Page 19 - FMH9

BLACK SPIRITUALS
Talking to Marshall R. Trammell and Zachary James Watkins from
BLACK SPIRITUALS.
Hi! You’re from Oakland? Tell us your personal histories and musical histories.
ZJW: I grew up in a small town in West Texas, in the panhandle. My parents moved there from Indiana, where they met in college. They’re artists so they teach at the school there. So I’m from Lovett, Texas, born and raised. I moved to Seattle when I was 19, then did school at Cornish for music, then moved to Oak- land in 2004 and been there for 10 years. Went there to study music, and follow my dreams and all that good stuff.
Cool! so what other musical stuff have you done in that ten years?
ZJW: A lot of my solo work, I’ve been developing,
Marshall and I of course; and my composition, my written stuff.
Is this your only project at the moment? You find it to be fulfilling?
ZJW: Yes, that and solo. Absolutely.
And Marshall?
MRT: This is Marshall Trammell, and my par- ents are from the Midwest, and my father was in the Marines, so I ended up being raised in Hawaii. Born in Oceanside, California and was able to ex- perience a lot of that culture down there - different cultures - Asian and Polynesian. I ended up going to high school in San Diego and San Francisco in the early nineties. I was there for about 20 years. I was certainly impacted by the creative music com- munity there, and the political community there. I currently live in the Central Valley, with my mother