Black Sound Symposium

 4/24: Mark Lomanno: “Modulating Bodies and Intimate Incorporations: Trauma, Improvisation, and Belonging.”

Examining practices of breathing, listening, and improvisation as modes of radical kinship in critical times, Lomanno asks us – What scales can a musician run if they’re running out of breath? Running for their life? Drawing on Abbey Lincoln’s music and a vast array of Black Feminist writings in music, literature, and sound, Lomanno leads a guided listening of Black American pianists Mulgrew Miller and Bud Powell, as he asks us – when listening to music, what have we missed by listening only to the notes themselves? What else will we hear if we listen for the musicians’—and all our—bodies? Suggesting that these jazz pianists have shared essential insight for manifesting the “Wholly Earth” Lincoln imagines, Lomanno makes a case for Black sound practices as incubators of more sustainable communities.

This event will culminate with a collective improvisation by Indexical's Artist in Residence, Kumi Maxson.

Akwasi Papa Abrefah discusses the spontaneity in the development of steelpan in Trinidad and Tobago -- a process that illuminates the extensive histories of resistance and radical joy tied to the instrument's origins, as these creatives clashed with the policing of pan communities and US militarization. Akwasi will also discuss his work in building a community for the music at Stanford University.

Teaching music - particularly the music of marginalized people - sets up an environment in which trauma is hard to avoid. The COVID-19 pandemic and the ongoing complexities of returning to classrooms with students who are frequently traumatized, dissociated, and disconnected led me to develop the exercises I will share in this workshop.  When we are stressed or traumatized, or otherwise in a hypervigilant state, our mind and body work overtime to find environmental clues that confirm that we can safely narrow our focus to the thing we're trying to concentrate on. Consequently, orienting ourselves to our environment helps our nervous system to step down a little from our alertness. By gently orienting to one another, and recalling the materiality of our bodies, we can make space for more creativity, shake off some of the fatigue that comes from activist work. These exercises are adaptable for all types of mobility and fitness, and do not require special equipment.

The Zoom In performance project is first and foremost about the Black experience in the United States in all of its various iterations. It developed organically through performances of original works, works by other composers, improvisation, and finding the commonality between the art created from these approaches. Additionally, it is a project that is constantly changing as the Black experience in the US also changes not only because of the passing of contemporary time but also because of the information from the past that is constantly being unearthed and revisited, thus creating a stronger context of past Blackness in dialogue with the present. Local violinist Samantha Bounkeua joins for a performance of Rest in Pow’r (Survival Song).

DeForrest Brown, Jr. gives a lecture on the theoretical work behind his Friday night (4/21) techno set.

Groove Sermon is a movement workshop celebrating the rich Black Queer history of House music through an exploration of the body's response to the African rhythms and dynamic vocals inherent in the music. The workshop begins with a groove-centered warm-up, followed by movement improvisation and ending in a short, choreographed movement phrase. 

DeForrest Brown, Jr.'s performance reclaims the Black origins of techno as a post-industrial Black folk music from Detroit. Techxodus [Live Prototype] is an improvised electronic rhythmanalytical performance that extends the myth-scientific narrative of DeForrest Brown, Jr.’s debut book, Assembling a Black Counter Culture, and encourages a reimagining of techno beyond the dance floor as a technologically optimized form of Black American Blues, Jazz, and Soul music. Stephanie Hewett opens with a DJ set focusing on the sonic, somatic, and spiritual manifestations of Black freedom.

Anthony R. Green and Gabriel Solis: A Conversation

The music we often call Jazz is a remarkable creation. Exceptionally dense and rich, its journey from a local way of playing popular songs to a genre with global reach was almost instant. The feedback loop between local and global networks has continued to define the music to the present. Jazz scholarship has struggled to make sense of this dynamic. A persistent thread of mostly white jazz studies has particularly taken Jazz’s global breadth as a reason to perform a kind of erasure of its deep relationship to Black aesthetics, and more specifically to African American arts communities. This talk offers a polemic, against erasure, but also a historiography, aiming to see the music’s global life not as something in a paradoxical relationship to the particularity of musical blackness, but rather as in a congruent relationship with it.

Due to illness, Thomas Pedersen had to cancel, but we will still host Madre Guía this evening! She will show footage from her recent project (E)cho (Q)ueue at The Lab in SF, followed by a discussion with other artists, moderated by the Black Sound Symposium's curator, Kira Dralle.

Madre Guía (Stephanie Hewett) (she/her) is an interdisciplinary artist whose work emerges from a play-based movement practice within an investigative framework. As a queer, Black, Afro-Diasporic artist with roots in the Caribbean, her work is inevitably rooted in emancipatory practices. Hewett aims to deepen curiosity around the Black American experience by focusing on the sonic, somatic, and spiritual manifestations of Black freedom through a variety of improvisational structures and cross-disciplinary experimentation.

Carolyn Jean Martin and Aaron Samuel Mulenga present artistic work and scholarship on articulations of Blackness in the Western visual field.

Come mingle, meet the artists, and hear remarks from the symposium's curator, Kira Dralle!

Event is Free and Open to the Public.