Introducing Aurora Nealand (Excerpted from "Freedom of Expression: Interviews With Women in Jazz")

With the help of a wonderful copyeditor and a wonderful proofreader, I am pulling together over 350 pages of interviews and introductory material for what will be my first book, entitled Freedom of Expression: Interviews With Women in Jazz. We're taking our time to make sure the book is nothing less than spectacular, and there is still much work to be done. In the meantime, I would like to share with you some excerpts from the book. Each interview will be presented in a straightforward, Q&A format, so that the reader can "hear" each musician's story in her own words.

I hope you enjoy these previews of what will be a truly expansive, entertaining, and in-depth look at jazz and the musicians, specifically women, who are taking the music into the future.

Aurora Nealand (saxophonist, singer, composer)

Some of the most important adult friends I have made in my lifetime (including my wife) are people I met when I lived in New Orleans, Louisiana. When I first landed in that city back in 1993 (via a 24-hour Greyhound bus ride from Columbus, Ohio—I don’t recommend it!), I honestly felt as if I had stepped into another world, or perhaps another time. I witnessed my first jazz funeral my first week in the city. Not a staged parade for tourists, but the real deal, slowly making its way through the uptown neighborhood I was staying in toward Carrollton. When I stop to remember, I realize most of my fondest mem¬ories of New Orleans are of moments that took place late at night, in the dark, and involved music. Lots of music, including funk performed by young brass bands for packed clubs of sweaty dancers; contemporary, sometimes free-form music by incredible local musicians; DJs spinning house music, as well as the then-new jungle and trip-hop recordings that were coming out of Eng-land; rock and roll, opera, classical music—even music theater. In his book The Year Before the Flood, Ned Sublette writes that in New Orleans, “all times are present at once.” I know exactly what he means, and I’m not even a native.

In New Orleans, in the early years of the 20th century, women instrumentalists and singers were an active part of the city ’s musical community and important contributors to the musical development of jazz. New Orleans is a very feminine city. Writer Louise McKinney describes its geography accordingly: “. . . tucked into a turn of the Mississippi River . . . putting her as it does at the bottom of the Mississippi’s muddy overflow . . . rich with dense, fertile soil . . . this bottoming out, end-of-the-line location also places her in a deep psychic realm. It is the subconscious, the basement of the soul, where dark inexplicable alchemy occurs, often considered the root of creativity and expressly feminine.”

With all of the above in mind, I knew at the beginning of this project that not including a musician from New Orleans in a book subtitled “Interviews With Women in Jazz” would be a huge oversight. And given the fact that my goal with this book is not just to discuss where jazz has been but where it may be headed, New Orleans-based saxophonist and composer Aurora Nealand seemed like the perfect person to reach out to for an interview.

Nealand arrived in New Orleans after studying at the Oberlin Conservatory of Music and the L’École Internationale de Théâtre Jacques Lecoq in Paris, France. Not surprisingly, given her academic background, her creative work extends into the worlds of experimental theater and performance art, and freely amalgamates the music of New Orleans’ past (the “traditional”) with contemporary sounds, concepts, and spirit. Nealand leads the Royal Roses, a “non-traditional traditional jazz band” that is a part of a larger local scene of musicians digging into a style of pre-jazz jazz informed by collective improvisation and a desire to get listeners on their feet and dancing. She is also codirector of the Sound Observatory New Orleans (SONO), a performance lab and venue for local and visiting artists-in-residence.

Over the course of our interview, it became apparent to me that the premillennial New Orleans where I used to live and make music has changed and is changing. If “all times are present at once” in New Orleans, what I look forward to is how a creative tension between the traditional and the not-so-traditional will continue to shape and nurture the city ’s musical culture.

Aurora Nealand and the Royal Roses

Introducing Helen Sung (Excerpted from "Freedom of Expression: Interviews With Women in Jazz")

With the help of a wonderful copyeditor and a wonderful proofreader, I am pulling together over 350 pages of interviews and introductory material for what will be my first book, entitled Freedom of Expression: Interviews With Women in Jazz. We're taking our time to make sure the book is nothing less than spectacular, and there is still much work to be done. In the meantime, I would like to share with you some excerpts from the book. Each interview will be presented in a straightforward, Q&A format, so that the reader can "hear" each musician's story in her own words.

I hope you enjoy these previews of what will be a truly expansive, entertaining, and in-depth look at jazz and the musicians, specifically women, who are taking the music into the future.

Helen Sung (pianist, composer)

The piano may not be the first instrument most people associate with Texas. But in the early 1900s it wasn’t unusual to find a piano in homes of both poor and wealthy families throughout the state, where several immigrant communities absorbed Spanish, Mexican, Cajun, German, East European, and African-American musical idioms. Along with the guitar, pianos were played in sharecropping communities, the popular musical styles of the day being “rags” (or “ragtime”) and “slow blues.” Classical and popular music would be played from sheet music, note for note, but when the grownups weren’t around, improvisation would inevitably happen. Brothers George and Hersal Thomas and later Moon Mullican (“King of the Hillbilly Pianists”) are a few of the Texas-born pianists who helped to develop if not outright invent the rhythmic concepts, bass lines, and melodic phrasing that infused pre-1950s rock and roll and jazz.

Houston-born pianist and composer Helen Sung did not grow up playing blues, boogie-woogie, rock and roll, or anything else close to jazz. But in her last year as an undergraduate classical piano performance major at the University of Texas at Austin, she attended a concert by New Orleans pianist and singer Harry Connick Jr., and was deeply inspired by what she heard.

“Classical music never affected me like that,” says Sung of that concert in her interview. “There was an irresistible passion and energy in (Connick’s) playing. And the fact that he was improvising blew me away, because classical musicians are all about the written notes.”

In the years after that concert, Sung would go on to study with some of the masters of jazz at the Thelonious Monk Institute of Jazz Performance. In 1999, she was a semi-finalist in the institute’s Jazz Piano Competition, and in 2007, won the Kennedy Center’s Mary Lou Williams Jazz Piano Competition. Sung has played with several jazz masters, including Wayne Shorter, Ron Carter, and Clark Terry, and appears on Terri Lyne Carrington’s 2001 Grammy-winning album, The Mosaic Project. Sung has also released several highly praised albums, including Anthem for a New Day, which incorporates her classical training with jazz in what she describes as an “organic and integrated way.”

Several of the musicians interviewed in this book studied and seriously considered a career as a classical musician before making a shift to playing jazz, but Sung’s transition is one of the most dramatic. In her interview, she speaks candidly about the challenges she faced in mastering its language.

“All I knew is that I wanted to find out more about this music,” says Sung. “I wanted to be able to really play it, but not as a classical player who could fake it because she had the chops, you know? I wanted to be authentic, genuine. I felt jazz was a music that had to be respected and honored in that way.”

Helen Sung "Anthem for a New Day"

Introducing Val Jeanty (Excerpted from "Freedom of Expression: Interviews With Women in Jazz")

With the help of a wonderful copyeditor and a wonderful proofreader, I am pulling together over 350 pages of interviews and introductory material for what will be my first book, entitled Freedom of Expression: Interviews With Women in Jazz. We're taking our time to make sure the book is nothing less than spectacular, and there is still much work to be done. In the meantime, I would like to share with you some excerpts from the book. Each interview will be presented in a straightforward, Q&A format, so that the reader can "hear" each musician's story in her own words.

I hope you enjoy these previews of what will be a truly expansive, entertaining, and in-depth look at jazz and the musicians, specifically women, who are taking the music into the future.

Val Jeanty (electronics, percussion)

Any book that purports to speak accurately about the roots of jazz must ac-knowledge the role Afro-Caribbean culture played in its conception and evolution. For example, in the case of the Haitian religion Vodou, author Michael Ventura writes: “The question of how Haitian Voodoo [his spelling] came to the continental United States, and the question of why jazz originated in New Orleans, are in fact parts of the same question.”

Like Palo and Santeria in Cuba, and Candomblê and Umbanda in Brazil, Vodou represents a new world formulation of African religious practices, practices that include sacred drums and rhythms. Beginning in 1817, these rhythms found a public forum in New Orleans’ Congo Square where, every Sunday afternoon, slaves were permitted to congregate, dance, and play music. To this day, Vodou, both as a religious practice and a musicological source, continues to have a pervasive influence on New Orleans’ culture.

Haitian-born electronic artist and percussionist Val Jeanty began playing Vodou drums at the age of 5.

“I pretty much grew up in what we call ‘lakou,’ ” explains Jeanty. “A lakou is just like a yard, and that is where all the ceremonies happen, all the prayers happen, all the drummers practice, all the singers practice, and all the dancers practice.”

Now based in New York City, Jeanty uses an array of electronic instruments and controllers, as well as sacred hand drums, to create music that is poetic and multi-layered, combining Vodou’s rhythms, rhythms that signify and call to its gods and goddesses, with modern electronica- and jazz-infused beats.

Given the breadth and complexities of Vodou’s influence, even the most conscientious historians and anthropologists may confuse its practices with its misrepresentations in popular culture. For example, in her 1935 collection of African-American folklore, Mules and Men, Zora Neale Hurston uses the word “hoodoo” interchangeably with “voodoo” (“as pronounced by the whites”) and inadvertently misaligns African- and Native American-based medicinal practices with the tools of religious worship. Such confusion continues to this day in souvenir shops across the southern U.S. where dolls, mojo bags, gris gris, powders, and charms are inaccurately branded and sold as accessories of Vodou worship. And I could write another book listing and describing American films and television shows that perpetuate ignorant and racist stereotypes about Vodou in the name of cheap thrills and gore.

However, there are several thoughtful, thoroughly researched books and film documentaries about Vodou, including Maya Deren’s 1953 book, Divine Horsemen: The Living Gods of Haiti and film of the same title (shot between 1947 and 1954), Mama Lola: A Vodou Priestess in Brooklyn by Karen McCarthy Brown, and Darius James and Oliver Hardt’s recent documentary, The United States of Hoodoo [2012]. Jeanty is featured prominently in James and Hardt’s film.

Jeanty ’s musical skills and sensitivity match that of any so-called “traditional” musician. Not surprisingly, in addition to performing and recording as a solo artist, she has collaborated with several highly respected musicians from the world of contemporary jazz, including Terri Lyne Carrington, Craig Taborn, Steve Coleman, and Geri Allen.

In her interview, Jeanty describes how sound, especially rhythms and specific frequencies, can compel a spiritual awakening in the listener, even if the listener is unaware of the historical origins of that sound. Her music often surprises even the most seasoned of jazz musicians.

“When I’m playing with a jazz musician,” says Jeanty, “I’ll play something, and they might say, ‘You know, I heard you play some African stuff, and I really, really like that.’ Yeah, yeah, yeah!” [laughs]

Haiti Lévé performed by Val Jenty

Happy Holidays!

Happy holidays, everyone. I'm not sure if its my age, my schedule, or the unseasonably warm weather you experience in Houston, but the holidays seem to have come out of nowhere. Work on the copy editing and design of Freedom of Expression: Interviews With Women in Jazz will be on pause for a couple weeks so I can recharge, refuel, and enjoy time with family and friends. I hope everyone out there gets the chance to take a break as well. (We are still on schedule to self-publish the book in March 2015.)

For more updates and women-in-jazz-related content, please "like" the Women in Jazz Facebook page.

Thank you for your continued support of this project. More soon . . .

Copyediting and design update

Pianist and composer Roberta Piket (photo by Daniel Sheehan)

Thank you to everyone who contributed to my recent Indiegogo campaign. Thanks to your contributions, I have been able to begin the process of working with a top-notch copy editor and an award-winning designer to help me complete my book, Freedom of Expression: Interviews With Women in Jazz.

When I made the decision to self-publish this book, a friend told me straight up to be sure I work with a great copy editor and designer. They say, "You can't judge a book by it's cover." But, when it comes to a book, you usually can! The photos in the book will be in black and white, and the book itself will be a 6" X 9" trade paperback. The photo above of pianist and composer Roberta Piket (taken by Daniel Sheehan) is an example of the quality of visuals you'll find in the book.

Photos representing the majority of the musicians I interviewed for the book are going to be a crucial component in providing a comprehensive history and/or current "snapshot" of this music. I think its important to recast the tired visual cliches we're sort of stuck with when we talk about jazz (...somber looking dude in half shadow, clutching a tenor saxophone, smoking (always smoking) and looking out into space...) and allow for women of all colors and ages to enter the iconography. They've always been there. (No disrespect to Dexter Gordon!)

Taking these extra steps with the editing and design means the book's publication date has been pushed back to March 2015. But when the book is ready for sale, it will be something any reader will be proud to display on their coffee table. I also hope educators become aware of the book and consider adding it to reading lists and/or curriculum dealing with music, jazz and/or women's or gender studies.

More soon. (For more frequent updates about this project, give it a "like" over on Facebook.)

Women in Jazz Decoupage

(Decoupage created by Lainie Diamond)

Handmade Mary Lou Williams decoupage. A thank you "perk" for those who contributed $250 or more to my recent Indiegogo campaign for my forthcoming book, Freedom of Expression: Interview With Women in Jazz. They go out in the mail Monday!

And thank you again to everyone who made a contribution to the campaign.

The copyediting begins...

...or rather, the copy writing has begun. Thanks to a successful fundraising campaign, I have the funds necessary to work with (i.e. pay) a professional to copyedit my book (Freedom of Expression: Interviews With Women in Jazz). Copyediting is a crucial step in completing any written work, and I am truly enjoying the process. It's nice to finally share the completed work with somebody whose job it is is to make sure all of the copy is tight, accurate, sourced and consistent. EVERY author you love has worked with a great copy editor, trust me.

I plan to self-publish the book in 2015. Once I made that decision, I knew I had to work with both a professional copy editor and graphic designer. It's sort of like recording great demos, then taking time to mix everything properly and work with a great mastering engineer. (It's kind of cool how many similarities there are between creating music and writing.)

On that note, I need to review some of the work that's come back to me. Wish me luck as we head into winter and the next-to-final stages of realizing this work. I couldn't have done it without your support!

P.S. The image below made ME laugh. But I have a pretty grim sense of humor...