Howard Mandel by Susan BrinkTerri Lyne Carrington by C. Andrew HovanOrbert DavisMarc Ribot by Sandlin Gaither
HOST [Lawrence Peryer]: Hello and welcome to The Buzz, the podcast of the Jazz Journalists Association, an international professional organization of writers, photographers, and broadcasters focused on jazz. I’m Lawrence Peryer, proud JJA member and managing editor of The Buzz. Today we have JJA president Howard Mandel hosting a compelling discussion on political activism in jazz with three remarkable musicians who have dedicated their careers to both artistic excellence and social change.
Our first guest is Terri Lyne Carrington, the four-time Grammy-winning drummer, composer, and producer who serves as founder and artistic director of the Berklee Institute of Jazz and Gender Justice. An NEA Jazz Master and Doris Duke Artist, Terri Lyne has spent four decades advocating for women, transgender, and non-binary musicians while reimagining jazz’s aesthetic possibilities.
Joining her is Orbert Davis, the Emmy Award-winning trumpeter, composer, and educator who co-founded the Chicago Jazz Philharmonic. He’s host of The Real Deal with Orbert Davis on WDCB-FM and .org, and has built an extraordinary cultural bridge through his Immigrant Stories concert series and his groundbreaking collaborations with Cuban musicians. His work transforms jazz into a vehicle for international understanding and social healing, initiating a New Third Stream.
Our third guest is Marc Ribot, the innovative guitarist whose extensive collaborations include work with Tom Waits, Elvis Costello, and John Zorn. Beyond his acclaimed recording and touring career, Marc has emerged as a fierce advocate for musicians’ economic rights through his organizing work with the Content Creators Alliance and efforts to reform the American Federation of Musicians.
Together, these three artists explore what jazz activism means today, from challenging gender inequities and supporting immigrant communities to fighting for fair compensation and workers’ rights. Their conversation reveals how jazz continues to serve as both artistic expression and instrument of social change.
And so now I bring you Howard Mandel, Terri Lyne Carrington, Orbert Davis, and Marc Ribot.
HM: You all engage in something that could be considered activism, jazz activism. And let’s start by defining the terms. Does that term jazz activism mean anything to you guys? Mark, can we start with you?
MR: Let’s chop it down even further to the term activism. There’s a great essay by the activist Astra Taylor called “Against Activism.” And what she says to make it short is, “I’m not an activist, I’m an organizer.” You don’t get points for being active, you get points for winning. And to do that, we have to not just act blindly, we have to organize. So I think to get back to your question, I think there’s a place for jazz and a lot of other types of organizing, and I hope we can shed some light on what that might be.
HM: Thank you, yes. Terri Lyne, what would you have to say about this?
TLC: Yes, I just agree with Marc. I don’t particularly label myself anything. I think that we see what’s needed, and if we have the courage and the time, we step in and we do what we can. And I think it’s just about respecting humanity, the humanity of others. An organizer or an activist, I’m just trying to do something good.
HM: Orbert, how do you look at this?
OD: It’s interesting. Years ago there was a write-up in the Chicago Tribune in which I was described as a jazz activist. And I never in a million years would have thought of myself as that. I just do what I do, love what I do, and try to spread the joy. But that really was a turning point for me to understand that it’s the effect of the music, the power of the music, and the power of the people that are organized around the music that activism is an outcome, whether one is smart enough to see it and identify it or not.
HM: The reason that I thought of all of three of you is because you’ve been active and organized about addressing certain issues that are beyond the purely musical element of jazz. Orbert, with your Chicago Jazz Philharmonic, you’ve done a lot of work with Cuban students and gone to Cuba and really developed a fantastic relationship there. Terri Lyne, you’ve really instituted an important center for thinking about and dealing with issues of jazz and gender complications. And Marc, you’ve done music that is specifically about political subjects, as well as working to better the situation for musicians in payment situations with your content creators coalition, among other things. I know that this has been a central interest of yours for a long time.
Are there people that you look at in jazz prior to your work who are inspirations, have been inspirations about how they engage with social issues?
TLC: We can look historically, from Billie Holiday, Max Roach, John Coltrane, and Louis Armstrong creating the moments when the music itself had to spread a message and kind of get people on track to understand certain things.
Jazz activism has always been alive. There’s so much more work to do, especially in our current situation that we find ourselves in. I would say that so many people have inspired me in that way. Right now, I’m thinking a lot about Max Roach and Abbey Lincoln because I reimagined their classic We Insist! album. And it’s crazy that we’re still talking about the same things that they were talking about in 1960. And some of the themes have changed, of course. But the foundation of what they were talking about is still relevant.
And that movie that came out, Soundtrack to a Coup d’Etat, it was just wild to see that scene where they went into the UN and where they were screaming and Abbey and some other women were screaming.
It was a very powerful scene to me because as much as I don’t put my body on the line as much as some of our predecessors have. So I’m inspired by people that were willing to go to jail, that were willing to make much bigger sacrifices than I feel that I have.
HM: It’s interesting that the institution of Berklee College supports your endeavors in this regard. And that’s a big change from historical jazz activism.
TLC: I just feel like we’re at a time where these institutions really have to look at what’s important to them. And if a college like Berklee, which is the leading contemporary music college in the world, if they want to stay that way, they have to really address what’s contemporary and the themes and the concerns of their students. And I think they have the freedom to do more so than some institutions. So I don’t think it was a big stretch necessarily to do. There was also a crisis at the college at the time with some accusations of sexual harassment, assault. I had been talking about this institute for a couple of years, but I think sometimes when there’s crisis, there’s also opportunity.
HM: Marc?
MR: I saw that film you mentioned, Terri. Was it Prelude to a Coup d’etat. was that the name of it? And that scene was amazing where they bum-rushed the UN. It was incredible. But also I have to tell you, don’t worry, Terri Lyne, we’re all going to get a chance to be arrested. So don’t feel bad. We don’t need to feel any nostalgia for earlier periods of history, the way things are going, unfortunately.
Well, if we’re throwing names into the ring, I’m going to have to put in Bob Cranshaw, the late Bob Cranshaw. I want to put him in because Bob Cranshaw was, of course, a legendary jazz bass player, but he was much more.
We can’t treat jazz as something that’s isolated from the larger world of the music industry. So Bob Cranshaw made a lot of his bread by being in a television orchestra for, what was that kid’s show? Sesame Street. Yeah, for years. And so what that meant, just a regular gig. He was still doing his jazz gigs at night and playing with everybody. But he lined up a pension that wound up getting him, I don’t know, something, a serious amount of money every month.
AFM members vote, 1947, photo by William Gottlieb, from William Gottlieb Collection
And he used that ability [to navigate the business] when he got older. He volunteered a lot of time to try to create a liaison towards jazz musicians and Local 802 of the AFM [American Federation of Musicians, the musicians’ union]. And ultimately, in spite of what I have to say are his heroic efforts, ultimately this failed.
I mean, sure, there’s a jazz committee and sure there’s everything else, but the majority of jazz musicians or the large majority of young musicians don’t know the union exists and it has not [necessarily been effective for them] … For those who record on major labels, we’ve benefited in a major way. For those who do union gigs, there are major benefits. But for the average musician who’s out there hustling, for the average student of yours, Terri Lyne, at Berklee, who’s going to be out there hustling in a few years, it doesn’t make any difference. And I mention that not to diss the union, but because I don’t think we have to just accept that. I think there are things we can do.
HM: The musicians’ union has been a powerful force, not always progressive, as I understand it. Can you talk a little bit more about that, Marc? Because we think about the union as possibly being a center for activism in some way.
MR: I’m sure that Orbert and Terri are aware of that most of the union was segregated up until pretty late in the game. When you see that word “amalgamated” in front of a union’s, it means it was that the Black and white locals were merged by court order. And in the case of the musicians’ union, that didn’t occur in some locals like Los Angeles until 1968 or ’69. So you’re right, it has a very mixed history.
On the other hand, that led in Chicago and Philadelphia and Pittsburgh and in a number of other cities to the creation of very strong Black locals that, I don’t know, when you talk to the older cats, like there was some kind of mixture of fear and respect. In other words, these locals kept alive the idea that when you play a gig or make a record, you’re supposed to get paid. When somebody shows up with a camera or wants to put it in a movie, you’re supposed to get paid something else.
A book that was issued recently on jazz in Pittsburgh, Jazz on the Hill by Colter Harper, that talks a lot about that history. I think there are things that can be done to either demand that the AFM change the things that have prevented it from serving not only most jazz musicians, but most indie musicians. Most of us who record for indie labels and work the recording-related touring circuits. And I think if they don’t do it, we need to start our own union. I think we need a union.
HM: So activism or organizing can be applied to everything from professional interests to international interests. Again, to go back to Orbit’s work with the people from Cuba, maybe you could talk about how that was initiated, Orbert, and what some of the challenges have been?
OD: It all started, the orchestra had been around for about 20 years now, which I’m every day surprised because it’s a labor of love. It’s the most difficult thing I’ve ever done in my life because we put an orchestra together. We needed a composer. So guess who’s the composer?
HM: The Chicago Jazz Philharmonic, you’re talking about.
OD: So we did the project in Poland, thanks to a dear friend of ours, Lauren Deutsch [photographic artist, at the time executive director of the Jazz Institute of Chicago]. And we said, this is pretty cool because Chicago has been good to us, but we could only really afford to do one or two concerts a year because of the cost of using professional musicians and everything (speaking of the union). But then we hit this thing in Poland that was like, this is cool, let’s do this. A couple of years later, we get the opportunity to go to Cuba.
But the thing about Cuba is I never realized that this experiment would transform my life and totally put me on the path of what we can call activism. There’s not a day that goes by without my having a conversation with now the hundreds of kids that have been through our program. I can’t even call it a program. They’re intersections, I’ll put it that way.
So to tell the story just very quickly: I’m a composer, so I was commissioned to do a work with River North Dance where Frank Chavez, who [was] the artistic director and choreographer, is Cuban-American. He said he’s always wanted to do a Cuban-American project, so we said, great, let’s team up. But we’ve got to go to Cuba. Definitely.
So while there, we visited the University of the Arts, and that’s when I first encountered these amazing students just by working with one trumpet player in a room, and pretty soon like 50 kids come running in and we start jamming. We just played “Night in Tunisia” for an hour. And as we left, we promised that we’d go back.
And we happened to go back in December of 2014. [While we were there] Someone tapped me on the shoulder, our translator, and said, “Hey, there’s something happening between our countries right now.” And it was right when President Obama and Castro were announcing the normalization of relationships. So imagine: like we go from strangers to becoming friends, really enemies to becoming friends. That weekend, my business partner and co-founder Mark Ingram, we were on 60 Minutes with Scott Pelley because we were the only people with Cuban reaction.
But what happened in those [rehearsal] rooms — and fortunately that happened at the beginning of the week, so we went through two or three days of rehearsal with this sense of celebration –that what these kids’ grandparents had hoped for, we were doing in the room.
So fortunately, because of having a great president with vision, I’ll say that, the next year we were able to bring 30 of those kids to Chicago to perform with the Chicago Jazz Philharmonic orchestra. We put together a 100-piece orchestra at the Auditorium Theatre, and that alone changed so many lives.
So fast forward, I’ve been to Cuba about 13 times since then, and just last January we performed. We put together another orchestra at the university and performed at the Havana Jazz Festival. But it’s not as much about the performance as it is about what happens in those rehearsals. And that’s where what I’ve learned is — I myself, I’ll start with me — I’ve learned so much about what it means to be human from the Cuban experience. And being an African-American, I’ve learned to parallel the African-American experience to the African-Cuban experience, and there’s so much richness that I could talk for six hours about it. But I’ll just say that it’s transformed me and it’s transformed a lot of lives. We just had a couple of students [from Cuba] come to Chicago and graduate to get their master’s degree, and so that’s been 12 years. And again, we’re still family because of it. That’s fantastic.
HM: So Terri Lyne, talk a little bit about what the people involved in the Institute for Jazz and Gender Justice go through, and what are some of the issues that they’re addressing and some of the maybe victories or growth that you’ve seen [since its opening in 2018].
TLC: We started off as really trying to serve the students at Berklee because I was just starting to hear some stories that were very upsetting, people that were quitting, that were very talented, but just didn’t have the support they needed from their professors. So that was the beginning. And then I realized what’s really needed is a cultural shift. We can change things within these walls here at Berklee, but it’s really a cultural shift that’s needed because for too long, women have not been supported. We’ve had extra burdens. You’ve had to be a certain kind of woman to succeed, one that plays just as good as the next guy, but that’s not really inviting a different aesthetic into the music.
Jazz has always been — aesthetically, sonically — pretty hyper-masculine. And the successful women were the ones that were able to fit into that existing fabric and texture of the music. What we started asking is, wow, what would the music have sounded like? How would it have developed if the contributions of women were in the fabric of it from the beginning?
Now we have an opportunity to open our ears and our minds to start to be able to possibly hear differently and feel a different presence in the music. Because yes, we do have different experiences and different feelings about things. And I think that voice is pretty void in the music. I’m speaking mostly about instrumental jazz, of course. Women have always been in the front singing, but that’s been an unspoken narrative, that women sing jazz and men play it.
And I have to look at, if I look at my career, I have to look at what did I squash in my own musical development and artistry in order to fit into what has been deemed “great”? And these are the things I would talk with when we had a trio with Geri Allen and esperanza spalding. Those are the things we started to talk about. Why did that trio feel different to us? And to me, it didn’t feel any different because I was so acclimated to assimilating. But Geri and esperanza would talk about, say they felt something different because somehow they didn’t feel as scrutinized or they didn’t feel as these extra burdens and weights that we may carry in all-male situations.
[In those] You’re low-key, always protecting yourself, always socially fitting into something. You can’t be too feminine or you can’t be too masculine. You have to walk this line of what’s accepted. Too feminine. You can’t be too masculine. You have to walk this line of what’s acceptable as a woman in a male-dominated space. Constantly.
I started thinking about all the women who don’t have a personality like me and felt out of place, or didn’t feel like who they were authentically was really accepted. So those were the questions I had to start answering, because if I wasn’t trying to look at that, then I feel like I was part of the problem. Because I was regurgitating the same things, telling my female students, “No, just hit harder, play stronger. No, don’t cry.” All these things that you would tell a boy, too, in general, because you have to be tough.
[An alternative, non-masculine point of view] doesn’t mean you don’t work hard. It just means let people come to the table as their authentic selves. And can we all just start to imagine a different aesthetic in the music, not replacing anything, but adding something that could be valuable to the future of jazz and valuable in a sense of helping music reach its greatest potential?
HM: Marc, I’m going to put you on the spot here because you’ve played in some pretty hyper-masculine ensembles, Jack McDuff, Elvis Costello, Tom Waits, and your own sounds of Ceramic Dog and some pretty tough music. How do you see the cross-gender relations? And we’ve seen so much development in feminism, post-modern feminism. How does this operate for you?
MR: I think that I’ve started to become aware, and I thank Terri Lyne and others for making me more aware of the necessity of reconsidering all these things. I’ve been paid a lot of attention to some things in the music, but I may have neglected that in this most recent band. I just got off the road with the quartet Hurry Red Telephone, with Ava Mendoza, but I couldn’t help but thinking we shared a bill in San Sebastián Jazz Festival with Dee Dee Bridgewater and her band We Exist. She was working with an all-female band and slamming, absolutely slamming.
But I couldn’t help but thinking that the entire next two bands, other than like a multi-artist night of flamenco music in which there are some amazing female musicians, but they were all male. So again, it’s not just the, I think it’s not just the responsibility of women in music to try to make this change happen. I think it’s all of our responsibility, and I think I need to do better.
TLC: You’re not doing too bad. It’s not like you’re exploiting women, I don’t think, with your music. And a lot of your repertoire really speaks to progressive causes or opposition to tyranny and bigotry.
MR: I’ll add to that. I think since this seems to be my job on most panels, I need to point out that for both in terms of race and gender, we got to look at it intersectionally because there’s a money issue involved. And I am conscious at every moment, like when we added, when we created minimums at the Winter Jazzfest, that every time pay for an entry-level festival goes up, every time the cost of producing a record goes down — in other words, because you get a record budget or you get fair treatment in producing record, that enables more women and more Black people and people of color who are historically and economically have less family wealth than white males. These issues are racial, and we can’t, when I hear these people say, you know, when I hear these people say, “Man, just DIY, man, make your own record,” I say, “That’s cool if you have the money to make your own record. That’s cool if you can not work for four months while you are writing, rehearsing, recording, mixing, editing, sequencing, doing the cover art for your record. But it’s not cool if you don’t.”
OD: We recently produced a gala for the Chicago Jazz Philharmonic, and the focus of the gala was Hazel Scott as one of the founders of Third Stream music. And so this is, I think, part of the revelation going back into our jazz history to see where the women and people who’ve been marginalized flourished and didn’t necessarily get the attention that they might have if they didn’t have the demographic that they did.
HM: Orbert, can we talk a little bit more about Hazel Scott as an activist?
OD: We talk a little bit more about Hazel Scott as an activist. The first thing I have to say is that I never really heard of her until our executive director Laura Rice brought her to my attention. I guess I’d seen the videos of her playing two pianos, left hand, right hand piano, and also the classical pieces that she played, but I never knew the depth of who she was musically, of course, or that she was the first African-American woman to have her own TV show.
But then when I started digging deeper into who she was. Her biographer, Karen Chilton, wrote an amazing book that I hope will become a screenplay for a movie one day about her life. But to know that she was the ultimate activist, and the fact that she was married to [New York City Congressman] Adam Clayton Powell Jr., and that put her in the limelight of social activism and racial equality… But also the fact that she was blending classical and jazz, which, again, was definitely unheard of.
The way that she got there was that I think it was Billie Holiday referred her to play at a club, and they were scrutinizing every piece that she wanted to play. And they said, don’t play that, don’t play that. No, you can’t play that, you can’t play that. But then she decided to start just playing classical music and then changing it and started swinging and changing the form and the textures and whatnot. And that kind of became the person that she would become.
And unfortunately, because of living in America at that time, she was ostracized and ended up having to move to Europe. And that’s where her career pretty much ended, because that’s when there was less emphasis on swing and more emphasis on bop and smaller bands and things like that. It’s time that she gets the recognition that she deserves.
MR: I think that demonstrates how activism has always been implicit in jazz in some ways. The adaptation of materials, the absorption of materials, and then transformation of them through a personal perspective. And as you say, she was actually persecuted by the Red Squad, by the Joseph McCarthy’s campaign, horrendous campaign in the early 1950s to root out what he thought was rebellious communism and all this scary stuff.
HM: It’s interesting that as Terri Lyne said earlier, it’s hard to imagine that these very same things are happening today. Okay, so what more can we do about it? Have you talked to colleagues? Are you trying to, or do you see that there’s more of a sense of urgency to address issues, social issues amongst your musician colleagues now? Not to be afraid of being silenced? Just continue, wanting to do what we do?
TLC: I always tell them to listen with their eyes and to look with their ears. And that tells them everything they need to know. As far as how we perpetuate our work with these causes, I feel doing things like this, of course, is super important, not just for what we’re talking about that others can hear, but also as a learning, an expansion, way of expanding for ourselves.
Because, for instance, Marc just mentioned this union thing in California in the late ’60s. And something, because my grandfather and my father were in the Black union in Boston. And I just looked it up and that didn’t merge until 1970, which really just blew my mind, because they talked about it and I thought just by listening to my dad talk that this was something that was way before my time.
I joined the union. I was the youngest person to join the union at 10 years old. So that was just five years after they [the segregated Black and white Boston musicians’ union chapters] merged. So these kinds of conversations are so important just for our own education. And for me, of course, you can formalize things if you’re working with an institution. But grassroots is always important. It’s always a big part of it. And it’s collective work. No one person or organization has a handle on it or does the most or everybody has to do something for something to actually shift.
But I think one of my strengths is just talking about what I believe in to other colleagues, male and female colleagues. Because when I talk to somebody, there’s really no way they can’t see what I see. I mean, it’s never happened. Of course, maybe people reject what I’m saying behind my back. But there’s many women that have really, how do I say, just bought, drank the Kool-Aid, bought into things that have been systemic. And we get used to how things are. So women have been not brainwashed, but just accepting of the idea that they shouldn’t talk about this. because they want to be considered equal. And so they don’t see gender. And I’m like, “No, gender is there. You can’t say you don’t see it. That’s like saying you don’t see race. It’s there whether you see it or not. It’s a problem whether you see it or not.”
And I think everybody has their passion. So if somebody doesn’t deal with this, they’re dealing with something else. That’s great. But as Marc said, intersectionality is so important because I can’t choose between race and gender as far as what’s important. So I’m looking at my brothers like they’re crazy at some point. If they’re talking about race and being an activist or an organizer in that regard, but haven’t given gender a second thought. And so I always see those connections. And sometimes that’s what I have to point out to people individually.
So I think we do what we can. And it’s a constant thing because once you open a Pandora’s box or once you see something, you can’t unsee it. So for me, it’s constant. It’s daily. I love being around people that I don’t have to talk about this with, you know, because it becomes tiring after a while. You can lose patience. I’ve been dealing with it my whole life and I maybe shut it out so I didn’t have to deal with it. And that’s a protective mechanism, too. But now that I have to deal with it, I really see the burden that we carry. So I try to explain that to people.
HM: Marc, let me ask you, do you see your responses from the audience when you go into activist-like repertoire, politically sensitive repertoire?
MR: Yes. To be honest with you, yes. People often, I think it’s very interesting in that most of what we’ve been talking about today has not been the content of the music. Like I’m singing an angry protest song. We’ve been talking about mostly organizing goes on behind the scenes. Who gets to be on the stage singing that angry protest song or whatever.
And like I’m all for singing angry protest song. I did a record called Songs of Resistance when Trump, during Trump’s first term. A record I’m proud of, but I will never make a multi-artist record again in my life. Please arrest me. I’ll serve the cause in other ways. To be honest with you, I think content of the songs is important, but not as important as it’s made out to be. Like a lot of artists who are like radical artists, they’re expressing radical sentiments as a way of seeking to sell records to a niche market of consumers who identify as radical. And there are worse sins than that. I’m glad people are putting out whatever message they’re putting out.
But I think a lot of the real organizing is not only what we say, but what we are. In other words, who gets a chance to be on that stage and who doesn’t? Who didn’t even have the money? Who gets into music when it becomes a marginal occupation where there isn’t the institutional framework or support? Who can afford to make music when your thing winds up on YouTube the next day? The thing you worked on for months or years is available for free? So the only thing you can get out of it is 0.038 pennies, a third of a penny per stream. It’s a starvation wage. Who can afford that?
So I think it’s what we are and how we fight that’s important. One way is to consider that conservatories have done a great job teaching young musicians. They all have entrepreneurship classes. They teach everybody, which entrepreneurship is how to take the received environment, how to use the received environment to your advantage. But what there’s almost no education about is collective action, how to change that environment, not just how to hustle within the environment we’re given, but how to change that environment. How through collective political action we can change laws, how through collective economic action we can create unions and create better conditions.
So I think that the conservatories need to get going on teaching collective action. Musicians, we have a history of collective action, and there’s larger movements, Black movement, women’s movement. There’s a history, and students need to know it, not just so they can be nice people, but to survive, because we are facing threats to our livelihoods on a scale of which we have never faced before. Generative AI can be legislated, it can be regulated, and there is a union negotiation coming up in January 2026 in which it can be stopped. But the union is not going to do anything about it unless we unite and make a lot of noise and demand that they do.
And so there’s several organizations that I am working with:
We’re going to make a lot of noise and we’re going to demand that the union go to bat, not only for jazz musicians, but for all independent musicians, negotiating for our interests in the AI envirnoment. Negotiating for our interests. How about some benefits for the people who play on the indie labels that the major labels distribute? Not only the in-house major label stuff. Right there, that takes in an awful lot of jazz.
And there’s other demands that they [the union] could be pushing that would help the people on our scene. We’re going to demand that they do it, and if they don’t, if they say they can’t do it or won’t do it, we’re going to say, stop claiming exclusive jurisdiction over our work and let us organize ourselves.
HM: Orbert, I’m going to end with you because being who you are is what really has stimulated the Chicago scene in ways. I want to point out you have a focus on immigrant communities in Chicago, and it seems like several of your concerts have focused on bringing out the connection between jazz and the music of various non-jazz societies. Do you want to talk a little bit about that to wrap things up?
OD: Absolutely. As Marc said earlier, we learned a lot from the first four years of the person who’s in office. And when the first immigrant ban went into effect we saw in a weekend, the destruction of what those words meant in having a band. I called my good friend Howard Levy, harmonica player, and we just chatted, a one-on-one conversation, asking “Wwhat can we do about this?”
We were actually about a month away from planning our next concert, and we decided to stop and just give focus on this. So the idea was to do three different concerts, three years in a row, based on three or four immigrant communities within Chicago.
And I am very, I don’t — that is to say I do my business with improvisation, so I had no master plan for this. But we started with Chinese Chicago musicians. I’m like, I don’t know any. So I searched Chinese musicians living in Chicago, and I came across a man named Kerry Leung who played multiple instruments and agreed to come to our office and talk.
His first thing was he got scared when he saw the word jazz. Says, “I don’t improvise.” So I said, okay, that’s no problem. Howard took out his harmonica, I took out my trumpet, and we just started playing. And before you knew it, man, Kerry was like all over it. And we said, welcome to the world of jazz.
Our next step was go to what we called our “innovation lab”. We got a rhythm section together, and we all played together. It was disastrous because we were playing and they were trying to play with us, and it’s a whole different language than they’re used to. So once we flipped the script, and said YOU play and let us compose to what you’re doing — then we created something totally new.
We started that process around October for about a month. And then by January, I would start composing by using every word that was spoken, every music that was played in the innovation lab, and creating these works for full orchestra. I’ll never do it again because I sacrificed three years of my life to do that.
But by now we’ve worked within the Chinese American community, the Indian — North and South India — with West African drumming. Oh, my goodness. With music of Bulgarian, Mexican American and Japanese communities in Chicago. We just did Brazil and Greece.
The thing that’s phenomenal is when we get together with the people of these communities as musicians, and have our conversations. That’s why we call it immigrant stories, Chicago immigrant stories. It’s the stories that matter. What does it mean to be American from your perspective?
Hopefully, this fall we’re going to start recording some of those pieces because after three concerts we’ve got a plethora of compositions and music. I’m going to call the results just “Immigrant Stories” instead of “Chicago Immigrant Stories.”
it may be something that gets blacklisted from the start. I hope it does, because then we’ll fight even harder to make it happen. That’s what it takes.
HM: Terri Lyne, do you have a last word?
TLC: No, really, just thank you for having this forum for us to come together and speak in solidarity. Thanks for doing that, Howard, and for supporting these causes because people want to act like politics is not really a part of the daily fabric of life or art, and it’s always that conversation about whether art or jazz has a responsibility or not.
I just don’t see how you avoid what’s happening around you socially, politically.And if we don’t all do something, even if it’s just being conscious… [nothing will change.] if I go back to gender, being conscious of what you support: I won’t mention the organization but I just saw an email this morning that bugged me because I’ll see long lists of groups and festivals, still to this day, the most famous jazz club in New York City — long lists of who’s coming — and there’s not one woman.
Politics and social activism is so important within our art form because it’s reflective of our community. And if we have a community, everyone needs to be represented and supported in that community.
So thank you for giving us this forum to speak.
HM: Thank you for participating. I’m very grateful to:
Terri Lynn Carrington from the Berkeley Institute of Jazz and Gender Justice,
Orbert Davis, Chicago Jazz Philharmonic,
Marc Ribot, an organizer and fantastic guitar player who’s working really for the ground level musicians.
Thanks all. See you again. In solidarity forever. And thank you for listening. You can check out episodes of The Buzz wherever you get your podcasts and we hope you will. Also visit us online at jjanews.org.
