Holding Space: Convening (as) Creative Music

I am deeply grateful to be present in whatever capacity I occupy. I create music and, on occasion, other forms of sound. The Vision Festival has honored me multiple times over the years — performing alongside Wadada Leo Smith, Amiri Baraka’s Blue Ark, Burnt Sugar, and the collaborative trio Fieldwork. I am thrilled to see this energizing festival reaching its third decade. It stands as one of New York City’s true treasures.

This talk engages critically with the notion of convening. For many years now, terms like jazz, improvisation, community, and dialogue have been linked within academic discussion. As a practitioner, I fully embrace this. I have experienced directly what music can accomplish — how it can become a unifying, shared experience of exchange for every person in a room. I sound somewhat idealistic when I describe it. Yet as an artist, I remain wary of any closed narrative or overly simple answer. I want to explore how much further we can dig.

When I originally planned this address, I intended to celebrate the wonders of musical improvisation. I planned to advocate for collaborative music-making as a force that builds community. I thought I would argue that the very act of bringing creative music together exerts that force. I meant to offer powerful examples where collective musical actions reveal new truths. Through recordings and live performances — as everyone here knows intimately — this music constantly creates a transformative reality. It builds community and dissolves boundaries between performer and audience through signifying, the blues matrix, rupture, flow, ritual, process, collaboration, radical empathy, and a trust built on listening. All of this helps us envision a better future.

These details certainly resonate with all of us — those who make music and those who are passionate fans and critics. They also provide convenient narratives for the jazz studies enterprise; they carry claims of emancipatory power and thus validate academic work. These stories of transformation through improvisation help secure funding for research institutes, journals, conferences, and faculty positions. We pat ourselves on the back for affirming — among a mostly non-black circle of colleagues, watched by white funding sources — the liberatory power of black music.

Meanwhile, it is summer in the United States. The summer of 2013 saw the Zimmerman verdict of not guilty. The summer of 2014 witnessed police killings of Michael Brown and Eric Garner, among so many others. This young summer is already scarred by the massacre of Black worshippers in Charleston, a half-dozen Black churches set ablaze, and just before that, a video of a white officer violently subduing an unarmed fourteen-year-old Black girl at a Texas pool party. And that is only in the summertime. In the eleven months since Ferguson, approximately four hundred more Black people have been killed by law enforcement.

The rehabilitative and celebratory impulses of jazz studies, or critical improvisation studies — our focus on a micro-utopia of racial harmony, intersubjective listening, and empathy — may feel rather futile, perhaps even inappropriate or unethical to some, when confronted with this staggering and relentless pattern of extreme anti-black violence, oppression, and exploitation.

Yes, we recognize and value music’s power to bring people together. In fact, I believe that music is simply a word for all the ways we exist together in time. So we might understand music and convening as synonymous. Though we often forget, to hear music is to hear others; music is created by people and for people. It is the sound of ourselves. Even Madonna once sang that music makes the people come together.

But can musical structures allow any kind of revolutionary response to these foundational systems of violence — the inherited injustices that shape every action and context? I am not simply talking about putting an individual or movement in a song title. I want to ask: what kinds of actions are available that can bring us to confront the systemic oppression in which we are all implicated?

As you know, I am now addressing you from within the establishment as a tenured professor at Harvard. In a 2014 speech I gave to the Yale Asian American Alumni, I reflected on our “complicity with excess.” Yinka Shonibare, the Nigerian-British artist, coined that phrase to capture his own involvement in an elite art world. He tries to stage these dynamics within his visual tableaus. But the phrase works equally well for considering our connections to institutions of higher learning. In this regard I am thankful to poet and theorist Fred Moten, whose collaborative text with Stefano Harney, The Undercommons, outlines an alternative way of relating to the University system. They describe the situation of minorities and other non-normative scholars — people there because of a misreading or a desperate search for diversity — as being “in-but-not-of” the Academy: “The undercommons, its maroons, are always at war, always in hiding.”

The conference title includes the words “improvising” and “agency.” On these subjects I will offer two important perspectives. First, historian Walter Johnson, in his 2003 essay “On Agency,” warned against “a teleology… which ultimately reproduces the idea of a liberal agent as the universal subject of history.” He cautioned that interpreting all actions within the framework of “agency” obscures critical questions about how enslaved people theorized their own deeds and about the real process by which those deeds led to new ways of understanding slavery and resistance.

In studying and theorizing improvisation, I have begun to wonder if what we are really talking about in such contexts is something else. When we examine collectives, communities, and collaborations, could it be that we are actually fantasizing about the dissolution of difference? That is why, later in this talk, I will address antagonism — moments when awareness of difference is sharpened and intensified.

We also constantly find ourselves in these discussions entangled with discourses of “freedom” — which, as one of the most loaded terms in the Western imagination, might be considered improvisation’s master concept. Harvard sociologist Orlando Patterson remarked in an interview last fall:

“The idea of freedom is seen as ‘inherent’ — so there is nothing to explain… [The idea is that] ‘Everybody wants to be free because it is part of the human condition.’ That’s nonsense. Freedom as a value, as a cherished part of one’s culture, as something to strive for and die for, is unusual in human history. You can’t just take it for granted. So the question turns into, how did freedom become important? My explanation is that freedom emerged as the antithesis to the social death of slavery.”

Under slavery, he explains, there were three groups: masters, slaves, and non-slaves. “All three come to discover this thing we call freedom through their relationships. For the master, freedom is being able to do what you please with another person: freedom as power. For the slave — well, what does a slave yearn for? To be emancipated, to get rid of the social death that is slavery. Masters encourage this notion of freedom, too, as the hope of manumission is one of the most powerful ways to get a slave to work. The third group, the non-slaves or freemen, look at the slaves and say, ‘We are not them. We are born free.’ Suddenly, being born free becomes important, in a way it never could be for slaves. Freemen have a different status in society, one that does not depend on their socioeconomic class.”

Within the horrifying context of slavery and its aftermath, freedom should be understood not as something Black people have, but something they must get. The phrase “get free” is familiar; it appears as both a goal in Black music and a dream in Black life. When we discuss freedom in Black music, or freedom at all, we are actually referring to what Fred Moten has long theorized as fugitivity. Escape.

Let me take a brief detour through recent art criticism, particularly the kind of art that emerged in the 1990s and became known as “relational art.” I raise this because delving into relational aesthetics — both its proponents and its critics — reminded me of certain tendencies in jazz studies and critical improvisation studies.

Nicolas Bourriaud theorized and promoted relational aesthetics in the late 1990s in his book of the same name. He described Relational Art as “an art taking as its theoretical horizon the realm of human interactions and its social context, rather than the assertion of an independent and private symbolic space.” He wrote, “The possibility of a relational art… points to a radical upheaval of the aesthetic, cultural, and political goals introduced by modern art.” One of his favorite examples was a 1990s series of gallery performances and installations by Rirkrit Tiravanija, who cheerfully cooked and served pad thai and other favored dishes to whoever showed up. Gallery visitors would unexpectedly find themselves sitting together, sharing a meal, chatting, and exchanging gossip. A curator observed, perhaps rather obviously, that Tiravanija’s work “is fundamentally about bringing people together.” Bourriaud agreed, writing, “Art is a state of encounter.” Instead of reifying the finished object, relational art emphasizes the participatory logic of a situation — populated, embodied, enacted improvisationally and in real time by whoever freely passes through it.

But there is that keyword again: freedom. Who actually possesses the freedom — the leisure, the expertise, the disposable time and money, the unhindered mobility — to wander into these spaces and subject themselves to such mildly entertaining social situations, loosely organized by highly paid art stars like Tiravanija, Pierre Huyghe, Joseph Beuys, Liam Gillick, or Jorge Pardo? Who enjoys such freedom? None other than the denizens of the art world, secure in their relative wealth and in the knowledge that the art world exists solely for them. This simple reality led Claire Bishop to ask, “If relational art produces human relations, then the next logical question to ask is what types of relations are being produced, for whom, and why?”

Andrés Montenegro comments in the journal Ephemera that “the ameliorative, palliative and restorative rhetoric that characterises much of Bourriaud’s Relational aesthetics reverberates through other current accounts of contemporary art.”

We might likewise ask ourselves if we can detect a similar tone or pattern within the sphere of jazz studies. Who are the “communities” referenced in our various permutations of “improvisation,” “community,” “agency,” “social change,” and “freedom” — if not the predominantly white, born-free community of privileged liberal consumers of some version of jazz? These are the people who buy into this specific musical art world, its supporting structures, and its convenient stories of transcendence and togetherness. I am not referring to the artists themselves, but to the systems of power that assign a certain temporary value to their work — displaying, symbolizing, containing, and commodifying the freedoms supposedly experienced by improvisers, especially Black ones, while operating within major cities that have their own built-in dominations and exclusions.

We never exist outside the political economy that has shaped the long history of jazz in this nation — its creation, its reception, and its ownership. Whether in the supposedly golden days when “all races” gathered in segregated and policed neighborhoods, or in contemporary settings where musicians perform at festivals for “the people” in cities that remain racially and economically divided. Complaints about the supposedly shrinking jazz audience rarely confront these deeper questions.

Among the artists associated with the Relational Art movement, Santiago Sierra stands out starkly from the others. He fills galleries and museums with people who might not otherwise enter them — homeless individuals, immigrants, laborers, sex workers, people addicted to hard drugs — essentially, vulnerable people in need of money — and pays them to perform a menial task, or in some cases, something more severe. The work can be peculiar and sometimes appears inhumane: stand facing a wall for one hour. Sit inside a closed cardboard box on the gallery floor for four hours. Dye your hair blonde in public. Have a straight line tattooed across your back. Block an entranceway for six hours. Sierra pays these workers a modest but steady wage for their time and effort. This is not charity; it is a market transaction.

What is an audience meant to take from this? Without excessive condescension, Santiago’s works touch a vulnerable nerve in art-world culture. Montenegro interprets their message this way:

“Art, therefore, cannot offer a perspective beyond the conditions that construct it: it cannot provide an emancipatory function if it is configured by subjugating procedures and mechanisms.”

Claire Bishop argues in her 2004 essay “Antagonism and Relational Aesthetics” that these projects highlight the underlying oppositions and imbalances that support everyday life for art-world participants. Santiago’s works do not bring people together; they force viewers to confront their separation from workers — people who remain invisible in elite spaces. Bishop writes:

“The model of subjectivity that underpins their practice is not the fictitious whole subject of harmonious community, but a divided subject of partial identifications open to constant flux. If relational aesthetics requires a unified subject as a prerequisite for community-as-togetherness, then… Sierra provides a mode of artistic experience more adequate to the divided and incomplete subject of today. This relational antagonism would be predicated not on social harmony, but on exposing that which is repressed in sustaining the semblance of this harmony.”

I will now discuss a couple of recent projects of my own, not because I think they resolve or fully address these issues, but because they appear to engage similar concerns. One is Holding it Down: The Veterans’ Dreams Project, a collaboration with poet Mike Ladd spanning 2009 to 2013. The other is a short piece presented at Brooklyn Academy of Music in December 2014 as part of a larger program.

Holding It Down: The Veterans’ Dreams Project, created with poet-performer Mike Ladd, completes a decade-long trilogy of works developed during the shadows of U.S. wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. Earlier works — 2003’s In What Language? (a series of micro-narratives about people of color in international airports) and 2006’s Still Life with Commentator (a satirical look at 24-hour news culture during wartime) — offered various domestic perspectives on the Global War on Terror. These experiences were distant and largely repressed or hidden, except for people of color, whose physical traits marked them as being on the frontiers of Americanness in an atmosphere of suspicion and surveillance.

The trilogy’s final work, Holding it Down: The Veterans’ Dreams Project (premiered September 2012), is built around genuine accounts from veterans — those stubborn bodily reminders of wars that remain mostly unseen, unexamined, and pushed aside in national discourse. We chose to work with soldiers of color, a complicated and uneasy presence in America’s strongly racialized wars and a disproportionately large segment of the armed forces. We decided not only to interview these veterans of color, but also to co-create, co-develop, and co-perform the work alongside them. In the piece, veterans describe their dreams in their own words — some improvised, some shaped into poetry or lyrics, in dialogue with other voices and with music played by an electroacoustic ensemble.

Points of reference include Bill T. Jones’s Still/Here, which confronted audiences with the physical presence of people who are sick, disabled, and dying, and Anna Deavere Smith’s Twilight: Los Angeles, a “documentary performance” drawn from interviews about the 1992 L.A. riots.

For us, the veterans’ involvement at the work’s core created a transformative experience. It was no longer art “about” war and its participants. It became something else — something directly linked to and entangled with the experience and aftermath of war itself. This was a deliberate attempt, as conservative critic Arlene Croce controversially stated in her infamous non-review of Jones’s work, to “discuss the undiscussable.”

The most powerful moments for me have been performing alongside Maurice Decaul and Lynn Hill, our two collaborators from the veteran community. Decaul and Hill co-wrote and perform crucial roles in the project. Audiences were brought to look them in the eyes, hear about their nightmares, and experience their full humanity — even as they represent a chapter of our shared history that we would rather not confront. These irreducible differences in perspective — between those who saw combat and those who did not, between those who carried first-hand knowledge of state-sponsored violence and those who did not — became the very substance of the work.

The other project I want to mention took place at Brooklyn Academy of Music's Next Wave Festival last December. The program featured Mutations I–X, a piece for string quartet, and Radhe Radhe, a film project.

Working with the International Contemporary Ensemble and filmmaker Prashant Bhargava, I was commissioned by BAM to create a short solo piece to begin a program. Around that time, the police officers who had killed Eric Garner were not indicted. Swept up in the fury of the #BlackLivesMatter movement, I felt the world had no need for me to perform alone at a piano. I didn’t want to present a solo work — I wanted to give away the funds.

I felt growing self-consciousness about every aspect of that event. BAM is a wealthy white institution sitting in a Black neighborhood, often attracting white audiences and presenting mostly white or international artists while rarely engaging structurally with its own conflicted position. As a South Asian American, I came to understand that I had been hired partly for my connections to the contemporary classical scene, but also for my ethnic background, which was treated in an exoticizing manner. This was plainly visible in the promotional material. Instead of using professional photographs of my fellow artists or me, the marketing department chose a still from the film featuring an anonymous Indian child covered

with bright Holi powders. It struck me: within BAM’s institutional framing, I was not brought in to celebrate Black music, but to sidestep it entirely.

I asked our friend Robin Kelley for advice. Inspired by the spirit of the moment, I considered staging a die-in on stage. But I hesitated, since die-ins had become so routine that they sometimes felt like an innocuous selfie opportunity. Robin reminded me that the real force of a die-in is its capacity to obstruct the ordinary flow of daily life, compelling bystanders to confront the physical presence of a community they would rather ignore.

What I had on my side — something that has become a recurring tool — was the element of surprise. The program note simply read “untitled solo piece.” What we actually presented came to be called “Dying In and Standing Up at BAM.” I partnered with choreographer Paloma McGregor from Dancing While Black, and we orchestrated an action no one in the audience anticipated or wanted. In that mostly white listening space, 98% white, we assembled a die-in that then turned into a stance of standing and facing the crowd. I instructed my collaborators that we would initiate the show by not starting. About twenty-five participants — whom I paid using my entire commission fee — lay on the floor for several minutes. Then I approached the piano; they rose, performed some movements, and turned toward the audience as if to hold everyone present accountable for events outside those doors. We understood this not as dance but as action. It concerned the way Black bodies become obstacles. My hope was that someone inside that hall would, during that opening sequence, question whether any performance would occur that evening, or feel that the security and comfort of that elite arts audience might be slightly unsettled.

Relational aesthetics was never the theoretical basis for these works; they came into being long before I was exposed to the artistic frameworks I have since described. I cannot even say whether these projects succeeded on the terms I have laid out. But I cared about how the art itself could somehow distort or complicate the settings where we operated, by foregrounding the disruptive physical existence of people rendered invisible or voiceless by those environments. I used to say that my work involves creating or imagining community — yet as I have learned to think through antagonism, I now realize it also concerns identifying and amplifying divisions. We do not merely host dinner parties. We hold space, we gather, we act relationally, and we listen for the contradictions that cannot be reconciled. Ultimately, that is what I took from Cecil Taylor and from Butch Morris: difference itself is music.