Threshold.
Recently, I’ve been spending a lot of time with Henry Grimes’ The Call. This album captures a musician on the brink... expanding, searching, stepping into something more, moving through a portal. It’s haunting to listen to it now, knowing how the era’s atmosphere of urgency and instability may have pressed against him: the demand for constant innovation, the economic precarity facing improvisers, the shifting cultural terrain that celebrated boundary-breaking while offering little structural support. In that volatile moment, artists were channeling the emotional, spiritual, and political fractures of the era into their sound, often at great personal cost. It’s not hard to hear in this music the figure of a man pushed to an edge.
When I listen to this record, I hear a trio interacting in real time and an artist reaching toward a future that the world around him wasn’t ready for. The ensemble is comprised of Grimes on bass, Perry Robinson on clarinet, and Tom Price on drums, removing the harmonic safety net of a chordal instrument. This absence opens a vast space for possibility: Grimes becomes both melodic engine and structural anchor, Robinson’s clarinet weaves between spiritual lament and folk-like insistence, and Price’s drumming acts less like timekeeping and more like atmospheric and emotional architecture.
The way this trio navigates their conversation is fluid. They know how to fill, clear, and balance each other and the sonic space. “Fish Story” opens with a desperate bass texture, as if the school of fish is picking up speed, and is joined in its scurry by a winding clarinet and abrupt drum kit. Perry Robinson’s clarinet shapes mutable lines, each gesture answering another in real time. The melody comes in dripping in an intervalic doubling in the bass and clarinet that invokes images in my mind of a 60s animated underwater cartoon, of exaggerated shapes and luxurious colors.
The title track distills the trio’s ethos, rejecting linear solos for an ebbing, tidal interplay in which written motifs and spontaneous reactions lean into one another, testing which will hold out til the end. Here, the conversation feels like Tio’s on the corner playing dominoes, a camaraderie of exchange that is about the game, how it's played, and win or lose, the trust that they will play again together soon.
What makes The Call so bedeviling is the knowledge of what came after. Shortly after this period of explosive creativity, Grimes left the scene entirely, pulled away by mental health struggles and the economic realities of a fast-moving, often unforgiving New York jazz world. His disappearance, and the fact that many assumed he had died, underscores the larger social and structural conditions that shaped artists’, particularly Black artists’, lives and careers.
I think about that a lot as I navigate my own artistic and personal life:
How someone so gifted can be pushed so far from the thing that once anchored them.
How survival twists our choices.
How the “practical” path can erase the self.
Combine that with the feeling of youthfulness. I often live beyond my means, take risks for experience, and pour myself into an art form that financially takes more than it gives. These past four years have been a doom spiral montage of highs and lows. Grief turning into an everyday scratch, always itching my mental stability with the illusion that the salve is to keep working towards that bag. I took Assata Shakur’s line too literally:
"You died. I cried. And kept on getting up. A little slower. And a lot more deadly."
So I said yes to a role that I thought would help me rebuild some ground under my feet; I thought it would feed my hunger. I convinced myself that my survival meant being reliable to my family and future, being able to take on more; that my time to explore had been long enough; that I had the capacity to do it all. I told myself, “It’s fine,” but I was gassing myself. The parts of me that create, reflect, and breathe deeply were being pushed into a dank corner, which sadly isn’t a metaphor.
I haven’t felt this unstable since puberty, when my hormones staged a coup, and no one was safe. Now, instead of a coup, my hormones are taking form as adult acne and insomnia.
I am familiar with the weight of the pull towards the black hole. The event horizon of life can stretch you further and further away from the thing that built you. Pain and pressure convince you that abandoning yourself is the responsible and right choice. And that’s where The Call keeps pulling me back in, forcing me to commune and congregate with the buried.
Henry Grimes reminds me that there is always a possibility of return. When he reappeared decades later, living in poverty and writing poetry, it became clear that The Call captured a moment right before rupture. And this, in a quieter register, is where I find myself now: standing in a moment when the truest version of me is waking up like a cold plunge, shocking and undeniable. What arrived as burnout revealed itself as a reminder, a recalibration of who I am.
Stepping away from this role isn’t failure for me. It’s listening and a lesson. I am relearning how to be Shara the person. Shara refusing to let grief and responsibility harden into self-betrayal. Shara acknowledging that faith can’t be compartmentalized. It has to be embodied in full.
Like Henry Grimes, I want to return dedicated. I want to give myself the opening I’ve blocked by fear.
Some other things I’ve been listening to that are bringing me back to myself:
Chris Williams - Odu: Vibration II
Guedra Guedra - MUTANT
Austin Williamson - Centre
keiyaA - hooke’s law
Tasha Dorji - we will be wherever the fires are lit
Astrid Sonne - outside of your lifetime
Yma Sumac - Inca Taqui
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