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winter 2023 issue

Angel Bat Dawid and JJJJJerome Ellis

The two multidisciplinary musicians on connecting to family histories, overcoming shame, and the need for destruction and rebirth.

January 10, 2023

Since committing herself to a life in music in 2014, the multi-instrumentalist, composer, improviser, and educator Angel Bat Dawid has become known for her avant-garde approach to music and as a bandleader working in the realm of free jazz. The daughter of missionaries who lived, for a time, in Kenya, Bat Dawid is based in Chicago. She has performed with the likes of the Black Monument Ensemble, the Sun Ra Arkestra as part of the trio Sistazz of the Nitty Gritty, and the Participatory Music Coalition, an improvisational collective she cofounded, among many others. Bat Dawid’s first album, The Oracle (International Anthem, 2019), exemplifies her approach of memorializing and expanding Black histories and experiences through cosmic, intricately layered sounds. To create the album, Bat Dawid mixed, performed, recorded, and produced nearly all of the album herself, primarily on her cell phone using an application that allowed her to overdub. Bat Dawid has released several albums and EPs since, including with her band Tha Brothahood. On Juneteenth of 2021, Bat Dawid released her mixtape Hush Harbor Mixtape Vol. 1 Doxology (2021), a haunting, atmospheric conjuring of Black resistance and liberation.

JJJJJerome Ellis, who describes himself as a “blk disabled animal, stutterer, and artist,” is a multidisciplinary artist whose oeuvre spans music, literature, and storytelling performances. In 2021, he released The Clearing as a book with Wendy’s Subway, and as an album coproduced by Northern Spy/NNA Tapes and the Poetry Project. The Clearing, which began as an essay Ellis wrote in 2020, intertwines his personal experiences— including a recording of a Barnes & Noble employee hanging up on him because of the pause created by his stutter—with his accounts of how slaves used music to resist subjection. Ellis incorporates this narrative with melodic loops of the saxophone, flute, piano, hammered dulcimer, synthesizers, and programming, and throughout he treats his stutter as an instrument to seek the liberatory possibilities of music against hegemonic regimes of time, speech, and sound. His forthcoming book of poems, Aster of Ceremonies, will be published by Milkweed Editions in 2023.

Bat Dawid and Ellis descend from a long line of ministers, and both artists endeavor to continue their ancestral practices of resistance through music. They met for the first time for this interview in July 2022 and got along so well that they subsequently scheduled their first performance together for the fall. In the conversation that follows, the artists connect over the limits of inclusion, their influences, their first encounters with their respective musical instruments, and communing and creating space with music.

Ellis’s glottal block stutter—which manifests as intervals of silence in his speech flow—is represented in this interview with the word clearing. Ellis offers this term as an alternative to words like stutter or stammer. Like a clearing in a forest, the stutter, for Ellis, can open a space of gathering between Ellis and the people he is communicating with.

This Performing Arts Interview is supported in part by the Select Equity Group Foundation.

5035 JJJJJerome Ellis holds a saxophone to his chest as he lies naked on a plateau.

JJJJJerome Ellis in Badlands National Park, South Dakota, 2021. Photo by JJJJJerome Ellis.

JJJJJerome Ellis (humming) Hello, Angel! I’m so honored to meet you.

Angel Bat Dawid I’m so glad that this has been arranged. BOMB was like, “Do you want to do this interview?” When I saw your name, I was like, Yes! We need to know each other!

JE Likewise. And I want to play with you!

ABD That’s gonna have to happen. But that’s already happening—we’re playing right now.

JE That’s right.

ABD The thing is, many people ask me to interview and do lots of things, and I’m always asking in the back of my head, What am I getting out of it? When I looked up who’s in charge of BOMB, I saw it’s mostly white women. Okay. And there’s a program where they’re collecting diasporic stories. I’m like, Hmm, I know they’re trying to seek inclusion and trying to make a pathway for Black artists to be seen and heard, but why am I feeling some kind of way about this? So that’s the first question I really wanted to probe your mind with, as one Black artist to another Black artist.

JE I’m grateful that you have brought us here already. It’s this ongoing question of, as you say, inclusion and getting stories from Black people, diasporic subjects, and all, and all, [clearing] all the complications there. Are you familiar with this book In the Wake: On Blackness and Being?

ABD No, tell me about it.

JE It’s by this amazing artist and thinker, Christina Sharpe, another Black artist and scholar. She’s thinking through the many ways Black people have been and continue to be excluded. She teaches me to ask: can Black people be included? What happens if you refuse inclusion? I [clearing] got to eat, and I got to make a living, and there are certain things that I do—including something like this interview—where maybe I’ll get some exposure by being in the magazine and maybe that’ll lead to other career opportunities. That’s a very separate question from the gift of talking with you because I [clearing] was not familiar with you and your work before. I am honored and grateful to meet you. But the other question of being in the confines of a museum or [clearing] a magazine . . .

ABD I think they’re synonyms at this point: magazine, museum. Are we validated because we’re asked to be in a magazine? Does that validate us as Black artists? It’s a beautiful thing that they have there, I’m not gonna lie. I went to [BOMB’s] website, and there’s amazing articles about Black artists that I never knew about. But who’s gonna be in charge of those narratives fifty years from now? Is it gonna be in the hands of Black people, you know? And so I started thinking we should have this conversation here, so that it can be documented that some Black people feel some kind of way about it. You know what I mean? I’m coming off tour; I was just in Paris. And I was like, Why do people act like racism is just gone? It was everywhere I turned in the most disgusting way. Why are we acting like things are cool? Being included in a magazine does not mean progress. Something is still wrong!

With that being said, I wanted to put up that little edge of protection for the knowledge that me and you are about to exchange because you are one deep, deep, deep, heavy brother. Whew! You are an incredible thinker. “Evensong”? Wow. What blew me away was when you said that the stutter is an instrument.

JE That’s so kind of you. Thank you. Yesterday, I took the train back to Virginia, where I live, from New York City, and I listened to [clearing] Hush Harbor Mixtape. I was just all up in it and received so much nourishment from, from, from, from being submerged in what you do.

Yeah, the stutter is an instrument. My relationship to it is like a continent, and music is so vast. For most of my life my stutter has been something that I have wanted to get rid of, something that I have felt lots of shame and despair about, something that I felt was wrong with me. I’ve been stuttering since I was very little, maybe four or five years old. When I was thirteen, I started playing the saxophone, and that was the first instrument that really locked for me. (I had played violin when I was ten for a year, and I liked it, but it but it didn’t stick.) I realized the saxophone is a way that I can express myself that doesn’t involve speaking and thus doesn’t involve stuttering—I do sometimes stutter when I play, but that’s a whole other thing. When I started playing sax, I could make all these sounds with a fluidity that I lack when I’m, when I’m speaking. There were these two parts in my life: there was speaking, which had so much pain involved with it, and saxophone, which had so much liberation. They felt separate, you know. “Evensong” is part of an articulation of a time in my life—now—where they’ve come together, where they’re not actually separate. “Evensong” is a video work I made for the MacDowell artist residency’s Summer of Music in June 2020. It is, among other things, a meditation on connections between stuttering and seeds. I used to feel like the stutter was an obstacle to a certain kind of freedom, but now I see it as a gateway.

ABD As a gift!

JE Exactly.

EVENSONG from James & Jerome on Vimeo.

ABD In “Evensong,” you went into the process of granular synthesis, and I was like, This brother is so heavy! I just know and understand that Black people have the greatest minds in the universe! (laughter) Tell me about granular synthesis! It was fascinating, y’all.

JE This is an opportunity for me to express gratitude to you, for asking, and to my mentor, my friend, my brother, Mikaal Sulaiman, who is an amazing artist, writer, director, and sound designer. In 2020, very shortly after lockdown started, Mikaal sent me a link to this music software called CYCLES, made by Slate and Ash in the UK. It was like when I started playing the saxophone; I was drawn to the saxophone spiritually. It opened up this whole other world of possibility with sound. You upload a recording into the program, and it splits the audio into thousands of snippets of sound, like grains of sand. It basically makes the sound like clay that you can reshape into something new. It made sense to me as a spiritual process. Your label says your work reminds us that “the past is still the present and the future is full of radical hope.“ For “Evensong,” I uploaded a recording I had made nine months earlier, at the MacDowell residency in 2019, and it was as if I was right back in the space where I had been but also making something new on the spot.

ABD You’re using very specific words like “nine months” and “something new,” and that all sounds like birth, birthing some type of new being, of new sound—which is what I believe we’re doing as musicians. You remind me a lot of Milford Graves and the kind of work that he was doing. You know, What is the science? What is the sound? What are we doing? How do we use the sound to destroy? I’m trying to find that. Dr. Yusef Lateef, great jazz musician that he was and is, didn’t call this music “jazz.” He called it “auto-physio-psychic music.” He has all these teachings about it that me and a bunch of cohorts have been studying. I think we all should be studying his work.

I know you mentioned Mikaal Sulaiman has been a big influence on your work. Are there any other major influential artists you love?

JE I would love to study Yusef Lateef with y’all! (laughter)

ABD Let’s go! We’ve started the school already; you are definitely a member. We don’t need a university or a magazine or museum to validate who we say the leading thinkers of Black music are. White people can’t tell us what Black music is. I’m not having it that way. (laughter)

JE Me neither.

ABD But they just have no other solution. I actually do have solutions. We can’t work with the same ingredients anymore. This magazine’s gonna have to be destroyed. These universities gonna have to be destroyed. The art museums are just gonna have to completely go. That’s the only way that we can move forward. Can I get a break from y’all white people? Can I get a whole Black day to myself?

JE A whole Black day. I love that so much. A whole Black year! A whole Black life, yeah.

When you asked me about influences, I thought immediately of the Coltranes. Alice and John. Both of them were doing so much sonic building and destruction at the same time. I think of John’s torrents of sound from the saxophone as these waves, and the way that water erodes rock. And Alice on the organ, the piano—again, these waves of sound that engulf, that drown, that take us elsewhere. You said the word protection earlier, and I’m thinking of their sounds as shields too, protecting what is being birthed. Like the eggshell needing to be there so that what is inside of the egg can develop. So those two have been influences. First it was John, early on in my life, especially when I was learning saxophone, and then later Alice. And Flying Lotus.

ABD Yeah!

JE You know, ’cause there’s that whole other electronic music side of my stuff. Like, the granular synthesis. Flying Lotus has been such a guide there. Who are some of your influences?

ABD Oh, so many. You know they were friends—Yusef and John? They were big and famous, but they were also esoteric musicians. You can hear and feel that those sounds were not just so that they could sell a record; they were being intentional about the sound being for healing and for getting us out of this situation. That’s why they called it “free jazz,” and they got freer in their careers. Their music got more abstract. They got more into exploring the avant-garde and all that. I’m definitely influenced by a lot of avant-garde, free jazz musicians: John and Alice, of course, Miles, and a lot of spiritual jazz musicians. I have problems with that phrase because I think that all Black music is spiritual. Chicago is the land of all of those types of musicians. When you come here... When I say, “when you come,” I mean you’re coming through, and we’re doing music in Chicago, for sure.

JE Oh, absolutely. (laughter)

ABD This is what I’m getting out of this interview: meeting you! Where in Virginia are you from?

JE I’m from Virginia Beach. And I live in Norfolk now, which is [clearing] just one, one city over. [clearing] Have you been down here?

ABD Yeah. My great-grandparents and my grandmother are from Richmond. We used to go down there every summer. Virginia has a vibe! I haven’t been back in years. But I have a show coming up at Virginia Commonwealth University. Maybe we can do something together. I’m gonna talk to VCU and be like, Yo, can JJJJJerome come on board?

JE I would love that so much. Where are you from?

ABD I was born in Georgia. That’s where my parents met. My grandfather was from Kentucky, so we lived in Louisville, Kentucky. And then we lived overseas, in Africa from the time I was seven to twelve. We moved back to Kentucky, and then we moved to Chicago when I was a sophomore in high school. I was always the new person, you know. That’s why I think I like to travel a lot. It’s more comfortable for me. It also helped me know so many different types of people. I’ve had a great life. I’m not gonna lie. (laughter)

JE My dad was in the navy, so I was born on a submarine base in [clearing] Connecticut. We moved to Rhode Island when I was two, and then to Virginia Beach when I was five. That’s where I grew up. I went to New York for college, and I lived in New York for thirteen years. I just moved back down here last year. But I love to travel, too. I love being in motion. I think I get it from my mom, in some ways. My parents are from [clearing] are from the West Indies.

3636 Black and white photo of a Black woman sitting at keyboard in a school, singing into a mic as she holds her clarinet in the air.

Angel Bat Dawid performing at Arthur R. Ashe Elementary School, Chicago, 2020. Photo by Sulyiman.

ABD Have you been back to your ancestral home?

JE Thank you for asking. My mom is from Jamaica, and I have been there only once. I went with her, which was so... I can’t even say how [clearing] how special it was. That was in 2019. Just for four days. But it was so huge for me. And Grenada is where my dad is from. I haven’t been there yet. I want to go with him and my [clearing] my younger brother when [clearing] when it’s time. I’m trying to balance traveling with rooting, you know. So much of my life I’ve not felt as rooted as I wanted to be. I’ve been focusing on that since moving back home. My family’s still here, so it helps to be with them.

ABD What are some of the roots of your sound or your process of composition?

JE The first thing that comes to mind, honestly—and I’ve never been asked this question before—[clearing] is [clearing] banana. My mom’s dad was a farmer, and his dad was a farmer, and his dad was a farmer, in Jamaica. When I went back to the house where my mom grew up in Jamaica, there were all these banana trees, and the leaves... I feel so spiritually drawn to the banana trees, and those leaves. I eat bananas every day, and there’s a banana that I’m growing in a little pot in my home here. You mentioned Milford Graves earlier. [clearing] I know very little about Milford Graves, but he loved to garden, is that right?

ABD Mm-hmm.

JE I love to garden too. Gardening teaches me so much about music. And music teaches me so much about gardening. One of the things I’m trying to do with music is create something that makes me feel like the banana tree makes me feel. The lushness and abundance, the generosity of the leaf creating all of this shade, and the fruits.

ABD It makes me think about your ancestors. The way that you feel about the bananas, they felt the same way. It’s good to sit back and be grateful for such a wonderful plant.

JE How about you? Are there words that come up for you when you think of your roots?

ABDVery much so. The ancestors are crying from the grave, “Angel, we need a reckoning. Don’t settle for this. We had way more in store for you all.” Music is definitely a gift that I wanted to have, that I sought after. I had to go through a lot of trials, humiliation, and all those things that you go through when you’re questioning if this is the pathway you’re supposed to take. If you get through all those hardships, and you’re still going back to music, it’s supposed to be in your life. Music is the thing that makes everything make sense for me. ’Cause this world doesn’t really make sense to me. I’m not a poli-trick-cian. I don’t believe in these tell-lie-visions. I don’t believe in it! Sun Ra is a big influence on me because he did the very same thing with his music. It’s not just notes on a page; it’s real! And it can move and change and shift structures and destroy, like the walls of Jericho, you know? Just because you want to do music doesn’t mean you want to be a celebrity. I want to do it to destroy things! It’s problematic to call it the “White” House. When I pull out a dollar, I got to see people who had slaves, who didn’t think I was a human being, and I’m just supposed be okay with that? It don’t sit right. So if I’m uncomfortable, we’re all going to be uncomfortable together. That’s a form of unity.

JE I feel so kindred with you, in the resistance, in the refusal.

ABD People got this bad idea about destruction. They got it twisted in their minds that destruction means “I hate you.” Nah. We got to get rid of anything that does not serve humanity. It’s destroy and rebuild, not divide and conquer. We ain’t doing that no more. We done with that. You know? We have all the tools. We just do it with the music. We do it with the sound. I’m gonna do this in a spiritual way—all of this is spiritual music. I come from seven generations of ministers. My great grandfather, who was from Richmond, pastored five churches a week. He used to pass on ancient knowledge to us, and he used to sing all these old ancient African songs to us. I’m not in a church. I’m in this other space, but I’m doing the same thing, just like your ancestors were banana farmers, and you’re doing the same kind of work. You know? And when—[sound of insects chirping]

That buzzing sound reminded me of when you did the granular synthesis on your work, and it ended up sounding like crickets! Those are the ancient sounds. I mean, you hear all these tones that sound a lot like the blues and like Black music. All these categories—[sound of insects chirping]

What is that?

JE It’s the cicadas, I think.

ABD We have a lot in Chicago too. Cicadas are rampant here.

JE I love the sound so much, [clearing] that vibration.

I also come from a line of ministers. My grandfather—the same one who was a farmer—was a minister, too. (And his father was also a farmer-minister, and his father was also a farmer-minister.) He had a storefront church in Brooklyn, where he moved in the 1970s, and I used to play saxophone there when I was growing up.

ABD I think that a lot of people don’t realize that with the church, we’re not talking about religion. We’re talking about community in faith where we can be ourselves—like Black day! I played a lot in church as well. All Black music starts in that spiritual space.

JE How have you been able to [clearing] trust your path?

A shirtless JJJJJerome Ellis plays his saxophone into a microphone at the foot of a grassy hill.

JJJJJerome Ellis at the Ucross Residency in Clearmont, Wyoming, 2021. Photo by Ryan Landis.

Ellis lies naked in the fetal position on a field of dried grass.

JJJJJerome Ellis in Badlands National Park, South Dakota, 2021. Photo by JJJJJerome Ellis.

ABD I have a relationship with the divine that’s very deep. Very deep. And I know that divinity is always with me. I ask this divine being to bless everything that I do. So whenever I’m walking, I have no fear because I believe in the most high, whoever is the highest of the highest of the high. I walk boldly and with confidence just like my forefathers, you know?

I had the privilege this year to play at Sistas’ Place in Brooklyn with this group I’m in, the one studying Yusef Lateef—you’re in it now! And after we were done, Ahmed Abdullah, a very wise elder who used to play with Sun Ra, gets up on stage and says, “We are in the third Reconstruction.” The first one was, of course, the Reconstruction, the second one was like in the ’60s and ’70s. We’re in the third one now. Third time’s a charm. Three times, and we’re out. That’s why everything feels so heightened. The reason why I started this interview with those question is because we’re going to address these issues, and then it’s going to be done! After that, we’re not doing this anymore! (laughter) Let’s get it all on the table right now, and then let’s start making the sounds that we need to do as Black artists, as diasporic artists. The touring situation is so toxic and abusive to Black people. They want a docile Black woman. But if you tell me to stop doing something, I’m going to get ignorant and petty on you real quick. People want me to be some nice mother goddess, to mammy-fy me, and I’m like, that’s not what this is! Oh, no, no, no. I’m going to tell you about yourself if you’re making me uncomfortable. And that’s a very loving act of compassion. (laughter) I’m gonna make you uncomfortable so that we can be in mutual compassion with one another, and empathy. It’s exhausting. But I think about our ancestors. I think about your ancestor working on a farm. We ain’t doing nothing! Really, what are we doing? We just hopping on a plane and pressing some buttons.

JE That’s right. I know, I know. I want to ask about the clarinet and your relationship with it.

ABD I’m so glad I stuck to that instrument. I wanted to play violin as well. I really loved Amadeus. Remember that movie? It’s so crazy: I’m so militant, and that’s one of my favorite movies.

JE I loved that movie. (laughter)

ABD I fell in love with classical music at a very young age. I used to be ashamed of that, too. I would be listening to concertos all day. I listened to the Amadeus soundtrack, and I wanted to be like little Mozart and play piano and violin! I was already taking piano lessons by the time we could start signing up for band after school. I went there, and they was out of violins. That’s the first thing I asked for—

JE Me too. Wow.

ABD They said, “Well, here’s the clarinet.” I was very disappointed. It looked kind of goofy. I wanted to be like [pantomimes playing the violin], you know, shredding. I went to the library to learn about the clarinet because I never heard of it before. All I could find was Benny Goodman, and I was like, Yo. I was already ashamed enough that I like classical music. Then I found Mozart’s Clarinet Concerto. In the concerto, the clarinet is shredding. I just got obsessed. I already knew how to read music, and clarinet was easier than the piano. By the time I was in band, I was moving up the ranks real quick. I really liked to perform. So I just stuck with it. It’s just been my friend and got me through those difficult high school years, when you feel awkward and weird. Just like how you felt free with the saxophone, I felt the same way with clarinet.

When I went to college for music, it was horrible. It was a small Christian school where I was the only Black performance major, and they made me feel like I didn’t know what I was doing. I ended up getting out of school and just started working. I had a good job that was paying me well, but I was miserable. I was like, Okay, this 401(k) I got? I’m going to cash it out and just do music for a year. I literally said, I can do this for a living, not to be a celebrity, not to be famous, but to live my life for what I love. I did that, and it worked! That year, I discovered the free jazz, experimental, avant-garde scene here in Chicago, the Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians (which is an organization of experimental creative musicians), and learned how to really be a free musician. I could read music, but I couldn’t do music. I had to get free of all those Western constructs. And I learned it by being a free musician. We just be getting up on stage and just be playing. We don’t know what’s gonna happen! That’s the journey I’ve been on for the past seven, eight years, and it just keeps getting bigger and bigger. So I know this is the right way to go.

JE I’m so grateful that you’ve had this journey, and I’m so grateful to have met you. I can’t wait to play with you.

ABDIt’s already on. We literally have a show. It was great talking with you, JJJJJerome! This was the first of many conversations.

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