Tag: big band jazz

Our Responsibility to the Next Generation

Posted on January 29, 2015 by - Columns

I try to live by the Seven Generations principle: meaning, to live one’s life with the next seven generations ahead in mind, while paying tribute to the lives and traditions of the seven generations that have come before. The most obvious application of this principle is in ecological practice: the reduction of one’s carbon footprint, elimination of waste, conscientious buying, and the like. As composers, we are immortalized in that our music is a tangible and teachable entity that can be passed down in the written and oral traditions for generations after we are gone. This concept is presented to us from the moment we learn what a composer is: part of the greatness of Beethoven and Bach is that their work has transcended not just years but centuries, and still remains important. As I grow as a musician and as a person, and (yikes!) my 30th birthday is less than a year away, I’ve been thinking about what it means to have a hand in bringing up the next generation of musicians.

In a rather quick turn of events, I’ve gone from being the devoted disciple to the one looked to for leadership. My circumstances were specific, given that my mentor Fred Ho was dying and knew it, but I feel a responsibility to eventually do the same as he did before his death: to ensure the growth of my artistic tradition well past my lifetime and into the changing times.

Fred’s last project, The Eco-Music Big Band, is multigenerational, with our musicians’ ages ranging from 20 to 70. This happened somewhat by chance when the band was formed last year: those who had worked with Fred Ho and wanted to continue playing his music after his death joined my band, which was already filling up with some of the best young blood in the city. It has led to a dynamic that I wouldn’t trade for the world: the avant-garde fused with the foundational traditions. It means that leading, in this case, still means learning.

Four trumpeters of different ages playing their instruments

Multiple generations are represented in the trumpet section of the Eco-Music Big Band

One of our first few concerts was at the University of Vermont; before the concert, we gave a masterclass with the University of Vermont (UVM) Big Band. The UVM Big Band had been working on Soul Science Stomp, one of Fred Ho’s more famous charts, and some of our band sat in to work with them on it. I was guest conducting, and when one of the veterans in my band, who had been in the recording session for Soul Science Stomp, heard UVM’s rendition of it, he cried. When I spoke to him after, this is what he told me: “They really did their homework. They listened to the recording, listened for our phrasings, and matched them. It was really great.”


For the encore of the final performance of “The Red, Black and Green Revolutionary EcoMusic Tour” at the National Black Theatre on February 23, 2014, we performed Iron Man Meets the Black Dog Meets David Taylor written by me with Fred (my first big band arrangement!) for the bass trombonist David Taylor. (He’s also doing vocals on this one…)
What I learned from this experience is that making sure our music survives is about a lot more than just writing it down. It has to do with teaching our harmonic language and melodic style to those who learn from us. It has to do with nuance, experience, storytelling, and subtlety. It has to do with knowing, for instance, that Fred loved blaxploitation films and that the pitch bends in his melody lines are best done on the first beat and a half of every measure. It means that we should be able to pass on the same implicit understanding to those that we teach our music to. If we can do that, maybe ours will generate a momentum that lasts past our lifetimes.

One of my favorite things to do is sit and listen to the stories the members of my band have of playing with the likes of Charles Mingus, Miles Davis, and Duke Ellington. Their stories are of a different time, when things were simpler in some ways and more difficult in others. The time that they speak of is a time that I could never even begin to understand (let alone experience—opportunities for a female jazz composer/bandleader back then were virtually nonexistent), but I feel that their stories in some way later inform the musical decisions that I make and the music I write. Furthermore, these experiences, both the ones they tell me about and the ones they don’t, inform the musical decisions that they make when playing my work. Their deep and firsthand understanding of the traditions of Mingus and Ellington allow them a poignant frame of reference when approaching my more avant-garde ideas. When I bring my hip-hop collaborators to the band, it is these same older musicians who have the most surprising contributions. (Have you ever heard a trombone participate in a rap call-and-response?)


spiritchild joins the Eco-Music Big Band in a performance of Cal Massey’s “Hey Goddamnit, Things Have Got To Change”
To take the traditional and add something new is to understand where the traditions came from. We must respect the past but not put it in a museum; there are enough big bands playing standards out there. Understanding where Cal Massey was coming from when he wrote the Black Liberation Movement Suite allows me to help my hip-hop collaborators make informed contributions to his music. Similarly, understanding the traditions of Sun Ra informs my own compositions, even though my work doesn’t sound much like Sun Ra.

I am working with the poet and writer Quincy Troupe to finish an opera about Sun Ra coming back to life to save the planet from the apocalypse, brought on by global warming and large-scale oppression. It begs the question: What would Sun Ra be writing if he were alive right now? How can my experience living in the 21st century amid the effects of climate change and police brutality inform a fictional world of my own creation in which Sun Ra can come back and save us with his interplanetary music? Quincy has his own ideas—having known Sun Ra informs his creative process differently than mine. One of my favorite things about working with him is hearing the firsthand stories: running into Sun Ra in Switzerland; having the Arkestra visit the college campus where he worked. His stories inform my work in a way that I never could have anticipated. These stories couldn’t have been found in my research about Sun Ra’s life. They are only available firsthand.

I want to pass on not only my own stories but the stories that I am told about the likes of Duke, Miles, Sun Ra, and Mingus to those that I teach my music to. I want them to understand why the tradition is important to the continuation of our craft, even after we’ve embarked on our path to create something hopefully no one’s ever heard before. We must learn our scales before we can improvise; likewise, we must know where our traditions came from so we can create our own.


Albert Marquès wows the audience at the Blue Note with his piano solo on “Hey Goddamnit, Things Have Got To Change!”

Eco-Music: Not Just a Theory

Posted on January 22, 2015 by - Columns

Marie Incontrera conducting the Eco-Music Big Band, pictured are 4 musicians playing saxophones, 4 playing trumpets (1 of whom is standing), a trombonist, and a bassist

The Eco-Music Big Band in performance

I am political by way of music. My very first piece in graduate school was about gender: an abstract guitar quartet that played on expectations, with “male” melodies being more angular and harsh and “female” melodies being more fluid and unassuming. You wouldn’t know it by listening, of course—part of the beauty of abstraction is that listeners are free to take away their own personal experience of a work. Eight years later, I was going through old files and stumbled upon this one by accident. I am a different musician now, on a path that I couldn’t have imagined at the time. My politics are no longer an idea but woven into the fabric of my music, striving above and beyond it to create real change.

Eco-Music began as a band name, but it has developed into a philosophy. What if Sun Ra could save the planet from climate change by causing us to change our habits with his music? What if a concert of works on police brutality inspired our communities enough to propose new laws that make us safer? What if we eliminate plastics in our rehearsal and performance spaces and inspire others to do the same? Change begins at the cellular level, and if we can reach our audiences, then we can create a better world.

Cover of Shoatz book featuring a drawing of Shoatz

A book of Russell Maroon Shoatz’s collected writings is usually on sale at the merchandise table at Eco-Music Big Band concerts and other Scientific Soul Sessions events.

The Eco-Music Big Band kicked off in February 2014 with the Red Black and Green Revolutionary Eco-Music Tour, produced with the political collective Scientific Soul Sessions. Part of the tour’s mission was education around the condition of political prisoner Russell Maroon Shoatz, who was 70 years old at the time and had spent 23 consecutive years in solitary confinement. At the time the tour began, Shoatz had been placed in a cold six-by-ten-foot cell with feces on the walls, standing water on the ground, and no blanket. This touched a nerve in many: the agenda was not just political but in support of the basic human rights of a senior citizen.

The tour was through Vermont, and began and ended in New York City. Along with the introduction of the band to the world with these first public performances, our audiences were introduced to the condition and direness of the situation for Shoatz. They were encouraged to take action, spread the word, and contact the Pennsylvania Department of Corrections.

Here’s the thing about music: it actually moved people to action. On the third day of the tour, Russell Maroon Shoatz was released from solitary confinement and allowed into the general population prison system for the first time in 23 years. In three days, the people of Vermont went from never having heard of Shoatz to calling, writing letters, and posting on social media about his case. In three days’ time, the musical push did what the legal team had been trying to do for 20 years.

Old Dog Documentaries‘ film of the Black Red and Green Revolutionary EcoMusic Tour at Barnard Vermont in February 2014.
So I am not surprised when protest organizers contact me asking for musicians to play at their protests; I am less surprised still when I hear that it was the music that elicited the loudest response and the most action. I am also not surprised that at times the music truly speaks for its own politics, without having to say a word about it: if done right, a work about police brutality should be self-explanatory and not need a soapbox before or after.

This is the power of music. This is why Eco-Music is not just a theory but a practice. This is why I believe that my politics belong in my music: because it is the only way I have ever been able to make real change happen. It’s why I encourage those who write for my band to write controversially and to put their most political thoughts into their music. It’s why I call myself a political composer, and not a composer who writes political music.

I am political by way of music because I am endlessly optimistic in the face of global warming, grand-scale warfare, and the systematic oppression that is the state of the world today. If we can use music to protect the rights of a 70-year-old man, it makes me believe we can use it to end wars, liberate the oppressed, and cool the earth.