Returns
Another birthday approaches. A year has passed, and despite the normal reflections that come with birthdays, I am confronting the anniversary of losing Allie.
My cousin asked me, “What do you want for your next year?” My first thought was: for no one else to die. How naive. I have lost enough people to know this is not a thing I can ask of the world, but I am exhausted by grief as my ruling deity, tired of arranging my life, art, sound around its appetite. I have tried to rationalize it. I understand that no amount of sadness will bring her back. I understand that Allie, who I remember most as the sound of her laugh, would not want me perpetually on the verge of tears. Don’t get me wrong, she would absolutely want me to mourn her extravagantly, in several forms, perhaps with unreasonable amounts of drama. But not like this. Not in a way that asks my own light to dim as proof that I loved her.
Allie believed in me the way a child claps for fairies can get their wings: completely, without embarrassment, as though her belief itself could keep me in the air. There was something magical and unyielding about being loved that way. I am beginning to wonder if part of grieving her is learning how to believe the things about myself that she believed so easily.
With this, I’ve been revisiting Tamar-Kali’s Geechee Goddess Hardcore Warrior Soul and Leroy Jenkins’s The Legend of Ai Glatson. They are very different records, but I hear them speaking to each other. Both seem concerned with what becomes possible when you stop asking permission for the different parts of yourself to belong together.
Even the title Geechee Goddess Hardcore Warrior Soul feels like an answer to a question I have been asking myself. Tamar-Kali does not resolve these identities into something cleaner.
Geechee. Goddess. Hardcore. Warrior. Soul.
Ancestry beside distortion, femininity beside aggression, tenderness beside force. The music does not ask which of these is the truest version of her. Their simultaneity is the point.
This is something I need in that right now.
Grief has a strange way of flattening identity. For the past year, I have often understood myself through what I have lost: my best friend, versions of my relationship, certain assumptions about what my life would look like. Loss becomes so enormous that everything else begins orbiting it. I have been wondering how to return to the other names for myself without treating that return as a betrayal of grief. Artist. Teacher. Friend. Lover. Collaborator. Curator. Daughter. A person who laughs. A person who wants things; who needs things.
Tamar-Kali reminds me that these identities do not need to be reconciled before they can coexist.
Leroy Jenkins’s The Legend of Ai Glatson offers me something slightly different. With Anthony Davis and Andrew Cyrille, Jenkins creates music where composition does not eliminate uncertainty. Structure exists, but it is porous. Roles change. A sound that appears to be accompaniment becomes foreground; melody becomes texture; rhythm appears, disappears, reorganizes itself. The musicians seem less concerned with preserving a predetermined form than with listening closely enough to discover what the form requires of them.
I think this is part of what I have always loved about Black creative music. It does not promise control. It asks for presence.
Wadada Leo Smith wrote:
“the wonder and gorgeousness of nature - i’ve heard the sounds of the crickets, the birds, the whirling abou and the clining of the wind, the floating waves and clashing of water against rocks, the love of thunder and beauty that prevails during the lightening - the toiling of souls thoughout the world in suffering - the moments of realization of oneness, of realness in all of these make and contribute to the wholeness of my music - the sound-rhythm beyond - beyond- is what i’m after through this precious and glorious art of the black man - this omprovisational music that i see, that i feel, that bursts all about us in this world, that’s conveyed to us from the many different other worlds and that’s held intact through our minds from the univer - these are life sources that bring forth love through the creative ability of all man - these are the sources that spur, that prompt the nowness…”
Wadada Leo Smith, notes (8 pieces), 1973
You cannot know what the next sound will be. You can develop technique, establish conditions, listen deeply, make decisions, remember what has already happened, but eventually you have to enter the next moment without knowing exactly what it contains.
Grief has made that idea considerably less romantic to me… has made everything less romantic to me.
I used to think about improvisation primarily in terms of freedom: the possibility of making another choice, refusing hierarchy, responding differently, constructing something collectively. Lately I have been thinking about the other side of it. Improvisation is also what happens when the structure you expected disappears. You still have to make the next sound.
Maybe that is why these two records are meeting me now.
Tamar-Kali reminds me that I am allowed to contain contradiction. Jenkins reminds me that uncertainty does not mean there is no form.
Both of these albums create a world of return, that reminds me that things that come back around can feel new.
And Allie, even now, reminds me that being loved can change the scale at which you imagine yourself.
She believed in my work before I could always see what it was becoming. Who I was becoming. I think I have mistaken honoring that belief for carrying the enormity of losing her. Maybe honoring it also means allowing myself to become enormous again.
So when I think about what I want for this next year, maybe I don't actually need an answer as grand as the question.
I want to repair the ways in which I love myself. I want to deepen my process.
I want to listen.
I want to be surrounded by people who make my life larger, and to make theirs larger in return.
I want to stop confusing endurance with living.
I want grief to remain part of my vocabulary without allowing it to become the whole language.
I want to let the love in. Let the love in. Let the love. Let love.
And when I cannot see very far ahead, I want to trust myself enough to make the next sound.
Some other records I have been into:
12 Conversations Ryuichu Sakamoto + alva noto
Most Likely To_ ShyGodwin
Blue Light til Dawn Cassandra Wilson
low clouds hang, this land is on fire Tashi Dorji
ZING ZING índio da Cuíca
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