with the Trump machine. There's a lot of light and dark in your work. So now… you're… it's like, why werewolves? And I think because they have that in them, they're just like this terrible… light and dark in there. And I still remember when you read part of that work that you started back in the day on the werewolves, scared the crap out of me.

Deborah Klezmer: That's so good. I love hearing that. That was the point.

Tia Imani Hanna: There was only a couple of pages, but I was like, Oh my God.

Deborah Klezmer: Yeah. I think… it's funny that you brought that up just because of a current video piece that we're working on. It's about these jewelry forms that I call gear flowers, which are like this uniting of nature and culture. So, for me, I think for whatever reason, I'm always trying to take these things that we usually frame as a dichotomy and synthesize them and try to find the points of intersection. So, with the werewolf story, it really is about the more violent side of human nature because I don't think that the violence side is necessarily being the wolf part. I think of it as being the human part, with our compassionate self as well, and how those two things can, and very much do, co-exist. So, it's that meeting and I think that's always an exciting place. When you take two things that don't really belong together and you put them together, interesting things will happen, and it does force you to see the world in a different way. And I think in some ways, for me at least, I can only speak personally about this, but for me, it does help me overcome really negative feelings that I have toward anybody who doesn't think like I do. It helps me bridge. It's a bridge.

Tia Imani Hanna: The bridging, I get that because when Trump came into power, my partner, she literally just sat in the chair for literally two weeks and just shaking her head the whole time, saying, “I can't believe it.” And I just kept on trucking and she asked me. She said, “How can you not be affected by it?” I said I am affected by it, but this is just normal life for me. What's changed? Really, it's really, nothing's changed. Just like I was still doing the same thing I was doing yesterday. The thing that's strange about it is I actually am thankful for him because he's put all the stuff that was hidden… it's out in the open now. People aren't hiding anymore. So, all that stuff that I was seeing all the time as a black person in this country, it's not hidden anymore. And people are admitting things openly because they think it's okay because he's just vomiting crap all over the world and saying this is the way it should be. And people are like, yeah, that's right. So, you're like, Oh. So that idea of bridging between those people who support him, and they say, he's not all bad because he…

Deborah Klezmer: Can you think of a reason?

Tia Imani Hanna: I can’t. I can’t. Some people are saying he's not all bad because he's tough on crime or something. But the fact that they say he's not all bad because… somehow, they're justifying all of his behavior based on one thing that they found that they agree with.

Deborah Klezmer: Yeah. And they're… I think there's a term, single issue voters. and I feel like they've built a coalition of all of these different kinds of single-issue voters, but those single issues just don't happen to be issues that I agree with at all.

Tia Imani Hanna: It's also one of those things where I still have to remember people are human.

Deborah Klezmer: Exactly.

Tia Imani Hanna: And that just because they support a candidate that I don't appreciate doesn't mean that they're bad humans. But, at the same time, I have to wonder… you're supporting, you're overlooking all of these horrible, inhumane things that he's supporting, and you think that's okay.

Deborah Klezmer: Yeah.

Tia Imani Hanna: So, how can I bridge that gap?

Deborah Klezmer: Yeah, exactly. Yup. As a Jewish person, and someone whose… our family story is about the Holocaust because of my grandfather. Having grown up with the knowledge of what happened as being a predominant part of my lessons, right? There's this thing that you go through of not wanting to ever become like the people who did these horrible things, and I do think that there's a way in which hatred makes you like that, it makes you more susceptible to the ‘cray’, right? Hatred makes you more susceptible to ‘cray, cray’. We can leave it at that. I don't want to be that, and, at the same time, the polarization is real. The differences are real. They need to be acknowledged. They need to be discussed. I think sometimes it's as simple as, like, this very easy lesson that I was taught early on, “You don't have to say everything you think.” I do think the world might be a better place if… yeah. Yeah.

Tia Imani Hanna: And that has been, I think, the fight that all of us have had internally and some of us externally, as well. It keeps coming back to, “What do we do? What are we doing?” I get… I'm hearing that from a lot of people. And I keep saying it, I just say, “Make art. Make art. Make art.” It does affect me. My stress is high. I'm worried about a lot of things I was never worried about before. Of course, COVID is a huge fear. But it's just make art, just keep making art and yeah. Because of COVID. Because we have this technology where we can talk to each other. It's like it… it's allowing us to have the salon that I've always wanted to have. I'm talking to people I could never talk to before. What are you doing? What are you working on right now? How can we work together? Is there something I can help you with? Can you help me? That is happening and on a different level. And I'm really pleased to see that. So, there is some good coming out of all of this. and I think because artists are creative enough to reach and ask for that. Yeah. So that is… that's a lovely thing to see happen.

Deborah Klezmer: I think those moments, where everything, just really falls apart, you can be felled by that, or you can innovate. Those are our choices. You can do a combination of both, different minutes in the day. I see a lot of people really just innovating and trying to find new ways to connect. We're humans. We want to connect. We'll figure it out until we can return to in-person stuff more safely. We'll figure it out. And I really appreciate what you're doing. I think it's awesome and it's always good to hear what other artists are doing, and adapting to weird times, so yeah.

Tia Imani Hanna: It’s very strange. I's propelled us so quickly into this, this digital age for those of us who are over 40, over 30. Yeah, 20 I should say.

Deborah Klezmer: Yeah.

Tia Imani Hanna: Because all of this digital stuff, it's like, what is this? But we're having to jump headlong. And I think this was going to be like a 10-year span to get to where we are right now. I think that it just pushed us from that ten years it would have taken us to get to where we are right now, where everybody jumped at the same time, which means everybody's a little bit more hyper-educated about digital stuff. Which I would've never even thought about this podcasting as even a possibility because before you had to have much more equipment, it cost a fortune. It's not like that anymore.

Deborah Klezmer: Yup. Yup. And as an artist, for me, at least, the digital stuff... and I still… I feel like a newbie every day still. But it is just another language. So that part is exciting, to learn, and that's why I also do work in CAD. Again, it's just another language. The technology, it's a tool, so it's one more tool. So, I love that.

Tia Imani Hanna: Let me ask you a question about what would you tell your younger self now that you didn't know. Let’s say, what would you tell your 30-year-old self?

Deborah Klezmer: 30.

Tia Imani Hanna: Can you remember what you were doing when you were 30?

Deborah Klezmer: Again, time makes no sense. So, I don't really know. I have a lot of trouble, things to chronology, just, in terms of, carbon dating myself, but thirties…

Tia Imani Hanna: Let's see. Late 80s, middle 90s, somewhere in there.

Deborah Klezmer: That helped me.

Tia Imani Hanna: Let’s say the 30s.

Deborah Klezmer: This is what I would say. I don’t if it's relevant to anything we've discussed, but I think it actually is. I would use a quote from a poem by Lucille Clifton and… actually, no... It's a quote from Lucille Clifton, but I don't believe it's in one of her poems. She said it in an interview and she just said, “If you see crazy coming, cross the street.” And that’s what I would tell myself because it applies to a lot of different things, really. I think your path can be smoother if you just cross the street. Yeah.

Tia Imani Hanna: Just avoid the whole situation.

Deborah Klezmer: Yeah, you don't have to flip them off, just cross the street.

Tia Imani Hanna: I like that. So, woo hoo… cray-cray is comin’!

Deborah Klezmer: Yeah, definitely. yeah. Yup. I think we have a lot of choice over what we permit into our lives and the less cray we have, the more creative I can be. There's no question about it. I'd rather be crazy at the bench all by myself.

Tia Imani Hanna: Yes, that's right. Have that crazy idea and have it turn into some beautiful piece of work. Is there anything that you want the audience to know before we sign off today? They should go to your website andour art, your photos, your videos are there at deborahklezmerdesigns.com.

Deborah Klezmer: And also, one of the ways that I'm getting through this time is with commission work, which I shied away from before with the jewelry. I did some, but I wasn't actively seeking a lot of it. And now, those are big projects. They're fun. I enjoy working closely with people. They're very personal. So, if you have something in mind, definitely feel free to contact me through the website if you don't see what you're looking for on the website.

Tia Imani Hanna: For sure. Thank you. Thank you, Deborah, for spending the time with me today on Tia Time with Artists.

Deborah Klezmer: I just love getting to see you!

Tia Imani Hanna: Thank you for joining us this week on Tia Time with Artists. Make sure to visit our website, tiaviolin.com, where you can subscribe to the show in iTunes and never miss an episode. Please leave us a rating wherever you listen to podcasts. We really appreciate your comments, and we'll mine them to bring you more amazing episodes.

I’d like to thank this inaugural season's sponsors: The folks at Jazz Alliance of Mid-Michigan or JAMM, Michigan ArtShare, a program of Michigan State University Extension is a partner in supporting the Tia Time podcast, and Shambones Music. Without their support this podcast would not be possible. Thank you so much. If you would also like to contribute to the show, you can find us on https://www.patreon.com/TiaTime1.

If you want to continue the conversation about topics discussed on the show or start new ones with like-minded people, join us at the Tia Time Lounge on Facebook.

Thank you for listening. See you next week at Tia Time!

+ Transcription

Tia Time with Artists, with guest Petra Daher – recorded 9/25/2020

Tia Imani Hanna: Welcome to Tia Time with Artists, the weekly podcast where we discuss the methods, challenges, and real-life experiences of living our creative dreams. What kind of creative warrior are you? Musician? Filmmaker? Painter? Choreographer? Poet? Sculptor? Fashionista? Let's talk about it right now. I'm your host, Tia Imani Hanna.

Tia Imani Hanna: Welcome to Tia time with artists and today's guest is Petra Daher. Now, am I saying the last name, right? Is it ‘dare’ or ‘daher’?

Petra Daher: It's “Day. Her.” Petra Daher. Daher.

Tia Imani Hanna: See, now I've worked with your sister as a massage therapist and I've worked with her and she calls it…. she says “dare.”

Petra Daher: It's been Americanized, honestly. It got Americanized and I'm reclaiming the original pronunciation. I'm the only one in the family that's vigilant about it. My sister totally honors what I'm doing, but yeah… no “Day Her.”

Tia Imani Hanna: That's good. I wanted to clarify that we do know each other, so it's so good to see you and so good to have you on the podcast today. And Petra, you are a photographer. You're a film maker and you've got all kinds of projects that you've been doing for years. And I love your work. And I wanted to have some conversation with you today and just talk about that and see where you've been, where you're going, what are you doing now? What was it about photography and filmography that first titillated your senses, that made you want to go into that? Did you just start by drawing things or did you start by somebody in your family took pictures, or what was it?

Petra Daher: This is a great question Tia. I've always been so obsessed with creativity and anything artistic ever since I was a child and I did come from a family of photographers, especially on my father's side. They, my grandparents on my father's side, emigrated from Lebanon. And I think they just had such… they just honored everything and they wanted to commemorate it with photographs because they were so happy to have the freedom and have their life and the opportunity for family to be together. That picture taking was always a huge part of our family gatherings. I actually… so I was gifted with my first photo camera I think when I was in fifth grade from my Aunt Rose. And I was at that point that I began deviating from just family pictures and experimenting with photography, going into the woods, and taking pictures of reflections. But at the same time, I also did study painting and I love to draw. And at the time I felt insecure about my style because what I now realize is, I had a very tribal style, and I was growing up. Art teachers wanted more classical styles of art. They wanted pastels and I was … I've had people tell me that my artwork is scary, dark. But that was coming out of me and I not realized that it was just, really, it was my particular artistic style.

Tia Imani Hanna: Did you feel like they tried to change that or did it… did they change that in you? Or did you just say, this is how I draw?

Petra Daher: So the question was, did people try to influence and change my artistic style and even what I appreciated and I absolutely think they did. And I'm really grateful that I have a kind of personality that I don't like to be told what to do. So, even if it was a professor, or even if it was my art teacher, I really trusted my heart and my instincts more than what they had to say. Once you gain my respect… I remember… I actually… I also am an educator and when I do teach puppetry or digital filmmaking, I try not to be like my first art teacher who basically was very controlling. She was very into perfection. She labeled people as the best artist in class and people that were just there because they enjoyed art. So, yeah, no, I try to be absolutely the opposite of my early art education when it comes to creating and also teaching. I think that you really do have to march to the beat of your own drummer to really be a creative person. You can't care what other people think. You have to study what you love. You have to practice. You have to look at artists that inspire you and you just really need to think for yourself.

Tia Imani Hanna: Now that's a hard thing for a lot of people to do, especially women for some reason, probably more in this culture than other cultures. Maybe not another… I don't know. I never lived in any other culture than this one, but it seems to be. If you have a strong tendency towards anything as a woman in this culture, you're told to lay off that's too intense or that's too much.

Petra Daher: Absolutely. Honestly, I want to just thank my sweet mama who taught me to be strong and to always be kind and polite, but to be myself and to believe in myself. I transitioned from painting and drawing to photography. And then in high school, I started doing filmmaking and video and it was a very male-dominated field. And I had, honestly, I had to become auteur and learn how to do every aspect of video and filmmaking in order to create and to finish my projects. Because, honestly, my experience was when I was working with the men in the classes, or even male friends, they had a really hard time not trying to take over. And even to this day, I think it's really difficult to be a female in the film industry. And you can look at the statistics. It's not me just talking. When you see the lack of opportunity, the lack of funding, even when female filmmakers make products that make incredible amounts of money, they still sometimes have to wait really long time to be offered the support they need for the next project. Unfortunately, there's not equity. And the medium of filmmaking is male-dominated and still is, although a lot of women are doing amazing things. I think in photography it's not… it doesn't depend on teamwork, so you're able to just go out and do your thing. But with filmmaking, it definitely was a challenge.

Tia Imani Hanna: The thing I noticed… I recently did a small video project with a filmmaker and they shall remain nameless because I was deeply unsatisfied. It was a woman. First off, I didn't choose her. She just got dumped on me by somebody and she was not prepped properly. So, partly, wasn't her fault. But after we figured all of that out and I went in and I spent time with her, and I gave her a very specific note. She refused to write anything down. I would look at her and say, “You are not writing this down. Why aren't you? You’re still are not doing what I asked you to do in the half hour conversation we had yesterday.” And it's, I don't know, it just goes right over their heads. And I don't know if that's because of who she's been training with or what. Or if it's institutionalized sexism, like I'm not going to listen to you because the men don't listen to you either. It was the strangest thing I've ever experienced.

Petra Daher: I feel like, I've experienced that as well. And I think some, sometimes, in some schools, they train people to assume that the client doesn't know anything. And even if they have an idea, they don't know what's best. So, you just need to show them what's best. And I've had friendly debates and discussions with other directors and producers or educators where I've suggested perhaps you should ask a series of questions, pull out what they want, and then offer them technical advice and meet them halfway. But I hear you Tia. It can be challenging. I love what I do, but yeah, it is. It's not easy. It's not easy. You have to persevere, and you have to really want it and also be a little crazy. And working with people is a challenge. We're lucky when you find someone where you communicate in the same way and when you have mutual respect for one another and process and respect for each other's time. Whew!

Tia Imani Hanna: That's true. yeah. It's a tough thing.

Petra Daher: You have to do many things to survive.

Tia Imani Hanna: Can you give us some examples? I know for a while, for a good decade, I lived in New York and I had seven jobs at all times, yes. And they were always disparate in 'em and desperate too.

Petra Daher: Yeah.

Tia Imani Hanna: So, can you give us an example of how if you were talking to Artists coming up now because we're in COVID times now we're in the 21st-century technology times? A lot of this stuff that we have now, did not exist. If this stuff had existed when I was in my twenties, I'd be so much further along in my career just because I had access to people and places and technology and things. I just could never have dreamed of when I was in my twenties. What kinds of things did you do to, if you had to think about it, was it a time when you just didn't have a car, but you had gigs someplace doing work and how you got there and things like that?

Petra Daher: No, honestly I had a car, but it didn't run well. I remember like having to stop and deal, perform emergency surgery on the car on the way to remote or something of that nature. I have to say that I know how to cook beans, I know how to live humbly. I know how to pinch a penny. I live humbly. My friend Nishawn was just joking with me about that, but also admiring that. And that's because I'm an artist. It's the way I've chose to live my life. I think one example of that is that I use used equipment. I, yeah, some people feel like they need to have the most expensive fanciest equipment. I, when I was younger, I got a really nice quality camera and I used it for eight years, the same video camera and the same tripod and the same microphone, which I took care of. And all sorts of other people are like, Oh, I can't do that. I need to go buy the newest model. And I just got to know that camera inside out, got to know lighting, knew how to do my game. And I did it, but I used older equipment. I drove an older car. Instead of having an assistant, I did double the work. Yeah, I guess so. Sometimes you have to pay a buddy to drive you ‘cause they got a better car, and I would do things that were crazy to make extra money. I, one time I had a gig with a company in New York city where, this is right now, it seems so commonplace, but like 15, 10 years ago, I would connect with groups, where I would go and I would shoot on the street interviews for NBC news. When they have a newscast and they say, “Let's go on the street and see what people think.” And I was that person, and they would give me the questions and I would have to run out and get a certain amount of people and get release forms and uploaded onto the computer. And, in a matter of 24 hours or so, I'd go and shoot something and have to edit it. And honestly, not getting paid the best either, but just doing what you have to do day to pay your bills. So, there's a lot of this, there's a lot to learn and you really gotta hustle. And that's why I think I became an entrepreneur and that's why I have my own business Petra Daher Productions. Because you got to cut out the middleman, if I'm going to be hustling that hard, then I might as well be doing all the work and getting all the pay too.

Tia Imani Hanna: That's right. That's right. I talk about these things because I have never heard interviews where people talk about what's the hustle really like. They’d say, “Oh, you gotta hustle. You gotta pay your dues.” And that's the only sentence you hear across the board. And I said, let's talk about what's the hustle? What is the hustle? So, it's things like, I have a shift at my restaurant gig from 6:00 AM until two o'clock in the afternoon and then I have to get home and I have to feed my cats. And then I take a shower. Then I have to go up and do my afternoon gig from three o'clock until 10 o'clock the then from 10 o'clock I've got me get home. I take another shower, eat a little something. And then I practice, or I work on something until three in the morning, and then I do it again the next day. Yeah. And that's just Thursday.

Petra Daher: And my hustle like, looks like I'm being, working as a production assistant for someone's film and showing up at six in the morning in the freezing cold and carrying heavy stuff around and then taking promotional photography for them, and then getting in my car and getting food for everybody and then helping with lights and, but, doing a 12 hour day and getting paid like a day rate for it. That's what you did because you wanted to learn, because you wanted to work with that filmmaker, because you wanted to be part of the crew and then, like you said, the next day, get up and teach all day and that's just the reality of it.

Tia Imani Hanna: Yeah. So, does that change over time, do you think? Are you still doing some of the same things you had to do when you first started out or have things changed for the better, like you've made different decisions or created different situations for yourself?

Petra Daher: I think, yeah. Good question. I think from persevering and doing this so long, I've created a good network and I've also figured out what types of jobs I have to do so that I can do less jobs. Like I quickly realized I'm always going to be working on my own personal projects, which we'll talk about later, but I also need to pay my bills. I had to figure out what type of work, where I could have clients that I work with more than once, that I could have longer types of projects, so I could have more sustainability. Yeah, that's it, I guess. You could ask me another question. I lost my train of thought.

Tia Imani Hanna: No, it's really easy to do. It's really easy to do because yeah, this is a rabbit hole, but that's a good. I wanted the rabbit hole because these are the quandaries that I personally go through all the time. And, my partner, Diane and I, we constantly are talking about this and I remember I would call her about… this is before we were together, we were just friends, but I'd call her from New York and I'd say, I can't make enough money to just get my subway pass, which is like $50 a month and then pay my rent and pay for everything else. It was this crazy and she’d say, “Find a job that's walking distance from your house.” And I was like, “Oh, that's brilliant,” but I just never thought of it that practically.

Petra Daher: Yes. Like I say, the obvious alludes me. People will say stuff like that, and I'll say, “Oh God, the obvious alludes me.” I think, honestly, that's why I got into education and not saying that I don't love to teach because I get a lot from it, but I think that the way I dealt with how hard it is to make ends meet was that now, teaching digital filmmaking, or teaching upcoming podcasting class on to be offering at a local committee college. But I also, yeah, I got burnt out with the filmmaking industry and all the politics and I studied puppetry for a while. So, I think you have to do many things, But I've taught at after school programs. I've been a visiting artist-in-residence, schlepping boxes of art through schools and going into classrooms where people already don't even know I'm showing up.

Tia Imani Hanna: I've been there.

Petra Daher: So, I've taught in college classes and settings, and now I'm going through the awkward transition of having to transfer teaching puppetry and digital filmmaking and even podcasting and how to teach it online. And sometimes I feel like my head's going to explode. I really do. And also, like we talked about when you're trying to ride that old software so you don't have to buy the new software and you're not updating other stuff, so you can keep things active and no, I think you have to like solving puzzles. You have to look at problems. As an artist it’s solving puzzles and you can't personalize it, you just have to keep at it.

Tia Imani Hanna: And that's the thing. I think that's the… one of the things I really admire about artists in general. and I always have, every time I talk to people on this podcast. So, I'm excited about that because I keep finding other people who are talking about the same things, but I'm seeing how they're doing, navigating these, I guess you'd say ‘navigate the puddles’, like how do you not get stuck into this puddle? It's really a 25-foot deep puddle. And you think it's a puddle, but it's not, it's a well. How do you navigate those? Walking down the street, so to speak, and it's good because people do say things that are obvious to them, but you totally can't see them because you're so used to looking out to not step in the wells. So that you can keep going. Because once you get stuck in a well, and now I've got to learn all of this new technology. That's going to take me a month and a half just to learn that I'm not going to have time to do anything.

Petra Daher: So things… I say that and then I laugh. I was going to say, yeah, Things have gotten better and I'm doing more of the kind of work I want to do. And then there was the pandemic back in that puddle again. So here we are now as artists at this moment where we have… well, I've heard about and read about a tipping point. We thought it happened with the pandemic. Then there was the tipping point. There were already was the tipping point of. Our environment. Then we had the tipping point of the worldwide pandemic, and now we have the tipping point of the social justice movement and the backlash that's occurred because of that. So, I don't know many people whose personal lives and careers haven't been shaken. I think that artists are better prepared to deal with this. A lack of knowing. But it doesn't make it easier.

Tia Imani Hanna: No, we live on the cliff all the time. I remember being younger and saying, yeah, I'm a cliff diver, so this is nothing. We're all like, how can you know? how can you do that? And I said, “Because I chose to be an artist.” Yeah. So that's where we're at. This is every day, but you're right.

Petra Daher: I've had many clients like, look at me, like I could never do what you do. Yeah. That's the thing, everyone, I know you gotta be a little crazy. but I knew I didn't want to be in a cubicle. I knew I didn't want to work under fluorescent lights. I knew that I wanted a life of purpose and I think that that's why art and social activism and community and personal spiritual evolution are so important to me. I think that those are the most important things in life.

Tia Imani Hanna: Out of the works that you've done, what is your most difficult that you can remember? And what was the one that was the most heartfelt that you felt like you hit that spiritual level that you were looking for?

Petra Daher: Oh God, those are hard questions because they've all been difficult.

Tia Imani Hanna: Yes.

Petra Daher: Yeah. Yeah, I think that's honestly a hard question for me to answer. So, what's been, I think though, I wonder what would I take from that question is that what's felt good is a lot of my time in the last decade has been spent doing other people's projects and helping other people make their films, which it's an honor to do? And helping other people bring their dreams to fruition. But, after my mother passed away five years ago, I thought, you know what? It's time for me to start working on my own projects and my own stories and making that a priority. And I think what felt spiritually wonderful with that is how things fell into place, even though there were still challenges. Once I made that decision and I have to say that, although I've been supported by all sorts of humans, it's been the community of women artists that I know that have been the greatest support to me and the greatest advocates to me. One fun project that I've been… an ongoing project I have… is called ‘Tree-Hugger Travel’. I don't know if I mentioned before, on top of culture and other artists travel, is a huge source of inspiration for me. So, I being an artist also knowing that travel can be very expensive. Tree-Hugger Travel became my journal of how to travel sustainably, how to travel respectfully. And so, I've started creating many videos and, travel logs. And now even some podcasts talking about different travel adventures I've been on. For people that are earth-centered and nature-centered, different affordable options of where they should stay, communities that actually want tourism, what kind of products to buy to help support the community when you're there. And also, my one highlight of that is seven suggestions. So, for every place I visit, I'd give seven suggestions of things to do because sometimes on our trips we can spend more time researching than actually doing. So, that was something really fun that I did. But then, honestly, after 9-11 travel became really hard and flying became hard. And it just seems like the last couple of decades things of been so political and so dangerous that I've moved towards doing stories about social activism and with a focus on female activists. When, a few years back, I heard about what happened in Flint and what was happening in Detroit. I was shocked. I went with a friend to Detroit because we heard that water was being shut off and the people didn't have access to water. And he was a water policy consultant and he said, this is huge. We should go. So, I brought my camera, and I went, and we expected to have all sorts of people there supporting the people of Detroit. And it was, us and 200 other angry Detroiters walking around, trying to bring exposure. Shortly thereafter, we learned about what was going on in Flint. And I began documenting these different situations happening near me. And I quickly recognized is that it was women leading many of these movements, but when you saw people on the news or when you saw other documentaries that other people were making, usually it was that stories are being told through men. One of them even has the actor Baldwin as the voiceover artist and, no disrespect to that, but I saw the people on the front line doing all the work and shaking the cages. As these females, so much like the civil rights movement, a passion project of mine that I'm working on now is called ‘Great Lakes Water Warrior’s. And it's a series of documentaries about the Flint water crisis and Melissa Mays. It's about what's going on in Detroit and the different women and people from the people's water board that are involved with that. And then, obviously, Line Five and the First Nation and the different people of Michigan's movement to protect our Great Lakes. So, I'm really proud of, and have been very much enlightened and enlivened by, working on these stories and meeting these incredible people that go above and beyond the call of duty to fight outrageous fortune when politicians and different people are doing unjust things. Even though it might not be as fun as making a travel series, it's what needs to happen right now. So, those are a couple of examples of how, when I chose to take leadership and to demand that I'm going to be deciding the stories and the content I create, things happened, grants happened, support happened, and I still need more. So, go to www.petradaher.com and there's some sites where you can kick in some money if you want to help with those film projects.

Tia Imani Hanna: Okay. we'll definitely make sure that gets put up in the link so that people know about that. No, that's exciting work. It sounds like it's arduous, but it's worth it.

Petra Daher: I'm still working on it. I've been filming for five years, a lot of the documents, several other people made documentaries and they're out. Now to me, the story's not over, I'm still documenting. I'm still capturing and, as a filmmaker, I'm often working on several films at once. So, while I was working on the Great Lakes Water Warrior documentary, I went into interview one of my mentors, Father Peter Doherty from the Michigan Peace Team, now known as the medic peace team. He's now retired and goes by Peter Doherty and he's a full-time activist and the co-founder of the meta-peace team whose mission is to teach conflict resolution, nonviolent techniques. They do things like create peace teams at events, such as the woman's March, such as, the Black Lives Matter rallies or, even the different events that people are doing for the water movement. And they also go to Palestine. They go to the Mexican, California border. They have the whole concept of by standard intervention, the whole concept of people from the United States of America with privilege going someplace like Palestine or Mexico and bearing witness and reporting back, holding people accountable or documenting what's happening and helping to spread the word. So, basically from that, another documentary started and that was, is called ‘In Peace We Trust’. So, while the Great Lakes Water Warrior documentary series is not done and it’s still in the production and postproduction stage, last year I completed ‘In Peace We Trust’, which is a 30-minute documentary about the meta peace team. But it's also about the philosophy of nonviolence. It's about the history of non-violent movements. And I talk about some research that a couple of scholars did and you'll have to watch the documentary to find out more, but they talk about how, when you study social movements in the last couple of decades, the ones that used nonviolent methods were more sustaining. So, we do not have to use violence to have social movements, to have effective results. So, we did talk about that and we talk about what to do when systems collapse and, interestingly, it's happening right now. It talks about empire. So, if our country is an empire, empires collapse. Rise and falls of great powers in China and England lost their superpower status because they were busy conducting war maneuvers in other countries and their infrastructure and their economies collapsed. And that's how they lost their power. So, in studying peace and justice and peace movements, it's also about survival and sustainability and how we're going to take care of each other and how we're going to communicate and interact and agree and disagree without violence. So that documentary is called ‘In Peace We Trust’ and, interestingly, during the pandemic, a really neat group forum that it was called the ‘Real Woman's Network’. So, on Twitter, I try to connect with as many artists and documentary makers as I can. And I got an email from a woman and I found out that there was a group of female producers in Los Angeles that were sick of the lack of opportunities for female filmmakers for distribution. And they decided to create their own streaming platform similar to Amazon prime or Netflix, it's called the Real Woman's Network.com. And it basically, and honestly, your podcasts could go on Tia, it is all content created by women. It's documentaries, it's films, it's podcasts. And you can purchase a membership monthly or you can purchase a year membership and you get this incredible content from different female content producers from all over the world. And the creators are basically Crystal Chappelle… I think she started off as a soap opera star and an actress and then she's now a very successful screenwriter. Her production company is called Open Book Productions and she has a highly successful YouTube and Vimeo, it's a lesbian soap opera, that's wildly successful. And her partners in this collaboration are from Bella Productions. And I think that's a major bookstore. Forgive me if I'm wrong ladies in the LA area, their names are Jessica and Linda Hill and they got together. They paid Vimeo to create their own platform. It's going to have a store for women. It's going to have a blog. And honestly, when you talked about something that just fell into place, it felt wonderful. That's my guess. Example of that, they contacted me. we connected, we communicated, they said, “Hey, you want to put your documentary on our network?” And I'm like, heck yeah, do I want to put it on Amazon Prime? Or do I want to put it on the Real Woman's Network? I want to put it on the Real Woman's Network. The women have been amazing, and the comradery is amazing, and I'm connecting with all these different content producers from around the world. So, if you want to see that my 30-minute documentary In Peace We Trust about the meta peace team go to the Real Women's Network, get a monthly membership. I think you can watch some stuff. There's some free content on there. I think some is pay-per-view, but please try it. Get out and support women and film.

Tia Imani Hanna: That's really exciting to hear about. I had not heard about that. And congratulations on that.

Petra Daher: Thank you. That's what cracks me up about social networking was we're all on social networking. Telling people about stuff. And Tia I can't tell you how many people. Yeah. Oh, I didn't know you were a filmmaker. I didn't know. You take pictures. Oh, I didn't know. you made that documentary. I didn't know. Yeah. So, I'm like, why am I on there? What's going on that we're all posting our stuff and everyone, what are people actually seeing?

Tia Imani Hanna: Yeah. That's the 21st century. I'm trying to figure that out. I just had a podcast with Marion Hayden, the bass player out of Detroit, and we just talked about, yeah, we're just getting into the 21st century, 20 years later, we're just starting figure it out right now. So yeah, it's a big learning curve. Yeah. It's a really big learning curve, but it is exciting. You’re in the Lansing, Michigan area. So, there is a film festival that happens up there. Have you been involved in that at all?

Petra Daher: I actually, years ago, I was involved in the East Lansing Film Festival. Like in the very early days I was part of, they used to call it Michigan Zone. And now I think it's called the Great Lakes Film Festival. I was a judge last year for The Capitol City Film Festival, which is out of Lansing. I think film festivals, those are great, but as filmmakers, sometimes you have to be strategic. Honestly, people can also spend money at film festivals and get nowhere. So with this current film, I decided to do it my own way instead of paying money and seeing if people would show my film, and granted if you get into bigger film festivals, it's worth it, but at a certain level, you have to decide how you want to market yourself. In Peace We Trust was going to go on its own tour, where people are going to sponsor the screenings and then people were going to pay the money. And so that would allow me a little bit more control and a little bit more money, but unfortunately, because of COVID, the tour was canceled. And so, I was down. I'm not going to lie. I'm going to be like, wow, I just spent yeah, three years making this documentary. And now… and I think a lot of filmmakers felt that way. And a lot of people did online screening. So, the fact that the Real Women's Network was created did, and that they found me that I was able to put it on that network was wonderful.

Tia Imani Hanna: Fantastic.

Petra Daher: I love the people that do the Capital City Film Festival. They're great people. I enjoyed attending the films last year, and I'm not saying I'm anti film festival, but I think we as artists, we have to think out of the box because the whole idea is you're trying to make a living doing what you're doing. You're also trying to create quality projects and influence the world for the better, but you're also trying to make a living.

Tia Imani Hanna: So, you're teaching right now at the Lansing Community College. You said you were going to start a podcasting class and you've been teaching film classes or photography classes or puppetry classes.

Petra Daher: Yup. Yup. So, I got started about a year ago, teaching digital filmmaking at LCC, Lansing Community College, and Lansing has a community education program. And basically, they have youth programs, and they have programs for adults that are non-graded, there’re simply for the joy of learning. And so, I've developed digital filmmaking classes and music/video production classes for both those colleges and for the adults. Adult education. I've created a podcasting class. Honestly we don't know when they're going to start right now, I'm in hiatus and I'm just trying to figure out how I'm developing online teaching methods, but because of the pandemic and Lansing Community College is doing a great job of being very human-centered when it comes to their policies. They're prepared to teach online for the next couple of years because of the type of classes I'm teaching, I'm hoping to do it in the fall, late fall, or winter, But honestly, I'm not sure it will be happening soon. So, I would follow the LCC Community Education Facebook page if you want alerts on different classes that they offer. But that's been fun to teach on that level. And I do teach puppetry. I think I mentioned that some years back I got burnt out on technology and I was working at a place in Lansing's Old Town called Art Space with an artist named Penny Kriebel and another artist named Nancy Frank. And we decided we wanted to start a puppet troupe. We got a grant, and we went to Minneapolis and studied with ‘In the Heart of the Beast’ who were an amazing puppetry troop and we're part of their annual May Day Parade. And, basically, they've served as our mentors and we came back to Lansing and did some puppetry here. That was the beginning of my puppetry career. I've also, done some studying with ‘Wise Fool Puppet Intervention’. They were at the Michigan Womyn's Music Festival and I did their week-long workshop once and also went to San Francisco and just basically served as a volunteer at a couple of their productions. Their whole idea is in a tradition of bread and puppets. It's a beautiful tribal papier mache'-oriented puppetry style that includes giant puppet trees and pageantry, but also marionettes and all different types of puppets. Sadly, In the Heart of the Beast, because of funding issues, I think their last May Day Parade was last year. And it's just heartbreaking right now to see how hard it is to obtain funding. It's so heartbreaking that humanities is in such a crisis. I worry about it because people don't prioritize it. And usually in times of conflict people turn to arts. They support artists. They support storytelling in different ways. And I hope to see that in the future.

Tia Imani Hanna: Yeah. I hope to see that too. I met a puppetry guy several years ago we were going to do a project together. It just didn't work out at the time, but it was a really lovely idea. Do you make the puppets too? Or is there training on that?

Petra Daher: Yup. So, I actually love to make the puppets and then I like to document the puppets. I usually make other people wear the giant puppets, but yes. I actually, my specialization, is making puppets out of recycled items and trash. So currently, I am an artist-in-residence for the Wharton Center, through the Kennedy program, Kennedy partnership, and in art integration. And their whole idea is for artists to work with teachers to help them do art integration in the classroom. Again, like everything else, it's atypical this year because of COVID and everything is on a delay. But I started that last year and it was really a joyful experience working with these wonderful artists. They have a fine artist. They have a dancer. They have a drama person and they have myself, who teaches puppetry. We do workshops with educators. Educators can sign up and we have a summer Institute where we just play, and we do different types of art. And we do hands on experimentation of how you can integrate art in the classroom. And then we have in-services throughout the school year, and then the teachers that sign up get to select one of us artists to work with them. And we go into the classroom on three different occasions and we work with them on a specific art project. Yeah. So that's really cool. And sometimes with the schools, I'll also do that with documentary filmmaking. And so that's been really a joy.

Tia Imani Hanna: So, have you ever made a personal project, done puppets in a storytelling situation, like your own puppets with your own story in film?

Petra Daher: I've always wanted to do that. And I had a situation that I was doing something of that nature and it never got to the film level, but this summer, Tia, I did a lot with so many educators, even though we were in laid off status. I created several videos and one video I made and filmed and it was on social justice because it was during that moment when everyone was in the streets and I couldn't help but think about how all young people were thinking, trying to piece it all together. So, this summer I made a puppet show that really talked about social justice and I made a series of stick puppets and it was an inter-generational, biracial family. And the setting was that they were camping. everyone's been isolated and they're sitting around the campfire and it's the whole family discussing what was going on. It was the kids talking about their confusion. It was the family trying to talk about social justice movements and the history of Martin Luther King defining what the word ‘social justice’ means and all that it encompasses. And it was a discussion with this family, the kind of thing that I think every household in America needs to be having, just opening up your heart, being vulnerable. And, in the premise was the kids were like, sometimes I honestly don't even know what to say because people's ideas are so different. So, I actually shot that. I made the puppets. I wrote the play, and I was like, “Oh boy, this is going to be fun to film this and do it all by myself.” So, I went up to my friend, fellow artist Pamela Dueweke's house, who is both a sculptor and a metal artist and she makes masks, and I did an art residency with her at her farm. And I stayed out in her yurt and we were really careful with social distancing, but I brought all my stuff up and my camera and she helped me. And her partner Pat helped me, and they helped with the voice work and they helped with… she did all the puppetry, and I did all the filmmaking. Then I came home and edited it, but I honestly want to do more of that in the future. I collected a bunch of driftwood and a bunch of rocks, and I want to create, I'm going to create some puppets over the winter from these found items around the Lake Michigan area. And I'm going to continue to do storytelling with puppets and video, both environmental issues and social justice issues for the young people that I work with.

Tia Imani Hanna: Oh, that sounds really great. I'd love to see some of this stuff. Do you have a YouTube channel or anything like that?

Petra Daher: Some of these. I do have a YouTube channel and if you go to my website, I have a lot of samples there and I believe that this video was first shared with all the teachers last year that were struggling to create content, and I hopefully they'll be on the Facebook page for the Kennedy Center Partners in Education, but, I hope to also have it linked on my website soon. So, hopefully, people can go to my website and my blog and find information about how to find these different things. But honestly, Tia, one of my goals for the future is I want to make giant puppets and I want to make a music video with them.

Tia Imani Hanna: Wow. That sounds like a plan that was just going to ask you about that.

Petra Daher: Maybe we can use your music Tia

Tia Imani Hanna: Because I want some music videos, but I don't necessarily want to necessarily be in them, per se. Maybe a snippet here and there, but I don't want, like the big Hollywood type. It's me all the time, I just want the music to shine.

Petra Daher: Your music does shine. I just… I love your voice and I love it when you play your instruments.

Tia Imani Hanna: Thank you. Thank you. So, puppets would be awesome. So that would be fun. We'll have to make that happen. especially with the digital age, it can be seen by billions.

Petra Daher: Yes. And I love working with any kind-hearted artists, but I love collaborative reading with other women because like we talked about earlier in the interview, I honestly do think women have to work a little harder to be heard, to be seen. Oftentimes, they have to learn to do everything themselves. Like I… like you are creating this podcast, you do technical aspects of your music. you learn to be multifaceted because you have to get the job done.

Tia Imani Hanna: It's true. It's interesting too, because you talk to different folks and I've talked to some actors, not too long ago and they were like, Oh, we get together. And we do these things. We'll just get together and work on some stuff together. I said, I would so love it, but musicians don't really do that. And some of the filmmakers that I've talked to don't really do that. It's all independent. It's really isolated. It's like they almost keep a secretive little cachet. Like I don't want my ideas to get stolen. And it's no, you never do any of these things by yourself. And if you have some other people, that throw in their excellence and you work together. You're going to get some amazing stuff, but there's this… I don't know what it is. So, I'm trying to break that down.

Petra Daher: It is limited resources, but I think that you're absolutely right. Yeah, we have to collaborate. I think you're right.

Tia Imani Hanna: Yeah. It just makes so much difference. It’s not so lonely.

Petra Daher: Yes. and even though, even though I can produce and direct and shoot and edit and make the graphics and do the voiceover, I would really rather work with a team. And I do, and I'm doing all those roles. I bring in three to five people through review, give me feedback. And I try to… I'm in a space where I'm going to listen to it because the whole idea is you want to reach people and you want it to be, you want people that understand what you're trying to do. And you want it to be clear and concise. So, we need to be open to feedback and we need to know how to work together.

Tia Imani Hanna: It's one of those things too. Cause if you look at all the quote unquote great filmmakers that we know, they have the same crew of people. They have the same actors that they work with the same screenwriters, the same directors, the same DPS. It's always the same people. And if you look at Spike Lee stuff. Who's in the movies all the time? The same people, family, and friends. Yeah. And Denzel wasn’t in a whole bunch of movies before he was Denzel.

Petra Daher: Yeah. And Giancarlo Esposito.

Tia Imani Hanna: And, if you look at Coppola's, same thing.

Petra Daher: Absolutely. it takes time to learn to work with someone. And once you do, if it's a fit, why change up? And I am trying to work with other female filmmakers and when I can hire crew, I try to bring in other women, but also, my former students and also any sensitive soul that's willing to apprentice with me and then move into a paid position because that's how I learned. I think these days I notice a lot of young people just, they just want to be a director and I'm like, you know what you think you should apprentice with somebody first and observe. And just understand that it's a process. And, I have to say, my sister, is always an associate producer on all my films because she is my support, and she will support me in any way. And she's that person that will look at my rough cut and give me feedback. And, so yeah, it's nice to have people that you can trust that believe in you and that are willing to re-watch something 12 times, cause things like that… and provide film and they can and then also like just support you as you're dealing with the outrageous fortune of funding issues and people not following through on what they say they're going to do, or egos. There's so many egos involved in the art world, even when you're doing a social justice documentary. Oh, so I want to share, yes. Okay. I have a fun collaboration. So, talking, so this is about… this is Tia Time and we're talking about art artists and women's artists, and she was talking about how you were talking about how it's nice to collaborate. And so last summer I had… not this year cause it's 2020 it's COVID. But last year, I had the busiest professional year of my life and both on a personal level and on a collaboration level, just amazing, wonderful things were happening. And I was just so thankful. And one of those amazing things that happened was that someone that I knew from my past, who had moved to New Mexico, her name is Jane Rosemont. She was always a well-known photographer and award-winning photographer, in the second career of her life, she decided to become a filmmaker. So, she made a film called “The Pie Lady of Pie Town,” based in New Mexico. And it won a bunch of awards. It was on the short list for the short form, documentary Oscar for that year. So anyways, I think this is her fourth film. She decided to make a film about actor Jim Hoffmaster, who's in the film “Shameless,” and Jim is a fascinating, interesting man with a great face and the film is called “Acting Like Nothing is Wrong.” So, Jane contacted me and, a lot of it was shot in LA, but there is a… because Jim is from Michigan, there was a large part that needed to be shot in Michigan. So, she basically called me up and she said, I want to work with a filmmaker, director of photography. I'm going to work with you. And I want you to… can you help me get a crew? And can you hire women if you can find them. And I said, “Oh, my God are you kidding me? Oh, my Goddess!” So here, for the first time in my life, I have somebody approach me, a director who chooses me over a male, and then also asked me to hire a female crew. it was just really wonderful working with her. So, Jane's documentary is now going to be a feature length documentary. It's about Jim Hoffmaster, who is a successful Hollywood actor, but he is a character actor. So, it's a story of many things. It's the stories of the trials and tribulations of being an actor and being on “Shameless,” which is a TV show. If you haven't watched, it's about what not to do and how not to act. Okay. But he was a foster kid. He was a kid that was in foster care. So, it's also the story of growing up in foster care. It's the story of finding something special in yourself when no one's cheering you on. It's the story of how he began acting and he moved to Lansing and how, without anybody cheering him on, he decided to go to Hollywood and become an actor. But it's also the story of dealing with the trauma of being in foster care. So, when he came back here, we got to have fun interviews with the first people he acted with and the local theater companies and local directors. But we also went to his hometown of Durand, Michigan and visited some of the foster homes he lived in where he didn't have great memories and great experiences, or, he met some of the foster homes that were good experiences in the family members that he met and lived with for short periods of time. And we met his old girlfriend. So, it was wonderful to serve as her director of photography to work with a female director. We were able to be really creative. And so that particular film is being co-produced by Kimberly Browning. And who's a very successful producer in the LA area. And I'm really excited that it's being edited by David Aubrey, who Lives in New Mexico, in Santa Fe area, along with Jane Rosemont, the director, and he has edited documentaries such as “Baraka,” “She Sings to Stars,” and “Defending the Fire.” So, I am very excited to see how he splices all the footage together. The film should be done next year. In that film, we'll be at film festivals. That film will be, hopefully, at some of the bigger film festivals. And we do hope to have a premiere, not a premiere, but a preview, doesn't cost money, but she's going to show it someplace in Michigan, sometime in the next six months, we hope. And we will personally invite certain people to go and view it and give us feedback. So that's just part of the final editing process. So that was a wonderful collaboration. It was wonderful to work with different females that I hired the other female filmmaker, video production teacher at LCC, Bonnie. so that was a nice example of what happens when you collaborate, and you let everybody’s skills come out.

Tia Imani Hanna: That's… it's heartwarming to hear that part, for me to hear it. And you deserve that. That's great. I'm so happy for you on that. That's fantastic. I can't wait to see that. Yeah. Yay. Yeah. Women empowered. Yay. Yeah. Yeah.

Petra Daher: So keep it coming. I liked it. I like to collaborate. I will travel. I've got my own equipment. I had gotten a new HD, a four K camera. And that was the first film that I worked on with my new camera. And I love my new camera.

Tia Imani Hanna: Awesome. Awesome. Awesome. Is there anything else that you really want people to know about what you do or that they should think about when thinking about hiring artists or women, artists or your website, and again, anything like that?

Petra Daher: I want to start off by asking everybody to study the life of Ruth Bader Ginsburg, watch RGB, the documentary, and just… I want to just pay respect for her for all of the work she did to help women in the work world. And I just hope to continue to use my art to help make the world a better place. I do want to ask people to give women in art a chance. I want to ask you people to hire women. And I want changes to be made in the system so that it's not hard. It's not so hard for female filmmakers to obtain funding, to get the type of jobs they need to become part of the union. Please, change begins with you. If you want to learn more about my documentary, about the Meta peace team, or if you want to learn more about my upcoming documentary, “Great Lakes Water Warriors.” If you want to find links to some of the puppetry activities I've spoken about, please visit my website, www.petradaher.com. I also run a production company and I think more than ever, I also need your support and help to continue with my studio and with my project. So, I also provide, I offer filmmaking and photography services and instruction. And I just want to thank you, Tia, for having me on your podcast. It's been delightful to talk to you. I've always admired you as a human and as an artist and a friend. So, thank you for having me.

Tia Imani Hanna: Thank you so much for sharing your wisdom and your knowledge and your heart. For doing this work and I really appreciate you coming on the podcast and I will have you again. So, thank you so much.

Petra Daher: Okay. Thanks, Tia.

Tia Imani Hanna: Thank you for joining us this week on Tia Time with Artists. Make sure to visit our website, tiaviolin.com, where you can subscribe to the show in iTunes and never miss an episode. Please leave us a rating wherever you listen to podcasts. We really appreciate your comments, and we'll mine them to bring you more amazing episodes.

I’d like to thank this inaugural season's sponsors: The folks at Jazz Alliance of Mid-Michigan or JAMM, Michigan ArtShare, a program of Michigan State University Extension is a partner in supporting the Tia Time podcast, and Shambones Music. Without their support this podcast would not be possible. Thank you so much. If you would also like to contribute to the show, you can find us on https://www.patreon.com/TiaTime1.

If you want to continue the conversation about topics discussed on the show or start new ones with like-minded people, join us at the Tia Time Lounge on Facebook.

Thank you for listening. See you next week at Tia Time!

+ Transcription

Tia Time with Artists, with guest Sunny Wilkinson – recorded on 9/19/2020

Tia Imani Hanna: Welcome to Tia Time with Artists, the weekly podcast where we discuss the methods, challenges, and real-life experiences of living our creative dreams. What kind of creative warrior are you? Musician? Filmmaker? Painter? Choreographer? Poet? Sculptor? Fashionista? Let's talk about it right now. I'm your host, Tia Imani Hanna.

Tia Imani Hanna: Welcome Sunny Wilkinson to Tia Time with Artists. I am so glad to have you here.

Sunny Wilkinson: Oh, Tia! I'm thrilled to be with you! It's making me smile!

Tia Imani Hanna: You are such an exciting and wonderful performer and a wonderful person and you're so sweet to do my show and I appreciate it. If you don't know Sunny Wilkinson, she's a singer extraordinare and has been up in Lansing [Michigan] now for, I don't know how many years, but she does an amazing job.

Sunny Wilkinson: Tia, almost 30 years I moved here. In 1993, I moved here January 4th of 1993. Not that I'm counting.

Tia Imani Hanna: You remember… You remember that date.

Sunny Wilkinson: I do, because I moved from Los Angeles and all of a sudden it was 20 degrees and I didn't, I did not, have the appropriate outerwear. Let's just say that the…

Tia Imani Hanna: Major shock to the system, for sure. For sure. So, what was going on? You were in California and what brought you to Michigan?

Sunny Wilkinson: It's a crazy thing. I loved my life in LA. I was doing… I was busy from seven in the morning until one at night. And when you're in that age period, it's easy to be consumed all the time because you're on fire with everything. And I was singing everywhere. I was doing session work. I think I had something like 25 private students. I was teaching at different universities. I was just bouncing around here and bouncing there and on the road and making my records and I was happy as a clam. And then, I went to IAJE, which was the International Association of Jazz Educators conference. It was in Washington, DC there at that old Sheridan, beautiful old hotel in Washington, DC. And there I met Ron Newman. And that Ron Newman, he courted me across the country for two years. And honestly, an old-style courting and finally convinced me that it would be a good idea to move to the Midwest. So, I moved, we married in July of ‘92. And at one point he says, “Hello, nice lady. Are you going to come and be my wife or what?” And so, I kept trying to close things up there in LA and finally in January of’ 93 I moved.

Tia Imani Hanna: Wow! Very romantic.

Sunny Wilkinson: It was romantic. Could I tell you a little bit about how we met?

Tia Imani Hanna: Please do.

Sunny Wilkinson: Okay. Did you ever go to any of the jazz educators’ conventions?

Tia Imani Hanna: I did. I did quite a few. Yeah.

Sunny Wilkinson: I don't think we met there though.

Tia Imani Hanna: No, we didn't.

Sunny Wilkinson: No, crazy. They were…It was jazz music from nine in the morning ‘til two at night. But it was also like the world's best hang. You would see friends from all over the world and all over the country and it was just a big hang. So, one night I think six of us were going out to dinner and somebody invited Ron along and that night we went on a walking tour of the monuments. And while we were walking around to the monuments, we heard that war had been declared, it was the beginning of Arab Spring. And so, it was also this sort of somber moment and also a joyful moment. And then… I'll cut to the chase. Cause it's a lovely story, but it's a little lengthy. Ronnie and I met up again after a Steps Ahead concert. Oh my God! They were loud, but fantastic. And then we hung out and went and heard Effortless Mastery.

Tia Imani Hanna: Kenny Werner.

Sunny Wilkinson: We hung out ‘til five in the morning and at five in the morning we went and found a piano in the hotel and he played, and I sang “Close Enough for Love” by Johnny Mandel. That's romantic.

Tia Imani Hanna: And then you were definitely like, “Okay, I'm hooked. I'm coming. I'm going to be in the Midwest. I'm going to be a married woman and do jazz 24/7.”

Sunny Wilkinson: Oh, yeah.

[both laughing]

Tia Imani Hanna: That's the romantic part.

Sunny Wilkinson: Reality is a little different from that.

Tia Imani Hanna: So, you were doing session work in LA, how did you end up in LA or are you from California originally?

Sunny Wilkinson: No, I was born and raised in the Midwest, so it's interesting that I come back here, which honestly, I would not move back to LA. I love it here now. I love the people. I love the fact that I live across from woods on a river and it's pastoral and quiet and the music community is beautiful and so is… I love the greenery, et cetera, but I'm sorry, what was your question?

Tia Imani Hanna: Okay, let's back it up even further. So, you were in the Midwest. You're growing up. Was your family musical? What started you singing as opposed to choosing an instrument or something else, or painting or, I know that you're a ceramicist as well now. But did you start out doing handcrafted arts or did you study? What got you started in the first place?

Sunny Wilkinson: My family was very musical. My mama was a music major in college. My daddy was from a long line of Methodist ministers. As a matter of fact, my brother is the last in the line of, six in a row generationally, of Methodist ministers. So, we all grew up singing in the church. We all, I grew up singing hymns around the piano and we were all encouraged, if not mandated, to study instruments. So, I studied piano and I also studied trombone. Now, in this little town where I grew up in Minnesota, Fairmont, it was at the time this little area in the Midwest was band central, just the best bands in the country, really high caliber programs. So high in fact that just before we moved there or somewhere near when we moved there, the high school band played at one of the President Kennedy inaugural events. So, this was a high school band.

Tia Imani Hanna: That was really great.

Sunny Wilkinson: I know. So, I started playing trombone in and amongst these people. Where the music ethic and was very high. So, we practiced, and we got good. So, I was a little hot shot trombone player. I'm still in touch with the guy that played ahead of me. His name is Peter Scherer and he played first chair trombone. I played first chair second, and we connected through Facebook, which is just crazy. So, I had this wonderful foundation. Singing in choirs, but mostly singing with my families. I don't know if you guys did this, but my sister and I would sit down at the piano. I'd play right-hand, she'd play left-hand and then we'd sing a song, like different intervals apart, like a minor six, or if we got really adventurous, we'd sing a tri-tone apart.

Tia Imani Hanna: Wow!

Sunny Wilkinson: Try to hold our position in space, yeah. I did have… I had a lot of training and I had a lot of it. I think it's unusual sometimes for singers to be able to be proficient in bass clef and treble clef reading. And I was, because of piano, but also because of trombone.

Tia Imani Hanna: I think that is unusual. And it's a good grounding for everything that comes after. Trains your ears up in a different way so that you're listening in a different way.

Sunny Wilkinson: Exactly. And you came up in one of the most famous jazz families ever.

Tia Imani Hanna: The funny thing about that is, I didn't really know my Uncle Roland [Sir Roland Hanna] until I was in my thirties.

Sunny Wilkinson: Really.

Tia Imani Hanna: And when I was living in New York and that's really when I got to know him a little bit, just a little bit, he was traveling a lot and I was working and we lived in different parts of the state. He lived in upstate New York and I lived in Brooklyn. So, I didn't really get to know him that well. Then he passed away, so I didn't really grow up with him. But my Aunt Naima in Detroit, I grew up with her. I learned a lot from listening to her and from my Uncle Sham, her husband, George [Shamborguer], he knows everything about jazz. So, I learned from the two of them.

Sunny Wilkinson: Did they mentor you and take you under their wing?

Tia Imani Hanna: Basically, it was one of those things. If you were around them there, you were listening to jazz. And Sham would say, “Listen to this, listen to that!” And this is… there's a way to listen to jazz. You don't talk while it's happening. You listened to it. And then you talk after. There was a real education about listening.

Sunny Wilkinson: So, they schooled you.

Sunny Wilkinson: They did.

Tia Imani Hanna: When you're a kid, you're like, eh, but you take it in. So yeah, there was that. Yeah, my family was more… we were classically based more than jazz. I learned a lot more classical music. I played professional classical music for a long time and then switched over.

Sunny Wilkinson: Isn't that interesting? Really, my background was that too. I didn't know anything about jazz until later in life, but I think I was first exposed to it when I was 19 or 20. We grew up, I love that. We were talking about listening to music theater and listening to the sound of cast records of…

Tia Imani Hanna: “Camelot” and “My Fair Lady.”

Sunny Wilkinson: “Camelot” and “My Fair Lady.” I wore out those records.

Tia Imani Hanna: Yep. “Kiss Me Kate” was another one that I really loved.

Sunny Wilkinson: “South Pacific.” I love that too.

Tia Imani Hanna: Yep. “Oklahoma” and “Seven Brides for Seven Brothers.”

Sunny Wilkinson: Oh my gosh. my, “My Fair Lady” and “West Side Story.”

Tia Imani Hanna: Oh, “West Side Story” was the ultimate. I heard the album for years and I knew all the songs and everything, but when I finally saw the movie, I would say, “Oh my gosh, look at that dance!” It was like…it was incredible. Incredible!

[Sunny vocally imitates percussion]

Tia Imani Hanna: Very cool.

Sunny Wilkinson: And looking back on those two, the social commentary that went along with what used to be a really frivolous art form, just song and dance and kicking up your heels and petticoats, turned into something that had social relevance.

Tia Imani Hanna: Oh, sure. and just the adaptation of Shakespeare, there's just so many levels of that. So, if you weren't exposed to Shakespeare, cause in the States we don't really read about read Shakespeare until we're in high school. If that, depending on what school system you're in. So just looking at the different ways that… And so West Side Story happened in 1960 and 1959, like the stage show. And then I think the movie was 1960, something like that. I'll look it up. Any of the people listening who do Google will say, you got that wrong, but it's okay. But somewhere in that range, ’58 - ‘59, because I know they workshopped this show for years and years before they got it to Broadway and it was an exciting experiment because you had Jerome Robbins and you had Leonard Bernstein and you had, I think, Hal Prince was involved in it too, as far as production. These are, these were amazing giants in their field. [On Broadway in 1957 and the original film in 1961.]

Sunny Wilkinson: And wasn't Stephen Sondheim involved?

Tia Imani Hanna: Yes. He had just come from an apprenticeship and he learned a lot of his craft from Oscar Hammerstein and he grew up in their own kind of an apprenticeship in that sense, because his mother put him… he hung out with that family. So, he grew up with the Hammersteins. That's amazing. So, he learned a lot of stuff just by osmosis. It's amazing what can happen by just being around the arts.

Sunny Wilkinson: That's true.

Tia Imani Hanna: So anyway, we're talking, but we digress. We’re talking about you! You grew up with a family that was doing all these things. You're influenced by musical theater. You're influenced by classical music. You play music with your sisters and sang and played trombone. Do you do arranging as well? Cause I know a lot of trombone players do arranging.

Sunny Wilkinson: I do arranging. I come now from a family of composers and remarkable arranging. I would say, I think I do pretty simplistic arranging like quartet stuff. Do I arrange for a big band? No, I don't. But I do, I do arrange. And I write, but I don't think I'm prolific at that. I write when the spirit moves. But after high school, which I… of course I played in the bands and I sang in the choirs. I went to Arizona State as a Choral Ed major because my strong strongest influences at that time were my choir directors, who were remarkable. Her name was Kay Poor. And she was just a spitfire of a woman. And, wow, was she a great musician. She inspired me. And then I think it was between my junior and senior year, I went to Jackson Hole, Wyoming and did summer stock theater, which was so much fun because every night we put on a show. That hones your skill in performance and performance energy, of course. And then, every day we were climbing in the Tetons. It was phenomenal. And then I also sat next to this tenor, John Tatum, at Arizona State, and he had a rock and roll funk combo. You remember these bands. The horn bands, Blood, Sweat, and Tears, Chicago. He had a band like that, and he heard me sing and asked me to come and audition. And I did. And because I had sung between my senior year and my freshman year and sophomore year of college, I had sung in a kind of a rock band. We did Gracie Slick tunes and we did, not Earth, Wind and Fire, but we did, oh, a whole slew of things. And I can't remember… Jefferson Airplane stuff. I can't remember all the stuff that we did. I had a little bit of experience in singing that kind of music. And so, I joined Gold Mine, singing and playing trombone, and that's where my first exposure to jazz was because the trumpet player and trombonist berated me because I didn't know who Miles Davis was. I know! I was a complete idiot, but luckily the resources at the library were such that I just went in and I just spoon-fed myself and I listened and listened. Can I tell you the moment I fell in love with jazz?

Tia Imani Hanna: Yes, please.

Sunny Wilkinson: It's a defined moment. It is. Charles Lloyd's Forrest’s flower record “Live at Monterey” and Keith Jarrett is playing his solo on the title cut and it just stopped me in my tracks. It completely stunned me! And I took the needle. Yes, the needle, and I put it back into the groove and I put it back and I put it back and listened again and put it back and listened again and put it back and listened again. And it just simply caught me by surprise and totally captivated me. And then I was on a quest, right? With the help of these guys. They said, “What do you mean you don't know who Joe's Zawinal and Weather Report is?” And of course, then I was hooked, and I would go to garage sales and there'd be these beat up, worn out records of the triumvirate, my favorite, Sarah Vaughan, my favorite, my goddess of song. I love her so much. And Carmen, right.

Tia Imani Hanna: Yeah, Carmen McRae.

Sunny Wilkinson: And Ella [Fitzgerald].

Sunny Wilkinson: Yeah, Carmen McRae. And so, these beat up old records, I beat them, I beat them to a point where there was nothing left in them.

Tia Imani Hanna: The grooves were worn through.

Sunny Wilkinson: And that's how we used to learn this music, right, before I think everything was so readily available to just listen and then move on. We listened and listened. And again, until they were sort of part of your body armor; they just became a part of your soul. And that's really how I learned to sing jazz. We had the jazz band in college, but there were no real classes or anything to teach you about it. And so, I just learned from the masters. I remember one thing that happened when I was young, which I think is hysterical now. When I could copy them exactly, I thought I was as good as them.

Tia Imani Hanna: [laughing] It's a good start. It's a good place to start.

Sunny Wilkinson: It's a good place to start. Exactly. Nice mimicry. And then all of a sudden it dawned on me that every single time they sang that song, they sing it with equal mastery, but differently, because their ears were so vast and their sense of time and rhythm was so deep. Very humbling.

Tia Imani Hanna: Phenomenal. The mentors that you had were on the records.

Sunny Wilkinson: Yeah.

Tia Imani Hanna: Pretty much. So that's what you took, what they had, and you developed it into something. You learned the vocabulary from the masters. And then after that, at some point you say, Oh, wait, I have to put myself in here somewhere.

Sunny Wilkinson: That's right. And you start… learning to improvise is such an adventure into being human, I think. Because you don't all of a sudden improvise like Chet Baker or like Charlie Parker. You don't do that. It's a step-by-step process, putting one foot in front of the other, and your ears get a little bit bigger and you learn one little lick and you memorize that. And then you alter that lick, or you alter a melody line, or you alter… to me, it all starts with the way you phrase something. Phrasing is such a beautiful way to improvise. Little by little, you expand that ability and it's just like walking or learning a language or an interpersonal relationship. It grows step-by-step.

Tia Imani Hanna: And you flower into ‘You’.

Sunny Wilkinson: Yeah. I have a student that is just… she's hungry. She's one of those people. She's arranging for jazz choir. She plays beautiful piano and she's singing and she's writing and she's just… she can't get enough of everything. She's hungry. And she said, “Sunny, I'm really worried. I don't have a personal style and I don't know how to find it. And I'm concerned.” And I just said, “Oh, my darling, take a breath. Just breathe. And by the process of doing what you're doing, this is your personal style and it just keeps growing as you go along.” ‘You’ are your personal style.

Tia Imani Hanna: That's right. You're making… you're perfecting the tool that you've got. The art comes from inside out to whatever tool that you're using. It's one of those things that I learned a long time ago. I had a performance in Mexico City. I was maybe 16. I was doing an aria, a Vivaldi aria. I had never done that before. I practiced with the orchestra every week. But I never actually performed in front of a group or big crowd,this gigantic thing. I had two arias to do. And the conductor gave me this terrifying look and he had this big muscle… mustache. I call it a muscle mustache because it’s always the guys that are bikers that have those big mustaches. He had one of those. And he, yeah, he just gave me this look and I was like, “Oh!” and that scared me. And he was like giving me the cue, but he was looking at me so intensely. It really, it made me jump, and I froze. So, for two arias I stood there and didn't sing anything. Cause I just couldn't. And so, he never gave me another chance to perform again after that because he was embarrassed and I'm like, dude, you're a teacher. You're supposed to work with me. But he took me backstage and yelled at me for half an hour. And he said that he was so embarrassed and I'm like, how is this helping you? It's not helping me. It's helping you. Then he never gave me another chance.

Sunny Wilkinson: There are some people that would be enough to just completely block them off from music for the rest of their life. That's abuse and that's traumatic.

Tia Imani Hanna: It was very traumatic. That's why I still remember it. But the thing that I came out of that with is, that I'm just lucky that I had whatever I had internally to say, “That's not going to make or break me. I screwed up.” It's scary coming back after that was really scary, but I was like, “People make mistakes all the time. Yeah, I'm a kid. I've never done this before. And I'll never get a chance to do a classical aria again because I'm not an opera singer. I missed that opportunity. I got the chance to sing with the orchestra, so I've done it, and I did it well when I was rehearsing. So, I've had the experience, I've also had the experience of failing fantastically on a gigantic stage.” So that was traumatic, but it also taught me that I don't have to be perfect and that if I fail and fall down, it doesn't mean it's the end of my career. It's like you make mistakes, go out there and make a mistake, make it bigger, go out big.

Sunny Wilkinson: Go big or go home. That reminds me of a quote that I really like. Check this one out. This is from Winston Churchill, “Success consists of going from failure to failure without loss of enthusiasm.”

Tia Imani Hanna: That's great.

Sunny Wilkinson: Isn't that great?

Tia Imani Hanna: That's great. I love that. Yeah, that's the thing. And I think that as I'm speaking to so many different artists lately. That’s the thing that I'm seeing. So many artists do other things besides just their music. They are still artistic because the artist is inside, and the tools vary.

Sunny Wilkinson: “The artist is inside, and the tools vary.” I just love that. Is that a Tia Hanna quote? I have to write that down. I'm a quote hound. I love that.

Tia Imani Hanna: There are just moments that happen and you get through them and you learn things. So, on your journey, you have developed your ear and you have your mentors, you have the real mentors, the teachers that you were working with, and then you have classical mentors and teachers, but when did you get jazz mentors? In real life?

Sunny Wilkinson: Oh yeah, and there are so many, right. Before I talk about that, I did want to say that, if there are young people out there listening, the idea that Tia got to sing this aria with an orchestra. I was very lucky in college because with that idea of the ‘artist within’, I really want… I was exploring everything and into everything. And luckily, as an undergraduate at Arizona State, I got to sing opera. I sang the witch in “Hansel and Gretel.” I sang Marcelina in “The Marriage of Figaro” by Mozart. Did I do it well? Probably not, but I got the opportunity to do it. I did “The Princess and the Pea,” “Once Upon a Mattress,” I played Carol Burnett’s part in music theater. I started singing and playing with the jazz band because I was persistent with the director there. I go, “Hello? Hello. I'd like to do sing with the band. Hello? Hello.” And I think he let me sing with the band just because I wouldn't go. And I think the idea of a liberal arts education, if you just explore and play and don't let anything hold you back from singing classical music and singing country and singing blues and singing jazz, because all of that adds to the artistry that is you. And so, when I went out and started singing jazz, my first band was with these guys that were in the jazz band and they were my buddies and they protected me and kept me safe. Because I had no clue what I was doing. And then I moved to LA just because of deeply shallow reasons, I wanted to be a star.

[laughing together]

Tia Imani Hanna: Yeah.

Sunny Wilkinson: And I thought that's what you did. And there was an audition. For the opening of Space Mountain stage. at Disney. And one of my friends, again from the Arizona State band, was now playing as a career. He was a career player at Disneyland making really good money and got to play music every day. He told me about the audition and said, “Get out here and audition for it.” And… wow! There were hundreds and hundreds of people auditioning. I got the gig. I can't believe I got the gig. Then, all of a sudden, you talk about mentors here. I am all of a sudden thrown into the deep end. Mike Miller, who's played with Chick Corea and Frank Zappa; Albert Ming, who played with Frank Zappa; John Navarro, who played with Larry Carlton. I can't remember though, this is 1977. So, forgive me that I can't remember his name, but the guy that played synth developed all the synthy sounds for the first computerized movie, “Tron.” So, these big, crazy ‘out there’, just astounding, musicians playing this sort of weather reporting, contemporary jazz gig. And they, again, they took me under their wing because I did have a certain amount of naivete, I have to say. But I was so anxious to learn. And then I just, do you know who Bobby Shew is?

Tia Imani Hanna: I know the name, but I don't know his work.

Sunny Wilkinson: He is…He was a lead trumpet player in Vegas, beautiful jazz player and a big session player in LA. And when I was a kid, I had gotten a small part in the movie, “A Star is Born” directed by Barbara Streisand. And unfortunately, my part was a little blue, so it got cut. Dang it. But I was on the stage with these astounding musicians, and Barbara Streisand directed me in my scene, and Bobby Shew was in the band, and he took me under his wing, so that when I moved out to LA, he taught me the ropes and he taught me something I will never forget, I still tell my students. He said it's really easy to be taken up with day-to-day living in LA and just get off course. He said make sure you do at least two things a day for your career here, at least two. And I did. Every day. I cold called, I went and visited the union. I tried to find people to play with and, little by little. This was a time when the jazz life and the jazz world was really active. Dante's was thriving. Carmelo's, Jimmy Smith's club was there. What was the name? Anyway, it was.. Vine Street Bar and Grill, Catalina's. These were all thriving and world-class musicians would come in and you just sit there, as close as you and I, and listen and learn. And also, I feel like there were a group of singers… that… LA can be really catty and so competitive that it's hard to bear, but this group of jazz singers that came together… Peggy Lore, beautiful singer, Kathy Siegel Garcia. Oh, golly, Julie Kelly, and a host of others, maybe eight or nine of us. And we’d give each other charts, we’d turn each other on to gigs. We’d come and support each other at gigs. And so, there was this little community within the community that really held each other up. My mentors were piano players mostly, I got to say. Keith Greco in Phoenix. He was, “This is a stern learning process. It's done with love. You don't mess up too many times on the band stand before you get home and get in the shed and get practicing. And you said you learned five tunes today? No, you didn't. You go home and learn those tunes until you really know them.” It's like, “Yes sir. Yes, sir.” And then another one of my very big mentors was the great Tom Garvin, who I did my third record with. He played with Carmen McRae. He played with Sarah, he played with Ursula Dudziak, and he again, burnt me by fire, but in a very loving way. Yeah. And those were the days we didn't have iReal Pro and we really didn't have fake books, so players knew how to play tunes. And they knew tunes, they knew them inside and out, in any key and in LA every piano player that I worked with you go, what key? “F” bang; “B flat” bang. And then when you move somewhere else and they don't know that, it's a little stunning. It was. You have it. Isn't that your job?

Tia Imani Hanna: Oh, okay. It was a blessing to have that because that culture doesn't exist everywhere, and it is surprising. By the time I got to New York, that culture did not exist at all.

Sunny Wilkinson: Really.

Tia Imani Hanna: I went to a jam session and called “Summertime” and they couldn't, they didn't know it. I was, you don't know “Summertime.”

Sunny Wilkinson: You’re kidding me.

Tia Imani Hanna: “Autumn Leaves” don’t know it. But they knew every tune by Wayne Shorter and that was it. No standards at all. And I was like, “I love Wayne Shorter, but yeah. Okay.” So, it was interesting.

Sunny Wilkinson: I think maybe that culture is gone for good, unfortunately. Because the stories that I heard from the people that I really respected out there is how the great artist would just start. Just start. Frank Potenza was one of my partners out there and he played with Gene Harris, never called tunes. He just started and if you're going to last on the bandstand, man, you better pick it up right away.

Tia Imani Hanna: Yeah. That culture. Yeah. Part of that is gone because there aren't jazz clubs. There's not a lot of places for people to get together. There's not. There used to be a lot more jazz clubs. Now there's one or two in the big cities. In the small cities, there isn't anything. Maybe if there's a university, there's some place to go, but even then, cause even in Lansing, I think there's just Moriarity's one day a week and that's not a jazz club by any means. And that wasn't even there 20 years ago, 30 years ago.

Sunny Wilkinson: I have to say, though, I think Jeff Shoup does a great job of transforming that place into a jazz club on Tuesday nights. It's got a really great vibe that he's worked and worked to establish, but it's not.

Tia Imani Hanna: Yeah, it's rare. And now, granted we're in COVID now, so things are really different. People can't get together and play like they used to, but most folks are really busy, so they don't get together and play. They're not learning tunes together, so they don't want to do standards anymore. They're not getting together to woodshed the tunes together.

Sunny Wilkinson: And I understand that. An art form does have to move on and progress to stay relevant, I understand that, but there is in our language, the standard literature, is like a painting, a painter learning how to paint in a traditional style as training. And it also is something that sort of draws us together in commonality. You and I can go “Autumn Leaves,” bang, and we're in, or so it was a wonderful universal language, right?

Tia Imani Hanna: So where are you teaching right now?

Sunny Wilkinson: Right now, I am…

Tia Imani Hanna: Granted we're in COVID…

Sunny Wilkinson: Still… I am still an artist in residence at U of M, although that hasn't happened at all during COVID. I go and work with the students, maybe three or four times a semester, the vocal students, I love it. It's great in sort of a workshop masterclass situation. Sure. Up until recently, I was just going back and helping out at Western Michigan with their phenomenal program there. I taught the online summer jazz camp at Interlochen this summer. That was an experience. Wow. Talented the kids. I taught a kid from Cupertino, two from California, one was in London, England. And one was in Argentina or was it, is it Argentina? I can't remember. And they were so talented. This one girl from California, she's going to be a junior, she's got 50 tunes in her repertoire. And she sounds like she's 40 years old. And I don't mean the age of her voice. The depth of her phrasing and stuff. And then I'm just teaching some Zoom lessons. Fewer is better for me because it gets old being on the computer.

Tia Imani Hanna: Yeah, it does. Yeah. The energy's a little bit different, so I understand that. So, when you're teaching your students nowadays, basically with all the computer stuff, what do you tell them like about careers and what do you tell them about developing their form? You're developing your art form. How do you develop you?

Sunny Wilkinson: See, I think that I, honestly, I am not addressing that too much right now. Okay. Because there's so much to work on vocally and learning the tunes and style and the ones that are already professional… I have a few that are just so ridiculously talented… and we're really just coaching, just doing a little coaching. They're out doing it already. They're doing live concerts that they're gathering to put on Facebook Live later, so they might do three or four concerts and then put it on in a series. I think it's really tough to be young out there and trying to develop this art form. How do you develop jazz without playing with other people? I don't have an answer for that because I don't think you really can. You can get proficiency, but you have to have human interaction and something ‘in the moment’ that you're molding back and forth and listening to be able for it to be jazz. I don't know. Do you have an answer for that? Maybe you can guide me.

Tia Imani Hanna: I don't have an answer for that because I feel like, even before the digital age, I felt like I was working alone a lot. Just to develop, because I didn't go to school for music and I didn't have, really have, jazz mentors. Not really. By the time I was getting to the point of trying to develop that whole thing, it was I'd asked people questions and I would gravitate to different teachers. I studied with a lot of… I would take lessons with a sax player here and there; I'd take lessons with a vibraphone player; I'd take lessons with different people and they all told me completely different things. And I took some lessons with you and I've taken some lessons with some other vocal teachers and everybody had something different to say, so then I just cocooned. And just listen to the music and try to get the vocabulary down and understand and listen and hear things. and then, ran into lots of trouble. And I got so uptight that my hands would get too tight and I couldn't really play. And it was just like, I was, because I was trying so hard to get these lines to come. I was trying to play bebop on the violin, which is like incredibly difficult. Because whatever you play still sounds like you're playing the classical run. You might be going (Tia scatting here), but that doesn't sound like that when you play, it sounds like (Tia and Sunny scatting together). Yeah. Especially if you play it faster, then instead of… Yeah. So, it's just not, you could be playing with it, but you're not. Yeah, I think in a lot of ways it helped me develop my own sound because there was nobody who could really tell me how to do it. And, at that time, there weren't a whole lot of jazz violin players around. And none of them were teaching near me, so I had to move to New York to find a jazz violin teacher.

Sunny Wilkinson: Who was your teacher there?

Tia Imani Hanna: Julie Lyonn Lieberman.

Sunny Wilkinson: Did you like Bela Fleck and Stephane Grappelli and…?

Tia Imani Hanna: I've listened to Stephane Grappelli I liked him, but I never really thought of him as jazz because it was so classical sounding to me. Stuff Smith was my man. So, Stuff Smith was the guy and I was like ‘that's what I want’ because he had that edge and that umph and he was always swinging, always. And all through the ages… I think he died in the sixties, but he was still swinging hard, and it was really great. Then John Blake was around and, his style was different too. Regina Carter started coming up similar around the same time as me, but I wasn't in Detroit anymore by the time she was coming up. And then, there's quite a few players that were out there. Jean Luc Ponty was the first one I really got into because he was in Detroit. They love Jean Luc Ponty. I don't know what it is, but here in Detroit, that's the man. So, I was just… I would learn his stuff, aurally, and so I transcribed it, but I didn't know how to write it down. Because I could read music and I couldn't write music because nobody ever taught me how to write it. I would literally just put the note heads and group them in what I thought were the rhythms.

Sunny Wilkinson: And then that would give you the memory recall of what it is.

Tia Imani Hanna: eah. And then at least that way I was training my ear to hear the individual notes and then some stuff I didn't know… he had different tunings where he had an extra string. So, I was like, wait, how is he doing this?

Sunny Wilkinson: It's magic!

Tia Imani Hanna: Yeah, I think you find that later. Oh yeah. He has a five-string violin. Oh, he tuned it a different way. Oh, he did this thing electronically. Oh, no wonder I couldn't play it. I'm thinking I just suck.

Sunny Wilkinson: But in the old days, in the old days we couldn't slow anything down either. It was, we didn't have the amazing slow downer. We went [Sunny rhythmically demonstrating]… that was it. Wait, what? Yeah.

Tia Imani Hanna: Exactly. But because of that, we have gigantic ears. I had a teacher, at a jazz camp who just said… he was talking to me about bebop. I'm going, “I can't figure out the bowings” because I can't make it sound right, because the bowings are too smooth, or I just couldn't. I still haven't heard anybody play bebop violin that sounds like bebop violin to me. I just decided “I don't do bebop. Fine.”

Sunny Wilkinson: There you go. And you’re better off. We're all a little bit con constrained or confined by our instrument or, what's the word I'm looking for? “Defined.” There are certain limitations on each instrument that define us a little bit.

Tia Imani Hanna: So anyway, enough about me. This is, supposed to be about you. So right now, you're teaching, you've been working on new material or a new CD. Do you have something out right now that you want people to know about?

Sunny Wilkinson: My latest CD that I'm really proud of. I wouldn't say I'm the most prolific CD album maker in the world, but my latest CD was with my Michigan band because they have been… talk about loyal. These guys. It's important for me to feel safe onstage. I want to be surrounded in love. I want to know those cats have my back and I have theirs. And these guys do. They have been with me for a long time and we've made a lot of music together, From really contemporary stuff and hard Ron Newman lines to just some fun standard stuff. So, my band is Eddie Fedewa, who is the principle bassist for the Lansing Symphony.

Tia Imani Hanna: Yeah, Ed’s fabulous!

Sunny Wilkinson: Oh, he's such a… I always feel like if he had gone, if he had gone to New York, he'd be one of the cats.

Tia Imani Hanna: Oh yeah.

Sunny Wilkinson: He really would be, he would be. Burnt by fire into one of the cats. Larry Ogletree, fantastic drummer from Battle Creek and my dear friend and great player. And then of course my husband, Ron Newman.

Tia Imani Hanna: On piano.

Sunny Wilkinson: It was just way past due to make a CD. I had gotten so caught up in… you can only do so much in life, right? You really cannot, we cannot do everything at once. The feminist-era told us we could, and I think most of us exhausted ourselves and felt bad of about ourselves because we couldn't. We can, just can't do it all at the same time. So, I was raising a child running a household, I had a full-time gig developing a vocal jazz program at Michigan State. And I just… was too much to put all the creative energy into making a CD as well. I just didn't have it. Some people can do it. I just didn't. So, after that ended and I regained my strength and vibrancy. It became clear that we needed to make this record. And I'm so pleased we did, because it is about family and about connections and about broader family. I'm really proud of the record. It went to number 25 on the charts and got some wonderful airplay, but mostly I'm just, I'm so pleased that I could put out our band and let everybody hear what we've done.

Tia Imani Hanna: What's the name of the CD?

Sunny Wilkinson: It's called “Into the Light.”

Tia Imani Hanna: And where can people get that?

Sunny Wilkinson: Amazon for sure.

[Sunny and the band playing title track “Into the Light”]

Sunny Wilkinson: I'm so excited about this. My dear friend in California, Cathy Siegel Garcia started doing these. Zoom to Facebook live shows every day for two hours.

Tia Imani Hanna: Oh, my goodness. That's… yeah, that's incredible.

Sunny Wilkinson: Now I could never do that. I could not sustain that. However, I thought wouldn't it be lovely to do one of these shows that really features the world-class artists in Michigan that have not just made an impact through music, but through what they share with the community. And there are others skills and advocacy and that sort of thing and I'd also like it to be cross genre where we're not just talking about jazz, but we're talking about Celtic music and we're talking about blues and we're talking about funk. And I have an educator that helped develop an early childhood music program that is phenomenal and that sort of thing. So, I started my show and I love the name of it. It's called ‘Lighten Up with Sunny Wilkinson.’

Tia Imani Hanna: Fantastic title.

Sunny Wilkinson: I know. Good title. Jamie Sue, my manager from Smokin’ Sleddog Records came up with that title and I just think it's great. She nailed it. And so, I'm doing it every other Monday at two o'clock and my next guest, which we have to talk about him, is Elden Kelly.

Tia Imani Hanna: Oh, okay.

Sunny Wilkinson: And that's not this coming Monday. It's the Monday following that, and we'd just go live to Facebook and it's on my professional Facebook page, “Sunny Wilkinson Jazz Singer.”

Tia Imani Hanna: Fantastic. I'm so excited about that because I'm going to be on your show too.

Sunny Wilkinson: I cannot wait to talk about you and you're there's so much we’re going to get into Tia. I'm thrilled!

Tia Imani Hanna: Fantastic!

Sunny Wilkinson: One thing that I realized about doing this show is how, even doing it through Zoom, you can get intimacy and community going. I am just grateful for it. And I'm so glad I'm doing this show. I'm sure the same thing is true of you.

Tia Imani Hanna: Oh, this is great. I haven't talked to some of these folks in a long time. This is a good reason to reach out and we'll have a nice conversation. So yeah, this is fantastic, fantastic! Is there anything else that you want the audience to know before we sign off today?

Sunny Wilkinson: Let's see. I took so many notes, so I wouldn't forget, but please do go to my website and go to my Facebook page to find out about “Lighten Up with Sunny Wilkinson.” Oh, one thing that I would like to just talk about real quick, thinking over the arc of my career and my teaching and singing. When I was involved in the International Association for Jazz Educators, I was president of the women's caucus. And I knew that I needed a project for those times. And so, with the help of several other people… Marion Hayden, here in Michigan, Diana Spradley, here in Michigan, we developed a mentoring program for young women in jazz called “Sisters in Jazz.”

Tia Imani Hanna: Yes, I remember.

Sunny Wilkinson: And it became an international mentoring program through IAJE and I'm so proud of that program. Anat Cohen came out of that, the saxophone player. Sarah Caswell, the violinist. Tia Fuller, beautiful saxophone player, was a “Sisters in Jazz” participant and Rosanna Eckert, who is a remarkable musician/singer when she was a part of the Sisters in Jazz group at IAJE, she was the best of the four. Yeah. I was really proud of that program and I think they've picked it up and started it again through the Jazz Education Network. The new IAJE is called J.E.N. (Jazz Education Network).

Tia Imani Hanna: I did not know about that either. I have to look into that. Thank you Sunny for spending the afternoon with me. We'll put all the links up on the website, (tiaviolin.com) so that you can reach out yo Sunny on her webpage and download her music and go to her Facebook page to see “Lighten Up with Sunny.” Thank you so much for joining me. I really appreciate you. Thanks everybody for joining us on Tia Time.

Sunny Wilkinson: Thank you so much, Tia, for having me. It's just been a joy and a delight. Thank you!

Tia Imani Hanna: Thank you for joining us this week on Tia Time with Artists. Make sure to visit our website, tiaviolin.com, where you can subscribe to the show in iTunes and never miss an episode. Please leave us a rating wherever you listen to podcasts. We really appreciate your comments, and we'll mine them to bring you more amazing episodes.

I’d like to thank this inaugural season's sponsors: The folks at Jazz Alliance of Mid-Michigan or JAMM, Michigan ArtShare, a program of Michigan State University Extension is a partner in supporting the Tia Time podcast, and Shambones Music. Without their support this podcast would not be possible. Thank you so much. If you would also like to contribute to the show, you can find us on https://www.patreon.com/TiaTime1.

If you want to continue the conversation about topics discussed on the show or start new ones with like-minded people, join us at the Tia Time Lounge on Facebook.

Thank you for listening. See you next week at Tia Time!

+ Transcription

Tia Time with Artists, with guest Timothy Orikri – recorded on 9/18/2020

Tia Imani Hanna: Welcome to Tia Time with Artists, the weekly podcast where we discuss the methods, challenges, and real-life experiences of living our creative dreams. What kind of creative warrior are you? Musician? Filmmaker? Painter? Choreographer? Poet? Sculptor? Fashionista? Let's talk about it right now. I'm your host, Tia Imani Hanna.

Tia Imani Hanna: Welcome to Tia Time with Artists. Today's guest is Timothy Orikri, the most amazing artist, a painter, a woodcarver, instrumentalist, singer. He does… you name it, he does it. So, Timothy, welcome to the show.

Timothy Orikri: Thank you so much. It's a pleasure being here.

Tia Imani Hanna: I'm really excited that you're here because I have heard you do many interviews over time, and I've gotten to know you a little bit, so this is a chance for us to get to know each other a little bit better. And I wanted to start with some basic background information. You are here in Detroit, but you started out in Nigeria where you were born. And when you were a kid, what was it that turned your mind to the arts, to painting, to woodworking? Which one did you start first?

Timothy Orikri: It's a long story. I don't know where to start, but…

Tia Imani Hanna: Start at the beginning. We have time.

Timothy Orikri: First of all, I was born in the city called Warri, Delta State. It's like worrying. You don't have money. So, worry. I was born in Warri in Delta State, southern part of Nigeria. I was fortunate and privileged and blessed to be born by parents who are very spiritually minded, creatively minded, academically sound and my parents were much instrumental. I can't tell my life story without mentioning them. So, you forgive me if I mention them more than a half-dozen times this afternoon, but the point is I was raised by them and every child who's born with privilege. I too was, I was one of nine children. And I was the last one. So, I was like an entitled brat. That kind of had its plus and its negative. The family orientation I grew up in was very much like a disciplinarian, very harsh to the mind who's not enlightened. And you may see how my discipline curtails the background when you're reaching. Where I was born in. So, I literally started to be an artist based on not necessarily happenstance, but it's a… a divine orchestration, so to speak. My parents took me to the boarding school because I was flunking when I was a teenager. And there I met a German-trained Nigerian artist, and she was phenomenal in those creative attributes. And I was very excited. And so, my career started at age 17 and I became a little fascinated by creativity. I was inspired by her and my family and parents and the neighborhood took it upon themselves to allowing and to support and sustain my art to be created. I can go on extensively to speak on that, but that is the nutshell. So, it is at age 17, he enrolled me in the children's art project and more of an art competition and I happened to perform well. And I told him, I said, after that performance, wow! I think I'll be an artist because if I can win a contest, then I think I'll be able to strive towards becoming a better artist to say, and the rest has been history since that wonderful interaction I had with this wonderful artist. Now, you know how they say, if the student is ready, the teacher will appear. I was literally ready, and she was there to sustain, support, inspire, and direct me to becoming what I have been today.

Tia Imani Hanna: What a lovely story that is. So, you went on and you won the prize. You started to build your portfolio? Were you painting at the time or did you just delve into lots of different art forms?

Timothy Orikri: Being that I had this inquisitive mindset, I'm building on curiosity. I, first of all, went to my father and I said to Pa, “I think I found a career” and he was like "What?” I said yes. He always had a smile on his face, and he takes his glasses out and cleared his throat, “Tell me about it.” And I said, I met this lady. Initially he frowned, but he kept his gaze straight, “You met a lady.” I said, “Wait, let me finish.” Because I was excited. I said, “I met a lady who was an artist, she is phenomenal.” This literally, he didn't say it out loud, but I felt he would have said, “Oh boy!” And I said, “No, she's an art teacher. She's excellent. She's dynamic. She's wonderful.” He thought I was literally glowing on her physique and all that. And you want it to me? And he says, “Get to the chase, come true.” I said, “She says, she will personally take time to tutor me to becoming a great artist since I am interested.” And I said I needed his blessings. He said, “Have you spoken to your mother?” I grew up in a very sad chauvinistic time. I'm like, “You run this family.” He says, “No, go talk to your mother.” He was teaching me then how to learn to respect, love, and give same respect and honor, I give to him to that of my mother. He wanted to hear my mother's take. I went to my mama and I said, mom, “Guess what? Get this. I met this woman.” The same gaze. She looked at me again. If I have to put it in colloquial, Detroit, like Ebonics, is “Aha. Tell me about it, son.” I'm like, “No mama, wait.” “Just what do you mean? You just said you met a woman.” Then I told her, I said, mama, no, yes, she's cool. I said she could be my mentor and my teacher. My mother caught through the cluster of my excitement and really found that I was serious. She said, let's talk to Papa during dinner time. So, my parents were on board. I call myself the artist who became successful based on a family affair. There's a book I'm writing, if we have time, I'll tell you about it. And in the book, I said that how my humble beginning was literally spurred and literally embraced by family. And I was thinking that for everyone around you as a clique, family, or friends, they ought to be on your good wagon or otherwise, kick them out because you need champions. You need cheerleaders, you need the BFF to be on board and the FFF. I'm sure you asked me what the FFF is. And so, my family took it upon themselves. And so, put it on record. My late brother, Daniel was a classical pianist, so he was in the arts already. One of my sisters already was working with pottery, clay, the ceramist. So, then I had older sisters who were doing crochet and so we're into this creative dynamic that kind of helped support it, this young 17-year-old. So, my success then inspired me and encouraged me to go to college in Nigeria, which the college is called Delta State University. And that is where I enrolled, and I pursued fine art and I have a BA ED fine art. So, I technically am a trained teacher. So that is the origin, so to speak, to your question.

Tia Imani Hanna: That's the amazing part of getting your family on board ,that your parents were on board and you were saying what's FFF family, friends…

Timothy Orikri: And yeah friends with benefits, friends with favor…

Tia Imani Hanna: I see.

Timothy Orikri: that are into your success. So the FFF and the B with the best friends, then you have some friends then you also have the EFS, the confused enemies, friends, and all of them have to be on board because, believe it or not, our influences, our environment, our cliques even, are our enemies. If we are mentally savvy and psychologically awakened, we could tap into all these cliques to make us and not to break us. That is how I was raised. That philosophy has guarded and guided my cliques and continues to help me to evolve.

Tia Imani Hanna: Being involved in an artistic community is basically key to you doing the things that you do and keeping motivated in the things that you do.

Timothy Orikri: Yes. Yes. In fact, yes. In fact, I'm a community-oriented person, I believe in the chorus, I don't believe in going solo. I believe in the chorus. I believe in walking with people; green, white, yellow, blue. it is the same sermonic, the same spiritual reflection of my father who was a minister. He was a go-getter that pursued success through different people, regardless of whatever tribe. Talking about being in the States where we fight racism, where we fight, they reached a poor and a divide. Back in Africa, yes, we have tribal conflicts. We had people who were into sectionalism, into… I don't want to put the zing to it to compare, but you always have factions. You always have this conflict in societies, just as you have here, you have there. My father was able to have a congregation that had the Yorubas, the Igbos, the Benins, Urhobo, Itsekiri , the Ijaw. And so, I tried to, as best as I can, mirroring his lifestyle and mirroring his attributes by working with community and I do better when I do things with folks and not move by myself.

Tia Imani Hanna: That makes perfect sense. You also have to have other influences to stimulate your brain, to keep moving forward, to do new things, to look at things in a different way. So that makes perfect sense.

Timothy Orikri: Yeah. Yeah. Talk about it. We cannot act as if know it all, and we need people. The universe, I don't want to say God or the creator, but the universe is a cluster and a conglomerate of culture’s diversity. One of the beautiful things about people and one of the beautiful things about a true and unique progressive society is when we're together. And when we respect the race, regardless of what, and when we respect different classes. You cannot diminish yourself and think you are high up there. No, there's a reason why the sky is blue and there's the reason why the tree is green and isn't why the tree could be brown. And there's a reason why the fishes swim and all that, every part and facet is part of this unique chorus. And I'm trying to do that with my art. And I'm trying to do that with this belief system knowing that spice, the variety in life is the spice and the trueness of beauty of society and the trueness of making society truly work.

Tia Imani Hanna: When you first started training, you trained with this teacher, what happened that you left Nigeria? How did you develop from school and then you did professional shows? Or did you get… what happened?

Timothy Orikri: So, technically speaking, you're right. It is not just that from jumping from high school to college. I actually enrolled in school and I did something that no other artist would do. I quickly made buddies and friends with those who were second year, third year, even fourth year. And I was trying to learn ahead. So, I was doing things with my colleagues in sophomore and I was also doing things with my, you know, those who were ahead of me. Because I wanted to learn from my Papa. My father only had old friends. Sorry, I'm bringing him in again. You see why. My father had me when he was 54 years old and everybody I could see as friends and uncles were his age. And so, I soon had this love for older people. I used to, like, technically want to date people who are older or relate to people who are older because experience it's never bought. The aged, domain of age, may not be the right prerequisite for wisdom, but those who've gone through an experience, it's good to embrace them. So, I went to college embracing all of these older colleagues, older students. And so, I did a four-year program and I got out of college and I had a BA in fine art, but I did something unique. It could be Googled. You find out that in Nigeria. I was the first student to have what is called his solo exhibition before I graduated. And that got the attention of the provost, the chancellor. I had this one-page ad about this artist who's doing dynamic works. And that sent me off to tell myself, someday I may go overseas. Someday. I may have to live by this creative genre, this creative verve, this fire, and this beauty that is coming. Because as a young man, at age 29, when I left college, I started to be a teacher and as I have to strive. I'm sure you're trying to bridge the divide from Africa to America. And so, I will create paintings after teaching and serving, being a teacher for high schools in Nigeria. On my own spare time, I will create artworks, which are known as airport art. The art you create for society, for those who are tourists. And a lot of Americans and a lot of Chinese, Japanese, (unintelligible), Hispanic, and those who have visited Africa and visited Nigeria were impressed by what I did. And I discover that this fine art was more supported, they were more commercially viable, were more interested. This is sad to say people don't value things until they lose it. And meanwhile, the Africans and the Nigerians they do love it, but they felt like we don't have disposable income, go sell it to the foreigners, go sell it to that tourist ready to buy my work and I started to have this dream. Someday, I would rather be there than my work being there on my behalf. And I was fortunate. I also had a brother and a friend in St. Louis, Missouri, who had an organization that promoted African culture. So, I was invited to be the artist-in-residence wherein I created stage sets, wherein I developed dance formats, as someone who could dance African dance, and also the European American dance. But what I was doing was helping his position project Africa through the arts. I did the exhibitions. I helped this course. I have created a dance. I have a great drumbeat pattern and motion to go with them when they perform their music. So, through my dream and desire to wanting to be in a place that truly appreciates and truly supports the arts, that dream led to me, finding somebody, and finding an organization, and the rest is history. So technically speaking, I have been here, and I was first in St. Louis, Missouri before I finally moved to Michigan, Detroit.

Tia Imani Hanna: What was the transition from Missouri to Detroit?

Timothy Orikri: As I said earlier, there ain't no happenstance in life. It is a bittersweet story. And I like to either say it or keep quiet. So, I will say it in the most discreet, coolest way. I was married then, and my wife says, “Let's move to Michigan. Then we'll have a family and then we'll be sustained by family. Then you can go ahead and do whatever you're doing. But being in St. Louis is a stretch. I have to travel here to meet my family in Michigan.” So, I hesitantly, grudgingly, but I came, and things didn't work out as I planned and as I wished. But I told myself in 2008, maybe it's time to go back to St. Louis, but I kept liking the Kool-Aid here, the creative spirit you all drink. Part of my colloquial, I kept liking the creative Kool-Aid because I told myself I was now identifying if this is a place that rare people like Marvin Gaye, Diana Ross, and all these cool people that did things here. This is the motor town. If this is the viable place where you have the arts, I have to go with admiration, go downtown and look at beautiful… Don't get me wrong. There's a great creative entity in St. Louis, but here it's different. And I told myself, maybe I should drink this Kool-Aid, then maybe I want it to become the dash in Detroit. And so, the transition though was a little bit shaky. There is this wonderful man. Unfortunately, his story is still unfolding. It's the ex-mayor. I happen to have a conversation with him, Mr. Kilpatrick. And I said, ah, I'm an artist. And I'm trying to have this wonderful big exhibit. I'd like to create a portrait of yours, to honor you because I honor the office. To create something that reflects you because there's an admiration for his charisma, for his academic excellence and for all that. Mind you, I'm not being political here and I say true that because we're all first human beings. And we're all first mentally, creatively savvy, academically, and all that. And that is where I'm going. And I told him about this project, how can I do something to help society? I'm trying to create imageries and scenic, valuable things that reflects Detroit. And he gave me a nod and he talked about initiatives and ideas. Some of them I implemented and I'm so glad I did. Some of them, like every human being, you save some of it. So, then I quickly started to make friends. I went to the Detroit Public Library opposite to DIA, (Detroit Institute of Art) and I said, I have lots of pieces of art. They were gracious. They had the first exhibit of mine, was close to about a hundred paintings. The whole floor was filled up and it was almost like a Safeway having a free clinic, people came in droves. And so, I felt, “Oh, maybe this might be a place I could settle in.” And that first exhibit has led to numerous, tons of exhibits.

Tia Imani Hanna: That's pretty amazing to see how your brain was working. Like how can I further my art? How do I pay the bills with this thing that I call my craft? And how do you develop that? And just watching how, from what you're telling me, watching how… to see how you develop this into a workable career is, it's pretty exciting to see.

Timothy Orikri: Well, to me, and I can tell you this real quick, creativity is often a difficult entity to market. Sticking daily to find ways to conquer and to find ways to beat that financial credit card bill and all this, it's the top challenge, but I have been able to find ways to do that. And one of them is you dream. You have a purpose, you're hopeful, you focus. Our focus determines our destination. Our focus determines who we are. One of the reasons for Black Lives Matter, or about any movement, if there is no true focus with all the hype and all the vigor and all the, whatever you call it when you focus is damping. Everything else falls out of rails. I was determined. I had focused. I was determined. There's a promise I told my father because Papa was not an artist. Papa was the preacher man who could preach with any few verses. He'll come up with a sermon based on you breaking your fingernail or based on your ear hurting, he could find, and I was traveling into that. So creatively, I told myself, I told Papa this. Don't worry. I won't be a Van Gogh. I'll rather be a Picasso. He's like, “What?” I said, “Go study them.” And the next few days he came to me he says, yeah, one ate off his ear and one made tons of money. And so, for me, I have continuously tried that societal challenge of wanting to be purposeful with my art, wanting to create and not just looking at the aesthetics alone. Like I said, was telling you ‘that's art to me’. It's like food. It has to be served to everybody. One quick, short story. You can hush me if you want because my mouth keeps rolling.

Tia Imani Hanna: No. That’s why you’re here.

Timothy Orikri: I was at a 1917 American Bistro. It used to be a restaurant on Livernois…

Tia Imani Hanna: Yeah, my old neighborhood.

Timothy Orikri: And this wealthy man came to me and said, “Are you not Timothy Orikri?” I'm like, “Yes.” “We have your paintings at the Detroit Athletic Club, as we speak.” I'm like, “Yeah, thanks for that exhibit. Yes.” And he said, “What are you doing in the restaurant?” And I said, “What are you doing in this restaurant?” He said, “I am eating?” I said, “Oh, I'm serving food too, but my food is on the wall.” Then he left quiet and he left disappointed. I had to make; I have to make my art accessible. We know that it was worth or what it was, a way or whatever you call them, collect art. Some are angry that I have my works in places that seem to be diminished, that doesn't have the aura of a majestic gallery or museum that is not my ‘Cup of Tea’ or however you want to put it. Because we have to ensure that this fluidity of art drains into every cup, gets into every ear, gets into every hand. That's why you find my works in some very informal places, like restaurants, hospital lobby, church, places of worship, temples, and all that. And back to your question, I have tried, and I've continued to try, to make my work fit into the dynamics of society. And all of this came from that old man that gave birth to me. He says, let your art sell yourself, let your art sell you. Please don't go dead with tons of works. And so, let it be your food. Let it be your guide. Don't sell yourself. Why you sell your art to sell yourself?

Tia Imani Hanna: Very wise man; very wise man. So, some of the forms of your artwork, you do a lot of very large canvases. You do round canvases. Now I haven't seen a lot of people who do round canvases. I was curious as to what was it about the circle that called you?

Timothy Orikri: First of all, the circle, you've heard the songs about the cycle of life, or you've heard the words ‘cycle of life’. My last name happens to be ‘O’. My father used to tell me that for you to go through life, you have to have your wheels inflated all the time. And that inflating of your wheels has to do with… you have to have knowledge. You have to invest in learning. Then you have to be optimistic. You have to be determined. That optimism has to steer you into expanding your genre, expanding your horizon. Americans say, “thinking outside the box.” In Africa, they say, “make it work anyway.” And so, the big canvas, the oval, and round canvas, you see, it's me trying to come up with ‘what else’? What can I do out of being squared and out of being rectangular? It is that. So, to speak that disharmony, that optimism, that hope, and yes, a lot of people have embraced it. I have… the largest of the round canvas is, eight feet in diameter. Speaking about big works. Well, for your information, there's another long, cool story coming. This, the biggest painting I have, that I did while I was back home, I guess it should be maybe the size of a door. It was the crucifix or the crucifixion or the road when our Savior was being laid. I did the painting and that was the biggest, so it's about, so 4-foot by 6 or 7-foot. That was to me then, ginormous. When I came to America. I was fortunate to have my first vehicle. It was a Toyota Tercel or whatever they call that. It was really small. And so, the biggest piece would be at 24" x 36" and soon I went to the art store for once and I saw rolls of canvas. And I was freaked out when I saw a roll that was 72-foot tall and another role 84-foot tall, 74-inches and 84-inches, 96-inches. I was like, “Wow!” And then told me that you could build that to a canvas. At that same time, I was fortunate to have a commission, an exhibit, that was sponsored by Time Magazine, Ford Motor Company, the World Bank, and the Detroit Science Center. They wanted me to create a mural that was 24-foot-long by 7-foot tall. I was… Wow! That is big stuff. So, it got into my head and I was excited creating that exhibit for the Science Center. And I went to the store one day and I said, “Give me a roll of that canvas.” So, I started to build paintings that fit in the trunk of my car. Shortly… a few years later, I bought me a Dodge Caravan so I could travel. And, instead of doing U-Haul and Enterprise and all that was draining me, I felt ‘buy a van’. So, I took out all the seats of my Dodge Caravan, and I started to build paintings and there were eight by fours that fit in the eight feet by four feet. Show me after that. I'm like, okay, a little money came the perception of value. So now I'm trying to downsize because 1. Is so big to transport them 2. Not everybody has those wall space, 3. The value does not come in content or sizes. So, I have evolved and have learned that I have to create things that are marketable, create things that are receivable. So, that is the reason and the essence of your question, the logic, and the round pieces.

Tia Imani Hanna: Now, do you think you'll ever downsize to small, very small, canvases like 8-inches by eight or something?

Timothy Orikri: Well, for your information, my smallest painting I've done, as we speak, is this six-inches by six-inches. If we're actually doing this live and if this was from home, I would have shown you. So, I have pieces that are this small. Did I like it? Oh, it is a chore doing it because it's so intricate and small, but I will tell you one sad story. When I lost my brother at age, he was age 40. It was an exciting time then for me, but when he died, I mourned him for about a year. And that year I was creating because I felt I had to respect and bid him farewell for a year and not live an active life since take the times and to say that things were the same… so I was creating round plates and I would paint on plates and fire it. It was intricate. It gives me time to remember him, but it, at that sad time, it was an opportunity to delve into another genre. So, looking back at it, while I mourned his loss, I was also tapping to a creative outlet that I would never have if I never had the trouble or the worry or the problem I had losing him. So yes, that time I painted almost 25 to 40 plates and they were just 11-inch in diameter. So no, I do do small works and I'm now actively doing more smaller works. So those wall spaces in your house, tell you what, we have to get some small pieces.

Tia Imani Hanna: We would have to, because living with Diane Wilson and Michigan ArtShare, who I know you've also worked with, that we have a lot of art in our house and we have one or two of yours I think, and they're not small, but they're lovely. One of things I know how prolific you are. How many paintings would you say you've done in the last five or six years? Because I heard stories about the canvases are just piled up.

Timothy Orikri: They are. First of all, to let you know, painting has become breathing to me and that is why I have diversified. That's why I've lately been picking instruments to learn, and in my book, The Portrait of an Artist, there is a part where I am saying one of the reasons why I no longer have dry spells, or whatever you call that, is because I've been able to diversify my creative attributes. One of the reasons why people fall into drugs and fall into some things to help them with their creativity is the mind wants to create all the time. But then, there's sometimes the creativity is not coming. The beauty of that thing that makes you create doesn’t come. The spirit is quiet. Inspiration is in his spirit. In what spirit? In that powerful and magnificent spirit. When this spirit wants you to come down and chill out, it shuts down. Then we humans who are not spiritually or psychologically awakened, we'll look for substance. And then we get into an abuse of it. And, of course, and then things get out of whack. So for me, what I have learned to do is, when I'm not thinking creatively when it doesn't come, I pick up an instrument and you sure do know as a musician, just letting that chord go, whatever, fills your spirit. And so, I tap into creativity in any way I can also pick up… That's why I'm writing all these stories about Froggy and this world. But here we'll go, just being able to contain and deflect and diversify that's kept me going. Otherwise, if I didn't do that, I will have a thousand paintings a year. And so, back to your question, I have a few. I have done in my stay in the U S I think I may have done close to two, three, four, five, 6,000 pieces because I paint something new every day. And sometimes I do two or three, they may not be finished, but that, you see, that keeps you in a continuum of some kind. And before this interview I started painting, I was fortunate to paint and my dear friend, I claim her as an adopted sister, she got married yesterday. So, I painted while a marriage was going on. So, from the pallets that I brought from that wedding I've started a new painting. Now by tomorrow, I'll be painting two simultaneous pieces that will be recorded live. So where do these go to? Why am I doing it? To take this creativity and this spontaneous whatever from a life, then you be asking me to go visit a shrink. That's why…well, that’s why I say this is food. This is redemption. This is resourcefulness. This is exciting. This is art. And this is life.

Tia Imani Hanna: You're doing all of these paintings. So, this is the part that impresses me. They're just simply gorgeous. I haven't seen anything that you've done that I don't like, and you're doing thousands of pieces. Now, I did not know that you did woodworking. I went to your website and I saw that there was woodworking in there too. Are you doing any of that stuff currently or is there… in the past you've done the woodwork or…?

Timothy Orikri: In fact, I am getting ready to do even more woodwork. And in fact, I'm taking another creative gamble, so to speak, I'm getting ready to become a sculptor. So, I'm now trying to diversify because, as I said to you earlier, if it is overflowing with a canvas, do something else. And so, I felt… I've been drawing lately. So, those wood sculpture you saw, you’re seeing, there are what I call ‘kinetic art’. There are things that will evolve or move from one form to two dimension to ten feet to six feet. These are prototypes. So, I'm creating things with wood. I will convert them to metals. I'm trying to get me a metal workshop studio soon. Once you can talk, you can sing, then you don't just stop singing the blues. Like I know this lady called Tia Imani [Hanna] who improvises, that doesn’t mean she only improvises. I bet you, she can sing the blues or play the blues. If you give her that, is true. The truly creative person or true academically sound person should be versed in one thing a lot. They should know everything that relates to what it is. What am I saying? So, if I'm educated, if I say I am elite, I’m educated, I should be able to know one thing very well. So, let's say I'm a politician. I should be able to know everything about politics, but then actually be able to know a little bit about the culture. And so, the creative mind and the enlightened person and the educated person should be aware or awakened to learn and diversify. And that's what I'm doing with my art. And I'm trying to do my art by jumping, from being a painter to a sculptor.

Tia Imani Hanna: You see things in 3D anyway, and probably 4D, if you go on your brain, somehow, it's more 4D. Do you know what I mean? You're just bringing the artist out into different tools, that's definitely one of the things that I have seen to be true, is that the artist is the same. The artist is within. So, no matter what tool you're going to be artistic and you just using more tools. It's something it does. It keeps you active. It keeps you… the plasticity in your brain having to be expanded all the time and to keep your brain healthy.

Timothy Orikri: Yes.

Tia Imani Hanna: So definitely. I can see that you're doing that, I'm impressed. Plus, then your marketing. So, you're doing all this online live stuff. Where did that start? You were on Facebook and you've been doing… or YouTube… doing lots of things.

Timothy Orikri: First of all, and I will add another layer to it, I have a wonderful friend, who's become not just a neighbor, but a friend, and now he's become a creative. We're almost sounding and beginning to think alike, which is scary. We're creating music tied to art. He happens to be a trained classical, a mind that is very cool, not necessarily classical, per se. He also does pop and all that. He happened to do things and hear things and sees things the way I do. I'm grateful for that. So, it's not happenstance, as I say about when things happen. I say all this to say that I'm now trying to tie music… I write some, a couple of songs were written things about Detroit and he's writing, working feverishly daily, and putting things together for his career while we're doing things and in unison of some kind or doing things together. And one thing we added, one thing I'm adding, to being a painter is, hmm, maybe I should call myself that ‘M’ word? That ends with an ‘N’. A musician. I am not. Disclaimer. I am not. I can't even tie your shoelace or put your cuff in your cufflink.

Tia Imani Hanna: Maybe you're not a professional musician, but you are a musician and I teach all the time that, if you make music, you're a musician, period.

Timothy Orikri: Yeah, okay. I accept that title if it’s coming from you. Thank you for the honor to call me one. It takes one to call one, one, but Tim had just this wonderful…we call ourselves ‘Tim Squared’ because his name happens to be Tim as well. The only thing is he doesn't have the clumsy African Orikri as the last name. He has Clark, the Clark Brothers. I'm sorry, forgive me. That's the clown nature of myself! But, anyway, him and I had this function where we had lots of people come together and talk about harmony, talk about love, with this sad COVID time and this sad tension prior to the election, we're trying to bridge people together and we're going to continue to do this every month. Yes, we are going to have a YouTube channel. Yes, we are going to have a website. Yes, we're going to do things through Facebook. Yes, we're going to do things Instagram. So, I'm using all these facets of media to push and we'll continue to have several more and soon we'll have a channel. And then someday we'll have a podcast and try to fit in the likes of folks like you all who are doing things to bring society together.

Tia Imani Hanna: It's nice to hear other artists are doing the same things. That was one of the reasons I started the podcast in the first place is because we're all in a similar line. We all want to do… bring people together, especially now because of Black Lives Matter, because of COVID, because we have Trump as president. We need to have other things that are important, which is creating a help and hope and harmony and love, and creating art is how we do that. We create culture, and also inspire other artists that ‘you matter’, what you do matters, what you do helps create the world. And that… I'm aware of it and I want to make other people aware of it. And I want other artists to recognize each other and to recognize themselves that they're doing something that's of vital importance to the world. So, thank you for doing what you're doing.

Timothy Orikri: Thank you. Thank you.

Tia Imani Hanna: So, I saw you playing the clarinet. And then I saw, I think you were playing… I've seen you play the piano, you sing, and what other instruments are you picking up?

Timothy Orikri: At the age of 16, 17, I played the guitar, to help my dad and his choir. Then I also try to fumble through to play the bass guitar and the lead guitar. My brother wanted me to learn much, but I was so foolish and dumb. Yes, I said the D-U-M-B word. I took for granted. I thought ‘he will always be there’ and then soon he started to become popular and decided to travel. Then started to be committed to the family. And I too… I had to go to college, but there was one cool thing… when he wrote his music, composed, I will be creating a work of art, but then, he wanted me to learn. So, I picked at… I can play by ear. I cannot for the love of my life or for the pursuit of life, I cannot even read a note. I can't, but I can hear, and I play by ear. So, I play the guitar. I play the piano. I play the trumpet. I play the clarinet, which I picked lately. You asked me, “How are you?”… I'm asking this. I started to unmask them and use them as props when I have a model. And so, we will do the…after improvising with them, posing with this instrument… a few months, few weeks, a few years back, I told myself, “Wait a minute. You fool. Start to learn all these things you’re amassing. What are you doing?” So, I have a banjo… sounds funny… I provided guitar. I'm sorry to those who are banjos, specialism banjo, whatever you call. I felt okay. Maybe I will learn that eventually. It has broken strings. I have not. Recently, I bought myself a cello. I decided to play that now. It's soothing and amazing. I wouldn't play publicly yet because I don't want to be a laughingstock, as they say. So, I'm learning the cello. There are three more instruments I would like to buy. I'm just praying my neighborhood does not get mad. So, I bought a mute for my trumpet. I have a saxophone and it is broken and I'm trying to fix it and learn it. The cool thing is all these instruments, they all relate! You know about chords and frets. So, you get it in the guitar. You got it in the cello. And I have a viola that I'm trying to learn as well. So, all of these things relate. The clarinet and the alto sax, they're like cousins. And it's amazing what we do to enterprise ourselves. So, it ought to be with every creative generally in life. So, it ought to be with every walk of life. If you can dance to James Brown, you sure could dance to Nellie or dance to Jay-Z, and if you can do one of these, then you could do many others. But we do not enterprise our brain enough. What am I doing with all this learning? I'm thinking someday I'll be able to write classical… what do you call them for kids?... humorous stuff. Ah, “I am Froggy. I am important. OooOoo.” Write jingles and then write stories. Create a digital creative forum that comes from Orikri. So, I'm learning all of this. Then, I can give my sketchy prototypes to classical musicians like you guys to… “Okay. Here. This is the blueprint. Can you fix it up and make it something cool?” So, that's why I'm learning them so that I don't just come with ideas that can’t be performed. I know. Yeah. So that's why I am leaning all of this.

Tia Imani Hanna: That's great. I like your world vision, that you're looking outside of just one thing and that is something that I don't think we see enough of, as people are looking outside of just the box that they're in, and expanding the world. So that's really a fun thing to see.

Timothy Orikri: Yeah. thank you.

Tia Imani Hanna: You're doing all of these different things and you're expanding the culture. Have you done any co-creations with other painters?

Timothy Orikri: I started to do some of that. Unfortunately, I hate to sound this way... Everything has been upbeat while we spoke, but ego misses a lot of creative forms. I don't play petty. I don't play like they used to say, “Obama, no drama.” I will stretch my hands and walk with anybody who stretches their hands back at me. In fact, I just love to integrate and interact and do projects with folks. But that is not happening a lot. A lot of people will see me as ‘I don't want to do stuff with him’. Oh. And all that. There is no image and no context and no, I just love to. But lately I spoke to Chazz, the muralist Chazz Miller. I said, we could collaborate on things. But right now, I'm collaborating a lot with Tim. We're doing some very fantastic things that you'll soon see. I’m trying to create a humorous Obama, who is happy and smiling. And I want to have eight-to-nine foot of it in different strategic places around Livernois, one in Farmington, one in Detroit, one in Livonia, one in downtown.

Tia Imani Hanna: It'll be interesting to see that. [A bit of technical difficulty.]

Timothy Orikri: I'm writing this book called Once Upon A Farmland. And Once Upon A Farmland, it's typically more of me reflecting on life from the view of an animal society. Today needs to be properly appreciated from an outsider looking in. And so, what I'm technically doing is trying to show society, based on farmland, an animalistic mindset, that there has to be a better constructive… a better way to let children see and know that. Our society today is a serious thing, and we can point… we can literally enforce change. We can literally enforce good virtue through letting these kids know of ills and problems. So, then the farmland book reflects the society in its sad state. There's greed. There's hate. There's politics. There's religious abuse of power. And there's inhumanity to man. Froggy is the main character of my book. Froggy dealt with racism. Froggy was born and two weeks shortly Froggy died. This fictional story sheds light on our society, reflecting the challenges and the beauty of our society that we experience today. Now, Tia, I must tell you, this is imaginary. It's a tale. Well, this tale has a moral there, colorfully reflected. It will provoke intriguing ideas that will reflect harmony and these names of characters, as they say, it's about nobody. So, Froggy, his momma died, and Froggy became this child that was just arrogant and dumb, that had no parents or upbringing. Froggy is like a black man who wasn’t raised. Yeah, has resolve, he was resilient. Froggy saw things and go for it. Froggy felt he could be visionary. Froggy had dreams. I'm not saying this is Reverend Dr. King from whom had this real dream. Froggy wanted to bring unity, but Froggy met every good thing, he met roadblocks here and there. Froggy even ran for election. Froggy was that determined. Now Froggy was running against the elephant. The elephant was the King of this farmland. This is my imaginary farmland. So, my goal is to inspire kids to see things from a non-religious, in non-secular, in non-moralistic, just pure story. Done in a whimsical, childlike format. Froggy once thought he was a ballerina. There's a painting. I have this fantasy-driven… Froggy said, “Oh, I am a butterfly and I'm a ballerina. I can dance.” Froggy felt, “I could fly a plane.” That is a frog. Then imagine the human being with all our brains and all the enterprises of our mind and our thinking. So, I'm trying to create something that may sound just a frog, Froggy and Lanky, Froggy and Rudolph, Froggy and the Squirrel. The squirrel was angry with Froggy. Froggy kept telling the squirrel all you do is hide nuts. And what did the squirrel tell Froggy, “All you do is ‘Ribbit, ribbit’ all the time.” Froggy say, “But I have a dream.” So, there's nuggets and all this that is in the book is supposed to really help us refocus again. Think of ourselves as wealthy. I'm not saying Froggy is a black man, I'm not saying Froggy is a Hispanic. But maybe he has entities of things like that. Whatever we could do with our art to create a better hopeful, joyful, unique, forward-going society, we should do. We all, as artists, we are vested with power. Tia, the power you have with your violin and with your ‘dooba dooba dooba’ (scat singing), the things you do, Powerful. You're bringing life. You're bringing sustenance. You're helping critical thinking. You are a scientist without knowing. You're a doctor. You're a chanter. What do you call it? You're a spiritualist. So, your music helped people to meditate. Your music helped transfix people. You were helping people to make babies. You’re helping people to dream and think. Sorry, I don't mean it that way. So, there is power in the arts. Yeah. So, we can set this place ablaze or set this blaze a beauty. We can create value. We can create unity. We can create power. We can create joy. We can create harmony. What are we doing with our art? I'm sorry, I'm taking over your interview. And I believe that if we all could channel our creativity to bring about unity, bring about prospects, to encourage people. People say you post a lot, yes. I'm trying to inspire somebody. Don't be an Orikri. Just take some elements of the Orikriness. In my philosophy it's called ‘Orikriology’, it is a philosophy that has guided me. Your podcast may not be enough to carry all of this, but the truth of the matter in one to three-sentences is… Our creative ventures, regardless of whatever genre or whatever medium is ought to be, because we're all indebted to society, ought to be that which should help society to go forward. What has your art done? Not just to have the love of your life. What has it done to help the community in your life? What does it help to strengthen, to encourage and to build?

Tia Imani Hanna: With the election of Trump, a lot of folks got really downhearted and there was no hope for a lot of people. And my thought was, “What's changed? Make art.” And that's what I've been saying is, “What's really changed?” I just need to make more of it and get it to more people, which is… we have, the technology to do that now through the internet. I can reach millions of people all around the planet. You don't make art for yourself. You make art that you love that you like the way it looks and inspires you. And if it inspires you, it's going to inspire somebody else. It's not just for you, it's for the world. You're not creating art to just sit in your living room with it because other people can't see it in your living room. So, you have to produce ways for the art to get out. We can do that now. Giving a platform for people to do that and encouraging as many artists as possible to do that. So, people can find you on Facebook and they can also find you on your website. What's your website?

Timothy Orikri: It’s a little bit clumsy for some, but yes. But it’s my name and my last name T-I-M-O-T-H-Y Art by Timothy O-R-I-K-R-I, that’s similar, timothyorikri.com. Then I also have the normal Facebook page, but I also have the Instagram that I’m beginning to use of late. It’s just ‘Timothy Orikri’. Soon will have what is called ‘Timothy Orikri and Music’, ‘Timothy Orikri and his books’. There are three books I am writing simultaneously. One is called Inspired by Detroit. So, it’s all these paintings of Detroit and those I’ve interacted with. In fact, the lovely Tia Imani Hanna is part of the book and I’m creating portraits to go with, portraits to go with the places. And so, I’m painting musicians. Those who are celebrated musicians in Detroit and those who are upcoming. I have painted just somebody randomly who is from Detroit. And so, what I’m trying to do is to create what I call my creative diary. I don’t know how long I’ll be here in this city or this state or in this vicinity. So, what I’m now quickly doing is, come up with a hundred pieces of Detroit, then come up with several pieces that reflect the city and its culture. That is one book inspired by Detroit. The second book I’m working on is Once Upon a Farmland. I just told you briefly it may have facets to it because the brain just keeps jumping and I’m grateful for that. I have facets to that book. The other last book I’m working on is actually my own memoir. It’s an autobiography, but I felt I should write up something for those who call themselves following my art and do want to be inspired for them to actually see how I’ve been able to sustain and continue to try being an artist. And so, the book is called The Portrait of the Artist or The Portrait of an Artist, and it details the ups and downs and the lessons I’ve learned. There are pages, there are chapters in the book that says ‘In my father’s shadow”, ‘All the things I learned from Papa’, ‘The family affair’, ‘How my family helped’, and how I’ve been able to take society and it’s pressure, the works that didn’t sell and the interaction I’ve had, and community and all that. So, these three books, I’m working on them simultaneously so as to not make me just sit there and just continue to create. Then lastly, I’m trying to get into sculpture and who knows what else I would do. But every month we now have a celebration of love, harmony, and healing through arts, wherein we get a forum and get a few people to just hear us run our mouth, run our art, and just do and celebrate humanity and the collective unique nature of this chorus called “people.” I’m also trying to work with a Russian violinist as well. And I’m also trying to work with Dr. Michelle Lynch to see if she can play the flute. Then, soon I will now have someone who with just play the piano while I paint. It’s like a collaboration. I don’t want to just go solo. And I don’t like that. I’d rather do the chorus. There may someday be an orchestra. I’ve had that done before the DMO had performed while I paint. Wait. So, why am I doing this? I’m trying to, in a little way, give it little medicine of love through music, through the arts. And soon, you’ll hear about this in the next few weeks, we will record and have it there on either You Tube or on a different channel. What we’re going to do, literally, is there’s coming carols and festivity of Thanksgiving and all that. We want things to still be there since we no longer have a normal setting. We want things to be broadcasted. We want things to be enjoyed. We want people to still get music and the arts come to them. Since you cannot go to the museum, you can tune into Timothy’s channel or tune into that musician’s channel and still enjoy art. So, this will be all through October and November we will be recording for and doing some live, doing some ahead of time. So, there’ll be something every week. There’s a different musician or a different clique of people. In fact, there’s an initiative I’m trying to come up with, ‘Taking the arts to the temple’, going to paint in a cathedral because it is empty, and we can paint while the man sermonizes. Or paint while the choral is. And, in fact, I’ll be talking to you more and see how you and I, as well as someone listening to me, want to participate in this. It’s so easy. It’s just performing for an audience that is not there, but we know they will be there visually because the whole life you and I live today is in our media, is in our hand, our iPod or iPhone, and all that.

Tia Imani Hanna: Well, thank you so much Timothy for joining us on Tia Time with Artists. I really appreciate you being on the podcast and thank you so much for your artistry and your work. And I look forward to seeing the painting that's coming up with me in it, and I look forward to working with you more. So, thank you so very much... and, thank you.

Timothy Orikri: Any time I could do something to encourage someone else is a very gainful, wonderful time. And I thank you for giving me the honor to do this and the platform to do this through your podcast. Much success to you and I look forward to visiting again if you so desire and to talk again about progress, or about more of where my art is taking me through my journey. Thank you so much.

Tia Imani Hanna: Thank you for joining us this week on Tia Time with Artists. Make sure to visit our website, tiaviolin.com, where you can subscribe to the show in iTunes and never miss an episode. Please leave us a rating wherever you listen to podcasts. We really appreciate your comments, and we'll mine them to bring you more amazing episodes.

I’d like to thank this inaugural season's sponsors: The folks at Jazz Alliance of Mid-Michigan or JAMM, Michigan ArtShare, a program of Michigan State University Extension is a partner in supporting the Tia Time podcast, and Shambones Music. Without their support this podcast would not be possible. Thank you so much. If you would also like to contribute to the show, you can find us on https://www.patreon.com/TiaTime1.

If you want to continue the conversation about topics discussed on the show or start new ones with like-minded people, join us at the ‘Tia Time Lounge’ on Facebook.

Thank you for listening. See you next week at Tia Time!

+ Transcription

Tia Time with Artists, with guests Chazz Miller and Amy Wellington – recorded 8/21/20

Tia Imani Hanna: Welcome to Tia Time with Artists, the weekly podcast where we discuss the methods, challenges, and real-life experiences of living our creative dreams. What kind of creative warrior are you? Musician? Filmmaker? Painter? Choreographer? Poet? Sculptor? Fashionista? Let's talk about it right now. I'm your host, Tia Imani Hanna.

Tia Imani Hanna: Welcome to Tia Time with Artists! Today, we have Amy Wellington and Chazz Miller, and they are fine artists and amazing people and I wanted to welcome you both to be on my inaugural season of Tia Time. So, thank you very much for spending some time with me today. Thanks for coming.

Chazz Miller: Well, thank you for your time.

Amy Wellington: Yeah, this was real special for us. So, we really appreciate it.

Tia Imani Hanna: Our show is about inspirations. How are you being inspired? How do you get inspired? How do you inspire other people? Amy, what made you choose the art form that you chose? You do painting.

Amy Wellington: Yeah, it really has been a metamorphosis. Throughout my whole career as an artist there's been some sort of paper element, so I'm really a mixed media kind of paper media artists. So, I do a lot of collage. For years I was a paper maker, so that was getting vats together, filling them up with water and pulp and pulling paper and making products and artwork out of that. And I still use that today, but now I do a lot of collage work in my imagery and have quite an extensive paper collection to draw from, to make imagery from that. But I'm also a mixed media artist, so it's lots of drawing media, paint media, watercolor, pastel, oil pastel, all that. I just look at the image and go, “What do I need in that spot?” And then I go get it.

Tia Imani Hanna: Okay. All right. Was there something like in your childhood… you saw somebody paint, you got some fingerprints on the thumb in kindergarten or, what was it that… what was it about mixed media? What was it about paint? Or what was it about drawing that really captured your vision?

Amy Wellington: I don't know if it was any one thing. I know that, growing up, my dad would make a lot of things. He was a woodworker and so it was nothing to say, “Oh, I would like to do this” or “I would like to have this thing” and then go and figure out how to do it, and make it. And so, he really did that. They were, they're both educators, so it's a problem to solve. How do you do it? And, just, it really hit me more, probably in high school, junior high and high school, where I went in and I was looking at doing that, but by the time I was a junior-senior, I knew I was going to art school. And I put a portfolio together and submitted it. And my first years were at Kendall School of Design. And then went out West and went to school out there. And then, ultimately, came back to Alma College and finished up with a BFA. Tia Imani Hanna: And Chazz, for you, was there something that made you go with painting and drawing, and what was it? Was it small projects first and build into big things? Because now you're working in murals and things. So, what was it for you that set your art in painting as your thing?

Chazz Miller: It was a natural progression. As a kid you doodle, but in school I was highly distracted, and I would always sit in the back of the class so I could doodle. I just never stopped doodling. And then at some point, you run across an art teacher to tell you there's more to the world and art than doodling and starts giving you all these options. And it's just mind-blowing. Detroit Public Schools, at the time, had no decent art schools. So, it was two schools you would go to Cass Tech or, I think, Henry Ford and Murray, maybe had decent art programs, but definitely Cass Tech that was a prima donna for the arts. So, if you didn't get in an area, you pretty much weren't going to art college or didn't even have a clue. I was exposed to the vocational schools the first year they started vocational schools in Detroit. And this is kind of my argument for when we get into talking about MEDU, about teaching art as a practical trade. So, I was fortunate enough to have that experience and meet a teacher who had actually left Cass Tech, Al Noyer. Mr. Noyer was an amazing art teacher and introduced me to the opportunity to have scholarships to go to art school, which is something I never even knew. I knew about, of course, basketball scholarships, football scholarships, and those things, but to get a scholarship to go to a full art school was absolutely mind-boggling to me. And, through him, I was able through this mentorship, was able to go and achieve four scholarships. One of them was to Kendall, but it was only for a half a year or something like that. But the most elaborate one was the one I chose, of course, which was four years at the Columbus College of Art and Design, which at the time was in the top 10 of the college of art design schools. And I went there for illustration and marketing and advertising. And then it was just, at school for a while and you become a senior and you got to figure a way to pay bills. You got to go out and start getting a real job while you're at school and so on and so forth. So, I stumbled across the billboard industry and, totally by accident, and I was just painting signs with them, doing the little signs and the lettering. And one thing led to another, ended up doing that for about seven years. And then someone told me with my background on billboards, I should go out to California and seek work in Hollywood to paint large mat paintings for movies, backgrounds. I thought that sounded very interesting, but I just had no clue how I was going to get out to California. The art of positive thinking and reinforcement by writing things down. I still have the calendar that I said I was going to be, on my birthday in 1991, on June the 14th, in California. Two weeks before that date, I looked at that calendar, and there was no way I was going to be in California. Lo and behold, I did some portraits for this singing group. Make a long story short, ended up meeting Don King's limousine driver, one thing led to another, and soon turned into reference, ended up meeting Don King and presenting all these artworks to them. And they invited me out to Vegas, and he paid for my trip to go out to Vegas, to hang out with… to see Mike Tyson fight George Foreman and paint and draw ringside.

Tia Imani Hanna: Oh my gosh!

Chazz Miller: On my birthday I woke up in Phoenix, Arizona, and from there we went to Vegas, and from there we moved to LA. Yeah, my birthday, I woke up on that day. We actually left before May. It was… my birthday is in June. We actually left in May to head out West. We drove. So yeah, by the time we got out there and I ended up in LA, we stopped at three places, Arizona, Vegas, and then LA, and on my birthday, I woke up in LA on June the 14th. So that's one of my stories about, really about writing things down and positive reinforcement and visualization. From there, I spent almost, went out there for a two-week vacation, and ended up staying out there for seven years. The power of art. I ended up doing artwork for Magic Johnson, Olympic gold medalist Ron Brown. I could go on and I got pictures of me and OJ Simpson and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. But ended up, family became more important. So, after my seven years, I moved back to Detroit to help take care of my father and my daughter, at the time who was 12 years old. I came back to Detroit and just seeing how blighted things were at the time. I was just absolutely just blown away at that. And so, I wanted to do something. At the time, my father was still alive, and I was doing all this complaining and he said, “Look, I don't want to hear all that. You need to go and to do something about it or shut up. No, I don't want to hear it. Look son, you're either part of the problem or part of the solution, real. Look at what tools you got and see how you can make the difference.” And my biggest tool was my art. and, and then, just through years of doing outdoor murals and billboards, I knew the power of public art. Then, I met Hubert Massey when I came back to Detroit and he gave me a lot of positive reinforcement as far as the power of public art, which reinforced what I already knew. And just one thing led to another and I worked out in Southwest Detroit, with the Hispanic community first, and ended up meeting Blight Busters and doing work over there, and then that's how it all started with the Artist Village.

Tia Imani Hanna: Wow! So that's a lot!

Chazz Miller: Believe me, I condensed it. Yeah. Cause one of the… one of the most profound things is, again, the juxtaposition of narratives. Is before I knew what the Artist Village in that community was, I was carjacked in that area. When I first moved back to Detroit, I was a character artist specialist. We did nothing but corporate and private parties. Obviously, I still keep plenty of markers and things right behind me and coming back from a party and stuff to the gas station, on Burt Road in Brightmoor and was carjacked and almost lost my life. So, when I ended up in that neighborhood, about two years later, I realized it was the same neighborhood. I really had a breakdown in emotions because I realized I was in a neighborhood that I almost lost my life and that I was making a difference. So, it's a lot, it's a journey. It's quite a journey.

Tia Imani Hanna: So, this is for both of you then. For Amy, what about art is the thing that makes the most difference in your world and in our world? What do you think it is that makes art so powerful in our world?

Amy Wellington: I, for me, it's the whole realm of creativity. Okay. So, it's the whole process, it’s that whole creative process. It is coming up with that concept that I actually want to spend time to create and time to take it all the way to the end and put it on the wall and all of that stuff for people to see. So, it’s that creative process and for me, the end result. I really want to be really guided as far as what kind of things I create and put out there as far as visual things. Particularly now, it just seems like it is… people can create all over the place and they do, but they don't really realize what effects that it has out on the viewing public and out in the world. So, for me, it's got to be… and it's been more in the last years. I was at the Ella Sharp Museum and we created stuff there all the time because of the mandate of the museum and you're supposed to have a lecture series, or you're supposed to do this, and you're supposed to do that. And it looks good for the website. It looks good to offer these things, but whether people came or not. That was some of a problem. Some things people came to and it was great, and it was wonderful and some things you just did, for the sake of doing them. So it was, like, I got to a point in my life and it was, like, I'm not going to do it unless, first of all, it gives me joy and happiness to do it. And, that once it gets out there in the world, it also shares joy and happiness or love or care for one another or bringing people together. Having a positive message and really moving people in a positive way in their life forward. That's what motivates me. It's out there. Maybe earlier on, it was really self-reflective stuff. When I was in school, Kent Kirby, who is my advisor and mentor, he would sit there and he would say, I think most of the kids that come through here, they do art and it's almost like art therapy for themselves. They tried to process their own stuff and being able to really express themselves in a manner that was positive, or at least visually. So, they weren't out there hurting anybody or getting into trouble or something like that and they were able to communicate. But a lot of people, they make a lot of visual information and they don't want necessarily to communicate with anybody. It's, you look at it, and it's I don't know what you're trying to say to me. Or I don't know what the purpose of this work is about, kind of thing. And that's fine. that's their place. But, for me, it was, early, it was self-expression, things that I was going through, reflective of some of the challenges that I had in my life. And, and I still have to work that day, but now it is, yes, these are challenges, but this is the outcome. This is what you want to aim for.

Tia Imani Hanna: Okay. So, you want to create what you want to see in the world. Is that kind of the idea?

Amy Wellington: Yeah. One of my sayings is to focus on what you want, focus on what you want to have happen in your community, in your life, with your friends, to the public or the community. So, it's like focus on what you want.

Tia Imani Hanna: Sure. Okay. And Chazz, for you? What do you see as the purpose of art in your life, in how you express your art or your voice in art?

Chazz Miller: It's, again, I believe in residuals and thoughts and things. Again, focus on what you want. It reinforces what I was talking about, the California experience, and writing it down and visualizing it. But then working towards those goals and sometimes, for me, it was just about inspiration because that's what inspired me. I was inspired by other artists, taking gallery trips, museum trips. I was fortunate enough that my mother took me out to museums and things at an early age, so just seeing all those images and then growing up in a car capitol. In high school, there were a lot of guys that drew cars and growing up around just… It was always kids that drew cars. He knows, especially in the sixties when I was growing up, so that was always cool. And I don't know how many of the age group of your listeners remember Big Daddy Roth or Rat Fink. Airbrush artistry really started at the State Fair in Michigan. Airbrush tee shirts were one of the first things they would ever present with hot rods T-shirts, when you remember like the modern hot rods with the rat coming out with the giant stick shift and a giant motor. And I don't know if you guys know, it was really inspiring. So just, again, we're an automotive capital, the engineering automotive stuff, all that was always around, and it was just always exciting to me. And just looking at factories like the angles and all the machinery of the factories to me was… Always, people see dirt… I just always thought it looked like sculptures. It just really looked sculptural to me. So that was always inspiring to me, the lines of the industries, industrial city that is Detroit.

Tia Imani Hanna: So, the two of you now are inspired and working towards different things and some of the same things. I know. Now, Amy, you're working on… you've got the dolls, right?

Amy Wellington: Yeah. I have 12 multimedia, paper media, what I call “Kindred Spirit” paper dolls and I really take that kindred spirit, and it just is… it's with a lot of different things. So, there's one on love and there's one that is about stardust. And there's one about the seasons. or there are several about the seasons and there are two that are a butterfly and a dragonfly. And that's more about like metamorphosis and transformation. So, they have these separate kinds of meanings that all go with them. And so, a lot of my effort just recently is to start to take those and I'm putting stories with them. I'm working with a graphic designer and we're figuring out how to make them into kits so we can sell them as a product. So, we've been looking at different ways of… different paper types that have pearlescent on it. They're really very girly. They're very glittery. They're very fanciful and they all have very similar things to them. And so, we're really… I’m looking at that. And this is a push to be out into a more general public, a more mass public venue or audience, particularly children, so that the stories are looking at storybooks. And, how you know, and there's a kindred spirit in the back that they can make, kind of situation. So, we're looking at several different things. We're just starting off with the 12 we're going to release. We're working on releasing the Love Kindred “Kissa” for Valentine's Day, 2021, coming up. So that's coming up fairly soon and working on that and really looking at the… finding the right printer and all that kind of stuff. So that's all trailblazing right now to me. That's pretty interesting. And then, another one is that I've been working with a group of women in Detroit who are using oracle cards and things like this. And so, I'm also working on a series of oracle cards for another person, doing the backgrounds and things like this and putting that together for that. So those are two things that are going on right now which are pretty exciting. And that's, that's also putting that positive energy out there in the world and creating that scenario that can hopefully bring people together and help unify people and be in a positive place.

Tia Imani Hanna: So, with the Kindreds, you’re aiming it towards all children or female children or all children?

Amy Wellington: I think at this point, it’s probably female children because they're all quite feminine in how they look and how they're constructed. But that doesn't mean that there can't be an appeal to males. It might actually not be a Kindred. It might be something else that has that kind of magical fairy realm kind of stuff that is more, that might be more magician or might be more some other kind of character that would be more appealing to boys, but it's with the girls right now, definitely solidly in that audience right now.

Tia Imani Hanna: And you're trying to see, going back to what you were talking about, create the things you want to see. So, what do you want to see these children get from these Kindreds?

Amy Wellington: First, just the idea of being a kindred spirit or what does that, so it means that it doesn't mean it's this huge love attachment relationship or anything. It is, it's more about… you can identify with other people that have the same kind of values that you have, If you want to promote love, or if you want to be able to… it's just, it's a subject, pick a subject, So if you're trying to have more of a positive experience in your life where you're trying to process trauma or something like that, these Kindreds are there, and they're supportive in that they're a force for good and a force for helping, that kind of idea. And then just teaching about that, what does kindredness mean?

Tia Imani Hanna: Okay. And this also ties in with what the women's group that you're working with as far as creating the spirit of general goodness in the world. Is that kind of…? You mentioned them in conjunction with each other. That's why I ask.

Amy Wellington: Oh, the women are all about self-actualization. So, it is really finding out who you are. It's going back and looking and being reflective of instances that might've hurt you. And so, it is going in there and addressing it. There are lots of techniques of being able to process that kind of stuff, but it's more about… it's about self-healing, it's about self-development, more than anything, and then a pursuit of kind of your purpose. What it is that you are trying to accomplish in this lifetime. What are you trying to share with people? What are your talents and skills and your treasure and effort and all of that, and where do you want to put that, and how do you want to support people and things like that?

Tia Imani Hanna: So, do you have some new artwork on that level since you've got the Kindreds with the children, and then you're doing this inner work with the adult women. So, do you have any new artworks that you're considering for the adult women part? On self-actualization?

Amy Wellington: I have things in the sketchbook at this point, yeah. I do. they haven't gotten out yet but, I've been able to experiment around a little bit. the studio is set up right now to… there's a lot with paint and it's just a big space and it's playing around with a lot of media. I know how media moves around. I know the different layering that I like to use, and I have the imagery that I want to do. So yeah. yeah, I do.

Tia Imani Hanna: It's coming. So, I'm just trying to see if there… do you feel like it's leading you in a particular way since you've been working with this group? Is there a particular thing that you feel floating in the ethers? You know what I mean? Like, from working with these women, do you feel like you're being led, and they need direction by your muses? You know what I'm saying at all?

Amy Wellington: I think so, but it's also… it's just sitting down, it's centering, it's really centering. It's really just taking that look within. I'm very visual. So, in a meditation, things come to me visually, quickly, so I have to make sure that when I get done and I'm journaling afterward that I have to really write it out, I draw it out. Most of it is drawing it out. It's just, okay, I saw this. Now I saw that. And then it's I want to share those things because you know what I see, I just… it's beautiful to me. So that's all I really need to do that, and if I was going to spend time doing it, that's, that's what I want to spend time doing.

Tia Imani Hanna: Okay. That's what you're currently working on. Now I know that you are facilitating a project that Chazz is working on, or Chazz you have some independent stuff, and then you've got the thing that you're working on with you and Amy working together, correct? Yeah. I see an eyebrow twitching over there. Audience, I know you can't see this, but his eyebrow is twitching. So…

Chazz Miller: Yeah, there's always different levels. So, my fine art collection is always ongoing… series of works that I'm working on. I'm finally… I'm looking to do a show in October with those pieces. But my main focus right now, while the weather is good, is painting outdoors. And again, that's just my outdoor painting credo from painting billboards for so long. I just love painting outside, painting big with a lot of equipment, and it keeps you in shape and all that good stuff. So right now, yeah, I'm trying to crank out as many murals as I can. I'm on my third one for the summer or second one or something like that. but the two I'm doing right now, both over a hundred feet long. One is an MLK theme that's based on… and that was done in 2003 and has been redone based on the current events that are going on with George Floyd, which are the same events, unfortunately. And the other one is a tribute to George Washington Carver and Sweet Potato Sensations, which is a business that's been in the community for probably 30 years. The owner was inspired by George Washington Carver, and she attended Tuskegee Institute and her daughter is now taking the baton, but she also does the sweet potatoes and the cooking and taking it to the next level, the merchandise and things. She also has a natural hair show that she does every year, I think probably for the last seven years. And so, the mural is a combination of both of those or all three of those, the George Washington Carver history, that the heritage of passing a legacy was the theme, and it's a mother harvesting sweet potatoes from her daughter's hair.

Tia Imani Hanna: Okay. That's different.

Chazz Miller: Really cool imagery tied together, based on a real story.

Tia Imani Hanna: Okay. Many people may not know about George Washington Carver. For those of you listening who don't know about George Washington Carver and Tuskegee Institute, you can look those up on Google and in books in libraries.

Chazz Miller: Great African American inventor. Yes, indeed. And actually, he was an artist also. He was a very awesome painter and drew a lot of the plants that he studied. So that was really interesting and inspiring. Then, outside of that, is just developing. This logo here is for MEDU Detroit. MEDU Detroit is Micro Enterprise Design Unit, which was founded last year with Amy and I and it's really to continue our efforts to train young people in the field of arts. That's really our core. It’s really inspiring young people to understand and to see a path to have an art career, recognizing their talent and how to cultivate it. And that's why Amy and I really struck a great accord. And just the fact that we both really, really have a passion for the arts, from the ground up. The connection has just always been awesome.

Tia Imani Hanna: Okay. Let's see, tell me about What did you say that it was called? MEDU?

Amy Wellington: It's ‘me do’, so it's M-E-D-U. It is Micro Economic [actually ‘Enterprise’] Design Unit. Okay. That is what it is. And to me that, essentially… and I'm going to let him talk about the African connections and the roots of all of that. I'm going to let him talk about that for us. We just do a lot of really project-driven kinds of work. So, if it's a mural project or a placemaking project, or a hopscotch event, or going and attending events and doing different things. Then, it is taking what is that thing, that project and, how do we incorporate the community with it? How do we incorporate the youth with it and involve them so they can be doing problem-solving creative endeavors in working out the project? If you're starting off with it, it's here… we have this project and we're going to get started. So how are we going to get started with that? What needs to happen to do it? So, it's taking people through this process.

Tia Imani Hanna: Who is MEDU? Exactly. Or is it a government-funded agency or what is MEDU?

Chazz Miller: Right now, it's an LLC. It ultimately will possibly be a nonprofit. We're evaluating what direction we want to go in because really the whole thing is about enterprise and enterprise is about profit and that's the whole thing. We're looking at small manufacturing through 3-D printing through laser digital cutting processes and as many of the modern techniques that we can learn and teach young people to utilize, but, again, MEDU Detroit is about using art as skilled trades or manufacturing training. Which was actually the history of MEDU. Actually, MEDU Ensemble was… you can do a little research on this also… got a lot of homework for you guys… But MEDU Ensemble was to give you a short version… it was a South African group that fought apartheid using the arts from about 1970 to about, I think, 1987. Don't quote me on that. Again, do your homework. But the interesting part about it is they were brought down on my birthday, June 14th, I think 1987. I know for a fact it was June the 14th because adverts really stuck with me to utilize this as a way to start a social revolution to change the hearts and minds of young people about what they have to live for. And so MEDU, literally, would go to different villages with their art, to like silkscreen political posters. And if they were caught, they were murdered, they were killed. And so Fela Kuti, if you ever heard of him, a famous artist, comes from that group, and so on and so forth. So that's where MEDU originally originated from, South Africa.

Tia Imani Hanna: I see. I did not know that. Okay. I will definitely look into that some more. I know Fela Kuti.

Chazz Miller: Yes. Awesome artist. Yes.

Tia Imani Hanna: All right. So MEDU… right now, are you all working on a media project in Detroit right now?

Chazz Miller: The, murals, all the murals I'm doing right now are under MEDU Detroit and all my public art right now is under MEDU Detroit. And again, the murals are bait to lure the children in. Okay. So, once we get them and capture their imaginations, then we can start offering classes and getting them to sign up. And of course, even the parents. So, as they stop by, they are inspired, usually, we try to give them a card, or at least get their digital information so we can get them on a mailing list, start notifying them. And, at that point, they're ready to sign up. So that's really exciting. So, we just obviously been seeing how things play out yeah. With the COVID and everything, but we're really looking forward to activating some classes probably early next spring at this point.

Tia Imani Hanna: Where are the classes going to be? Where are the murals that you're painting right now?

Chazz Miller: Right now, we're focusing on Lahser and Grand River, which is the Artist Village. We have quite a bit of a property in that area that we can activate. There are also some areas in the Puritan area, the D corridor that we have opportunities activating. But the beautiful thing is that we want to be mobile. We don't really want to be tied in any one location. We want to be flexible in that regard, so that's what is exciting about what's going on right now. So, it's like having satellite locations.

Tia Imani Hanna: Okay. Okay,

Chazz Miller: So, we can serve more young people that way.

Amy Wellington: Yeah. People have reached out and then we also put proposals together. As far as some of the things, how would… what a neighborhood or community is looking for? If they've got a project and how we can add to that and we're very good at going in and being able to engage the community. This is like one of the number one things that needs to happen so there is a real exchange. So anything that a mural, or work, or memes, or whatever it is, that remains, that is something that the community has had a hand in and people that are in that neighborhood are reflected in it. That has come really from Chazz. That has been his mode of operating for a long time, is to really go in and what it is that you're looking for and talking with people and being able to take all that information and then come back with a real nice visual design of what that is. And then it's right out there and everybody comes and looks at that and goes, wow, look at this thing. And it just continues, just continues. Social media, we're getting postings of people reacting to the mural that's on Puritan all the time, tagging it, liking it, whatever it is. And we've gone back, we've put some more memes up and down Puritan and that kind of helps keep people re-activated with it and looking at it again with fresh eyes. This summer we're circling back and being in the Artist Village, Lahser/Grand River area a little bit more. And, going back, we'll work with Roslyn again, a little later this summer. We've worked with her in the past too at the Cross-Pollination Corridor. She is in the Brightmoor neighborhood in the Farm Way, I guess they've named that area of Brightmoor. This woman, Roslyn Flint, she has begun this kind of campus area and it is to grow food and she has a tea house there called the Urban Country Tea House and that's on Bramell and she curates her own teas, and she has a little meeting spot there, and then she has gardens and, a big greenhouse that has just been erected, and she's working on a meditation garden, and she's working on a couple of centers, the Butterfly Art Center. And I know it's not called that… it's another name, but it's butterfly, the transformation and metamorphosis at the center and the art part of it. But the Cross-Pollination Corridor is… it's not just about pollinators, bees, and butterflies and such, but it's also about ideas and having people come together and share ideas and learn from one another and things like that. So, that's actually where Chaz and I met three years ago and that was a project that we had, that I had written a grant from the State of Michigan, from Michigan Council for Arts and Cultural Affairs. And that was to do a street mural. Years ago, when I saw this street mural stuff and, and I was, like, when I was back at Ella Sharp Museum and I'm going, I'm doing one of those things some time in my life there's going to be a street mural that I'm going to be involved with. And so, when we were working with Roslyn, Diane Wilson, and I, with Michigan ArtShare, we went in there and that was who I worked with to put this grant together and do this project. Actually, Diane was the person that introduced us all, acquainted me with Detroit and all of that whole scenario now that has happened, but that's where we met, and we put together a street mural. That is the central location. She has a big event every year called "Meet in the Street" and people come and they do the hustle on it ,and they dance on that mural and gather and drink tea and learn about gardening and she's got a big vision for that place and we want to keep working with her on that, bringing more art to it. And we've got another, a small mural project over there about bats as pollinators.

Tia Imani Hanna: Wow!

Amy Wellington: A bat mural.

Tia Imani Hanna: That's great! That's great! Okay, so you've got the Cross-Pollination Corridor mural project. You've got the redoing some old murals over at Artist Village going on. And then you've got some new murals as well.

Chazz Miller: There was a mural that was done, when was Obama elected? 2008, the first time? Yeah. Okay. So, after the inauguration at the inauguration dance, I took a photo of him and Michelle and I did a mural that was 16-foot that is 16-foot by 8-foot. And I placed it on top of this abandoned building. And it was on that building for his whole two terms. And somebody finally bought the building and the owner of the building decided. Yeah, they want it to stay in the flavor of the neighborhood with the Artist Village and donate it to the nonprofit and make it more of a community co-op type building. Okay. And so, they kept the mural and they we went to the community for about two years and discussed what the community wanted to see in that building. And the community decided to keep it The Obama Building based on the mural that we had done all those years ago. When you talk about placemaking,

Tia Imani Hanna: That's amazing!

Chazz Miller: Yeah. The power of public art. There were parents that told me that their children demanded that they drive by that mural on their way to school, which was out of the way on the way to school.

Tia Imani Hanna: Just so they could see it, right?

Chazz Miller: Yeah. So, when they took it down to start rehabbing the building, I got a lot of feedback, like “Where's the mural, what happened to it?” And so, fortunately, the community decided they wanted to name and keep the building “The Obama Building,” and the piece is being restored. And it's going to be placed inside the lobby. And there's going to be a gallery and we're going to be working with Amy and Michigan ArtShare to curate the gallery. So, in October I'm going to be doing my first show probably in about 10 years, my fine art show, combined with the unveiling of that mural and unveiling of all the murals that I've done this summer at Artist Village. So, I really want to make a statement about speed, quality. I want to set a whole new benchmark in outdoor public art when it comes to murals as far as speed, quality, substance, technique, media, community engagement. So, when I check down this list, there'll be no question who the “GO” is. You know who the GO is, right? “The Greatest of All Time.”

Tia Imani Hanna: Yes, Yeah.

Chazz Miller: Understand, I'm a big sports buff and its always competition to me. People go, “There are no winners. There are no losers.” No. The kid that worked hard, that sacrificed, that didn't break, you know what I'm saying? If he wins, he deserved to win. How can you say a kid who didn't sacrifice, didn't do his homework, he really should get a trophy too? Really. So, for me, it's always about what you put in is what you get out and you… really, for me, it was always about hard work. Talent is one thing, but I want to outwork everybody.

Tia Imani Hanna: Okay.

Amy Wellington: You're working your tail off over there. That's all I say.

Chazz Miller: Yep. When I see all those construction workers on that building, I'm like, oh yeah, they're not going to outwork me. No way. So, I make sure when they quit, I'm still working. I get there before them in the morning. And when they leave, I'm still working.

Tia Imani Hanna: That's right. That's how you get things done. How you get things done.

Chazz Miller: And respect, really, just through the years… I've really… my hard work ethic has really gotten me a lot of respect, just as much as my talent. And that's a blessing to me, especially coming, I always say… coming from a blue-collar town because my father was a steel mill worker. He worked in the coal mines. So, I used to see him come home, literally covered with coal-black, and, back then, 12-hour shifts was regular, you know.

Tia Imani Hanna: Sure.

Chazz Miller: So just that a work ethic is really good. And so, we want to pass that on a lot of these young people that really need it.

Tia Imani Hanna: Don't know what work really means.

Chazz Miller: They'd say, two hours of work and for every two hours of work, a 10-minute, 20-minute break, really? So yeah, so it's really about that, just continuing to build on what we already have and… but really the next level for me is looking forward to the fine art, museum-quality work. And eventually, murals, I'm getting a little older and getting up there and I say, ‘long in the tooth’. I'm looking at slowly phasing out the larger work as far as physically, as long as I can do it, I'm going to do it. But, really looking at maybe train some young people, but ultimately the residual money that can come for my family and for my legacy is through, obviously, reproductions and prints and fine art pieces that have a legacy to go in museums and things.

Tia Imani Hanna: Okay. Okay. So, here's some general questions, for both of you. What is something that you know now that you wished you knew when you were 20, regarding art and working in art?

Chazz Miller: The internet. Yeah. Oh my.

Amy Wellington: Just to piggyback on that, it's just to know the type of effect, the internet is one, but just the technology, the path of how technology has gone, particularly in visual information and how people get that information, that kind of thing. That's… who would have ever known?

Chazz Miller: Yeah. And then for me, I think it's about systems. What I've learned is that there are systems and there are patterns to everything. And to be able to recognize patterns, guys that, it wasn't called the… Oh, I see. My title was ‘intellectual resonator’, right? No. What did they call them? Futurists? Guys that kind of predict the future that's based on looking at current patterns and trends. So, I think if I would've had a better vision of the bigger picture at that age it would have been obviously very helpful. Because at that age, I thought I was… I thought I was hot shit too because I had a scholarship. I had a little red Mustang. So, you think you got a lot of it figured out, but, yeah, I just wish that I could see, could have seen a little bit beyond my own smell.

Amy Wellington: Yeah, a lot of it too, at 20 years old, pretty much for me at 20 years old, I did. I left Michigan. I went and I moved out to Portland, Oregon, and that was pretty urban for me. And being far away, not really being reliant on family or just the homestead and all of that and just striking out. Portland was a good place for me to land, but it was also probably, if I look back at it now, I think I would have tried a couple of other things. I think I would've tried to hop into some other cities too, whether it was New York or Chicago or something,

Chazz Miller: What I'm talking about, like, the big picture understanding, right? The bigger picture.

Tia Imani Hanna: Yeah. What would you tell 20-year-olds now, looking at what's happening? Do you see trends starting? Point them, because of all of your knowledge that you do have, that you've pointed a 20-year-old towards?

Chazz Miller: Yeah. just even right now, I had a conversation yesterday. I had a conversation with two of my mentees that actually live in Chicago now and they came to town and stopped by the mural I was painting on. Yeah, we had some of those conversations. But yeah, it was looking at, again, we’re in this society. We’ve got this COVID thing going on and some of the other things with all the natural disasters in the environment, so… just looking at those things right there can give you clues. And so, that's what I, again, the bigger picture outside of, even outside of your art career, looking at the world and where the world is going. Just like everybody, all of a sudden, they realized the opportunity to make masks. It's obvious, but at first it wasn't so obvious, you know. And so just being ahead of the curve, by seeing the big picture gives you an opportunity to be ahead of the curve. So yeah, just telling young people, some of those things that recognize, you have pointed them out.

Tia Imani Hanna: Okay. How about you, Amy?

Amy Wellington: Sometimes I think it's interesting, some of the trends you're seeing. That is now for me… now I've lived in the same place for over 30 years, So I have this home base, which I love and I have all the resources that I can possibly think of here. But then sometimes that's wavy and it's ‘I can't be that nimble’. It's not like I can just, “Oh, let me catch a flight and go someplace.”

Chazz Miller: On a painting excursion, right?

Amy Wellington: Yeah. Hey, I want to spend six months over here. So, it's do it, do it, do tha.t Then, figure it out. And I look at, sometimes I think the Europeans had some really good ideas with that. It's balance things out, nurture your relationships, nurture your friendships, be able to travel, and meet new people. That is one thing that even now… because I do get in the car. That's my little oasis. I make sure that I can get in the car and I can go places at least around Michigan and it just brings so much richness to my life. All the people that I have been able to meet in the last, well, my whole life, and it's going out. So, it's when I'm with Chazz and we're at the mural and I'm talking with people and what's going on with you and what are you interested in? What are you doing? What do you think about this and all that kind of stuff? And then I have done work with Diane and Chazz and other artists. And it's we go to other cities and it's “there's this artist Chazz and you would really enjoy talking to him and finding out about his ideas. And would you like to meet him?” I really look at myself as a vessel of being able to do that and I think young people can really start to take a look at that too, and it's not just… I have my close friends. I do, and they're my confidants and stuff, but then I have this whole group of people that I know, that I love, that are just wonderful. The things that they're doing out there, their efforts, their energy. The things that they're creating that are so great… and just being able to make that connection…and enlarge the world, basically. So, you can do that here with the podcast, with technology, you can do it face-to-face. You can do it in creating art. You can do it by creating music or any of those things. For me, it's just the world is an oyster, and it's just going out and discover it and use it and taste it and all that kind of stuff. Go do it.

Tia Imani Hanna: Do it.

Amy Wellington: Yeah.

Tia Imani Hanna: Make art. Make art. I feel like that little parrot ‘make art, make art.’ Yeah, exactly. Okay. You're telling kids to create the social circle, and this is partly why I wanted to do the podcast, because I always wanted to have a salon, like they used to do in the Harlem Renaissance or they used to do in the twenties in Paris, that people will come to. Gertrude Stein was throwing a party, so everybody was there. Picasso was there. Hemingway was there. Or in Harlem, you had Duke Ellington showed up and Louis Armstrong and Josephine Baker and all these people would just show up and talk about their art and talk about politics and talk about everything that they were working on. And so, this is my version of that. You guys are in my living room… actually, you're in my closet, but still the same idea. I'm really grateful for the technology and it's definitely something I would have killed for when I was 20 because that was what I was looking for and I couldn't find it.

Chazz Miller: Yeah. Yeah.

Tia Imani Hanna: And people just were like… they were there, I guess I just don’t know where they were because I couldn't connect to those people. I couldn’t find those people. And now you can go online and find those people and they will be there with you. And that's mad cool.

Amy Wellington: Back when I was 20, I don't even think there was VHS. Yeah. There was VHS tape. There was VHS tape at that point, but the people that I knew, filmmakers, and they were on film.

Tia Imani Hanna: Yeah. They were on film. That's right. And you couldn't even see their films unless you went to someplace that was showing their film.

Amy Wellington: That's right. That's right. So yeah, when you talk about that connection and I see when people, like Chazz and I, have this connection, we have a connection with you. We have a connection with, there's like a group of people that we each have, but we have together too. And I think about some of the work like actors, where actors work together and they create films or TV shows and things, and they work together, in project after project. And those are the ones actually that kind of rise to the top. They know what they can do. They know what their skill set is, and they can produce it. There are a lot of artists out there right now that have great ideas and never do anything with it. It's like, how do I take it from here? Up in the head, into the visual on the third eye, all that kind of stuff. But how do I get it out through my hands out onto the paper, out onto the wall, out onto the canvas, whatever it is, and then make that community around it and share it with the world. And that's… you've got to share it with the world.

Tia Imani Hanna: And I just… I had a conversation with… on a separate podcast with, percussionist Carolyn Koebel that I work with a lot. And, she said the same thing. We were both saying… she's like she had decided several years ago that she was not going to just let stuff pile up and not producing anything. She was going to just record it and put it out a record and put it out. She says, artists do it, writers do it. So why are we holding onto this stuff? Because it's not perfect. Who cares? Get it out of the way. Because I know if I don't do that, it stacks up and I can't work on anything new, because there's this old stuff that's still in the way. So, if I get it down and put it out there then it's done. There's room for new stuff now… and then get that done and put it out. And so, this podcast is… one of my new mentors that I don’t know, those online mentors, she says, “Done. Not perfect.” Now I'm adopting that as my thing. This podcast will be done, and it won't be perfect, but it'll be done, and it'll be out there. It'll have great content. The energy will be good. The people will be fantastic. And the things that aren't perfect, we'll tweak them as we go.

Chazz Miller: Now you've got something to build on.

Tia Imani Hanna: Yes. Yeah.

Chazz Miller: You can't build on nothing.

Tia Imani Hanna: Exactly. And you…

Chazz Miller: And you can. You're still gonna have to rebuild that…

Tia Imani Hanna: Exactly. The thing I think about… I put out a CD in 2012 and the one before that was in 2002. And so, there's a lot of time in between there, partly because back in 2002 and 2012, the technology was so different. It took a lot more money to do that little thing that I did in 2002 than it did in 2012. I got a whole CD out of the same amount of money that it took me to do a five-song thing in 2002.

Chazz Miller: Are we good? You can do the whole thing on your phone now.

Tia Imani Hanna: Yeah. So, it's now, and now it's 2020 and I still need to do another one. Now we're dealing with COVID, but I can still, I can still say it's written, it's arranged. Now when COVID is up, I can just get my musicians. We rehearse it, we record it. Boom. Done. And that's my new thing. So, ‘done not perfect’ is the way to go. It's “just do it. Just do it. Make art.” I need a hand puppet, “Make Art.” I like that idea that is what we're all about. And I love hearing everybody's different versions of how to do that, how to go about that. And Chazz, I need you to make me a note about how much money I'm going to make by next year. And then we're going to go play the lotto.

Chazz Miller: One more little story. So, I told you I was doing character drawings. As a matter of fact, it could have been… it had to be… more than that night because it was in Livonia, but there was a couple of the first year. He says, “Hey, draw us in a boat.” The next year I came back to the party. This was Ford Motor Company, like a company appreciation party. The same couple said, “Look, you drew a boat. We ended up getting a boat. Wow! Can you draw us in a new house?” We’re joking. I'm not lying. I don't swear, but if I did, the next year, the same Christmas party, they came back and they said, “Man, you won't believe it. We got the house, yup.” So, they wanted me to draw them on a vacation… I haven't seen them since anyway, so…

Tia Imani Hanna: Magical drawing powers.

Chazz Miller: I want to thank you very much for the time.

Tia Imani Hanna: Oh, thank you so much… You both so much. Amy Wellington, where can we find you online? Is there any that we can send people to find you?

Amy Wellington: I'm on Facebook. You can definitely find me on Facebook, and I've got a page on there and studio or AMPATH, so you can see some of my work there. We have the MEDU website. And so, I'm involved with that, but that's a lot of the projects have MEDU.

Tia Imani Hanna: Chazz Miller. Thank you. And where can we find you online?

Chazz Miller: #Chazzoriginalzart on Instagram and Chazz original/Facebook, then MEDU.org. and from there, you can see other links to other references.

Tia Imani Hanna: I will make sure that they get on the show notes. All right. So, thanks guys, so very much! And I appreciate the time and the energy and… thank you.

Chazz Miller: Come on. Come on out the closet.

Amy Wellington: Okay.

Chazz Miller: We love you, baby!

Amy Wellington: Okay. Thanks. Bye. Bye.

Tia Imani Hanna: Thank you for joining us this week on Tia Time with Artists. Make sure to visit our website, tiaviolin.com, where you can subscribe to the show in iTunes and never miss an episode. Please leave us a rating wherever you listen to podcasts. We really appreciate your comments, and we'll mine them to bring you more amazing episodes.

I’d like to thank this inaugural season's sponsors: The folks at Jazz Alliance of Mid-Michigan or JAMM, Michigan ArtShare, a program of Michigan State University Extension is a partner in supporting the Tia Time podcast, and Shambones Music. Without their support this podcast would not be possible. Thank you so much. If you would also like to contribute to the show, you can find us on https://www.patreon.com/TiaTime1.

If you want to continue the conversation about topics discussed on the show or start new ones with like-minded people, join us at the Tia Time Lounge on Facebook.

Thank you for listening. See you next week at Tia Time!

+ Transcription

Tia Time with Artists, with guest Emmanuel Smith, ‘Mr. E in the D’ – recorded on 8/6/2020

Tia Imani Hanna: Welcome to Tia Time with Artists, the weekly podcast where we discuss the methods, challenges, and real-life experiences of living our creative dreams. What kind of creative warrior are you? Musician? Filmmaker? Painter? Choreographer? Poet? Sculptor? Fashionista? Let's talk about it right now. I'm your host, Tia Imani Hanna.

Tia Imani Hanna: Today’s guest on “Tia Time with Artists” is musician, educator, producer, and creator of the Emmy-nominated program for children, “Mr. E in the D,” that's Emmanuel Smith. His goal is to equip today's youth with the character and academic habits necessary for them to be responsible citizens, so it's Tia Time! Thank you so much for coming to do this with me. I really appreciate it. I've been hearing good things about you and seeing you online and hearing your music and stuff. So, I’m just like, “Oh, I gotta have him on the show?”

Emmanuel Smith: Likewise. I was about to reach out to you for my little mini episode.

Tia Imani Hanna: Fantastic. Okay. Let's do a little history. Teaching music, where did the fascination start? Music first, teaching second? What was the first thing that got you started, was there a memory when you were a small child?

Emmanuel Smith: So, I would say most definitely music first. So, music was always around, of course. From… I always thought it was the norm, I thought it was a norm. Like people… like, okay… Christmas Eve, everybody has a big musical, at a family member's house. Until I got married. And that's a long time. But until I got married and my wife came over to the house, Aunt Cleo’s, and she was like, “Your family does this every year? I've never experienced anything like this before in my life.” I was like, this is what we’re supposed to do, ever since I was a kid.” Yeah, music has just always played an influential, huge part from the start. I guess even as I've gotten older, like understanding the connection from family to music. I come from a rich musical family. This is like the TV shows. The theme song would stand out to me more than the show. And, just like all of those things, but I made the connection. I believe I was in third grade and I was having problems with my multiples of threes. At the time I was playing the trumpet for school or I had a trumpet. My Uncle Mario gave me his trumpet. I was interested in trumpet and my sister; I think she played the violin at that time. She was like, “Make up a song about the threes and we'll record it.” To this day I remember that song, but that was like my first connection of learning on my own because vintage PBS taught me all of that cool stuff with music and learning and the Alphabet People and Schoolhouse Rock. That’s what always emerged for me.

Tia Imani Hanna: Did you have Zoom and… that might be my generation. We had Zoom. And then I remember the theme song, [singing] “Zoom-a-zoom-a-zoom.” Yeah. It's the best show ever! And Morgan Freeman on the Electric Company.

Emmanuel Smith: Electric Ecompany. Yeah, that song was out cold, but then all of the music, yeah, that went along with it, but it was so progressive. Where it was like they were dealing with synth sounds and it was just like… one thing that I really appreciated back then was that they put a part of their spirit into the music. It wasn't just… we're making some songs for kids. It could just sound like this, but they were like making some JAMS!

Tia Imani Hanna: Yeah. Yeah. Schoolhouse Rock was one of my favorites. Bob Dorough, an amazing jazz singer, that stuff was great. “Hey Little 12 Toes” and songs like that, what was it? Conjunction Junction, all those kinds of things. Now you're doing similar things like that now with your… what's the…I forget the name of the project? [music in the background.]

Emmanuel Smith: I have two projects. The first one is “Mr. E in the D” Yep. Mixtape. [musical interlude from “Mr. E in the D’] Tia Imani Hanna: So, all of these things from the seventies and the eighties got meshed into your psyche and turned into this new thing that's hip and cool and kids will listen to. I was listening to it. Yeah, this, I can listen to this and this isn't going to drive me insane.

Emmanuel Smith: That’s the goal.

Tia Imani Hanna: Yeah. Yeah. That's was really very, very cool.

Emmanuel Smith: I'm glad to hear that. That's the goal that it can be a family engagement tool where we can all sit down and listen to it together and we can all learn something. Going to have fun, all dance. And it's not “Oh, turn this off.” At least you get… you can listen to it a few times, or halfway through at least, and you won't get a headache, hopefully.

Tia Imani Hanna: Yeah. With kids, you have to listen to it a lot of times. A lot of times.

Emmanuel Smith: Most definitely.

Tia Imani Hanna: So, was it becoming a parent that drove you to do more of this kind of work or was it the teaching first? Because you became a teacher before you had kids, right? So, was it the teaching first? Can you tell me the progression of how that came about?

Emmanuel Smith: Okay. I'm gonna give you this short version. So, I started out with my graduation, I got a job with the Detroit Youth Choir, which was supposed to be like a hybrid of the Boys' Choir of Harlem. I got a job as being a mentor. Like, he asked if I could sing and I'm like, eh, I can't really sing or hold a note. So, it was working with those kids and having the experience with them, learning new types of music, from classical to spirituals to what's out, you know, they learned. They learned a plethora of things. And at the time, one of my coworkers in that job was Anthony White and he's with the Detroit Youth Choir. So, we all just had this strong foundation with working with kids. I went from there, I got my first…my…not my first, but my next job because of that job, which was an after school enrichment teacher for the YMCA when it was on Seven Mile and Lasher… sorry. Lahser.

Tia Imani Hanna: That's right, ‘Lahser’.

Emmanuel Smith: ‘Lasher’ all day!

Tia Imani Hanna: ‘Lahser’. You know you're from Detroit when…

Emmanuel Smith: Right there on 7 Mile and Lasher baby! I got a job with being… they wanted a music teacher and I'm like, I can't really, but I can keep the kids engaged and we can learn some stuff. Then went from there to being a summer day camp counselor to…just my whole-time working has been working with kids. So, with the YMCA, that's what got me into working with schools because of their before and after school care programs. That's how I got into University Prep. I found out that I could be a substitute teacher and make some good money and my school is right around the corner. So, I was like, perfect. And I worked with a lot of the kids I already worked with from the YMCA. So, it was just like a perfect match. And that's where I was. I saw the engagement that I had with the kids in afterschool programming and through summer day camp versus their engagement when they're in the classroom. And I noticed it was a huge, almost like a rift, like it wasn't like torture, but I could just… I've seen them on the other side. I just really believe that engagement could live in the classroom too. If they're just connected, they'll be engaged and just as excited as they are when we're playing ‘Capture the Flag’. There was a time I was doing a math lesson and I noticed that some older kids… they didn't know… like, they couldn't recall their multiples and I'm like, you don't know your threes? What's going on? So that's where the idea just smacked me in the head. I believe at that time…I think Drake had just come out with his first mixtape. All the kids were talking about it. This was like when mix tapes had made its famous come back because it was like online mix tapes, all that stuff. I was like, I could make something where the kids… they know the hooks of all the songs. I can make something where it merges the math with the hook formula. Which the hook formula to me, a lot of the modern, more modern rap, it was almost nursery rhyme formula. You could look at that in like a bad way… or is that ingenious because everybody remembers the song? So, I was like, okay, if I can do that, then I know I got them in terms of you’re learning without knowing that you're learning.

Tia Imani Hanna: And you've got to get the engagement somehow. And the history of music, especially popular music, has always been the hook. Oh, it's been the hook. So, it's if you look at Motown… we are from Detroit… So, if you look at Motown, everything has a hook and if it didn't have a hook, if it didn't have the James Jamerson bass line on it, that hooked you in the beginning, it has some other kind of hook on it. So, that's how it work, you know. I get that. That's wonderful… That you figured that out and that you were able to do that. But your sister gets credit too, for saying, “We’ll make a song about it.”

Emmanuel Smith: Oh yeah. My mom, she was like, let's make this song. I still remember the song. It was super corny, but I remember the song. I remember the tune of the song, like it

Tia Imani Hanna: Let's hear it. What's the tune, the song? Do you remember the song?

Emmanuel Smith: Yep. Okay. And I can't remember all of the words now, or I can most of them. [to a rap beat] “My mama told me it's time to do math. I said, nah, ma I'd rather do rap. The math is really square, but if you asked me, I really don't care.” I think it was like some character stuff right there. “Try hard. If you keep working, you could really go far. Three, six, nine, 12, 15, 18, 21, 24, 27, 30, 33, 36” and the, my trumpet was… [imitating trumpet sounds]. Now that I think about it, it was almost like a twenties, like ‘heidi ho’.

Tia Imani Hanna: Oh, sure. Okay. Yeah. Yeah. That's awesome. Cause, for me it was a Schoolhouse Rock three, six, nine, 12, 15, 18, 21, 24, 27. Yeah… 30, 33, 36. All that was how I remembered it. Yup. So, it makes perfect sense. So, it's just nice to see how art, over time, is still alive and present and shapes the world we live in now and shaped the world we lived in the past and it's carried through sound over time.

Emmanuel Smith: Timeless.

Tia Imani Hanna: It's amazing. Yeah. Amazing. If we go back even further, I'm sure there was somebody else that had something back in the day that was… that we don't even know about because those people are gone now, but it's just cool. And then, because the technology is so much bigger and stronger now that this will carry over for a lot longer.

Emmanuel Smith: Yeah. I just… I try to just have the mindset of always keeping the kids first and I just always hope that whatever I create that it’s timeless, that it doesn't, like, it's not like trendy, but it's like timeless where it could be listened to 20 years down the line and there could still be a connection to it.

Tia Imani Hanna: Yeah. So, like with the words now, the math. It seems almost a little bit easier to do math because it's rhythmic and it can fit in the beats and it can, you can just put those numbers in and it's easy to remember the numbers, but with the words, because you're talking about what are they ‘linking words’?

Emmanuel Smith: Sight words.

Tia Imani Hanna: Now let's explain what sight words are.

Emmanuel Smith: So, sight words are like, my first tape was the first 100 sight words that early readers should know. And the thing with sight words is they don't really follow the phonetic rules of sounding them out. So, you have to know them off of sight say so, but there's so many of them, they're like the links in all of the words that the texts that like, if you're reading a text, you would still need to know those sight words along with the ones that have the blends and that you can sound out and things like that. So, they break the phonics rules. Yeah, those are the sight words.

Tia Imani Hanna: So, phone, because ‘ph’ and those kinds of words would fall into that or are they smaller than that?

Emmanuel Smith: I think now though, I don't want to start lying because the English language is like the most ridiculous language to me in terms of all of the trick rules like that, the F and the PH, right? Yes. It's so much to it. But, when I was doing the sight-word mix tape, there are a lot of sight words that I didn't even realize were sight words. Because of the English language, it's just, this it's so complex. I'll put it like that.

Tia Imani Hanna: Yeah because there's so many different mixed… Yeah, we've got Spanglish. We've got just all the little phrases and things that are colloquial for each region. You've got things from the South that people say up here, and then they get switched when they get up here. So, it's half-Southern, half-Northern, and you've got stuff from other countries all over the place.

Emmanuel Smith: Yup. Yup. So, Germanic roots. We have stuff. England, it's just it's yeah, so yeah, it's a gumbo.

Tia Imani Hanna: It's definitely a gumbo. Yeah. I found out recently that… in the black community, a lot of people say ‘axe’ instead of ‘ask’… and, I found that is actually correct in old middle English, in the Anglo-Saxon tradition, they would say ‘axe’. That is actually correct. Yup. So, I said, that's crazy.

Emmanuel Smith: But that's English is like our language is Ebonics, taking things and we changed it and switched it and made it our own or they made it their own, whoever made it their own.

Tia Imani Hanna: That's true for all, and you have bits and pieces of words and words that we've completely grabbed, like ‘garbage’, is French. Yup. and I'm not saying for anybody listening, but I'm not saying that French is garbage, but the word ‘garbage’ is a French word. ‘Garage’ is a French word. And Detroit is a French word. It should be ‘Day-Twa’ and ‘Grat-i-ot’ is Gratiot. People don't know how to say it when they live here. And so, there's a lot of words that way. And yeah, it's a crazy language just because of that. So, it's always evolving, always evolving. Then artists like us, we create new words out of those old words, just because we're cool like that. So, when you have all these rappers and hip-hop artists, they will make up new words that means things that I have… I'm admitting my age… there's a lot of things. I don't know what they're saying. I really don't, because I don't understand the dialect that they're speaking in, because I don't speak that dialect because I don't come from that age and it makes me crazy.

Emmanuel Smith: It's a whole other language.

Tia Imani Hanna: Yes. Like there's an old movie called “Airplane,” which you probably have seen cause you're old enough to have at least seen that.

Emmanuel Smith: Yup, from Blockbuster.

Tia Imani Hanna: Yeah. It is one of those things. And then they say they have the two black guys talking in jive, they call. Do you speak jive? It’s the same thing. So, it's pretty amazing to keep up with that and to actually be able to make that into an instrumental or a musical thing to keep children engaged. So, I think that's wonderful that you're doing it and I think you're doing it really well. Because some stuff I've heard that I had a lot of that kind of Hip-Hop, because that's the thing when I grew up it wasn't Hip-Hop. It was Rap. Yeah. And then somehow turned to Hip-Hop. So, I don't know when that transition happened.

Emmanuel Smith: It was actually flip-flop. It was Hip-Hop and then, the terms of Rap came into play, which is more mainstream and that's fine. A lot of people were more familiar with Rap than Hip-Hop in the five elements of Hip-Hop and all that stuff.

Tia Imani Hanna: Okay. Because then I just didn't understand. Because for me, I had always heard Rap first and then became Hip-Hop. Okay, because if you, and if you go way back, it was Louis Jordan, Louis Jordan did Rap back in the forties.

Emmanuel Smith: Oh yeah. Yeah, he did. Yeah. I just got hip to that. Yup. So then, the stuff that, like you were saying, ‘Heidi Ho’, and that kind of stuff, that there was some rapping there, too.

Tia Imani Hanna: So, it comes back. It goes back far. Yeah. So, It even goes back further than that. If you listen to the African griots that was a rap, it was a poetry, it was a storytelling, it was rap. So, it just goes back and back and back. And it's not just on the black side too. Because in Middle England they had the. Folks that went through the… Oh, I can't think of a term… The minstrels would go through; the minstrels don't mean the same thing. Then as I meant, in the South here, in 1800s. They went through and they played music, but they weren't dressed in blackface, so there's just this whole… so, there's all these connections through the arts that you just don't realize. That we all, in different parts of the world, have the same things and that we're all connected. So, it's lovely to see that. As long as you're using it for good. It doesn't really matter where you come from or that they're all connected. All these different things are connected together… and I'm rambling.

Emmanuel Smith: It's supposed to happen. It's not rambling at all.

Tia Imani Hanna: Okay, so now you've started teaching, you started to do, did the mixtape first, then you started to do the sight words. So, what are you looking at next?

Emmanuel Smith: So, like right now, I've always… it's always been like a dream, to recreate what impacted me at a young age ‘cause I was that type of kid, like my imagination, very super active. And, like when I would watch certain shows that helped to spur my imagination, you know, it left a huge imprint within me. So, I'm trying to… It's almost like, in a world where imagination is almost useless now because everything is put right before you and yeah… there's no hate on technology at all, but we have kids that are growing up, swiping, and not seeing any form of artistry or whatever. I just want to help through the arts, help children to experience what I experienced through what would be called now ‘Vintage PBS’. So, a lot of my music, some people have noticed, it's educational. And then there are all types of messages floating through the song. There’s character-building stuff. There are exploratory messages. There's imagination stuff. There's just a bunch of things so that if I had the opportunity to do a lot of my songs off the sight word mix tape. I have songs about skateboarding. I have songs about riding bikes. I have songs about flying on a rocket ship. I have songs about what to do when it's raining outside. I purposefully merge those thoughts and ideas together because it's all about childhood. For some people, they'll be like, that's a bit too much. You should just stick to the sight words. And I can respect that. But what I did was, I just think about the totality of a child and if I can merge the excitement of riding a skateboard or the excitement of going to the library along with the excitement of learning to read and there's not a divide between the excitement of learning. I like… I really wanted to try to be a tool to help to create lifelong learners. And, if at age four you're listening to the music and you're excited, just as excited about reading as you are about exploring, or finding out something new, or riding a bike, or riding a skateboard. Those two are kind of on an even playing ground. I think that as you get older, you're looking at education through a different scope. Like it's fun. It's electrifying. It's cool. It's… I'm expanding my mind and that’s cool. Not I have to learn how to do it man. I got to read this book, man. I have to do this. Yeah. I'm learning something new and that's what I'm trying to do. I'm not saying that kids out here aren't like that, I'm just saying I just want to be a tool to help push that further, more.

Tia Imani Hanna: Sure. Sure. You've got all those test cases at home.

Emmanuel Smith: You better believe it. I'll be like this. I'll put it on in the car. Yup. And they'll let me know immediately if it's hot or if a flop. They will let me know.

Tia Imani Hanna: Now, what are the ages of your children?

Emmanuel Smith: So right now, we…until September, we're in stair-step mode, so we are four, and then we go to seven, eight, nine…four, seven, eight, nine. September and October are the oldest two, my ‘Irish twins’ who will be aging up. And then there's a little gap. They’ll let me know. Yup. I sure was tested, especially the math mix tape. When that first came out, I think they were like three and four, something like that. It really does work. They were like just singing the tunes. They didn't know that they were learning multiples. They were just singing a song. It works! It works! It works!

Tia Imani Hanna: Right. So, then you just ask them what's three times three and they'd be able to tell you.

Emmanuel Smith: So, my son who is in the…he's going into fifth, but in the third grade he made that connection. I was like E three times six to sing the three song and count how many times you do it. Like the 3, 6, 9. “Oh, three times two is six,” and he will start to make those connections. But on my end, as an artist, what I'm pushing forward now, is to create more tools to show that connection. I have songs and then working on like digital worksheets and things like that, like, all that stuff is in play now so that they can really make that connection.

Tia Imani Hanna: Sure. Yeah, that's fabulous.

Emmanuel Smith: Stuff like that. That will help make that connection.

Tia Imani Hanna: So, the beginning mixtapes are more like, so the ages are from what? From three to seven, six…?

Emmanuel Smith: I would say that. So, originally, I was going to make the mix tape and it was going to be multiples, I think it was like two to six, or something like that was going to be really small. I was having so much fun doing it. By the time we finished it… this is ridiculous, I don't even know, but I went up to like multiples of 15.

Tia Imani Hanna: I noticed that!

Emmanuel Smith: All the way up to 15. I'm like, Hey, they're going to be in love with numbers or patterns of numbers or whatever. But yeah, it went all over. We went all the way up. I've had parents of high school students. I've had middle school students, Hey, I’m listening too because I really didn't know my nines and I really didn't know my twelves. I originally made it just for like my elementary students, but it's for whoever needs help with it.

Tia Imani Hanna: Yeah. So yeah. So, the next levels then, maybe, you set up for the adult education programs, GED students and things like that, because I can see that being super… yeah. Write it down. Yeah. I think that's a wonderful idea. And also, English as a second language.

Emmanuel Smith: Yeah. And that's confirmation. Someone was just telling me that when they heard of the site, where mix tape. He’s going I think for his doctorate, he was like, yeah, “Manny, It'd be dope if you do this for ESL.” I was like, I never even thought of that, but yeah.

Tia Imani Hanna: Yeah. ESL, and even just kids learning. So, you can do it both ways. You can have English to a different language and then that language to English for kids learning other languages, because that's something in the United States we don't have. And we should. I keep thinking about Detroit in general. I moved back to Detroit and it's only been two years since I moved back to this area. From Lansing. And prior to that, I was in New York for a long time. But we don't have that cross cultural, language learning thing happening. We just don't, because we are Americans, we have the attitude that we don't have to do that because we're Americans. I'm like, no, we should be doing that because we are in world culture. Wouldn't it be great if Detroit became the multi-language capital of the world? Wouldn't that be great if we had something like that? Yeah. So, we need to be something else. So, maybe it's maybe that we're the arts capital. Maybe we're the multi-language capital. Maybe we're the making it happen cross-culturally capital in some way. That's one of the reasons I started this podcast, because I want to talk to the artists because we have the ideas, and we are the makers. Yeah, when you start to work on that stuff, I would definitely want to be involved.

Emmanuel Smith: Most definitely. And I'm going to hold you to it because I'm most definitely going to reach out. Yeah.

Tia Imani Hanna: Yeah. I think it would be fabulous to be able to do some of that stuff, yeah. Because there's this thing, there's so many ways to help. A lot of people learn in a way that's going to be fun for them. There's so many people who come here and they never learn how to speak the language very well and if you put music to it, it's going to help so much, it's going to help so much.

Emmanuel Smith: So, I wanted to, like, I couldn't take the name because it was a group Busta Rhymes was in, back in the day. But I think that where we're at in the city, when you mentioned the arts capital, it really made me think about the term, the leaders of the new school. I believe that the stuff like this, it's like reimagining what learning looks like reimagining what engagement in learning looks like and imagining what classroom environments look like. Where we're at right now is, we're literally re-imagining what classroom environments look like and how it's almost endless to what you can do now because you're not just in the traditional classroom setting in the school and the teacher is standing before you. Now my teachers are in front of me, on my laptop, and that’s familiar terrain for me as a kid, because it's just what I've grown up with. I've grown up with my phone and laptops and tablets. So now, it's we're on an even playing field. Now my teacher is learning from me. I'm more hip to the virtual world than my teacher is. Re-imagining what learning and education is like. Even though the circumstances are bad, it's also an exciting time to see, like, this whole shift in what the world looks like and what learning looks like. The new learners, the new world changers, like what, what can come about now? I think that we are the leaders of the new school, and not putting education and learning in a box.

Tia Imani Hanna: Yeah. the thing that I'm excited about is, I'm not excited about this COVID thing because we can only do this mostly online, that I'm not excited about. I am excited that it opened up this whole new world of doing that because we were already moving in that direction for us old-timers. We were moving that way, but it was slow. It was going to be 10 years. Easy. Now, it's right now. Yeah, so we didn't have 10 years. And they have 10 years. Okay. I'm trying to be an early adopter trying to get in there on this. I’ve got a podcast. I've got these programs that I'm not quite sure how to make them work as well. For those of you listening. we did try to have this meeting two days ago and everything crapped out on us. So, we tried again today, and I think we got it figured out today. So, all of us are moving more rapidly than we've ever had to before. It's an amazing time. It's an amazing time.

Emmanuel Smith: Most definitely. Most definitely.

Tia Imani Hanna: So how have you guys been dealing with the whole COVID thing?

Emmanuel Smith: You mean my household?

Tia Imani Hanna: At your house?

Emmanuel Smith: So, it's been a journey, but fortunately… and for some, they will look at it as fortunately, we have four kids. So, when it first started, it was like, it was like Lord of the Flies for the working people. For my work, “I have to be on this Zoom meeting.” “No Daddy! I have to be on the Zoom. I have to go to the Google classroom.” “I have to be on a Zoom meeting.” “I’m going to get the laptop first.” Until we got some laptops from the schools and stuff like that. And it was just reframing time together and working from home… and the new busy. I work in admin for a school. My wife works in admin for a school. She's a vice-principal at a school. I'll say it like this. I loved it because I felt that I was missing so much of my children's lives because it was just basically like we were the McAlister's in “Home Alone.” When you're trying to get to the airport every morning, it's who's going to go? Okay. I got the kids. Alright, come on. First stop. It's basically like a tuck n' roll so I can get to work on time and I'm picking them up late because I have to stay to work later to make sure everybody's out of the building. It was just like I imagined… it felt like I'm missing so much. Come home, eat dinner, do your homework, do your homework, do your homework, bedtime, then back at it again. I got a chance on our family nights because I'm usually the guy who is, “Let's go here. Let's go here. Let's go here. Let's go here.” And it taught… it showed me another part of living, which is like a homebody like we, we just got a new house and, if it wasn't, we wouldn't have been in a house.We would have been out somewhere, enjoying our home, enjoying our time together. Playing outside riding bikes, taking walks, like. You know, like consistently taking walks, it’s like ‘What?!’, but it's like, shoot we're gonna do something cause we're gonna go stir crazy in this house. Let's take a walk. So we've been spending more quality time together. And then just adjusting though, like to the whole Zoom life and just meeting virtually and setting parameters in the house. From, okay, when mommy and daddy are in a meeting, you all have to be doing this during the school time. Make sure that your Google Classroom stuff is done, that you turned it in, or wait, before you turn it in and let us look over it right when you submit it, and just staying focused. It's been a huge adjustment, but we've been eating better at home and spending more time and I can't complain about that. The circumstances, it really sucks, but I can't complain. I'm able to see my kids and see my wife more than what I was able to in the past. So that's the plus side for me.

Tia Imani Hanna: Yeah. So, you think that we will ever go back to how it was before, like in 2021, do you think it'll ever be the same?

Emmanuel Smith: No. No. I think that the world is striving to what I think is a divide. There's like the forward thinkers that are like, you all keep trying to go back to normal. But there is no normal, like we're not going back to that. So, it's okay, what is it going to look like? Like the forward thinkers. And I think a lot of it, it does have to do with the arts. The arts play a huge part in every big movement of the world. Soundtrack to the next phase of the world and it's exciting to see. I think it's scary for a lot of people because just like you're trailblazing, you don't know which, exactly, which way. I think that is like the unsure part, and where people are apprehensive. But, no, I don't think so. That's my long way of saying no, I don't think that we will return.

Tia Imani Hanna: Yeah, I don't think we will either. I think we're really in it now and we have to own it and, and personally, just again, like doing this podcast for me is a big leap. Yeah, it's a big leap because this is not what I trained for at all…and there's a lot of ‘hmms’ and ‘ahhs’ but it's okay. It's ‘take the leap’ and you feel good about it. And you're saying the things that you always wanted to say. And I've been very excited about things like, have you seen that program called Masterclass? That is a subscription service. And, I would have died to get that when I was 15. Yeah. When I just started reading plays and I just started really watching movies seriously. And I just started understanding how things work and how things get together and how these directors do this thing and how the lighting on this is this way. And I recently had a subscription to Masterclass and I was watching these things, I'm like, “You guys are awesome!” Because you don't know this stuff, you don't know you can do this. You don't know that they're just people that you can do this and that you are doing these things already. You don't know that until you like sit and watch people and understand how it works, that they have the same fears and the same goals and the same trepidations and the same problems. You don't realize that they're real people. Because you just, you see them on TV, and you think they're not real people, but they are. And even as an adult, you still think that.

Emmanuel Smith: And even, like, I try to be open to learn from my kids as much as possible, and yeah. My son, he's into Disney Plus “Life at the Zoo,” I think it's called, Animal Lover and, he was just telling me about all the different species of animals. That's at the Columbus Zoo and different places. What's going on and who's going to surgery for… What? And he was like, “Dad, look!” I think it was a polar bear had a messed-up molar or something and they had to have this, this dentist, this specialized dentist, come in, he's yeah, “Dad, I think that it's cool!” And I'm like, as a kid, I would never even have conceptualized being a veterinary dentist, a dentist for animals. Who knew that existed? Yeah. But like just…even through things like that, like being open and me being open to expanding my children's mind on those professions that are like those staple professions. Like those are cool, and then think, and then me, even more so, when my kids were saying, “Hey, I want to do this.” And they may sound a little wild or it's not in the box or the norm, like let’s do research on that. Let's see what it takes to be a dentist for a polar bear.

Tia Imani Hanna: Yeah, yeah, exactly. And I would, I still would never have thought of that. That's the first I've ever heard of that, but yeah, that makes sense. But wow. What's that show, “Dirty Jobs?” The world's dirtiest jobs or something. Those are all real things. There's a guy that scuba dives in the sewers of Paris in the dark through, literally, through excretion.

Emmanuel Smith: That's crazy!

Tia Imani Hanna: You're like, Really! How do you even train for that?

Emmanuel Smith: Qualifications?

Tia Imani Hanna: But, but think about that. You're scuba diving through that, but you're in pitch black with no air. So, you’re in the machine, you got your scuba gear on and stuff and you're in the dark for hours and hours. I'm sure he makes millions of dollars to do it because nobody can do it. There are only six or seven people in the world who can do it or something like that.

Emmanuel Smith: Wow!

Tia Imani Hanna: Can you imagine being that dedicated to your craft to go do that? It's yes, you get paid, but you have to survive it.

Emmanuel Smith: Definitely, medication.

Tia Imani Hanna: Yeah. So, that's amazing! But again, who would have ever thought, “That's a job?” That's insane. I would be the person who… I want to figure out how to make a robot that does that.

Emmanuel Smith: Yeah.

Tia Imani Hanna: I don't want to be down there. But just the fact that the person does it now, at some point there will be somebody saying, “I'm not going to do that. I'm going to make the robot.” Yeah. So that's a whole ‘nother thing. Because somebody did that, there's going to be another person to figure out how to go to the next level.

Emmanuel Smith: Yeah. I'm just thinking, I'm looking at this as now. I don't know why this link connection, but I'm like, in February (2020), I would have never been thinking about doing an interview with you like this in February. Just a few months ago, this wouldn't have been like…it would have been like, okay, what time do I have to meet at this point?

Tia Imani Hanna: Yes.

Emmanuel Smith: This location. I have to wear this, and I have to be mic’ed up. Is the wind going to be blowing? Is it indoor-outdoor, the lighting? And it's just we're just sitting in various parts of our homes and…

Tia Imani Hanna: Just chilling. Yeah. It's amazing. Amazing. Yeah. Because, I remember having to go to interviews at radio stations and that's the only place you could really go do this. Now I have a radio station in my phone or my laptop. That's insane. I'm really grateful for it. Really grateful for it. So, I'm interested to see what's going to happen with this in the arts. What are artists going to keep coming up with? There's going to be more and more stuff that no one…Wow! I didn't know. You could do that. So, somebody is going to see this thing and then they're going to go, “Oh, wait, I can do this.” And then it's going to just grow and this collaboration is happening. Just because of that, you don't even know you're collaborating, but you are collaborating with other people when you see these things. And then you say, I'm going to expand on that. And that excites me. I'm just like my whole life I have been trying to find people to get together and have what they used to call ‘salons’. And get together once a month and you have a potluck and you have some wine, and you talk about what you are working on? What are you doing? What does it look like? What are you painting? What are you writing? Share a piece of your novel, right? Play a part of your tune. That used to happen. Doesn't happen anymore. But now it is happening like this and that's really cool. I'm just excited to see… you're about a generation behind me, so I just go, I'm excited to see what people who are younger than me are doing. I'm like, yes, there's hope.

Emmanuel Smith: You literally took the word, like from my last interview that I did and it was with a friend of mine, Durell, goes by ‘Red’, and he's a director with the Detroit Symphony Orchestra’s Civic Youth Jazz Ensemble. He brought one of his students, 16-years- old. And just to hear her perspective on music and how it connects with life and to hear her passionately play, I believe it was a violin, and that’s what… that's literally what I said. I said there is Hope. There's hope like to see the spark in that young lady and to hear her, just how she made connections between life and jazz music. And, I was like, wow, that's dope. I'm so happy.

Tia Imani Hanna: It's amazing. And I'm so excited to hear that they have a jazz orchestra now. Beause when I was in the second year that they started the Detroit Symphony Civic Orchestra, as a violinist, the second violins…and that was back in 80, I want to say, 83, 82, 83, 1983. That was the second year it was in existence. Wow! And they didn't have jazz anything. So, I was a string player, but I'm just like, I'll just play the string stuff. I loved it. But I ended up doing jazz later, but at the time it was like, ah, this is the same thing I play all the time. So, it's exciting to me that it's expanded that far. That is still there and it's going that strongly, because so many other symphonies have gone down a lot. The Dime School of Music just went down, it’s gone. I think it went down last year. And that was the new school. So, there's just…. things in little symphony orchestras all over the country that have disappeared in the last five years. Those, they're just gone forever. We have a vibrant scene here and people don't realize it because all you hear in the news is, “Detroit is murder capital of the world, again.” But there's so much more going on than that, but almost more to us. We're proof of that. That's why we're having this podcast. Talk about that. Talk to people here, talk to people in other parts of the country and see what's going on. What's going on. I have a couple of questions. I wrote them down here that I want to, maybe if there's not really a speed round, but they're things I'm going to ask everybody at least once. What is something that you would tell your 20-year-old self or your 15-year-old self that you know now that you didn't know then?

Emmanuel Smith: My 15-year-old self, I was just growing to understand this boat. I always say this to myself, anyway, is to embrace your inner weirdo. I hope that didn't sound creepy.

Tia Imani Hanna: No, it doesn't.

Emmanuel Smith: Embrace. You embrace your ‘different’. It's okay to be a weirdo and roll with it. Everybody may not get it, but there are a lot of people that will appreciate you just being your authentic self.

Tia Imani Hanna: Yes. Okay. Good answer. All right. Role models? I want a role model from when you were 10, a role model from you when you were 15, a role model from when you're 20, and your role model now.

Emmanuel Smith: Alright. So, a role model from when I was 10, that will put me in about fifth grade. Fifth grade. So, I would say that would probably be, it was, I would say a tie between my dad and Isaiah Thomas. The Pistons. The Pistons, we were rockin’. Yes. 15. 15. I expanded, I wouldn't say it was a role model, so 15, it would be probably, I was going to say like Biggie Smalls or somebody, Camp Lo when they came out with "This is it" wasn't like a mentor, but it was, I would say they created something that it, they took that thing though. Earth, Wind, and Fire. It's you right off. That was a pivotal point. And you said 20? Yeah. So, 20, 20, it was… I cannot remember his name. But it was a professor at Wayne State University. It was, I think it was radio and television and he just opened my eyes to media, the power of media and how you should second guess pretty much everything. Don't just take it in. And he just went through how people believe, like back in the day, like with the newspapers and the radio, like everything that was said was gospel. And there was a bigger agenda at hand and that just had my brain firing like, “Oh wow, what's going on?” And I was looking up stuff. I think I'm trying to think it was still, I think, a lot of dial-up internet. So, it was still like looking up stuff. Enter, enter, enter, yeah. But, yeah, I'm so mad. I cannot remember his name, but like even the way that he presented it was very artistic. He didn't present in his class like my other professors, which were like, very quote-unquote professor. He just came out, “Look, I'm a brother from Detroit. We're about to sit down.” He didn't care who was in the room. He was his authentic self. And he was saying that how you want it to be, say it. He was giving us the lesson, how he felt that it should be given. Was like you didn't know what to expect from class to class, which kind of kept you on edge, then push you into an uncomfortable place of conflict or growth. I really made a connection with that class. Professor Todd Dunkin… really opened my mind to Detroit and the richness of Detroit and the history of this city and the press and the books and all of the writers. Hasting Street in, so yeah, that, was a pivotal point in my life, Professor Todd Dunkin.

Tia Imani Hanna: That's awesome! Yeah. Awesome. Cool. Oh, I meant to talk to you too, about the…didn't you have an Emmy nomination for your show?

Emmanuel Smith: I did. That still hasn't sunk in yet. Tia Imani Hanna: Tell me about that. What was going on with that? How did that happen?

Emmanuel Smith: The Emmy. So, I have a great opportunity to partner with the City of Detroit’s media department. And there they are the reason that my first episode of the “Mr. E” show came out. We did that on an absolute $0 budget. I'm just saying, great stuff happened from it. We ended up… we submitted for an Emmy, and we got nominated and I still, I'm like, wait a minute. I keep forgetting, this is an Emmy-nominated program. Yeah, it was so big. When I found out, I was floored. And I think, too, the reason that I was floored is because it happened in a way that I wanted it because, even though we're in a modern time, my inspirations were from like public access television, where you had the Fred Rogers and Mr. Dress-ups from Canadian broadcast had all of these things that were just on public access television and they did this world-changing stuff. Now I was like, man, that doesn't happen nowadays anymore. It's not like you're trying to get on a public access television show or whatever, but it ended up happening, and yeah. And it made moves, and I was just… I am so grateful that we were even nominated. Tia Imani Hanna: Yeah. How'd you forget that?

Emmanuel Smith: I don't know.

Tia Imani Hanna: Yeah, you have to start with that. You have to lead with that.

Emmanuel Smith: That's what I have to learn to do!

Tia Imani Hanna: To lead with that one. That “Yes, I have an Emmy-nominated television show that I produced, directed, created” … whatever, all of the things that you've done, written, performed in… “My kids are in it, my neighbor” … all these things. So, pretty amazing! It's costume design, right? So that is a pretty fabulous thing. What made you even… you just said, okay, we've got this opportunity to do a TV show and when you thought about it, like how did you sit down and go, “How do I make this work?” Did you write a script out first or did you have scriptwriters or…?

Emmanuel Smith: I'm doing better. We took, this Colby assessment that kind of like determines like your intuition in approaching things like with my work teams, I'm always like on the opposite end of the spectrum of everyone else. And I've taken it multiple times and I always end up on the opposite end of the spectrum. I'm saying that to say that I have tried and attempted to create multiple scripts. And there's always like bullet points of ideas of the scripts, but I took those bullet points and I gave it, I gave some of those ideas to the City of Detroit’s media department…a big shout out to Joe Harris and Becky Smith and Chris Moseley. Chris Mosley wrote this script. We just did a huge brain dump and we just went through it. And Joanna…we went through all of what the idea is and just talked about what it could be. What could we possibly do? What the production would look like…and the whole time I'm still doing, just sitting there, is this actually happening. Cause a lot of people, and I know that you probably are super familiar with this…Like when you're in the arts, sometimes you just have those opportunists that are always coming and they'll promise you the world. Oh, yeah. I'm going to do this for you. Yeah. We’re gonna go to the top of the mountain son, you know, just follow me, see. Just come down. I'm like, do it. If not, just don't do that. So, it was just amazing to me that this was actually, it was happening and we just… We took our ideas, Chris took them, and he created just a wonderful script talking about going to Imagination Land and just sparking that food for thought again and our young kids, you know.

Tia Imani Hanna: Yeah, that's lovely. That's lovely. yeah, that's inspiring. So, I was proud of you! What do you want to leave as a legacy for your children? What do you want them to know from you?

Emmanuel Smith: That's a great question. One of the reasons that I'm actually doing all of this, a legacy has been left… One thing that I want my kids to know is that you can always be a light. No matter how dark the world gets and if you work at it, just don't give up and you can help somebody else. It's so easy in a world that we live in to be selfish, but I'm really pushing to help my children understand the art of selflessness and giving, and not giving because it's trendy, but just like having a giving heart and being a light. And if it's done correctly, somebody is going to take that and they're going to pass that on. Yeah. Being the light and being selfless. And then, are we talking about the arts? …but like the art of just being an authentic giver? I think that's something that I would, I'm working on too. Yeah, I got super somber on that question.

Tia Imani Hanna: It was a beautiful sentiment. And you said it, really, and thank you so much, Emmanuel, so much. And where can we find you online?

Emmanuel Smith: I have “mreinthed.com.” I also have a Band Camp page, where it's “mreinthed1.bandcamp.com.” And I also have a YouTube page where you can search “mreinthed”…all one word… you can find some videos and stuff like that.

Tia Imani Hanna: So, I'll make sure that we get it all in the show notes and all your contact information. Thank you so very much for giving us your time and your wonderful energy and your arts and your skill. I appreciate it. And thanks for joining us on Tia Time with Artists.

Tia Imani Hanna: Thank you for joining us this week on Tia Time with Artists. Make sure to visit our website, tiaviolin.com, where you can subscribe to the show in iTunes and never miss an episode. Please leave us a rating wherever you listen to podcasts. We really appreciate your comments, and we'll mine them to bring you more amazing episodes.

I’d like to thank this inaugural season's sponsors: The folks at Jazz Alliance of Mid-Michigan or JAMM, Michigan ArtShare, a program of Michigan State University Extension is a partner in supporting the Tia Time podcast, and Shambones Music. Without their support this podcast would not be possible. Thank you so much. If you would also like to contribute to the show, you can find us on https://www.patreon.com/TiaTime1.

If you want to continue the conversation about topics discussed on the show or start new ones with like-minded people, join us at the Tia Time Lounge on Facebook.

Thank you for listening. See you next week at Tia Time!

+ Transcription

Tia Time with Artists, with guest Carolyn Koebel – recorded on 8/21/2020

Tia Imani Hanna: Welcome to Tia Time with Artists, the weekly podcast where we discuss the methods, challenges, and real-life experiences of living our creative dreams. What kind of creative warrior are you? Musician? Filmmaker? Painter? Choreographer? Poet? Sculptor? Fashionista? Let's talk about it right now. I'm your host, Tia Imani Hanna.

Tia Imani Hanna: Welcome! Welcome to Tia Time. Carolyn Koebel, you are the most amazing percussionist I've ever worked with. And I'm so glad to have you on my show. So, thank you for coming today.

Carolyn Koebel: Thank you for developing and creating this show. It's amazing. I'm so excited.

Tia Imani Hanna: We never get to talk because we never get to see each other, hardly ever. Very rarely do we even get to work together anymore. It's just too busy with COVID happening. It doesn't happen that often. So, this is a treat for me. So, thank you for coming again. I developed it [this podcast] so that we could have more outlets to talk about music and arts and inspiration and… what is it that makes us tick? What is it that makes us want to do this stuff in the first place? And what is it that makes us want to keep doing it? Even though we have to try to figure out how to pay the bills, and play the gigs we don't want to play, and all of that kind of stuff, but, that's basically the general idea of the show. I just thought I'd just get people that I knew on and we talk about things like, for instance, what were you a pots and pans baby? Were you in the kitchen playing the pots and pans and mom was like ‘knock it off’? Did you start with the percussion thing or did you start on a different instrument?

Carolyn Koebel: Yeah. You know what? I really think that I did start on guitar first because of my environmental exposure in the rural area of Michigan, where I was growing up, was actually the country music phenomena was what life offered me. And I saw a lot of women playing guitar. So, I identified with that very early on and wanted to, just gravitated toward wanting to express in that same manner. And, then we had a… at the Sunday school where I attended, we had an interim minister whose wife sang and played guitar in church. And I saw her as my ticket to musical expression and I began to gently plead with my parents to get me some lessons from her so I could learn to play guitar. And the journey into percussion actually began when I saw my sister's first band concert, which was like, literally, the only cultural event in town. It wasn't that it was even good, but it was the available resource. And for whatever reason, my sister chose clarinet. And when I heard her squeaking and playing that thing in the house, I absolutely knew there was no way I wanted to inherit that instrument. And, in families where you don't have a lot of extra resources, I just had this kind of bad feeling that somehow, I was going to get funneled towards the clarinet. And so, I began to scheme in my mind how to get out of this. And we went to hear her band concert and that was my first exposure in life. At that point, I was, I don't know, seven or eight or something, and I experienced the music and the musical instruments of a typical high school band ensemble. And the thing that immediately fascinated me was the percussion section because everyone else… there were many people playing flutes, many people playing clarinets, plenty of trumpets. And there were a few people in the back, playing percussion. And when it was time to play, they each got to do their own thing. And that really grabbed a hold of me. And I thought, why would anyone choose anything else? If you play back there, you get to play bass drums, and cymbals and those timpani and xylophones and snares and make all kinds of noise. I want to do that. The rest is herstory. And I began to bug my parents for a drum and I literally got a snare drum for Christmas in fourth grade, which was somewhat to me, like the least creative drum they could have chosen. I thought, what do I do with that? So, I said, “I don't know what to do with this. I need drum lessons.” I didn't understand it. Wasn't like it was a hand drum or a djembe or something you would just, like, go up to and start grooving on. It was this obtuse, formal thing that I knew, “Oh, you have to use sticks.” I don't have a stick technique. I don't know how to do that cool stuff to make it sound like I would want it to sound. And so, we found this ‘character’ who agreed to teach me. So, I took lessons from him for a couple of years, and we did the rudimental military snare drum journey. And by the time I got into the band… the band program didn't actually start until sixth grade. By the time I got to band, I was already as good as all the high schoolers. So, I became the section leader and I like realized, “Oh gosh, this is... this is the ceiling of my experience in this particular community and environment.” And, just got involved with honors bands and regional all-conference experiences where I met other musicians who were similarly motivated and I realized, okay, the people in my local pond are just… they're going along for the ride, but they're not invested in it; it doesn't mean the same thing to them that it means to me. Something different in me is awakened and enlivened through the vehicle and the expression of music and, in particular, drums and percussion. So that was, yeah, how that all unfolded. And I still play guitar. I kept playing guitar and it came back around in, in my collegiate studies when I had to figure out what to do with my life. And I thought, how on earth do you make a living playing the drums? I said, “I don't really want to be a band director. I don't want to play in a rock band.” And, I want something more than that and I found music therapy, which brought me back to the guitar and singing and studying all the music of the world, as well as moving into ethnomusicology, world percussion, and beginning to understand that percussion, as an instrument and as a vehicle of expression, had so much more depth and expressive capacity outside of Western culture. So that really set me on the path I've been on for the last 25 years.

Tia Imani Hanna: So, your parents were at least supportive enough to get you the lessons and they get you a drum and so did, at some point in there, did they say, “Okay, what are you doing? We are… you're this crazy kid that we have. What are you doing?” Because were other kids in your family doing anything on this level or was it just you.

Carolyn Koebel: No. By then the clarinet was ancient history and stuffed in a closet somewhere. And I was just the lonely black sheep sitting in the other room of the house, tapping away on my beats with a metronome and practicing classical guitar and other things, and just, I don't know, I found my own little inner world.

Tia Imani Hanna: Okay. All right. And so, were you reaching out to other musicians that you found, or did you write to people? How did you find other niches outside of your community at this point? You had the regional groupings, you said regional bands, and things that you got involved in that your parents took you to those things, or you just hopped a ride with a friend or you had a car by this time or…?

Carolyn Koebel: Some combination. Maybe there would be, maybe two or three of us from the local band community and we would carpool. We would recruit whoever's mom would take us there and somebody else's mom would pick us up. Or sometimes, even the band director himself was so excited that somebody wanted to do this, that he was always extremely helpful and supportive too.

Tia Imani Hanna: Okay. good. I'm just curious because everybody's story is so different. Like how did you do this? How did you get to this point? Because that's the part nobody ever talks about. And I'm always curious about that because I didn't drive until I was 25 years old, until after I graduated from college. So, I always had to get rides from people all the time after high school. Because my dad was really great. He drove me to all of the different orchestra rehearsals that I was in, in the evenings. And I was really lucky that way. But anything outside of that, I had to finagle. Friends and friends of friends, how am I going to get there? Mom can drop me off. If this friend brings me there and then takes me there. That I can...that sort of thing. And how do you get there? I don't know. I don't drive. So, it's just some of those secrets that people don't realize. Yeah, this is not miraculous. This is work. You have to figure it out if you really want to do it.

Carolyn Koebel: Even in order to have drum lessons, my mom got a job doing house cleaning for people, she had a few different clients that she cleaned house for. And I know that was where she got her petty cash to pay for my lessons. So, as I got older and I understood what was happening, I went with her and I helped her do her job. I understood, okay, this is something she's totally doing this for my benefit because she sees that this is important to me. So, maybe I can find a way, I wanted to contribute and participate, and I ended up with summer jobs so I could buy a car and start to take responsibility for my own transportation as I was able to as well.

Tia Imani Hanna: Sure. it's like all of this ingenuity, the creativity that we already have, and then you have to use the ingenuity and the creativity to figure out how am I going to make this dream into a reality. So, even at a young age, you're doing this and its part of what develops into your wanderlust. Like you, you travel the world now. So, how am I going to go to China? It was a couple of years ago you were in China, on tour, doing… is that your second or third time doing that? Or… you went on a world tour…

Carolyn Koebel: Yeah, we started in 2013, and we went back and forth for about four years while the season and the cycle were good. And then it ran its course, and we were hoping to go back, but it's always… it's always challenging with international relations and in the current environment, of course, it's not even feasible. Tia Imani Hanna: Yeah, with COVID, you can't do much of anything at this point, but in the past, it’s just… you studied with…on your webpage you talk about African drumming, South American drumming, Taiko drumming, and roots music in between, improvisational jazz. Did you seek… how did you seek out these different styles? Did you just listen to a lot of different people or what did you do?

Carolyn Koebel: What tended to happen is, I got funneled into a Western orchestral percussion course of study and it was, in a certain sort of way, pure torment for me. Because this was not like an innate musical language. It wasn't even something I had an initial attraction to and the role of percussion in a lot of our traditional symphonic repertoire is very conservative. I thought, there is just no way I want to spend my life counting rests and then playing for my magical 16 bars of music. I want to play. I want to play more music than that. So in school, when we were studying, principally ethnomusicology, where we're listening to music from so many different cultural traditions, and it really clicked in me at that moment that percussionists in other cultures were central and paramount to the music and they got to do a lot more than just be the timekeeper and the metronome for the ensemble. They got to play sometimes by themselves, like the whole ensemble is nothing but drums and percussion.

Tia Imani Hanna: Amazing..

Carolyn Koebel: A drum orchestra. Come on, Carolyn, do I want to be in a string orchestra playing suspended cymbal? Or do I want to be in a drum orchestra playing djembe and dun dunes or surdo or Taiko drums? Shime daiko. Then, just the whole world opened before me and I said, “I want to do all of that. I want to learn everything about drumming on the planet. And I want to go see, hear, feel, taste, and meet the people who are doing this and learn as much as possible with the time I have.”

Tia Imani Hanna: Sure. Was there any one particular drummer, or even more than one particular drummer, that you've met or studied with that really inspired you, that kind of set you in a particular direction?

Carolyn Koebel: Yes, I guess there's really two. And the first was in the context of a music therapy conference, we had a keynote performer. And this individual happened to be internationally renowned, the frame drum virtuoso, Glen Velez. And nobody taught us about Glen Velez. He was never even mentioned anywhere in the course of my experience and education. And this guy gets introduced, and I'm like Glen Velez! He walks onto the stage with a frame drum and his voice and two hands, no sticks. Here he is with a simple hoop drum and the most complex and amazing set of techniques using his fingers on the drum to elicit an incredible array of sounds and tonal, melodic materials from a very simple instrument. And after I saw that I knew that's what I want to do. You know, why, how do I, where do I go? I should. I need to go to Cal Arts. I need to meet, leave the place I'm at, and go find this man and these people in the world where this is happening because I need to be doing this. It spoke to me on such a deep level. And afterward, I literally… there was a reception. He was walking around. We were all walking around. So, I walked up to this very approachable, incredible musician and asked him how I could learn to do what I saw him doing. And he said, “I'll be here until tomorrow at four o'clock and then my flight leaves. So, if you want to get together for a lesson tomorrow afternoon, here's my number.”

Tia Imani Hanna: Wow!

Carolyn Koebel: Yeah! So, you better believe that's where I was the next day! And that began, like, a trend. That was a truly transformational moment because I stayed in contact with him. And then I followed what he was doing. Where was he teaching? Where was he performing? What workshops was he giving and how could I continue to study with him? So, I followed him to a week-long workshop in Vermont a year later. And from there we developed a workshop in Michigan and which he came to teach for four weekends over the course of 12 months. And we assembled a small group of 10 to 12 percussionists. We all agreed we wanted to do this intensive with him and he agreed to come here and teach us.

Tia Imani Hanna: Wonderful.

Carolyn Koebel: So, that was just unbelievable to spend time, in concentrated togetherness, over the course of a weekend, and learn and absorb so much about the history and the art, and to understand his techniques. We're all informed by traditional music from other cultures, so he's seen as a synthesist. He created a hybrid fusion style based on his study of traditional South Indian Redondo music and study of Arabic music, Egyptian Riq techniques and all these other styles of Kanjira and Pandeiro and world percussion styles. And he reimagined them for lap-style frame drum, which is a unique non-culturally oriented vehicle. It's like the frame drum itself appears in nearly every culture of the world. There are different and unique playing styles from one place to the next. And he even created more of his own playing style in which he incorporated and brought all these different techniques together in his own unique synthesis, which has been inspirational to me because it's never been my goal to emulate and exactly repeat what he's already doing, but to take his approach and to develop my own organic relationship to this instrument and find ways to incorporate it into my music therapy work, my performance work, and as an accompaniment tool for songwriting and the voice.

Tia Imani Hanna: That's so amazing! Amazing thing.

Carolyn Koebel: He was number one guy, and the second would be the incredible jazz drummer, Hamid Drake, who is best known for his duo work with William Parker. Absolute masters of the New York and international jazz scene. And Hamid is a commanding drum set player. But what you learn about him behind the scenes, is he is a full-on master of hand percussion, and world percussion, and just the language of rhythm. And he can play North Indian tabla. He is extremely accomplished on the frame drum, the family of instruments. He knows Glen Velez. He has studied all of the same techniques. He's a wonderful djembe and conga player. So, seeing him do the full gamut and embrace the totality of percussion was the next piece of inspiration for me. Okay, I love Glen's real extreme specialization within what he's doing. And then to see Hamid, removing all bounds and barriers, and he's an incredible singer. So, he would just be playing and then you would hear an absolutely commanding vocal presence come into the music he was creating and he's singing. And I thought there it is. The complete and total expression, and there is just no separation. Those two individuals together, they have been so inspirational to me.

Tia Imani Hanna: I can see the effect of it. Because I've heard you when you sing and play, and you don't sing that much. I'm going to… I'm going to shake and wag my finger at you because every time we've played together, I always want you to sing more than you do, but you won't do it in front of the mic. And I'm like, “Get on the mic! Get on the mic!” Because you’ll singing this incredible stuff that you can barely hear. Especially if we go back to the recording, you're going to hear you in the background very quietly singing. And I'm like, no, so I would love… so just reproving you… for the future, you're going to be singing some more on the mic.

Carolyn Koebel: Ok. Mama. Ok. I’m almost ready. I do it, except in public, on the mic.

Tia Imani Hanna: It's what you were saying about Hamid. It's the whole thing. You've got all of those pieces and then that's the last piece. It's sometimes I just want that piece to come out, because it makes the whole bigger and better, longer. So just, that, I bow to you there. You sound great, so I want more of it. Carolyn Koebel: Okay. Noted. I will do my best to rise to the occasion.

Tia Imani Hanna: All right. So, you got inspired and you learned all of these different things and you're traveling the world and you're picking up new stuff and then you end up doing music therapy. Now, how did that come into the mix?

Carolyn Koebel: Initially, it was a combination of reasonings and decision-making processes. So, I was super interested in music medicine, physical therapy, and occupational therapy and was leaning towards pursuing a degree in physical therapy when I stumbled upon music therapy in that process. And I thought, the thing that makes me sad about the idea of physical therapy is that I'm not sure how and where music would fit into my life if I choose that trajectory. So, I didn't truly understand what music therapy was, but I signed up for it because I thought, gosh, it says music in it; it has therapy in it. It's gotta be like something like physical therapy but combined with music. I'm in. So, fortunately for me, I had all this background with guitar, because I needed a principal accompanying instrument and I needed to sing, which I had always done, but not very publicly. But I grew up singing in church and just in invisible ways where I had developed at least some level of competence and music therapy allowed me to… actually I still combined my studies and did percussion performance because I absolutely wanted to reach my personal best level of proficiency and gain as much skill and knowledge and technique within the world of percussion as I could. What I did not anticipate was the way that those backgrounds would be so complimentary that they allowed me to actually evolve my career into a specialization of rhythm-based music therapy work and to combine all my interests and unique areas of inquiry into something much greater than either one in isolation. And over even the past 20 some years I've developed, oh, a ton of curriculum and workshops and continuing education programs and platforms, and during the COVID realm, I've really been sitting with all of this and looking at what else I can do and what else can I offer to my community and to the music ed community, the music therapy community, and to individuals, in general, who want to develop a relationship with the drum. Who wants to connect to it, to be able to express through it, to use it as a tool, for mindfulness, for self-help, for relaxation, for personal expression, expansion, creation, activity, stress release, all of these kinds of things. So, it led me into community drum circle facilitation, as well as teaching internationally and sharing my own integration and synthesis of facilitation strategies based on my work in improvisational models of music therapy and improvisational music with people, much like you, Ms. Tia, and other musicians that I've been blessed to collaborate with, who absolutely live fully in the art of improvisation. So, combining those expressive modalities and becoming quite a bit more involved in teaching than I ever imagined. I didn't ever go to school wanting to be a music educator, but I'm absolutely a music educator, but I don't have a degree in that. But having the degrees that I do have has uniquely positioned me to teach world music for one university and to teach world percussion skills for a number of music therapy programs, and to do and develop more opportunities through online and distance learning as those programs have been in strong development since around 2012 and are, of course, flourishing in whole new ways in the current pandemic era.

Tia Imani Hanna: Are those programs that you've developed specifically to be in place for COVID or you just expanded them because of COVID into an online realm?

Carolyn Koebel: It's both actually. So, a couple of them have been physical in-person programs that we've had to shift onto virtual platforms and the others, as part of a distance learning master's program I work in, have been online the entire time.

Tia Imani Hanna: Okay. Okay. What is that like? Are you doing any of the music therapy in long-distance ways? Or is it just the teaching at the university level?

Carolyn Koebel: Yeah. For the most part, music therapy is still in-person. So, most of my work over the past 15-20 years has been hospice-based. So, I'm working in end-of-life care and music in facilities, elder care types of environments and home care as well. So, doing bedside music in home environments, and a ton of work in at-risk youth programs through the vehicle of drum and dance. So, hauling in a van load of djembes, I go in with the drums, my collaborator who is a dance movement person comes in and we just transform the space into a transformative healing ritual, giving these kids a chance to really express themselves somatically and to be embodied and to just get connected to their emotional worlds and back in their bodies after of all the things they've been experiencing and the types of challenges and struggles they've seen.

Tia Imani Hanna: Yeah, that's impressive. And I've seen you work with kids. You came and did that program with me years ago, up in Lansing. Made the drums, and then they played, and they had the best time ever. You explained how all the drums worked and they couldn't get enough of it. So, it's one lovely thing to see, the kids get excited about something because a lot of times, kids are apathetic and, like, I'm not excited about anything. Nothing excites me. I'm too cool for that. So, it's nice to see them get excited about something.

Carolyn Koebel: Yeah. That's a tough thing because with COVID we're not able to do the in-person in the same way. And quite a lot is lost if you move that into the virtual realm. I just think you lose the vibrational aspect of it and you lose something about the feeling of safety is different on a screen. If you're all in an enclosed space together, vulnerability and group rapport is more tangible and manageable, but the screen world is a degree of separation that is a bit challenging to have that same level of connectivity.

Tia Imani Hanna: Yeah, it is. Definitely is. The rapport is going to be different and the responses are going to be different because the feeling is not there the same way. Yeah, that makes sense. So, when you're working from home now, you're still doing some musical therapy out in the field, but not really, or just here and there with a mask on?

Carolyn Koebel: Yep. We're just… over the past couple of months we've been able to. We did have a time of transitioning into telehealth, which meant we were offering our visits and our services only primarily over the phone due to limitations of available equipment. Most of the people that we are calling are in a nursing home or a private home or in hospice. A good majority of the clients we're serving are elder clients and they don't have access to iPads, or they don't know how to turn on FaceTime on a cell phone. These are not part of their generation in the same way. So, we lose some of the contemporary tools, are just not as viable. So, we're doing things on the other side of the phone, which loses a lot of dimensionality. So, we are fortunately reentering the in-person physical realm and using masks and using PPE where needed to whatever level is mandated. Everyone has to be tested for COVID. I have to be tested weekly. I have to have my temperature check taken before I enter any sites and facilities. And we're also monitoring the people that we're visiting and making sure, you know, that they're healthy, so we know whether or not we're at an exposure risk when we do go into those environments.

Tia Imani Hanna: Okay. What does PPE stand for?

Carolyn Koebel: Personal protective equipment.

Tia Imani Hanna: Okay.

Carolyn Koebel: Masks and gowns and shields and gloves and all these various things hoods and…

Tia Imani Hanna: Everything. Sure.

Carolyn Koebel: Yeah. The human bubble kind of factor.

Tia Imani Hanna: Were you, at any point, locked down for this? Because I know I work part-time at FedEx, or I should say full-time at FedEx, and so we were at work the entire time. I never got locked down and same thing, we have to be temperature checked, make sure you're checked for everything and wash your hands and clean your stations and keep masked all the time and all of that. And, luckily, we haven't had any occurrences of anybody at work at all through the whole time. But were you locked down at all?

Carolyn Koebel: Yes, actually. When we went to virtual online at the university. So, then we were teaching at that point, teaching online from home. So yeah, I did end up being personally just due to logistics. I was working from home up until July. So, March 13th until July, I had almost no outer world employment. All of my gigs got canceled, even the ones that got rescheduled to be outdoor events also got canceled. And my last gig of the season that I thought would be an active outdoor gig got moved, and we're going to video it and it's becoming a virtual video.

Tia Imani Hanna: Yeah, understood. Yeah. Have you been composing during this time?

Carolyn Koebel: I have composed many thoughts. I will tell you that, and I have worked on gaining composure, but it has been really rough. And, fortunately for me, I'm an outdoor person and a swimmer. So, starting in May, I just started my daily mental health regimen of swimming every day. And I have not missed a day yet. And I'm not gonna miss a day until around October 20th when it gets too cold.

Tia Imani Hanna: Understood.

Carolyn Koebel: So I am managing my mental health through physical engagement and I've been finishing, well, attempting to finish, four different recording projects.

Tia Imani Hanna: Ah, Goodness.

Carolyn Koebel: So that has really been… yeah, that's been where I was able to put my creative energy. It’s a new improvisational release with bassist Dave Sharp and oud player Igor Houwat, super fabulous. And we recorded a session that you can definitely relate to. We went in the studio and just hit record for a period of about four hours on one day in 2017. And then the files have been living on a hard drive, waiting for us to decide, gee, what should we do with this material? So, I started pouring over it in the spring. And when I was able to go back in person into the studio with masks, everyone's wearing masks in the studio space, then we started editing and mixing the albums. Just, I would say within a month or two, just finishing, mixing, and making some artistic decisions about content. And then a project… the one that's been, the most difficult to finish was the project with the Dasha Bridges Group, which was a quartet, a female quartet, based out of Kalamazoo with singer-songwriter, Dasha Bridges who moved back to this area from Stuttgart, where she had been a successful, very established European artist for about 25 years. She had a wonderfully diverse and successful musical career there and genre-bender for sure. She did new metal and dance electronica and pop-rock, folk, and came back to the States and put together a group here with percussion, violin, bass, and herself on vocals and guitar. And we were mid-flight on our album, and this would have been our collective debut album. She had several other albums already out, but she ended up, just having an absolutely unexpected brain aneurysm last summer. And she and I played our gig for the opening night of the Traverse City Film Fest. she was staying up at the festival to network and she was also working on a film that she was shopping to the fest, a documentary project she's been quite involved with. And yeah, we said goodbye, hugged each other goodbye. Had a great time, played a wonderful set. And I drove home and two days later I got a call that she had been found dead.

Tia Imani Hanna: I didn't know that.

Carolyn Koebel: Yes. And the autopsy revealed, yeah, just a sudden brain aneurysm.

Tia Imani Hanna: Oh, that's awful.

Carolyn Koebel: So it really did a number on everything creatively that I had in store for years to come. Like, what we were building together was the most ambitious and mutually satisfying artistic project I've worked on in a very long time, if not ever, with somebody who had very much a shared work ethic, shared intention, and just incredible camaraderie and respect. I can only say that she was just a dedicated artist and had so many plans. She had a wonderful Leonard Cohen tribute show that we were putting together with the Kalamazoo Symphony Orchestra and a series of other projects. And she had already sent the single from the album to her contacts in the industry. They were like, yep, we love it. Send us the whole album. We want to release this. So, we had, a plan. We were putting together a plan to develop a European tour and go back and do some of the circuits she had been playing and, yeah, the rug got pulled out from under us. We all fell into deep abysmal grief and, and then there was this album lying around and we're… it's heartbreaking to even work on it, much less to not do something with it. So, fortunately, the amazing engineer here in Kalamazoo, Ian Gorman at La Luna Studios, he had seen us perform. He absolutely loved the band. We did double bills with his project, Red Sea Pedestrians, and other groups. And he said “I want to help you guys finish this project. What do we need to do?” And so, he has just been awesome and benevolent and generous and probably wiped our tears in the studio and held us up when we didn't want to keep going forward. And he and I have been really fine-tuning the mixes the last several weeks. And we just… he's uploading the master today, actually, for the duplicator. So, we're doing the virtual release to mark what should have been her 47th birthday, September 15th. So, we're doing an online release on Band Camp and then a physical release as well, for a limited copy, mostly for family and friends. Yeah, so that's been huge. That has just been a huge project. And it's an EP. It's not a full album because she didn't have all her tracks finished. We thought we had more time. And we used… we finished everything that we had, final vocals for and we had to let some really killer stuff go because we just couldn't compromise the score. We couldn't put out scratch tracks of stuff that we knew would not be up to her standard. So that's, yeah, that's just been really a… it's been a brain scrambler because it was the thing that I was really moving towards and motivated around artistically. And it's been… basically, it's been erased. It's not a choice. It's not a possibility anymore. And as artists, we constantly have to flex and reimagine ourselves and shape-shift and move into the next space and form. It's just what we do. It's the way that we move through grief and… the difficulty is that we create something new out of it and we become something new as a result of it. And maybe, Tia, it's like you said, maybe it will propel me to do more of my solo work. Maybe it will help me to be… to take more risks as a performer and share more of my own writing and my own singing. And, also just to continue to, like I said, to keep releasing projects, I'm not one to sit on things endlessly out of OCD, perfectionistic tendencies. A lot of artists don't release albums because they're just paralyzed by OCD. Like they can't let something be finished. And that, to me, is the greatest detriment to our own creative propulsion. For me, it's documenting this collaborative experience and this moment in time, and I'm not going to be the same person a year from now, much less a day from now, or next week. I constantly am bombarded by life-changing experiences because I’ve tried to live as a very present individual and I'm deeply impacted by other people around me and what they're going through. It touches me and it affects me, and I change my own trajectory and actions because of it. If my friend just gets diagnosed with terminal cancer, I get to throw something else out the window and figure out what can I do to be of support to this person, here and now, who's been so central in my life? And we are constantly juggling these things and still, inside of it, there is a… there is an expressive agent of creativity that makes, makes it possible to keep moving forward. The, gosh, the words of Joe Biden over the last several days in the Democratic Convention after I didn't know a lot about his life story. I didn't realize the depth of his personal losses and life experience, but he really stated that the way that he's gotten through traumatic loss and deep sorrow is to always have a sense of purpose and to reconnect to what his sense of purpose is in life. And one thing that you and I have talked about a lot over the years is one of our purposes in being musicians and artists is to create experiences with and for other people, impressively.

Tia Imani Hanna: That’s right.

Carolyn Koebel: I don't want to be a famous musician that's idolized and people think, “Oh my gosh, she's so amazing.” I want to be a ‘salt of the earth’ musician who changes the molecules in the air, in the room, in the space, and people who are in that space together walk out and they're changed by the experience they just had. And that is the most challenging thing about COVID, that we can't be in the same space together, you know.

Tia Imani Hanna: True.

Carolyn Koebel: And I don't love playing on a screen and posting a video. It's wonderful to hear and receive feedback from people who say, “Thank you for posting those videos.” Because honestly, it feels way less than satisfying. But every now and then, every now and then, I'm like… I just… I'm compelled to do it for my own sanity. And then people will say, “Thank you. I needed that today.” And so, we know that even though it's compromised, it's still significant. It's still important. And, even more important, is that we do what we need to do as a collective humanity so that we can be together again in time and space because we know that's the essential place where music is made is in this moment, in this here and now, and we co-create the energy of the space with those listeners and audience members who participate in the experience with us.

Tia Imani Hanna: Yeah. Yeah. Couldn't have said that better. Yeah. It’s that thing about what we do and, like you said, we've talked about it many times it's like, what do we want to leave the world with? And it's, well, I always think of it as sound, to put the sound out in the world. It reverberates out and it's still going once it leaves you. It never stops. It's still moving through space forever. Because we don't know how big space is. It's still going. It's still going. It's still going. So, even when we're gone, what we created is still going. And so, if we're creating good art, which to me, good art is creating an energy of goodness, of health, of love, of stability, of safety, of growth, of spiritual awakening. If we create that in our bubble of art, whatever that art is, and we send it out through sound, even through movement… because that also creates ripples… is it's going to go out there forever. So, I tell everyone every day. People say, “What do we do? What do we do?” I say, “Make art. Make art. Make art.”

Carolyn Koebel: Axe'! Aho! Yes!

Tia Imani Hanna: I just feel like I'm just repeating what you just said and it's… so we're on the same page there.

Carolyn Koebel: Absolutely. Absolutely. Yeah, art, art is affirming and connecting. Art, meaning all the expressive arts, not limited to musical and sonic arts, but this greater body of collective artistry is so important. Yes. To all of the wellbeing of all our souls, our collective humanity really needs these expressions.

Tia Imani Hanna: It does. It does, especially now. So, with all of… with COVID happening, we can't meet in the same places, but then we also have the Black Lives Matter thing going on and we've got the racial fight going on in the country that's come to a head. It's not like it's new. It's not like… but it's… people are actually talking about that. And how has that affected you in your life? How has… what have you been thinking about that whole thing that's been going on?

Carolyn Koebel: It's absolutely necessary and whatever we need to do to move forward and to find a new and better collective way that honors and acknowledges all the wrongdoing and all the harm. And I've been very blessed and fortunate in that I did choose percussion and good majority of my artistic life, I've been working with people from backgrounds very different from mine, whose skin color is very different from mine. And we have had the most beautiful, connective relationships and understanding, and it shows me on every level what's actually possible. And it really makes it hard for me to understand why we cannot get this together as a collective whole. What it is that people are so biased against and so brainwashed about? I've really had to look at the dysfunction in our education system and the ways in which history has been rewritten and the whitewashing of really significant things. The whole system needs an overhaul. And I see it in certain communities much more than others, depending on who is programming what and how these things are manipulated. But the more that we wake up to this and tune into it, the more we need to unravel it, undo it, and rebuild something equitable.

Tia Imani Hanna: Okay. It's a tense time. Everybody's stressed out. I'm glad that you've been taking care of your mental health and your physical health and that you're still doing the work that you feel like you need to do. You're creating art and you're helping people with music therapy. So, thank you for doing that. I'm looking forward to hearing some of this music that you've got. So, where can people find you online or find out about these new CDs that are coming out or any passing needs that you have?

Carolyn Koebel: Sure. I will say, like I said, I decided actually about eight years ago that I was just going to start releasing art. I was not going to sit on it and put out an album once every ten years. I was going to make stuff and put it out there in the world. That's what painters do. That's what others do? You got to just let it go. You gotta let it go. So, during COVID, since I was pent up in my singular dwelling, I said, “Okay, this is ridiculous. I got to get my online catalog together.” Because people actually started messaging me, “Hey, where can I go download your music?” “I need to… I need some music to teach my online dance class.” “Where can I get some tracks?” Okay, this is silly. I need to get this together. So, I got my entire catalog organized on Band Camp, so “Carolyn Koebel at band camp” page. Absolutely all the best stuff is there. There are a few missing parts and pieces, but nothing that you need to know about. So, just go there and browse away. You'll see two of my projects that are nearest and dearest to my heart called “Honoring the Passage” and “Voices from Hospice Music Therapy.” I released one project in 2014 and then the follow-up late last fall which was “Honoring the Passage II,” songs for moving through grief and loss, contributions from many music therapists working in end-of-life care, as well as some of my own pieces. And, on my website, CarolynKoebel.com there's a variety of things that you can browse there, but I absolutely invite you to visit Bandcamp. I've got things posted there for free, things posted for ‘pay what you want’. Things posted for an incredibly affordable rate. It just gets the music out there. There's composed music, improvised music and a little of everything. Definitely something for everyone. Tons of music that it's great for modern dance and just for movement and yoga.

Tia Imani Hanna: Thank you so much, Carolyn, for giving me your time today, and giving your art. It is great to talk to you as always.

Carolyn Koebel: Yes, indeed. All right. You be well. Much love. Peace.

Tia Imani Hanna: Thank you for joining us this week on Tia Time with Artists. Make sure to visit our website, tiaviolin.com, where you can subscribe to the show in iTunes and never miss an episode. Please leave us a rating wherever you listen to podcasts. We really appreciate your comments, and we'll mine them to bring you more amazing episodes.

I’d like to thank this inaugural season's sponsors: The folks at Jazz Alliance of Mid-Michigan or JAMM, Michigan ArtShare, a program of Michigan State University Extension is a partner in supporting the Tia Time podcast, and Shambones Music. Without their support this podcast would not be possible. Thank you so much. If you would also like to contribute to the show, you can find us on https://www.patreon.com/TiaTime1.

If you want to continue the conversation about topics discussed on the show or start new ones with like-minded people, join us at the Tia Time Lounge on Facebook.

Thank you for listening. See you next week at Tia Time!

+ Transcription

Tia Time with Artists, with guest Naima Shamborguer – recorded on 7/11/20

Tia Imani Hanna: Welcome to Tia Time with Artists, the weekly podcast where we discuss the methods, challenges, and real-life experiences of living our creative dreams. What kind of creative warrior are you? Musician? Filmmaker? Painter? Choreographer? Poet? Sculptor? Fashionista? Let's talk about it right now. I'm your host, Tia Imani Hanna.

Tia Imani Hanna: Today's guest is one of my favorite people in the world. My aunt, Naima Shamborguer, who is a world-renowned jazz vocalist or vocal stylist, educator, performer. She is here to talk to me about her life and her skills and her new projects and her old projects and just to share some of her amazing bad-ass Jazz Warrior Goddess-ness. So welcome Naima!

Naima Shamborguer: Thank you. That's nice, thank you. I love that.

Tia Imani Hanna: One of the things that we're talking about on this program is just about what is it about the art form that you chose to express yourself in? What about music was the thing, or what about jazz music specifically? Because I believe you started in classical music. Can you tell me some about that?

Naima Shamborguer: What about jazz music? Should I go back to before the crib?

Tia Imani Hanna: Yes. Go back as far as you like. The microphone is all yours.

Naima Shamborguer: Well, I was born into a musical family. So, I always tell people ‘from the crib’. The music has been in my life, in my head. I was born into music. I was, influenced by many people in my family who were professional musicians. And, from that, I studied and sang classical music, spiritual music. R&B. We did all types of music, but, it was the family background that really got me going and, the family concerts and all the children being a part of it, and the piano lessons and all those type things, along with dance lessons too, which helped me with a good sense of rhythm. And so, it was pretty much that. And through the years, from the classical, the gospel, the music that I performed, I decided I would go on to jazz music because that's the music where I can go into being myself, improvise. I can sing what I hear because once you sing it, you don't do it again. That's jazz and that's what I like about it. And, influenced by many musicians, famous jazz musicians, like Miles Davis and Freddie Hubbard, those trumpet players I really love. And I love trombone players who I'm influenced by people like Steve Turre, Steve Davis, JJ Johnson. I'm a listener of instrumental musicians a lot because that's what influences my singing and helped to me to go into what I call obligatos, which is a classical thing you do when you're singing the choirs and they have these obligato high voices over the tones and over what the choir is singing, but you learn a lot from that too. So, all these influences brought me here today. I’m doing what I love best.

Tia Imani Hanna: Okay. I know a lot of parents starting out now with their kids, they start them as young as three or four years old or so, the same idea of starting them young, because of your family, or our family I should say, you started out just because it was in the air anyway, but what instrument did you start on? Did you start singing first or did you just start on a different instrument?

Naima Shamborguer: I started on piano, but I did start singing first, too.

Tia Imani Hanna: Okay.So why did you decide to stop playing the piano at a certain time?

Naima Shamborguer: Yeah, I studied the piano till I was about 10 years old. And then, I went on and started just singing in school, got into glee club, got into the choir, got into the Troubadours in high school, which was a group that I sang with. It was a high school group. Got into WJR radio “Make Way for Youth” chorus. From there, I, in fact, went back to classical. I was in the Rackham Symphony choir with Detroit Symphony Orchestra for several years before I moved to California.

Tia Imani Hanna: We're spanning such a large time period here. I'm getting confused a little bit, so let's go back to the very beginning. So, let's say, you started with piano lessons and you studied at school or you had private lessons or where did you start?

Naima Shamborguer: I had private lessons, piano. Okay.

Tia Imani Hanna: And where did you study? Was that a school-based program or...?

Naima Shamborguer: That's Robert Nolan School, a music school in Detroit.

Tia Imani Hanna: Was that a fairly well-known school in Detroit.

Naima Shamborguer: Sure was. Robert Nolan School of Music was a very famous black school of music for Detroit during those times. Robert Nolan was a very famous director, a musician, and teacher in the black community of piano, voice, and classical music. And at that time, everybody studied with him that was going into the music professionally. He left a great legacy in this city among many of the famous, I will say, classical singers that came out of our city, like George Shirley, people like my aunt, Georgia Davis. I had another aunt, Evelyn Davis, and Gloria Davis McCully, all these people studied with him and he was a great force in the black community for the music at the time, during the period of the forties and fifties.

Tia Imani Hanna: Okay. All right. So, you studied with him and you were doing piano training, but you were more drawn to singing in choirs than you were playing the piano? What was the thing that clicked with you with voice more than with piano?

Naima Shamborguer: What clicked with me was singing, versus piano. I wanted to sing. That's what clicked, rather than play the piano. I learned how to play the piano. I can play for myself, but the extent of it was I wanted to sing, so I was more interested in that. I enjoyed performing on stage. That's what I preferred doing.

Tia Imani Hanna: Okay. And so, when you were a kid and you were, let's say elementary school through to junior high, up into high school. So, what high school did you go to?

Naima Shamborguer: I went to Central High School.

Tia Imani Hanna: Okay. And was there any teacher there that you were profoundly affected by that taught you music in any way that really stuck with you that you carry to this day?

Naima Shamborguer: Oh, yeah, we had a teacher there. You caught me. I can't remember his name. He was a force in that school to get... He had one of the best choirs in the city. He was such a good instructor and it was during the period of the doo-wop days, where a lot of the guys would go into the restrooms and would be singing doo-wop music and he would pull them out of the bathroom and tell them you're getting in choir. Yeah. So, we had an excellent choir and there were people in that choir like Freda Payne, Scherrie Payne, me, a couple of the Lamont Dozier Brothers were in that choir. It was just an excellent choir and it was because of him that we had such a good choir and that was a great influence, being there with him and through him we got the opportunity, many of us from that choir, to go to WJR or Make Way for Youth Chorus every Monday after school. And I’ll add another thing. We would leave school. There were several of us. Go to school, then go down to Wayne State University and sing in the Wayne State All City Chorus. And we’d leave there and go to WJR radio and do Make Way for Youth Chorus. Before we ever got home at 10 o'clock at night.

Tia Imani Hanna: Wow!

Naima Shamborguer: And I have to add, my mother had all those kids packed in that car and she drove us there. And there was another instructor that we had, Ali MacFarlane who was one of my voice teachers. She used to take us home. We had to do our homework while we waited for our voice lesson. And she did that on Wednesdays. So, I was pretty booked up with the singing in school. Plus, I had to keep my studies up too.

Tia Imani Hanna: So at this point you were mostly doing classical stuff. Was the…we're talking like the late fifties, early sixties, or late fifties…

Naima Shamborguer: Early… late, late fifties, early sixties. But then I was in high school. We were doing some jazz things too. We used to have assembly and, yes, we were doing some jazz tunes. He was the type of instructor that had us singing. Oh yeah. I had two voice teachers while I was in high school that taught me how to sing jazz. My first two jazz tunes were "The Nearness of You"… they taught me how to sing, and I do" Nearness of you" now. It's such a beautiful tune. Sure. Oh, "Polka dots and Moonbeams." Those were my first two jazz tunes that I learned.

(musical interlude playing “Nearness of You” as sung by Naima Shamborguer)

Tia Imani Hanna: At this point…because again, you're still doing a lot of classical music and now dabbling your feet in the jazz realm… What were you listening to?

Naima Shamborguer: Nina Simone.

Tia Imani Hanna: Nina Simone. Okay.

Naima Shamborguer: I was listening to Nina Simone.

Tia Imani Hanna: Was there anything, like any particular Nina Simone song that stood out to you that you remember from that time?

Naima Shamborguer: “I Love You Porgy.” That was a beautiful tune.

Tia Imani Hanna: What about Max Roach?

Naima Shamborguer: He was doing that, Max Roach with Abby Lincoln. They were doing tunes like "Freedom." Oh yeah. and then, "Poinciana," that was one of the Ahmad Jamal. There were a lot of people that I was listening to in the sixties. I was listening to Miles Davis. I was listening to Miles. I was very aware of him. See, we had a radio station here that was phenomenal, the jazz station, and they played everybody. So, we heard it.

Tia Imani Hanna: Did you listen to the Motown thing that was going on too? Or not so much?

Naima Shamborguer: No, not so much. Okay. I listened to it. I knew about it. But I was more into jazz even then, because in the sixties I was singing with jazz bands. My parents would allow me to go and sing at the Meraki dances they used to have, was like Eastern Star would have parties or cabarets. And there was this group that I used to sing with, and they were all jazz musicians. One was a vibe player, the saxophone player, bass player. Ron Hicks that was with Aretha Franklin for years was in that band. Yeah, I was a James Youngblood, yeah, in high school, I was singing with a jazz band. My mother and father would allow me to go and sing because during that period of time, our high school dances, they had sock hops, but we had bands at our dances, and they were jazz bands. People from Detroit, like Kenny Cox, was playing with his band. We would hire bands like that for our dances.

Tia Imani Hanna: I know from talks with your mother before she passed, she told me you guys would hire bands.

Naima Shamborguer: We would have a band upstairs and the records in the basement. So, people could choose where they wanted to go in there to hear the music. That was Camille, my sister, and me. We had the best parties, and it was kids from all over would come to our parties and we just had a ball. So, the exposure to… because Detroit is so full of music and there was so much jazz here, I couldn't help but be around it. Plus, my father played jazz. We are classical music in the house, but my dad, let me tell you. My father was a jazz lover, and he could dance too!

Tia Imani Hanna: I never got to see Granddaddy dance. Oh, I wish I would have seen that.

Naima Shamborguer: I'll tell you the story. Because, all the cabarets, people would bring their so-called BYOB and they'd have set up and they sell hot dogs and stuff like that. And people be sharp-dressed, and a lot of the sororities and fraternities used to have lots of dances. So, my mother and father went to a lot of them and my dad used to say, “Would you please go with us because your mother can't dance, and I need somebody to dance with me?” Because she was like toe-tapper dancer. So, I was daddy's partner in a whole lot of those things. It was fun. It was just… we had jazz; it was jazz. That's what we heard.

Tia Imani Hanna: Okay. Okay. So, it was very much a formative part of your life as well as classical music.

Naima Shamborguer: Yeah.

Tia Imani Hanna: At some point, you graduated, you went off and you moved to California for a time.

Naima Shamborguer: Yup. I went to California for six years, had a family, went to school out there and there's a club called Esther’s Show Bar. I was staying in Oakland, California. I had a beautician who used to do my hair and she got me a gig down there. It was in West Oakland. And, so I did that, and I was going to school and then, by then I was in college, so I was in opera workshop too, in college. I went back to that and went and studied Madrigal singing. I kept it up, never forgot that. But all of these things, these experiences have helped me with jazz now because I hear things in my head that I probably would not have heard it if I didn't have that type of training.

Tia Imani Hanna: I see. Okay.

Naima Shamborguer: Then I have an Aunt Gloria who she, out of all my vocal training, is the one who really gave me the top training of what to do with my voice. How to do the extended note, play with the note, give it air to relax it, how to sing. She just really taught me some very important techniques. And so those are the techniques that I use now.

Tia Imani Hanna: It's very evident because I remember hearing Aunt Gloria sing, I had the opportunity to work with her. She was teaching in Highland Park at the community college at the time and my mom and I were in the chorus for “Porgy and Bess,” the professional production that she did of that. And I was probably 13 or something like that, but I got to be in the chorus of that show, and I got to hear her sub for one of the sopranos that was absent that day. She came in and sat in and just sang "Summertime "and people came out from the hallways because they couldn't believe the voice that was coming out of her was amazing. I had never heard her sing before. That's the only time I ever heard her sing. She was amazing. I couldn't believe that she wasn't singing all over the world.

Naima Shamborguer: She was amazing. She was amazing. And she did end up teaching, leaving the country, and she stayed in Bermuda for a long time. And she taught there. She has trained some very famous people. I don't know who they are. She never said. I know they were there, they’re out there. But she trained me, and she taught me a lot. So that's what I use. I'll never forget her for that. Yeah. Oh, she was really, and she was… oh, not hard, but she was stern.

Tia Imani Hanna: Oh, she was tough.

Naima Shamborguer: Yeah. She didn't play. She’d come over and hit you in the stomach, “Sing out of that diaphragm!” Yeah. Oh, and she was, she didn't play, In our breathing exercises. Now people ask me, “how do you extend your notes so long?” She taught me how, she taught me. It's hard to explain it, but it's control, it's called control. And you have to concentrate on it and let that air out. Like you’re letting air out of a balloon very slow. That was the fun part. And I had my, one of my favorite aunts, all my aunts were my favorite aunts, but one Georgia Davis, she was one who was a soprano. No, she was a contralto. Went to college at age 15 years old. She came along the time of Marian Anderson. Between Marian Anderson and Georgia, Marion was picked. My aunt ended up in New York and she was singing with the Metropolitan Opera Chorus for years. Rockefeller gave her a scholarship, where she was able to perform opera. And also, she got the chance to sing on cruise ships, for concerts and that type of thing, which was a very wonderful situation for her. And there is a recording in the Azalea Hackley files of her singing jazz.

Tia Imani Hanna: Oh, wow! I did not know that.

Naima Shamborguer: Yeah. And now I have to see it. The Azalea Hackley files are closed right now at the main library, but I would like to get my hands on it.

[doorbell rings – slight pause]

Tia Imani Hanna: So the Azalea Hackley. Okay. So, it's closed, but yeah, that would be definitely something that we need to look into getting the recording of that. I would love to hear that because I've never heard her sing because she passed well before I was born, so I never got to hear her sing.

Naima Shamborguer: Her voice was just melting and she was fascinating. I loved her so dearly. She was just really great. She passed at age 54. Yeah. She was young and she did have a, like I said, her career, it could have been better, but her health took her.

Tia Imani Hanna: Oh, I see.

Naima Shamborguer: Then I had my other aunt Evelyn. Excellent. Excellent. And they went to Julliard School of Music. The graduates, except for Georgia, she went to another school, but Gloria and Evelyn went to Julliard and, they were on scholarship there.

Tia Imani Hanna: Fantastic.

Naima Shamborguer: So, excellent musicians. Evelyn was an organist and piano player. She would just tear the house down. My grandparents…

Tia Imani Hanna: I got to know her before she passed. So yeah, she was amazing.

Naima Shamborguer: I can say my grandparents were so proud of them. Oh my God. They would just…my grandmother and grandfather, were so proud of them. And then we, we got a legacy. Yeah, and this is a wonderful legacy.

Tia Imani Hanna: And you've been keeping it up.

Naima Shamborguer: Yeah. Well, you've been keeping it up too.

Tia Imani Hanna: I have all those examples, so I have no excuse.

Naima Shamborguer: May I say that? [laughter] You have no excuse, and the thing is you got a double thing going on with Sir Roland Hanna. I mean, really, Sir Roland Hanna, okay.

Tia Imani Hanna: Yeah. I won the genetic lottery there.

Naima Shamborguer: You sure did. You sure did. So that's your father's brother. Yeah.

Tia Imani Hanna: So you've got all this family background and all of this, the osmosis, as well as the genetic pool and, the great experiences that you had. So, you were in California, you were raised in the family, you ended up coming back to Detroit. At some point you started to actually just do jazz. So, what was the transition there? What happened that you started to do jazz?

Naima Shamborguer: I came back in the sixties. And I started… I ran into a friend of mine that we were in high school together, walking down the street one day and she called me, I was walking my kids to school and I heard her call me and her name is Dee Dee McNeil, vvery famous singer. And she called me, and I couldn't believe it. She said, “Girl!” and we went and hung out. And that night she invited me to go to this group that was just starting. And I went to that rehearsal. I haven't looked back. And, jazz, and it was a singing group called the BrownX Voices. And we were a wonderful group of 15 to 20 people, lots of times. And we rehearsed all the time and didn't have no gigs. But we were one of the best singing in groups in the city and, every now and then, we would get a gig because who's going to hire 15 singers? But it was a great experience because he was a writer for Motown for years, but he wrote beautiful tunes. And a lot of his tunes, Aretha Franklin, and Stevie Wonder, they're famous, that he wrote. In fact, we did some work for Aretha and as I said, the group was excellent. And that's where I met my husband now. And so, I got into that group. And from there I met Teddy Harris, Jr. And also, another band member, actually before Teddy was Teddy and Don. It was called Desace Players, Donald Towns’ Desace Players. And I got into… I began to get music written, big band charts. I started getting big band charts written. So, I was singing big band music. And, and with the Desace Players, actually I was, before I was singing trio. I had, actually, my first trio was with Al McKenzie. He was like 16 or 17 years old, my musical director. And so that was my first group because we were all in a group with Teddy Harris Jr's big band. So, I put my little, small group together. But yeah, I still sung with the big bands. And then I sang with the big bands from the union. but all along, I was getting my own trios together. So always made sure I had music for everything for two people, for quartet, 9 pieces, 12 pieces, 20 pieces. I had music for everything.

Tia Imani Hanna: So where did you, okay, so I know you mentioned Al McKenzie who just passed recently, but you gave a lot of jobs to a lot of young jazz musicians in the area coming up through this time. And can you name some of the other people that you hired that were just young folks coming up?

Naima Shamborguer: Back then? You're putting an age on me. Oh, back then. Marion Hayden. She was young. There was, who? Regina didn't play with those. Okay. It was Marion Hayden. Geri Allen was playing then. I worked with her; James Robinson was on drums. There were so many of them back then. They were like little kids, they were young, Rodney Whitaker, and Bobby Hearst. I call him Bobby; he was playing with us and he was like 16. Yeah, they all worked with us. It was a lot of fun and we were doing gigs at the club called Dummy Georges. Lots of gigs over there. And that's when I was with Teddy Harris Jr. and the New Breed Bebop Society.

Tia Imani Hanna: Okay. Yeah, I remember them. There was, I was going to play on a string gig one time, and they ended up getting canceled for some reason, but I was really excited about it. I got to do one rehearsal with them. That was really fun.

Naima Shamborguer: And the Detroit String Orchestra, that was Donald Walden and the same with him. And Marcus Belgrave was in that group and Regina Carter was in that group. That was all strings. I would sing vocals with them sometimes. But then, and I always had my small group, where, finally I was recording… Oh, Eddie Russ. Oh, he was mine. Oh, that was my piano player!

Tia Imani Hanna: Yeah. He was on your very first CD.

Naima Shamborguer: He was on my very first one. He was so cool. Eddie Russ, Kurt Kranke, George Davidson. These people were playing with me. I miss him. He really was a good friend. He's another one that taught me a lot about singing. He would introduce me to tunes. He said, “Naima, you got to sing this,” and so we did lots of good work together. Yeah. It was quite a history. There's so much to tell, so many stories.

Tia Imani Hanna: Oh, you were listening to, you were learning from, some of the players that you worked with and that you were listening to. I know you, one of your favorites of all time is Sarah Vaughan. You've actually have written a stage show around Sarah Vaughn that you performed not too long ago. So, tell me about Sarah Vaughn. What does Sarah Vaughan stand for you?

Naima Shamborguer: She's the mentor. Our voices are not the same, but they are, but I hear what she hears. She's the closest I could come to listen to for what I do. So, I put the show together. I have a very good friend who is also a writer, actor, John Hardy. John Hardy. And I put my…I wrote the script and John Hardy was the one who went in and made that script what it is today. So together he and I put the show on, and we do many of the tunes that Sarah did, plus original tunes to using Sarah's style of bebop and Latin. And I love Latin music, so I always enjoy doing that, but she was a master at whatever she did. That's what my…thing is with Sarah…she was my influence. I listened to so much of Sarah for so long and I learned a lot from her. Never met her, but I have seen her in person.

(musical interlude playing “Miss Sarah” written and performed by Naima Shamborguer)

Naima Shamborguer: I also want to mention other musicians in this city. Another person that I worked with many times, Kenny Cox, and his Ellingtonia music (for Duke Ellington's music). He had an Ellingtonia group and we did music at the DIA. Other places in the city. That was an exciting, book to sing from.

Tia Imani Hanna: The DIA for those who might be listening from outside of Detroit is the Detroit Institute of Arts, but go on.

Naima Shamborguer: Yes. And he was… Kenny Cox was one of the great people in this city that kept the jazz music going for a long time. In fact, one of the first people that started the Detroit jazz festival.

Tia Imani Hanna: So I remember that when the jazz festival started and it was, at that point, the Detroit Montreux Jazz Festival, right? That's right. I remember you were down there almost every year.

Naima Shamborguer: I was there. Yeah. And I did the first vocal workshop there. Me and Teddy Harris, Jr. We did that first vocal workshop. We had so much fun. We had people singing the blues and all, just picking them out the audience and they had a good time.

Tia Imani Hanna: Yeah. Sounds like a lot of fun. You wrote the Sarah Vaughan program and gave people a history of Sarah Vaughn's music and about what was going on in her life. And that's just… it's a lovely program. I saw it recently at the Charles Wright Museum. Yes. And that was wonderful to see. And you've written some other ones too. Haven't you written some other shows?

Naima Shamborguer: That's the main one that I've written. Oh… you mean for Sister Strings?

Tia Imani Hanna: Yeah. Let's talk about Sister Strings. So, what's going on this year is, and I've got the honor of playing in this group with Naima as one of the string players in “Sister Strings: Roots, Voice and Drums.” So, tell me about that. Where did that idea come from? How did that all come together?

Naima Shamborguer: It's strange. I'm going to tell you a story. My mother passed in 2017. I don't know if I told you this. Okay. My cousin Mario was over here. And we were sitting there, and I said, Mario, I'm going to write a show. And I sat up and told him the name of it, “Sister Strings: Roots, Voice, and Drums.” That's where it came from.

Tia Imani Hanna: I did not know that.

Naima Shamborguer: I don't know… it just, I said, I'm going to do this. And that was the idea. And I guess because my mother was a gerontologist and that brought into mind, past, present, interaction, educational history. So that's what it is. That's how it came to mind. I just wanted to tell the story. My great grandfather was a fiddle player, and he was also an escaped slave. And he was a fiddle player and understand that he escaped slavery.

Tia Imani Hanna: John Wesley Davis, right?

Naima Shamborguer: John Wesley Davis. And then my sister corrected me, telling me that once he got out of the Civil War, he went from town to town playing his fiddle. And he was a very good fiddler and that was my grandfather's father. So that was a great thing to know about. So, I said, let me write about this, black fiddle players, from slavery until the present. And it's like a… it's a unique educational viewpoint that connects the past to the present.

Tia Imani Hanna: John Wesley Davis was a fiddle player and then…

Tia Imani Hanna: Your father's brother also played fiddle for a while and…

Naima Shamborguer: And my mother's brother Lawrence. Lawrence was a fiddle player, yes, he was.

Tia Imani Hanna: So, then it skipped a generation, then it went to me.

Naima Shamborguer: It went to you. That's right.

Tia Imani Hanna: So then to develop the show, what did it take? What did you do? You had to get funding, you had to… what did you have to do?

Naima Shamborguer: Yes. Through someone very sacred to me, Michigan ArtShare, partnered with me and created, supporting Sister Strings. You want to hear more about Michigan ArtShare?

Tia Imani Hanna: I do.

Naima Shamborguer: Michigan ArtShare is a program of Michigan State University Extension and they work to assist artists and communities in creating opportunities and experiences for artists and communities, well throughout the state, Michigan, right? And that's the purpose and it's a wonderful program.

Tia Imani Hanna: Okay, so they helped you too. How did they help you? What did they do?

Naima Shamborguer: Helped me write the grant. [laughter]

Tia Imani Hanna: Ah, bingo.

Naima Shamborguer: Hey, I don’t know what I would have done without Michigan ArtShare.

Tia Imani Hanna: Alright. So, they helped you write the grant and then to who, who is the grant written to?

Naima Shamborguer: The Knight Arts Challenge and they liked the program very well. They were very interested in it. And so that's how we got it going. And we were accepted, and we had to do matching funds, which we were very successful in doing. And we were very successful in having our show just before the coronavirus.

Tia Imani Hanna: Right, back in February.

Naima Shamborguer: We were very fortunate that we did our show, a week and a half later they were shutting things down.

Tia Imani Hanna: Wow! There's footage of some of that on your website too, I think, right?

Naima Shamborguer: Yes there is. And, I must say, Tia Hanna was a big part of that show. It was a good show and I’d like to name some of the people that are in that show.

Tia Imani Hanna: Oh, for sure. Please do. Because some of these people are going to be in the upcoming performance… is going to be where?

Naima Shamborguer: The Detroit Jazz Festival, Labor Day weekend.

Tia Imani Hanna: Fantastic!

Naima Shamborguer: So we’ll be performing, but I would like to tell you that at the time for the concert in February, we had cellist Akua Dixon from New York City, and for our next upcoming show, we're going to have Marion Hayden on bass, Pamela Wise on piano. And then Michelle May violinist, and viola player, Leslie DeShazor. And then, of course, Tia Hanna and Gayelynne McKinney and master percussionist, Mahindi Massai, and Jasmine James.

Tia Imani Hanna: As cellist.

Naima Shamborguer: Yes.

Tia Imani Hanna: Okay. Okay. Fantastic! Now I know this because I'm part of this, I do know some of the schedules. So, on Friday night on September, what is it? 4th?

Naima Shamborguer: Yes, September 4th. We're doing a piece called “Justice,” which is a suite that night. It starts at seven o'clock. Should be online at seven here. It may not start until about quarter after seven, but I would say seven o'clock and, Sister Strings is opening up the festival and we're doing "Kum Bah Yah" which is an arrangement written by Sven Anderson, who is one of our good writer pianist from Detroit. We just love him! Amazing! So, we're opening up with that and it's a suite tribute to John Lewis. So, we’re the first ones, and then they're going to continue on with the rest of the cast.

Tia Imani Hanna: Okay. And then, again, we'll have the full set of the Sister Strings on the Sunday night, September 6th. And that is at what time?

Naima Shamborguer: Seven o'clock performance.

Tia Imani Hanna: Okay. That's going to be available on WDET who is going to be hosting the entire festival on…they’ll be streaming it on WDET.org, I think it is. Also, channel 22, the Detroit cable online will be streaming the show.

Naima Shamborguer: WRCJ 90.9.

Tia Imani Hanna: Okay, so all of this information is up on the Detroit Jazz Festival. org website. They also have an app that they're going to be streaming things through, if you wanted to do the app. And we'll have some show notes on all of this information., It's really exciting that this is happening because, during this whole COVID crisis, we're going to have a lot of Detroit musicians playing the Detroit Jazz Festival stage, and a lot of string players. And the other thing that's really cool about Sister Strings is that you're going to have five current Kresge Fellows playing and that's the thing that you have not led with, and I'm going to bring it up because I'm very proud of you for getting this. You are a 2020 Kresge Artist Fellow. This is pretty amazing thing. So, it comes with a huge cash prize, and you won that this year. Congratulations on that!

Naima Shamborguer: Thank you. I'm very happy about that. Thank you, Kresge Arts. I can't thank you enough. It was… it's a fascinating opportunity that they have given me to have this. And we couldn't have our big celebration this year for that… hopefully down the line, they will... but we're all very grateful. We'll be doing some things with them, as they have workshops involved. I will be coming up with a new CD and it's going to be all bebop.

Tia Imani Hanna: Okay. Is Sister Strings going to record anytime soon?

Naima Shamborguer: We don't know exactly what we're going to do, but we're going to definitely do one. So those are the two things that are in the plan.

Tia Imani Hanna: Okay. and I meant to say earlier that, you mentioned all the members of the band and we've got past Kresge Fellow winners: Pam Wise, and Marion Hayden, and Gayelynne McKinney, and Michelle May, and yourself.

Naima Shamborguer: That's correct.

Tia Imani Hanna: So that's a pretty amazing group of people all on one stage. Please tune in if you get a chance for the Labor Day weekend this year in 2020.

Naima Shamborguer: And I wanted to add to that Mahindi Massai, master percussionist, is in our group, world-renown percussionist, has lived in Africa, Europe, and all. He's just a master of what he does. And I want to say that my niece, who I'm talking to right now, is an exceptional violinist and wait ‘til you hear her. I have to tell you that she’s phenomenal. Wait, until you hear her tune!

Tia Imani Hanna: Oh, thank you very much. That's nice. All right. I've got a couple of things. Let's see. I wanted to ask you if there was something that you wanted to tell your younger self that you know now that you wish you knew then.

Naima Shamborguer: I’d tell my younger self now to slow down. Everything doesn't come at once. Learn patience, which I have, through the years. And so that's the very important thing. And the young people I talk to now, and I do mentor, I say the same thing to them. And learn all you can. And listen to your elders because the musicians in this city have so much to offer you and there's so many of them. They’re still here. Learn from them. They're jazz giants. And so many of these young people are learning from them. We got some good young jazz players in this city coming up. Detroit's legacy is still alive everybody. We are still alive.

Tia Imani Hanna: That is for sure. Now you just did a project with that. So, tell me about that project with all the young players, you just did a CD release with that.

Naima Shamborguer: A CD called “Lifetime” and is a tribute to the famous Geri Allen, who is from Detroit, who was our sister in music and my good friend and she passed and we did a tribute to her. Most of the music on there is original music that these young musicians wrote themselves.

Tia Imani Hanna: And so who's on that album?

Naima Shamborguer: Alexis Lombre excellent piano player, Benny Ruben, Jr. tenor...who's doing excellent in New York now, Ian Finkelstein, piano, Trunino Lowe, trumpet, Jeffrey Trent is tenor, Tariq Gardner is drums.

Tia Imani Hanna: That’s Marion’s son, right? Marion Hayden's son?

Naima Shamborguer: Yes, that’s Marion’s son, yes. Lewis M. Jones is drummer, Jonathan Cotton on bass. And that's everybody. And me, I'm on it, because they insisted. And that's the group.

Tia Imani Hanna: And where's that CD available?

Naima Shamborguer: You can go on CD Baby now and download it.

Tia Imani Hanna: So a lot of musicians are dealing with CD Baby shifting over its attention into a different direction of distribution. I'm sure that it'll come back up again as available.

Naima Shamborguer: They can also go on YouTube.

Tia Imani Hanna: We want people to buy it.

Naima Shamborguer: Oh, of course.

Tia Imani Hanna: Support the musicians. Support the musicians and spend the money because art ain't free.

Naima Shamborguer: And then my CDs, Amazon has mine. They can check it out on Amazon also.

Tia Imani Hanna: Is it up on iTunes at all?

Naima Shamborguer: It's on iTunes.

Tia Imani Hanna: Okay. So, iTunes and Amazon for you. And your most recent CD was which one?

Naima Shamborguer: “’Round Midnight” with Larry Willis, Marion Hayden, Vincent Bowen, George Davidson.

Tia Imani Hanna: Okay. So, there are some other masters on there. Larry Willis just passed recently; and George Davidson’s is still here.

Naima Shamborguer: Still here. That's why I want to do the bebop CD. I want George to be on it and we're telling him, “Keep your health good.” We've got to do that. That's why I mentioned that CD. There are still some people here, while they're still here, I want to get them on it. It's a legacy CD. And that's why I mentioned that one first. Okay. Yeah, because I want to do that.

Tia Imani Hanna: Ok. Is there anything else you want the audience to know about today?

Naima Shamborguer: Remember the festival keep Sister Strings in mind, and you can go on my website, naimashamborguer.com

Tia Imani Hanna: And I'll have that up on the links for the website so that folks can just go to the links and open up your page. So, thank you so much for your time and your energy and your heart today. And I loved having you on my show and, thank you.

Naima Shamborguer: Thank you, Tia. Great time.

Tia Imani Hanna: Thank you for joining us this week on Tia Time with Artists. Make sure to visit our website, tiaviolin.com, where you can subscribe to the show in iTunes and never miss an episode. Please leave us a rating wherever you listen to podcasts. We really appreciate your comments, and we'll mine them to bring you more amazing episodes.

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