Page 20 - FMH9

who is aged, and I started projects out there. Zachary and I evolved before then, though.
Cool! so how often do you get to meet up to practice or write together?
ZJW: That’s the cool thing - we don’t practice.
Because it’s improv.
MRT: Yeah!
ZJW: Now, I’m trying to figure out how to describe my style of improvisation because I definitely work with a tuning that kind of tells me what to play, just because of what I find to be attractive and interest- ing. So I’ll come up with patterns, and I will reuse them and cycle them and play with them and mix them.
I noticed you climbing up and down steps, yeah.
ZJW: Oh, absolutely! Yeah I love doing this a lot, I do this a lot [mimes] and people are like, What are you doing?
MRT: How is that going to translate for the record- ing (laughs)
ZJW: A sinewave with my hand, it’s almost a dance move (laughter), so I’m interested in the tension release, rising and descending motion is beautiful for that.
How long has this project been going on for?
ZJW: Gosh I guess it’s been since 2012, when we worked with a brother named Morgan Craft, who I’d like you to, if you don’t know him, he’s really beautiful, he writes powerful manifestos about what you’re doing with your zine, and that’s how I found out about him, was through a mention in George Lewis, he’s an academic I really love - an improvis- er/composer, and he wrote a beautiful book about a group of artists called the ADCM, and he basically talks about black artists doing experimental music and their histories. And he goes about it in a family and almost economic perspective, a lot of that talk- ing in that book. So, there’s that quote by Morgan Craft - I emailed him 6 years ago saying, Hey man,
I felt your writing and I started to get it, and he really engaged, he emailed me back and the first thing he said was, What’s your Five Year Plan? You know? That’s his first question! And so im- mediately I knew he was engaging, so about 4 years later he calls me up, I’m in San Diego. He actually expatriated, he lived in Italy, and I said, I’ll find the money and bring you up.
I had met Marshall just weeks prior, and I said, Maybe I can create a trio. And when he went back to Italy, Marshall and I continued to play. So 2012 was when we did the trio with Morgan, and then Black Spirituals continued from that.
Have you talked about your Five Year Plans to each other? Are they similar?
ZJW: You know, we talk a lot about our plans. They’re probably different.
So what’s your five year plan, Marshall?
MRT: So when I met Zachary I was in a band called ‘Mutual Aid Project’, it was a free jazz unit, and we were all men of color, and we organized
a series called ‘Decolonizing Imagination’, and
we talked about what was inspired by a book by a Xicana feminist scholar Chela Sandoval, ‘Method- ology of the Oppressed’, and it’s in that book where she talks about five technologies, and I turned those five technologies into social science interviews, so
I broke down those ideas, like: Where are people from? How did we come to Oakland? How it influenced our music? A semiotic analyses, kind of broken down to just questions, and, How have these influences changed our movement? How is our movement different? A movement, as Chela calls it. And our democratics was our performance. Not a utopian idea, just: This is what we do. So I did a series of that, inviting musicians to come through, and on Sun Ra’s birthday, I invited Zachary to come play with us, with the saxophonist from the Broun Fellinis, and then a [inaudible] brother
was dancing, breakdancing and all kinds of stuff to this sound, going on for like 4 hours (laughter) non-stop. And also, India Cooke, violinist professor at Mills College, who played with Sun Ra, and she and I were together for years in the Bay Area. She is a black woman at Mills, so we stay connected. It’s all part of the story.