Category: blogpost

6:50pm, 20 miles from Malibu, California, high above the water – the scene of the perfect American sunset.

I’m walking up a steep winding cement road with my friend in Topanga Canyon, right around the summit of Tuna Canyon Road. You can see the ocean distantly past the neatly shrubby, deeply sloped mountains, blending seamlessly into the gradient of the setting sky as if it were painted on. It’s all faded pink and grey blue, the color palette of dry California in the late summer, sun setting behind the mountains to cast a general color mute over the remaining landscape. I left my phone behind at our trailer, but the effects of its nagging presence lingered on. The mountains shift to our right side as we continue walking up, the canyon mountains revealing themselves more massive and cavernous around the corner, dipping an even deeper v into the distant ocean below where two slopes converge. All of a sudden, I can’t catch my breath well. We’re at high elevation, but it shouldn’t be anything crazy. I then look down at the palms of my hands, humming with a shifting rainbow trace around the edges like the back side of a CD or the spots in your eyes when you shut them too tightly. I take a second to feel the sudden sensory shift that has taken over my body and remember the bit of psilocybin I had taken just an hour earlier.

“I think I feel the mushrooms now,” I say to my friend, still looking at my hands. I wiggle my fingers in attempt to get my mind off of the momentary panic of a drug comeup.

My friend, no stranger to psychedelics, stares up at the road, walking slightly ahead of me. “Yeah, me too.” She doesn’t seem panicked in the slightest, lost in the dream of her head. I always admired her for that, since she could have a million reasons to be anxious about her life and yet remains collected and present. I’m still looking at my hands, opening my palms and subsequently digging half moons into my palms with my fingernails in groups of five, an anxiety trick my therapist taught me years ago whenever I felt that buzzy, lightheaded panic, when she gasps and stops at a fallen tree trunk overlooking the canyon.

“Sasha, look!”

The tree trunk rests between two smaller trees that perfectly frame the deep mountain plunge into the water. It has the aformentioned color palette of a Renoir baked into the remaining light. The buzziness encounters a malfunction – it gets paralyzed in certain strains of beauty. Open landscape is one of them.

I drop to a squat to make sure my head stops spinning, and it does. The canyon seems to hum at me at its own barely discernable frequency. It speaks directly to me.

And with some deep breaths, I settle back into my altered state within my body, not itching to get out or fight it. We became one. My body starts to feel easy, a bit euphoric, melted, soft. I forgot about my phone, or most things, for that matter. My normal noise of repetitive thought is gone, and my head feels strangely peaceful and empty. It felt like I had been pulling on a rope with unbearable tension and then suddenly dropping it to the hundreds of feet of canyon below. I had forgotten what it was like to feel like this.

We go to sit on the trunk and look out. Neither of us speak for five minutes. We just sit and exist, feeling the breeze crawl up our arms, the air sit a little more cooly on our cheeks. Staring immensity in its face, not conflating it with a threat but a grand wonder.

My friend takes a picture on her iPhone. It may be the only public evidence of our time in this moment. To others, it is a passing scroll on Instagram. To us it is a moment of restoration. We don’t need to tell anybody to make it more real.

This is what reminds me of purity. And few, but far inbetween, we are always trying to find this state again.

//

There was a time where I was so comfortable being alone with myself. I’m not talking about alone time where you do your chores and watch your secret shitty TV and eat dinner from the counter next to your kitchen sink standing up. I’m talking about being comfortable with existing in one’s own body, in the very state its in in the present, with all current thoughts and feelings, reservations and hopes, goals and weaknesses swirling around your existence, dipping in and out of your subconscious at any given time.

It wasn’t easy to arrive at that place, but for a good couple months, it actually happened. I could sit and read for hours, write music, take hikes in the mountains with the sun and a good album, a headspace not riddled with my thoughts and anxieties interjecting every couple seconds. I would feel content in my own space independent of what was going on in the world around me or what was out of my control because I had resolved to a point of making peace with it all. I hit a perfect stride for learning new information. My mind felt like a blank, clear slate. Ready to receive. Ready to keep a steady stream of moving forward.

I always rebuild resistance to this state of being after some time. Maybe it’s habit, maybe it’s the world we live in, maybe it’s all of it. I’ve never been able to be 100% comfortable. Soon as I put rest to one preoccupation, another one crops up from the same crack in the pavement. It feels like I want to escape my own skin. All of a sudden, the person I’ve become up to this point isn’t all she’s cracked up to be. I look in the mirror and feel a lack of harmony. I look into the sun and don’t feel a dopamine release, but rather, a nuisance. Everything feels opposite – the music, processes, rituals, schedules I have all seem pointless or unfulfilling or disappointing or like they aren’t working, but I can’t tell if my mind is just playing tricks on me because it doesn’t know naturally how to default to feeling good.

This is, of course, a chronic American problem.

We have access to too much information. We are either deeply sensitized or too sensitive. There is no inbetween. And it’s feeding my problem like emotional wildfire – covering happiness, fear, horror, excitement, all in one fell swoop. It’s just a swipe away from another level of paranoia.

I need to be on my phone to know what everyone is doing, where everyone is going, performing, touring, exploring. I want to know whose record just came out, who got signed with a new agent and who left, who was all performing at that festival last weekend, who had a new performance opportunity, who made a new brand deal, who is promoting a new instrument. And then I suddenly need to know random things. Why is Cote d’ivoire one of the only countries in the world who has been able to maintain their uncolonized name? How many microplastics am I really ingesting from the water bottle that’s been sitting out for most of the day? According to science, what’s wrong with my face? What is the oldest tree on earth? Why is etoricoxib banned in the United States?

And then it becomes about things I don’t want to find out about.

Someone else has died of cancer under the age of 40. Somebody I spoke to last month.

They moved on.

Their family dearly misses them.

Kids are being bombed and air raided to death again.

Our potential vice president’s kids is being bullied on the internet for being neurodivergent.

There might be mold in your floorboards. Here are the ten symptoms.

Studies show the long term effects of Covid may alter your health permanently.

Why do I feel the need to assault myself with information? Stay in the know, but agressively, comparatively, volatilely so? Do we fear that if we don’t we are at risk of irrelevance, disappearing – online, in person, through Zoom, through texts, through emotional fervor?

I reach this point where I don’t want to post on Instagram anymore. I don’t give a fuck about keeping up an online presence because it has the capacity to feed the flame of making me have a depressive or anxious spiral. I’ve also learned that we all have experienced some version of this – our escape being travel, drugs, blowing off work, sex, any number of vices. I have tried various healthier methods than one of those options. This is when my friend who is in love with California and I decide to spend the end of August in the mountains and at the beach. I step away from the emails, the instrument, I reassess my own toxic patterns and sit with myself. I think about how to find that sweet spot of feeling good again.

Since I’m living in California again, now for the first time as a legal adult, I can revisit places that I went often as a kid. California beaches are marked by a side of staggering coastal cliffs, rough, gravely sand, a white sun, and a feeling of being cold and hot at the same time. The wind picks up around 4pm, giving you goosebumps if you’re in a bathing suit. But the water still glimmers the same way as an Island beach, like something out of a movie. Sarah Wilson has cited many resources about anxiety relief from nature working strongest when accompanied by a body of water – especially one that moves on its own accord (unlike most lakes), suggestive of the human and earthly breath. It isn’t just anxiety relief at work but also nostalgia. I used to run around naked as a toddler on the beach, total inhibition, total freedom from self consciousness. Those feelings don’t really settle in at that age yet. It’s a beautiful thing. When I got older, I would spend time at the beach with my brother and his friends, catching sand crabs right in the wake where the water pulls itself up to its highest point before ebbing away, making tunnels and moats and castles with my brother’s reckless friends. Eating cinnamon twists from the Taco Bell in Pacifica and trying to look for my dad surfing in the water.

I am sitting at Zuma beach in Malibu, legs tucked in to my chest, as my friend falls asleep face down with her headphones on. Looking out at this glittering water, these picturesque cliffs. I am trying to remember this. I am trying to remember this and breathe deeply into my stomach to counts of four or five. I forgot my Advil at home and my endometriosis is flaring up again, my stomach expanding at the response to inflammation, exposed with a sheen of sunscreen to the sky.

I am trying to settle into the mind of that little girl. I am breathing into my stomach slowly, out through my mouth. It is the most perfect beach, the most familiar beach. And yet I cannot stop thinking about the pain. I am remembering the wrong things. I am remembering when I nearly drowned in a rip current when I was 16. I am remembering that N fell off of a cliff just like these ones, at a beach just like this one, crying at his funeral while giving a speech months later. I remember when V couldn’t make the first day of my recording session for my album I made in high school because he had a concussion at the beach. He had texted me this nonsensical message the day it had happened, a bunch of jibberish and botched syntax. He apologizes the next day and makes it up to me because that’s the kind of person he was. He is shot on USC campus months later.

It wasn’t fair. I lived all these years without him, cursing my life for not going the way I wanted it to while he didn’t even get a chance to think about his life at all.

And I cannot stop thinking about the Etoxicob or the oldest tree in the world or my cat at home alone, looking out the window of my apartment, waiting for me to come back, or the 2025 touring schedule, or my constant inability to stay within myself as it exists today and the spin in my head goes faster and faster, taking my nausea with it. The little girl evades my fingertips. I don’t think she exists anymore. I can’t ever seem to find her, and neither can anybody else.

The wind starts whipping at my legs. The hair stands up on my arms.

When did it all start to feel so hard?

One, two, three, four, five.

As Sarah says, “we come into this world screaming.”

//

I have to keep trying. I have to keep trying because there is no other choice. I want more moments free of the assault that is modern adulthood, constant loss, competition, the consequences of individualism, inadequacy, and meaninglessness that plague us on a daily basis. I will take as many as I can get.

I have a day off in San Francisco, where I grew up. It is strangely sunny everywhere but the Sutro Tower, who’s red prongs emerge from a dense block of fog in the distance. From my neighborhood I spent most of my life in, Potrero Hill, one towers over a great portion of the middle of the city – the mission, downtown, SoMa, looking out on the Bay Bridge and the latest towering Silicon Valley structures. The neighborhood itself is very soft and classic San Francisco, home to quaint pastel Victorian homes, steep hills, abandoned industrial manufacturing warehouses, and cargo shipping piers at the base of the hills to the east. It smelled like yeast from the Anchor Steam Factory and pepper from the Morton & Bassett spice company when I was growing up, the latter of which closed in recent years. My favorite lookout then and now is out where the piers and boat shacks are, watching ferries shuttle slowly along the bay by the haze of the pink, foggy sunset. I never used to be able to investigate that area much as a kid, as Potrero Hill was working class up until the 2000s and the piers were considered dangerous. The twisted fate of gentrification made it not only safe, but a new hotspot for UCSF residents and trendy Google workers. It’s not aesthetically my style, and it’s certainly unfavorable to the natives who have been displaced financially, but there was something to fulfilling my life long dream of walking by those piers without fearing for my life.

I will make myself walk when I cannot sort out a solution or a salvation. I will walk and listen to music I can get lost in, like Bill Frisell. He is playing Lush Life with the Brussels Philharmonic when I spot an artificial sandy island by China Basin, right across from AT&T Stadium. There are lawn chairs for people to sit and look out at the bay and grass mounds for dogs to run around. This would have never existed when I was growing up – these areas were full of trash, porta potties, and dusty abandoned cement blocks. Families and friends are sitting out, enjoying the sun, small dog on a leash next to them. I wonder if they were here long enough to remember what this area used to look like.

I keep walking down the length of Third Street, back towards UCSF and Dogpatch, following the water. Here we are again – finding water when met with anxiety, remembering how much things are not how they used to be. Bill and the Orchestra are now playing the ever rotating, heartbreaking ballad of his called “Throughout”. I always loved how Bill was a fan of minor chords with b13, a harmonic addition to chords that tends to make them darker than their original quality. This song puts the b13 in the melody, mimicing the same interval created by the distance between the third and the root in a first inversion major triad – also a b13. It casts a dark and contemplative nature over the whole song, and the chords build up and fall back down again every time the melody is played. It plays over and over again, strings adding in slight counter melodies over time, but it never gets redundant. It is just meditative. This is a huge feat for an orchestra – a song that doesn’t move to new sections, simply reinventing the same section over every time.

There’s a giant park being built by the water that’s still under construction, full of more artificial grass mounds, perfectly cut cement stairs, and wood slatted pathways that meander around the mounds. It reminded me of when I first moved to NY at 18 and found the Highline, which has a similar aesthetic style. NYC and San Francisco have taken beautiful qualities of each city – skylines, shops, cafes, water views – and capitalized on them to attract new residents. You can argue if the reinvention is better or worse. In many ways it is both. In many ways the discussion is complicated. In many ways you forget how the old way was, and you may never go back. We are recycling loss, memory, mourning, happiness, reinvention, every single day. You are lucky if you reach a point to rest in it all and find the apex of feeling good, even if it is for just a handful of minutes at the summit of a canyon in Southern California, looking out on the towering mountains.

I can’t help but feel entirely separate from my childhood, like it was not my life I was looking at but somebody else’s. It’s not just about finally walking along the piers that were previously unsafe to me when I was younger, or moving out of NYC, where I thought the rest of my life waited for me. It’s not just about visiting beach cliffs like the ones I knew as a source of freedom and innocence as a kid that now bring up the wrong kind of memories. It’s about a transformation that happens so long that it starts to feel unrecognizeable.

What I do still recognize is the pain she felt. She appears in my dreams at the venues that I play in real life, convention centers, festivals, things I do routinely and well now, getting picked up by her parents, sobbing on the way to the car because she cannot bear the weight of inadequacy on her shoulders. And then it became about other things. I cannot hold her because I wake up and I cannot even see her anymore. She got lost when I was forced to become stronger, to not disclose my feelings publicly, to not think too hard about the lives of her friends she will never be able to retrieve, to find a way out of the madness of the online world, to move forward in reinvention over and over again.

Sitting on the final artificial beach by the piers before I go home, I’m left with more questions than answers about the state of my life – of all of our lives – in this western world. But it is unhurriedly, unobstructively so. I guess this is what I speak of when I am able to be with myself. Fighting an imaginary urgency we are all fed on every platform, software, medium of life. I hope for a dream in which I can see that little girl again, and I don’t find her in agony (and not necessarily in elation, either, although I would smile to think of that), but to find her on a bench, hold her hand, and sit in silence, waiting for nothing at all. She was one of excellence, but not of pipe dreams and false pretenses, all rom a young age. So I will not force it on her. I feel her in that we still share a need for peace and purity, after the piers have changed, after love has been lost and found and lost, a way of resting.

Just like the water, lapping at the shores in every timeline.

Just like the still canyons in the California summer.

Loving too hard always felt like more of a liability than a point of beautiful character.

She’s a freelance stylist who lives off of the Myrtle Broadway J and M stop. She runs clothing racks to executives with walkie talkies and places lunch orders on the phone. When she is asked to, she consults succinctly about an outfit, careful to only offer what advice is necessary. Sneakers over heels. Remove the statement necklace. Try the Alexander Wang bag instead, it’s better with the oversized trench coat. She is in high demand, but it isn’t the same as feeling needed. She does, however, routinely exceed every expectation with a snappy, quick wit, much to the allure of clients who never forget her name when they call her for work again. Sometimes it’s Nylon Magazine, sometimes it’s an Amazon ad. It is the essence of her work ethic to put her all in to both campaigns.

She gets her eyebrows done every Thursday at 5pm before she picks up her laundry, and browses the fiction new releases at Three Lives & Company on Saturday mornings in between work calls and last minute pick ups at the Zara on Fifth Avenue. The Strand and the Barnes and Noble had too much stock for high school and college students – LSAT textbooks, stacks of Moby Dick and Great Expectations and the rest of that righteous 19th century anthology that bores her to death. She never gets around to finishing most the books. They stay on top of her side dresser for the next month or two, untouched. When she does read them, she likes to insert herself into the plot line, imagining she temporarily zips on the skin of the character and lives their life, drifting off in thought down W 15th st on her way to work. She goes to Pilates on Sunday if she doesn’t decide to spend it with another emotionally unavailable bachelor The routine repeats itself ad nauseum. She never grows quite sick enough of it to change it. If it isn’t broke, don’t fix it.

In the morning, she wakes up and immediately assaults herself with the influx of digital information on her phone – Instagram, Gmail, The New York Times, unanswered text messages she drifted off to the night before – only because it gives her the reassurance of “staying on top of things”. Her eyes water in the morning in reaction to light exposure after being shut for hours. They are not to be confused with tears, which she reserves for a precise hour in which once a month the world decides to beat down with one too many unrelenting fists. She gets her period promptly the next day.

Love and emotion is a true source of liberation for her, one she only lets herself go in when she feels safe to do so. But when she does, she is free, passionate, engorged with life and experience. Everything looks more vibrant. She notices the green on the trees poignantly, the kids running around Madison Square Park with their nannies chasing after them as she sits on the park bench, eating a panini resting on her knees. One day, she knows she’ll be able to find life in this way every day. For now, it remains a pipe dream. She keeps steaming the dresses on the clothing rack, picking out low rise jeans and scoop neck tops to pair with vintage bangles and hoops for models that don’t need makeup to look effortless. If she finds herself wishing for an alternate life, she escapes to the lives in the books. She tells herself it’s not a form of erasure when it’s temporary.

She sits outside the coffee shop on the corner of Broome and Elizabeth st, tiredness pulling at her eyes as she stares at the blue light of her computer, half eaten scone crumbled on her plate. A stylish young gay couple shares kisses and cigarettes over iced cortados, crossing their legs over their jean shorts and knee high Ganni boots and leaning back into the metal chairs. They hold each other’s right hand over the table. She remembers the last time she did that on a date, it was only thirty minutes later over a bowl of overpriced tagliatelle that she heard him utter the words “I struggle to find sympathy for other people” – including her.

She seems to habitually choose men who, after she meets with them, irk her so spiritually that it makes her feel that she needs to find God again. It is not because she believes what they have done together to be “unholy”, but because she seems to lose many ideas of herself and her grander purpose in trying to fit them in to her perfectly orchestrated life. She felt she always does better alone, focused on those shining moments she works towards in every spare hour, hoping for that dream career break that Anna Wintour might take her on at Vogue and let her browse the backrooms of Jean Paul Gauthier and Chanel and Loewe at her will. But she also does not wish to inherit the isolation and cynicism that her father has. That was the time when her mother started working until 10pm every night, her father matching a half glass of bourbon for every beer on the couch, watching UFC reruns while her and her brother made dinner for themselves. Love had made him hard, and she was too young to be so bitter.

She lays in bed, naked next to a vexing romantic prospect. He makes love like he is trying to burrow his fingers into her skin. He kisses her inner thighs and her stomach, slowly, gently, intentionally, like someone who holds a deep reverence for her soul. But when the long hour is done, he retreats, putting a foot’s distance between their bare chests. They don’t cuddle. It’s a strange shift in personality, one that always jolts her slightly even though it is a predictable part of their routine. She hopes he might surprise her one day, catching a clue into her brilliance. He never does. She tells him he can leave at any time – it would be easier if he was the kind who didn’t linger. But he always wants to stay. She frowns to herself as she turns away to sleep on her right side, facing the crescent moon hovering in the moonlight of the opposite window. When she goes to sleep, she can forget all about it again. It’s simply a question of if. He falls asleep in thirty seconds. She can tell because he starts snoring gently next to her. But her mind keeps her up at least another twenty minutes, gears turning, thought trails whirring in the mechanic of her mind. I’ll pick up the new Issey Miyake for Georgina tomorrow. That gawky Ted Baker dress that Barbara insisted on probably makes her want to stick pins in her eyes.

She sits at the inner corner of an L shaped safety orange section of seats on the A train, going uptown. A guy with stark cornflower blue eyes sneaks looks at her while she’s leafing through her latest Third Lives purchase – Zadie Smith’s “The Fraud”. She catches him once, letting him have her for two careful seconds. She then looks back down, sighing, determined to keep him in her periphery. He keeps waiting to meet her eyes again. She pretends to be more interested in a work email on her phone. We all know what becomes of momentary allure. After all, she had to get off at 145th, and he was going up to Inwood. What was really the point? Is approval so starved that it must be harvested in the passing glances of strangers? What about her own?

She is determined to not be lost to erasure. She believes her life ahead of her is too precious, the men too temporary, too inconsistent, turning over their shoulder to look for a better thing that doesn’t exist, perpetually unfulfilled until they grow tired and old and alone on their leather couches, smoking spliffs on the porch and DMing their latest Instagram fascination. She would have thought her steadfast will, her ambitious web of goals, would make her stand out, but the problem ultimately was not with her. She has forgotten the shallowness of the insecure men she surrounds herself with too often, how they struggle with multiple choice and tip their erasers in the air, rubbing away the smidge of a chin, an eye, a chunk of personal integrity, as they go, believing themselves to be younger and freer than they really are. Of course, she knows men like this so well. It’s part of her own blood.

Perhaps the only solution is to wait to give it her all, which she begrudgingly commits herself to. When she comes back to God, she is told that her most untapped virtue – by far – is patience. It is that patience that keeps her toes above the deep waters of cynicism.

She walks up to 150th and Riverside Dr, meeting a dear friend by the massive trees and stone wall between the street and the edge of the Hudson. They sit on the grass, drinking cheap beer and watching the sun go down in the late summer. She unhands her figurative pencil and her friend chucks it in the river – for there are infinite ways to discover joy, so many ways to be remembered, treasured, understood, that don’t subject themselves to the threat of erasure. She has to remember that loving hard is a good thing to the people who are willing to receive it.

As if the world is testing her, she gets a buzz from her phone. A man has decided to return the part of her that he has erased. She laughs to herself, turning the phone over, watching the sun melt its deep orange into the glowing horizon behind New Jersey. God sure has a funny sense of humor.

Like many American cis femme girls, I was pretty young when I fantasized about the idea of romantic partnership. “True love”, “husband”, “king”, “fairytale ending”, were all highly elusive terms and things to strive for as a central goal of happiness and purpose in our lives. You may say we live in a modern world where women’s independence – financially, romantically, occupationally – is more stressed than ever. This is not true, however, for what is still projected on to kids in cartoons or classic American movies.

Most of us born before the new millennium grew up with Disney movies that perpetuate these kinds of romantic and gendered tropes from a young age. The story lines remain more or less the same. A woman’s life is swept away in the premise of earth shattering romance, usually by a strapping young man who is never fully emotionally or physically available. He is usually fighting some demanding war or off at his high stakes job while the woman is transfixed and paralyzed in her lust just waiting for him to return. Eventually they come together at the end in a stroke of sensibility to make the story conclude on a loving, reconciliatory note. The man is never waiting for the woman to come home from work or spending his days wondering when she will return to him, for that would cause the dynamic of gender roles that America so deeply clutches to disintegrate. Naturally, this had an impact on what I understood as important in my life. When I was five, I wrote in my Kindergarten school notebook that I wanted to grow up to be a princess. I remember being obsessed with the ballgown dresses, the corsets that emphasized your waist, the perfectly coiffed hairdos, all for the power of male desirability that was appealing and perhaps paramount even then. It all seemed so magical and dreamy to fall in love, and male infatuation was the sole solution to fulfilling understandings of personal worth.

I grew up boy crazy before I was music crazy, unlike my brother who was committed to guitar from age 6. I hate that I feel shame for it now, but when you’re so young, the media you consume has such a strong hold on what you believe to be true. The funny thing is that I think it was this power and ego gained by wanting to be desired and approved of by men more than ever believing a man was central to assessing my level of worth. (Fooling around with my girl best friend in middle school was a direct example of that). At the time, it was so easy to get those two things confused. I did grow out of most of my childlike obsession with the princess dresses and the ‘knight in shining armor’ tropes by the time I was in late elementary school. But I would still have some days daydreaming about having a boyfriend to hold hands with and find me irresistible, and furthermore, I felt that was the ultimate reward over the fact that I was one of the top academic students in my class or that I played rock drums well enough to be accepted for a School of Rock tour when I was only 11 years old. My commitment to my other interests remained on the back burner for a while. I struggled to be excited about a prospective career or educational interest.

It wasn’t until I decided at 14 that I wanted to become a musician when I grew up, upon discovering the vibraphone, that things really took a turn and came directly at odds with everything I epitomized in the realm of male desirability. I realized how temporary and ultimately unfulfilling this chase for male desirability was and how ridiculous it was that we put those images in to the heads of young girls as if that’s the only thing worth aspiring to achieve. It became a source of remorse for me because I always thought I would have been a better musician if I had been encouraged by media or external forces to centralize my passions and work. I think it was one of the more dysfunctional ideas of society that I’ve had – and held – far longer than I feel I should have, and I know this is the story that countless other women share and have shame over. I do hope in the future we can be better about the images and stereotypes we project on to young girls, particularly about what can make them feel fulfilled in this life.

Fast forward to the present day. The irony of becoming a vibraphonist who spends an inordinate amount of time alone with an erratic travel/work schedule, constant creative workshopping, and internal self worth conversations that occasionally dip in to the idea of “success”, is more staggering than I could have ever anticipated. It is more staggering than most office jobs, retail jobs, and the like. It is not to diminish the good work done in those jobs, but it is to say that the confrontation with inconsistent scheduling and constant self assessment on a personal level more than a skill based level is all consuming. I wouldn’t have it any other way because I do love my job and the undying sense of purpose and mental/spiritual fulfillment it has given me. I also know that the feeling I had about wanting to merely feel desired more than thinking a man and our potential family together contributes substantially to my sense of life fulfillment crept up for a reason. I didn’t want much of the classic domestic women’s life anyway – it just seemed like one of the only possibilities projected on to me. My mom grew up knowing she wanted to be a mother. So did her mom. So did my aunt. So did my cousin, who now has a two year old and wants a second. I never once had a desire to be a mother, even as a young girl, although I will not say that won’t change in the future. I think that I am hardly an anomaly in that feeling until it is brought up at every family gathering, every wedding, every year that goes by that it becomes a little less likely they will get to cradle the grandchildren they have always wanted.

I do remember when I truly envisioned my life as I got older and all the things I wanted to achieve through music, there was never a man in the picture, and this still appears to be true. Any achievements I made through music – getting in to college that eventually became full scholarship, tours, accolades, awards and opportunities with worth in the tens of thousands – was done without the help of anybody at all. And as I watched my childhood friends post about their recent engagements, the meals they cook every day with their partners as they live back home in the city they’re from, the house or apartment they just bought, the recently announced pregnancies, my divergence from the course of their lives became all the more obtuse. Some of these friends used to bully me for playing the drums, having odd fashion sense, hitting puberty late, being short – essentially not being conventionally desirable – and now their parents come up to me at class reunions and ask all about my music tours because that desirability factor is only so finite.

Some of my childhood friends desired a life built on systems of reliability, whether in their relationships or their 9 to 5 jobs. Working until 2am or having your only day off be on a random Monday night back from tour is definitely not for everybody. Some of them genuinely wanted that domestic bliss – it is the pinnacle of their lives – and it works for them. It’s not a bad thing. I just happened to not grow up to be that kind of person. No doubt, I have routines. Routines of practicing, writing, composing, reading – all sorts of methodology that I showed an early adherence towards. But I do think that the same person who has routine tendencies such as a 9 to 5 job pairs well with something like marriage and domestic bliss. Musicians deal with a lack of system, a stroke of spontaneity and trust in the unknown. It’s pretty hard for anybody to stomach, including musicians, which is why so many of us are mentally ill or abuse drugs and alcohol. How can you feel sane and put together when your creative outlet and line of work are entirely built on the unknown or on the feelings and money put up by the public? What does it do to our psyche, and particularly, what does it do to women who have been told their whole lives that the only way to build themselves up is through the stability and love of a man?

The one residual factor I had of my influence as a young American girl is how well I tolerated the latter on those few days that the work is not fun or easy. It was genuinely hard for me to let go of fleeting moments and the transience of this lifestyle. I wanted to hold on to everything so hard. I couldn’t easily meet anyone romantic, man or woman, that would want to stick around after I come back from tour a month later. You work this public life, performing for audiences, being social with band members and hangs after the show, and then you go home to your hotel room with its pristinely folded stiff sheets by yourself and feel a stroke of terrible loneliness. When you do get a moment to touch down at home and have some days off, you might not have much to come home to. If you get rejected from a major grant or job, you often have to bear that discouragement on your own. And that is extremely difficult.

The path to becoming a great musician is also a lonely one because you can take so much time practicing, including time away from friends or family to work on music, only to not have it materialize when it comes time to perform live or for you to find somebody at the drop of a hat who is even more talented than you. It is as if those compounded hours of work can just disappear in one single moment. It is something that men are born for, tasked with as their canon events, the strategy that will make them great in this world. Women are not.

In those moments, I mourn the little girl who wanted to live that domestic fairytale. As much as I’m certain it isn’t the right life path for me, there’s no question it would have been easier on me. It would not have allowed me to understand what it means to live my full potential, what it means to be truly great and to push oneself every which way in order to achieve it. It might be a path tasked with loneliness, but it only begs that the same kind of fulfillment must be found in the act of building oneself up. And if you can master it, that is the real life fairytale. That is forever.

A major facet of modern day optimism sprouts from this idea that if you’ve experienced a certain number of bad events in your life – heartbreak, death, famine, injury, poverty, war – that the universe will sometimes repay you in a form of positive karmic retribution. In other words, you will spend equal amounts of your life hurting as you will happy as a form of preordained balance that is believed to be at the core of this world. This would not, however, explain how five year olds get fatal leukemia or why certain innocent civilians are the victims of war crimes. (This is also essentially why I have trouble believing in “God”). This also does not account for the phenomenon of compounding in which more than one traumatic event being together also amplifies the power of them individually. They are stronger – and more devastating – when together.

I have come to the conclusion that the universe owes no favors. If you haven’t had good luck with something, you might continue to have bad luck. You could be let down 12 times over and some more after that, over the same thing. The key is to not imagine the next time will be better. I don’t mean this in a pessimistic way, but as if to free the idea that the universe is controllable and could have the power to honor things such as balance and morality. This in itself isn’t hopeless or a doomed thing because what isn’t controlled can also be exceptional and completely enrapture you in the best kind of surprise. It does cause a rather uncomfortable shift in the idea of security, one that I know I have always clung on to instead of sitting in what I don’t know. But because there’s no security in what isn’t known or predetermined, it doesn’t matter whether it’s going to be good or bad. Up until the moment something happens, we don’t know either way, and there’s no betting that it will reliably swing positively or negatively.

It’s hard when we get attached so naturally as human beings. Attachment, whether superficial or deeply developed, really is the source of suffering (or as Deepak Chopra puts it, suffering is pain you hold on to). I have always admired this stance of Buddhism because I think it’s one of the hardest pillars of Buddhism to actualize. Humans are biologically engineered to form bonds and connect with other human beings, other items, passions, and let them make our hearts swell – the kinds of things or people that give us a reason to exist, give us motivation, drive, and purpose. We have an entire hormone that sets off dedicated to that feeling alone. No wonder we get so scared if that source of connection and happiness is cut off suddenly by the wild cards of the universe.

It’s what we do after that initial scare that matters. And it’s not to say we don’t let ourselves feel, but it is to say that the web of experiences we build means there is always room to carve out another unforeseen avenue along the web. Keep building the web, searching for the new experience, the door we previously turned our backs on, the challenge we said we would never be up for. We can seek out the probability of the universe turning us on to new experiences – that much we can control, even if it doesn’t guarantee the experience be a favorable or unfavorable outcome.

The universe can guarantee spontaneity, which I acknowledge is an oxymoron. You can guarantee the fact that nothing is totally guaranteed. But spontaneity is the spin of the wheel, the dealing of the card – at least you’re in the game, building the web, carving out the avenue to at least see what’s on the other side. You can also guarantee things that will always be there to bring you joy on a mundane level rather than a wildly impactful level, which is far less frequent of an occurrence. You can guarantee that the smell of the trees on a summer afternoon smells incredible, or that this song by this band makes you get goosebumps or cry. You know feeling warm water calms you down. You know the rustling of trees makes you feel present. That kind of thing.

When I asked my friend who turned 25 a couple months ago what she felt like she learned at the start of this age, she put finding the joy in the mundane and the every day kind of passing moments at the forefront. As things get more “serious” the older we get, we inevitably need to instill more time for fun and play that we knew so well as children. There’s still an inner child that crawls in to a corner and buries their head in their legs in shame when we get a job rejection, a creative curtailing, a financial hit, whatever it may be. And that child does not deserve to be banished to the corner forever. We have to coax them out to run around on the playground and laugh with their buddies. That’s the quintessential image of joy for children, and we need to find our adult equivalent for fear we will become too despondent for our own good.

It certainly doesn’t come naturally to me to do this. Adulthood can make you hard like a rock, particularly once you reach this age in which you’re not really a “young adult” anymore. You’re just a full on adult. I believed for many years that I can somehow control the universe by how much I obsessed over a decision, or because I dealt with enough hardship so things must inevitably start turning around, etc. But of course, the universe owes no favors, and that lead me to loss adverse pessimism. I would mentally prepare for the worst case scenario at all times in that the best case scenario actually happening never registered like a reward or something I could be truly mentally present for. We are always one step removed, particularly from the impact of pain, and yet it has the consequence of also being one step removed from sitting with sheer joy.

It’s not about preparing for the worst or the best when it’s always a gamble, and there’s no level of intuition that can hint you in the right direction. The universe may be able to implement balance in aspects of nature – the sun rises and sets, the birth and death of all living things – but it has no preordained ethical code. It has no consciousness. The fun has to be found, again, in the pure exploratory nature of human experience. One experience causes one result that transforms your life in some way, and based on that, you compound a new experience that creates the fundamental web of your life. One choice leads to another, and over time, it all becomes you. There is a process to really fall in love with here. The unknown becomes known. This is what kids do every day as they grow up, and yet it’s always approached with excitement that gets gradually lost over the years. But we can find it again if we try.

Here’s one code I started to really live by. Tap in to you, full on, no regrets. Be honest with style and experimentation as a way to play with the unknown and not try to beat its outcome to the punch. I mean this both superficially, as in with your look or style, as well as with the passions you wish to pursue. Who cares if somebody doesn’t like it, if it isn’t professional, if it isn’t immediately understood? It’s you. And the truth is that we’re too old to give ourselves another reason to care so much about every little choice. We have enough to worry about when it comes to taxes, bills, healthcare, perhaps childcare, climate change, voting for political offices, you name it. One thing I’ve noticed from my friends in their 30s is that they do not protest who they truly are and have become, whether or not it’s what they imagined for themselves in this lifetime. And because of that, they live with a resounding self acceptance that conjures up an assured sense of confidence. I am just starting to arrive at this mentality of not running away from who I really am just because there are folks who want to change it or give me a reason to think it isn’t acceptable just how it is, today, in this moment.

Dye your hair blue. Tattoo your whole body if you want it for yourself. Go out with your close friends on the worst day of the week when you all just want to stay home and have to be up at 7am the next day. Fly across the country to see somebody you love, even if it doesn’t end up working out in the future. Write that orchestral piece. We cannot guarantee those favorable outcomes, the idea that our vulnerability will not suddenly become exposed. We cannot guarantee that the universe will not spin like a top and land on the side of fate that nobody could have seen coming. So if it happens, you could say you at least did everything you wanted to and could do.

I always think about how I had an awful time at my first middle school, and because my older brother was auditioning for performing arts high schools, that I could enter one with a middle school program as well to formally study music at a new school in a new city with new friends. My friend recommended I bring a glockenspiel to my drum audition. It was beyond terrifying at 12 years old to make this change. But this single choice is also the reason I got introduced to the vibraphone, which has shaped the course of my entire life. I merely drew a new thread on the web, and it exploded ten fold in to the fabric of my life. And it can happen to anyone.

The universe owes no favors. Rather than it being a source of fear and inhibition, use it to spark the present moment for any kind of opportunity to forge the intricate, solely unique web that is you and your experiences to come. It can lead you to fear, but it can also just as easily guide you out of it. The guarantee is the power of choice and exploration. We hold the hand of that inner child in the sandbox, and we close our eyes and smell the grass after a fresh rain. And maybe somewhere along the way, we look up to find the world around us has completely changed, for better or for worse. The only thing that matters – right here, right now, with every advent of age – is holding that hand, committing oneself to the inertia of newness at every corner, the subtly familiar, and wielding the vulnerability that cuts us raw as the same kind that builds the very essence of our character.

I remember when I first read the story about Frida Kahlo’s bus accident. When she was 18 years old, the bus she was riding in got hit by a trolley car, resulting in a number of crippling injuries. Internal organs, her spinal column, her bones – all affected. Her convalescence ultimately resulted in discovering her talent and passion for the visual arts. Her first documented paintings were done from her bed, where she was stuck for months. It is recognized today as a paramount event in both her life and the initiation of her career.

I’m not saying it’s even remotely the same situation, but I can’t help but feel guilt about how I spent my own physically restricted recovery. I recently had one minor outpatient surgery that forced me to chill out for a week, and I didn’t know what the fuck to do. I felt like my life was like that point in Miyazaki’s “Howl’s Moving Castle” when Calcifer, the anthropomorphic flame that is the “heart” of the moving castle, gets removed from the castle’s fireplace by the witch. This causes the castle to malfunction, and it starts teetering, dropping screws, wood panels, doors, windows, porches, and frantically running up the mountains with its staggering skinny metal legs. I cycled around my apartment, scrubbing cabinets, practicing Bach and Ravel, sinking in to my bed with the L Word on constant play because my incision hurts, alternating between looking at the clock and staring at my ceiling. There was certainly nothing notable or career-altering getting done in this time.

I took the train home from the surgery. After all, it was just numbing and a tiny bit of laughing gas. It’s surely ill advised, but I figured it’s nothing like eating an edible and drinking kratom at the same time (a frequent disassociative pastime of my junior year of college) and not realizing until 30 minutes in that you took the F train all the way to Forest Hills when you live in South Brooklyn. I also did not want to be recognized in my post operative state, so I made all attempts to look as nondescript and removed from society as possible. I had on sweatpants, some borderline orthopedic clogs, and a hoodie – all black. I also brought a head scarf and some sunglasses.

When I step out of the building to go outside towards the train after the surgery, the sun is in full blinding effect. It’s 3pm on a Thursday around Bryant Park. Zara and Best Buy loom particularly tall and brutalist. Evangelists hoist signs claiming they have “Proof That Hell Is Real” while selling bootleg Bibles on the corner. Lawyers walk around with matte blue suits and Sweetgreen bowls. Tourists are on their way to the M&M Store. Hahahaaa. Jesus, I can’t fucking do this right now, I think to myself. I tie my scarf I brought around my neck, put my sunglasses on, and pulled up my hood. I probably looked like the Hamburglar or something. And that was fine by me.

I get on the train and slide my way into the seat that’s in the far corner of the car, across from another two seats that face it. It’s tucked away from the center of the train where traffic goes in and out the two main doors. I figured I would be perceived by the fewest amount of people there. But about 6 stops in, I notice the guy across from me keeps staring at me. I think, well, I probably do look kind of strange. So long as I wasn’t fucked with or noticed by someone I knew, that didn’t bother me. I just wanted to get home, lie down in bed with my cat, and pretend the day never even happened.

Anyway, he appears to be some sort of anonymous clerksman. He’s wearing a white button up short sleeve shirt that’s about one and a half sizes too small. He has on a tiny black messenger hat which only emphasizes his rotund figure. He has a bluetooth piece in his right ear. People continue to get off as the train approaches Brooklyn, but he’s still on the train. I rest my head against the metal wall to the left of my seat, hoping it’ll all blow over, when I notice him get up and slide in to the newly vacant spot next to me. He was sitting next to a Black woman before, so my first thought was, oh god, he’s creepy AND racist. I pretend to ignore it until I see him take out a Palm Pilot type phone, something like a Samsung. He draws out a white pen from the side of his phone, brings up a black blank page on his phone, and begins to write something. I don’t want to engage him, but I’m curious what he’s doing, so I stare out of the corner of my eye.

In jagged capital letters, he starts writing, are you going through something?

I immediately stand up. The train pulls right in to the Fort Hamilton Pkwy station at that time, which happens to be where I’m getting off. I still have to wait a handful of seconds for the train to slow down and open the doors, but I’m committed to standing up at this point. Something about his writing startled me in a way I didn’t expect. But now it’s too late. I see him rushing to erase the writing on his phone, even though he technically hadn’t shown it to me yet. I get off the train, and that was the end of it.

Of course, I feel awful assuming he was possibly racist and also going to harass me. He was trying to exhibit a gesture of kindness. I don’t understand why I jerked up after having read that. I guess I thought I was not going to be noticed and I was, and that was enough to set me off.

Going through something. Hmm. I think everybody on that train was going through something private. We all suffer in some way, to some degree, every day, silently, with normal clothes on, before, after, with or without surgeries or physical ailments. And I wonder what would have happened if he had written that to somebody else. I wonder if they would have needed to hear it. I thought about all the people in those social experiments who see a stranger blindfolded holding a sign that says “hug me if you need it”, and a bunch of folks are filmed hugging and confessing to the individual what they’re going through. Some say they just broke up with a partner of many years whom they loved. Some say their father passed away recently. And it may have never been vocalized and released unless that person holding the sign was there.

Why was my own reaction not that of the people who hug the stranger with the sign? Maybe it’s because I didn’t think the surgery was that big of a deal. Maybe it was also because I don’t want anybody to feel sorry for me. I have developed my own personal system for coping with struggle alone, physical or mental, and unless I’m panicking, I don’t want to bother anybody with it. I was not hit by a bus. Nobody died recently who I was close to. I’m not totally broke. I guess what I’m going through is better told by the experiences I create or engage in before I’ll ever share what exactly it means when I answer to what I’m “going through”.

_

A week after the surgery, I’m on a date, trying to pretend as if I am back to my normal physical condition. We’re having oysters and wine in Williamsburg. It’s going okay. He tells me a lot about himself and I listen. He tells me he was in a coma for six months after an accident years ago. He’s been arrested twice for starting fights in bars. He has sold a painting recently for $11,000. I ask him if recovering from the accident warranted a new lease on the act of creation. He says he doesn’t really know. He fiddles with a box of Marlboro Golds in his long tattooed fingers. I think about the last time I was offered $11,000 for my work and how I had to split it with my other three band members on tour. I think about how badly I could use $11,000 for my next project. I’m 13 years younger, but starting to develop the intrusive thought that my life may be going awry. He makes a habit of meeting my eyes intensely and then turning away as if preoccupied by something else in his mind – perhaps the possible UFO sighting he saw from his studio hours before. I am trying to understand what might be going on in his head. I don’t know that I’ll ever know. I have never had a substantial physical injury that could have affected my brain chemistry for life. He is fairly attractive, and yet, I don’t desire him. I can’t really explain why.

We run in to his Danish friend, a classic Williamsburg transplant bearded dude working in art curation who I later find out has a heart of gold without even trying – a very Scandinavian quality I have known from my own family. My date is annoyed when I say I’m tired from the surgery and the beer, and also evidently annoyed that I’m not falling all over him. He asks incessantly if I’m okay, and I wonder where that concern was two hours ago. He superficially points out a pair of fake boobs that distracted him from our conversation with the Danish friend. His friend shrugs (he’s happily married). A different guy asks for my phone number and my date seems to get jealous. I keep making excuses to use the bathroom and text a third person who I actually do desire about how I can keep the night interesting. There’s a stagnancy and a mild discomfort in the air, segments of time in which the conversation stalls for a couple seconds before rolling again.

It seems the only right thing to do to shake the weirdness, bring us all together in a unified experience, and jolt me awake, is for all of us to rally and do coke and ketamine that the Danish friend has in tiny ziploc bags in his wallet. I had originally said I wouldn’t disrupt my healing time post surgery, but I told myself it was a desperate situation.

An hour later, we’re on top of the Water Tower at the Williamsburg Hotel. I’m talking to my date’s Danish friend, and he reminds me of the new extended “family” I found recently in Scandinavia on tour as well as the reconnection with my actual Norwegian family. He is the perfect person to take drugs with, and somehow, we all let down our guards a little, dissipating the tension. We look out on the expanse of the Hudson and the buildings that line it, glowing with specks of window lights and midnight color shows that you can see all the way from an airplane above, reflected on to the still water below like a painting. And somehow, in a city full of eight million people in which I hold the hand of somebody I can’t decide truly deserves me or not, standing at one of the highest points in all of Brooklyn, looking out into the world, there are palpable pockets of time in which I am overcome with inexplicable loneliness. It stays with me well into the next morning.

_

A trip is scheduled to LA and SF with my best friend the next week. I will show her the place that raised me, the ice plant covered cliffs of Fort Funston overlooking the beach expanse below. I remember the red ladybug rain boots back when I was in 2nd grade and had blonde curly hair, walking the white and brown beagle/lab of my childhood through the massive, ages old eucalyptus trees that are particularly characteristic of west San Francisco. My friends in New York remember San Francisco by the crack heads next to The Black Cat in the Tenderloin. My new Danish friend described the city as “beautiful” and “also boring”. The treasured memories of growing up in San Francisco seem to be dissolving along with the advent of the tech transplants and modernized high rises. It’s a bittersweet sort of nostalgia.
I remember the days in which I walked dogs at Fort Funston for extra income because I didn’t have enough gigs yet, I was about to move to New York for the very first time, and I had cut ties with most of my high school friends in Oakland. My boyfriend at the time is abusive, and my musical mentor is sexually harassing me under the premise of your “old soul” and “perfect pink lips”. One of the only friends I did keep from high school falls off the Fort Funston cliff six months later in an accident and passes away, three months before my other close music friend gets fatally shot on USC campus for being queer and Black.

I do not wish to be lost in the growing darkness of my birth place, and those are lives I hope to eternally cherish and not mourn. So I must hang on to the feeling of treading down the sandy cliff to the water like when I was a child – before the deaths, the harassment, the insecurities of young adulthood. I will put my arm around my friend, Blue Bottle cortado in hand. I imagine the dogs running, families hugging, the salt from the spraying water at the shore. My dad comes out of the water in his wet suit with his cream longboard of 20+ years, the new family puppy leaping across the sand to meet him. The sun decides to show once the fog layer migrates north to the Sunset District as it does every spring morning around 11am. I’ll go home to make pancakes and sit out on the wooden deck, doing the New York Times crossword puzzle. My friend will look up into the sky with her red framed sunglasses from the deck chair, beaming.

–

To cap off the weekend, I go to a friend’s album release party. My old guitarist who is there with me tells me about a show he attended at the Blue Note when I was stuck at home in my Howl’s Moving Castle whirlwind, recovering. They said, “the drummer really wanted you to play. If (Blue Note artist + vibraphonist) couldn’t make it, they would have called you.” I’ve heard some variation of it a little too much over the past year. I sip a wine that is a little too sweet for my liking and try not to think about it too much. I go home with a heavy fatigue and stare at my instrument, mallets in hand. And just as I feel the excitement that crops up in my chest every time I play, ever since I was 13 years old, it suddenly disappears. My heart sinks. I drop the mallets on the floor and go to bed.

I wake up with a headache and a sore reminder from my right lower abdomen that post surgery, the Endometriosis gets worse before it gets better. Breakfast is uneventful. I leave the dishes in the sink instead of doing them right away. My new students ask over Zoom how they can learn to play like me, and I can’t help but feel like a fraud to be looked up to in such a way. I have passed the time post surgery losing inspiration instead of gaining it, taking my free time and using it to pay only a little bit forward. It makes me sad and it is stubbornly occupying my mind, holding up in my bones that become paralyzed when summoned for action. People have made careers out of immobilizing injury and desirable artworks out of comas, and I would rather put toxins in my body precisely at the moment it should be healing than be stuck with the resounding, helpless feeling of not being where I want to be. And yet, there’s not really any other place I can be than here, where life has led me from the string of my experiences and choices both good and bad. I know others are going through the same exact thing in their own lives – it’s a common thing when artists are between tours or major exhibitions. I believe part of me not wanting any sympathy has to do with acknowledging that what is hard for one is also shared by so many.

I end up confiding in an older music mentor of mine who asks how I’m doing. This time, I don’t want to turn my nose up at the gesture. I accept it. I ask him why I’m feeling this way, how exactly I can “beat” this and get my normal productive self back. He tells me not to worry so much about it. Not just because I owe myself the time for my body to safely heal, but because when I’m back up and busy again, on the normal tour schedule of performing in LA one moment and rehearsing in Europe 12 hours later, 4am lobby calls, wondering when I can catch a break to do something other than eat and sleep, I’ll wish I was right here at home, doing what I’m doing right now. It’s the kind of cadence of life that we need to let happen instead of fighting against. And while I don’t think I’ve necessarily evaded my guilt during this time period, I will let it live beside me like a visitor before it’s ready to go.

So I guess it wouldn’t hurt me – or any of us – to break the stagnancy, to step on to the train on our way to work and pretend like we are not all mopping the messes of our minds in silent tandem. We could all use a gentle act of sympathy, whether or not we take it or simply save it as a random instance to think about later. Maybe this is how we learn to recover safely.

I recently took the stage at Smalls Jazz Club this past weekend – a hallmark of jazz tradition, rites of musical passage and cutting teeth through jam sessions, a jazz club that emerges down a skinny tunnel of stairs into a tightly packed, dimly lit basement club in the heart of the West Village. Me, mind you – someone who has been vocal in interviews about my music about neglecting a bebop vibraphonist path, not interested in repeating history. Me, tattoos all up and down my arms, Cruella de Vil colored hair, winged eyeliner, black gogo boots, openly pansexual, a woman bandleader, someone who has garnered a lot of work from using electronic manipulations of the vibraphone and speaks of genre melding freely. Anyone who has heard my recorded work or been to my shows can definitively say that I have not occupied a traditional jazz realm. And yet, this Friday night at Smalls, with its supposed traditional jazz leaning audience, I had sold out both sets. The second set wanted an encore despite that Smalls does not allow for encores to make room for the following set.

There is something beautiful about the fact that all walks of jazz appreciation celebrated that performance. It is something I often state of importance in grant applications and artist statements – my goal is to just bring folks out of their sonic comfort zone, period. I want to bring all of the above audience members together. Modern jazz, ragtime, bebop, free jazz, electronic music, alternative rock, punk rock, classical, whatever it may be – my musical upbringing has been rooted in the fact that all of these things have been in constantly dialogue with each other. You can hear it like a panoramic in my music, even if the compositional style can be more highly attributed to jazz in particular. My sound has been influenced by the simultaneous existence of all of them, and each highly influential record I have is as innovative as the last, whether recorded in the 1920’s or 2020s. The fact that some folks insist on driving a dichotomy through old jazz vs. new jazz, a theme that has existed since Ornette Coleman explored free jazz and Miles Davis brought on Filles de Kilimanjaro and Bitches Brew in high contrast to his famously renowned Kind of Blue, has never served the music well. Maybe the reason why folks are not so interested in jazz has nothing to do with the music being created or the spaces it exists in but the fact that we are too concerned with how it should exist, sound, or act in today’s world. The fact of the matter is that it exists in many forms, places, and ends of the jazz genre spectrum, and one does not need to die in order for the other to exist.

This is the argument at hand in the recent article by Giovanni Russonello in the New York Times, entitled “Where Jazz Lives Now”, which bears the overarching point that old, uninspired, and less inventive jazz exists in dim basement jazz clubs while today’s more innovative jazz exists and thrives in modern, multi genre spaces akin to night clubs or rustic loft spaces. The irony is that some of the main artists featured in the article are not quite part of this dichotomous movement like the narrative of the article is painting. One of the artists featured prominently in the article as being at the head of this exploratory and interdisciplinary current jazz movement is Melanie Charles, a singer and dear friend of mine who has a vocal tone and vibrato control akin to Sarah Vaughn or Betty Carter with an instrumental soundscape like J. Dilla or Solange. And sure enough, after my Smalls gig, I head on over to the neighboring twin club Mezzrow and see Melanie seated at the bar with Lezlie Harrison – singer, WBGO radio host, and co-founder of the Jazz Gallery. Upon returning to Smalls later, the Corey Wallace dubtet was hosting the session with music in the realm of RH Factor, and Melanie’s bass player Jonathan Michel was on bass that night. So we have to ask – is jazz really that polarized in reality? And is it totally necessary?

It is worth considering the politicization of the subject at hand. Smalls, for example, is falsely associated with exclusively traditional jazz. Russonnello states of the club that “today it’s hard to argue that Smalls is the right destination for hearing the most cutting-edge sounds”. My presence there would be a direct counter argument to that, and to make a claim like that would generalize the innovative individuals I have seen share their music there – the only difference is that their innovation may not exist in electronic manipulation and production as often as the largely acoustic setting. The two do not go hand in hand. He also alleges that these types of clubs are often engaged in an archaic understanding of who gets to own and run jazz spaces – white men. While Smalls is, in fact, run by a white man (as is, might I note, Nublu, which is revered highly in the article and a venue I do love equally), Spike Wilner has done a fantastic job at featuring band leaders of color, members of the LGBTQ+ community, and women who fall both in the more familiar jazz tradition and who write cutting edge original music.

Furthermore, there is something extremely powerful about the fact that so many of these musicians are leading their groups or taking up room in a space historically conflated with misogyny, bitter jazz tradition, and homophobia, to name a few, and reclaiming it for the modern day as the leaders of the music. Joel Ross, the vibraphonist and good friend of mine who is mentioned in Russonello’s article, got his start on the New York scene playing the late night session at Smalls regularly. Nicole Glover, one of the most talented young tenor saxophonists today, has one of the most well attended, skillful late night sessions I’ve seen at Smalls as both a woman and a lesbian. Although she falls more within a traditional jazz realm, the way it is expressed and articulated has as much innovation as a cross genre form of jazz. Marta Sanchez, an outstanding pianist who’s music easily falls in to a more contemporary sound, led her group at Smalls with extremely thoughtful and intriguing compositions.

In a similar vein, there is another quote worth addressing from the article about the challenges of rewriting the script in a traditional jazz club setting:

But the real blood-pumping moments — the shows where you can sense that other musicians are in the room listening for new tricks, and it feels like the script is still being written onstage — have been happening most often in venues that don’t look like typical jazz clubs. They’re spaces where jazz bleeds outward, and converses with a less regimented audience. […] since the 1960s, jazz clubs — a vestige of the Prohibition era, with their windowless intimacy and closely clustered tables — have rarely felt like a perfect home for the music’s future development.

This quote makes literal sense in the context of sessions like Ray Angry’s Producer Mondays, which the article mentions, where there is no sheet music, all parts are learned and conducted by ear and live on stage, manifesting a different strain of the jazz jam session. It does not make sense when I go to the Village Vanguard, a highly renowned jazz venue that follows the appearance and historical timeline of said typical jazz club – walking down a skinny, steep set of stairs to a basement like, low ceiling space with round tables, intimately seated setting, and certainly no windows – and hear some of the best modern jazz concerts of my life. Melissa Aldana’s most progressive album to date, 12 Stars, debuted there just two weeks ago. The boundless and experimental trio of Vijay Iyer, Linda May Han Oh, and Tyshawn Sorey held residence there for a week. Folks of every background and walk of jazz idiom perform there in the current day.

Furthermore, I’ve seen shows at some of the more “unconventional” venues mentioned in the article that were far from innovative, rewriting any scripts, or would make the mainstream music audience get in to jazz more. I will also argue that a lot of this archaic hegemony associated with old jazz clubs happens just as much at other venues as it does at traditional clubs. If anything, I think it’s happened more, since folks still have an issue with the idea of today’s forefront innovators being canonized as women, members of the LGBTQ+ community, or folks of color. I’ll give you an example. I went to see a gig at Oakland’s Spirithaus a couple years ago – the space curated by crossover drummer Thomas Pridgen – featuring electronic/acoustic hybrid “jazz” groups led by innovative drummers Justin Brown and Mike Mitchell. I’ve known Thomas Pridgen since I was 17. I knew everyone in Justin’s band. I knew half of Mike’s band, and I’ll be joining him for a show in LA next month with my MalletStation (basically a MIDI vibraphone). I was talking to a drummer friend of mine when a mutual friend of his said hi with his group of friends, who consequently introduced themselves to my drummer friend while fully ignoring me because it was assumed I was there as someone’s musically disinterested girlfriend, despite the fact that I was more closely involved with the musicians there than they were.

This is not a dig at any of these venues, by the way. The point is that the venues themselves are not responsible for curating that kind of behavior. It is a socialized thing that has existed in every single type of musical space. It’s not the venues that make the music what it is. It’s the musicians that do, and what they choose to do within their respective spaces. The article’s subtitle asserts that jazz happens in a “host of different spaces”, which I agree with, but is not actually the argument made in the article. And I think that while I understand the point and motives of the article completely, and perhaps it will get more mainstream crowds crossing over in to the jazz idiom in some form, the argument made in the article is that the best jazz today does not, in fact, exist in a host of different spaces. It exists in places that cater to many genres, ages, personalities, styles, and disciplines of art exclusively. And we have to be careful when we say these things.

As someone who is as far from an old school jazz tradition as one can get, innovation can both exist at those edgier performance spaces or those jazz clubs dedicated more strictly to jazz acts and the art of improvisation equally. Innovation can exist inside your own home, practicing to the walls, falling upwards to no ears but your own. Innovation can exist inside the subway train station at Chambers Street, only to have pennies thrown in to a bucket by annoyed Wall Street executives. That does not negate its existence nor its validity. Maybe if we saw jazz as an incredibly complex spectrum, full of 100+ years of incredibly diverse discography and evolution, electronically toyed with or not, a discernible beat or a fleeting soundscape, something that even the greats of the music have begged not to categorize or compartmentalize in to a name, a selling point, existence in a particular space or another – we would eradicate this decades old thinking that has largely caused greater division and bitterness in the genre. The truth is, jazz is everywhere, all the time. I hope that our objective as jazz performers, critics, teachers, adjudicators, appreciators, and spectators, can simply be to uphold that simple fact on every account that we see it.

I took AP Psychology in high school. I didn’t retain an incredible amount of info from that class due to my constant sleep deprivation and perpetual stress at the age of 17, although I was fascinated by the subject more than any other class I took. One of the things I do remember was this one study on the subject of learned helplessness: a term more clinically described as “the behavior exhibited by a subject after enduring repeated aversive stimuli beyond their control”. The experiment goes like this. A group of dogs are locked in cages in which they experience a temporary, mild electric shock – it is more annoying or startling than actually harmful, but it does cause an unpleasant reaction. The idea is to give the dogs a negative association to their being locked in cages. A control group of dogs experiences the shocks once and doesn’t continue to experience it in the cage, so that if they were shocked again, it would startle them as much as it did the first time.

The variable group of dogs was shocked more than once until they stopped flinching from the shocks, which is to say they were conditioned to them and got used to it. After a while, scientists would open the cage door and shocked both sets of dogs again. The control group that only got shocked once responded once the cage was open, yelping in surprise and running out of the cage to escape getting shocked. The variable group got shocked with the door open and none of the dogs left the cage, even though the dogs could leave the cage and never get shocked again. They chose to stay where the shocks were – after all, they were used to it, and they had come to the conclusion that they were stuck being shocked even when there was an opportunity right in front of them to not be shocked anymore by leaving the cage.

The outcome indicates that one can get so conditioned to pain or suffering that you may not even process it anymore, or you don’t fight for a way out anymore even when there is a way to get better. In humans, it manifests as the following: “learned helplessness is a state that occurs after a person has experienced a stressful situation repeatedly. They come to believe that they are unable to control or change the situation, so they do not try – even when opportunities for change become available.”

I believe this is truly why I’m scared of change (no, not because I’m a Taurus Moon, or whatever). I associate change in my life with harmful or terrifying experiences, even if they eventually become good again. I’m stuck with that initial reaction, and I don’t want to go through it anymore. I would often rather not try to change things than try even for the opportunity to improve my life. Any time I’ve found myself in a situation where I realize a change will benefit me in the long run, I’ve had to force myself to do it. Kind of like when you see people walking their old dogs and all of a sudden the dogs don’t want to move even with a tug of the leash – they hold their ground, collar smushing up in to their necks, and may even lie down on the cement in the cold in protest.

I actually did something like this as a toddler. Growing up in San Francisco, there are a ton of huge hills – especially in my neighborhood of Potrero Hill. Often we would have to walk home up the hills after school, after going for lunch, going to the bookstore, that kind of thing. I would get tired and refuse to walk anymore, so I would sit on the ground and not move. Eventually, my parents would pretend they were “leaving me there” (they always came back to get me after a certain distance – I never left their eyesight) so that I would have an incentive to get up and start walking. I guess I’ve always been stubborn when it comes to undesireable stimuli.

Of course, when I talk about “averse stimuli” in my life that have made me afraid of change, I’m not really talking about that. It’s more like, things that I openly failed at doing in public and thus didn’t get approval that I wanted. (i.e. the jam sessions in high school in which you get lost on the form and start playing some weird notes and embarrass yourself in front of your teacher and your highly competitive peers). Things that triggered anxiety attacks or my occasional bouts of vasovagal syncope, which seemed to happen when I was alone in public enclosed spaces. Things that spiraled me in to deep depression because it seemed to indicate that I was not good enough. I wanted to avoid those physical or mental lulls as much as humanly possible.

I remember being in college and not wanting to apply for Young Arts, the competitive nation wide jazz program intensive, because I did not feel like I could hear “no” one more time. I used to have dreams about getting rejected and humiliated at live auditions to the point where it felt like it had really happened to me in real life, or performing for a large crowd that booed me and subsequently emptied the venue because I was so bad. That’s how much learned helplessness affected me – it made reality seem worse than it was.

I knew I could get better and better at music at any moment, and the recipe was quite simple. Practice more, discover what music you do like and want to play, write what is true to you, let your inner child create in abundance without judgement, and most importantly, what happens to you does not mean you are a bad person or do not deserve love. Try, audition, fail, and try again until you get a different result. That is a solution that undoubtedly works, and it’s the only one. Nobody becomes a good musician by the way of some mysterious gift or God given talent. But I could not believe that that could be true for me, and because of that, I would do all of these things only halfway while carrying an immense amount of internalized pain. I did not believe things could get better. And for a while, they didn’t – everyone knows that learning information accompanied with feeling unsafe, anxious, or depressed is not retained very well in the memory. Our body will eventually reject it, rid ourselves of it. It’s like erasing your own work. One of my music teachers who I looked up to in high school had told me “just because you’re talented and can play doesn’t mean that you’re necessarily going to make it in the industry or be recognized for your work.” That resonated through my head non stop. I thought I was destined to be shocked in to standing in place – I may never be the musician I want to be, and it is too painful to go and find out.

“In humans, learned helplessness is related to the concept of self-efficacy; the individual’s belief in their innate ability to achieve goals.”

It’s an illusion when you have real ways to better your situation that are proven to work and you don’t take them because you don’t see the point in even trying. It feels like a real reason, but it is logically not a real reason. It might sound cruel, but, dismantling learned helplessness in my life means that I am trying to make the choices that seem to hurt me the most. And then you wait for the sting to wear off, whether it takes days, months, or years. But it does wear off – it always does – and the results subsequently come. It’s a lot like those people who dip in freezing cold pools as a mental exercise, which is also a proven solution to folks dealing with anxiety and bipolar disorder. The goal is to regulate your stress reactions by not reacting emotionally when in the face of stress, since the cold will be highly uncomfortable and unpleasant when touched, thus raising the stress tolerance on the nervous system. I think it’s not a coincidence that I am one of those people who slowly inches in to freezing pools, who’s sensory system becomes overloaded at the thought of jumping in to the shock.

I don’t say I’m happier than ever because my struggle with learned helplessness, anxiety, depression, or stress tolerance has necessarily been cured – although it has gotten better. I am happier than ever in the sense that I now possess the bravery of the cold plunger. I am aware of when I do not want to leave the open cage and why. I’m not completely used to the sting, but it’s okay. I understand that it has to happen in order to get the life I want to achieve.

I have never looked in to the door of an open cage since.

“Different Trains”  is a Steve Reich recording I essentially discovered by accident. When I first heard it, it made a severe, unsettling impression on me. I recognized polyphonic strings playing paradiddle variations, a rhythmic pattern derived from drummers, while the string voices move in contrasting motion pitch-wise. It mimicked a train’s haphazard chugging, much like the old steam locomotives of the mid 20th century. The train rhythm changes speeds throughout the album at seemingly random points, or what we might call in musical terms a “random onset of metric modulation”. This is a slight departure from Steve Reich’s signature phase shifting technique in which a handful of slight alterations (i.e. the displacement of a single eighth note or pitch) generates a piece that shifts entirely over the course of time. The key is that it’s phased in or out slowly rather than a drastic change. The pitch, rhythmic, and sample changes seemed nearly randomly decided upon here.

A twist in the emotional quality of what was happening would occur as soon as the tempos changed and the harmony shifted intervallically, often by leaps in notes rather than small steps, in a way that sounds almost like glitching. The speech samples start as a variety of train conductors or intercom announcements, some passively mentioning trains “from Chicago”, “to New York” as if doing nothing more than their job they do every day. At other points, there are more harrowing quotes buried in the sound of paralyzing EAS alarms and slow string bowing like “Black Crows invaded our country, many years ago”. Whoever is speaking becomes source material for melodic content, which one of the strings doubles in pitch to reinforce.

What was hard for me to shake was the unspeakable feeling of discomfort and panic. The harmonies that the strings create, even when the paradiddle is so slow as to lose its rhythmic pace, are more disconcerting than relaxing or beautiful. The train horns tend to blare out in intervals of fifths or ninths relative to the harmonic material, until it reaches the darker Part II in an ascension of dates announced – “in 1941…1942…”, where they become triadic and alarming in nature.

Interestingly, this album was released in 1988. The names of the tracks were “I – Before the War”, “II – During the War”, and “III – After the War”, respectively. But I couldn’t imagine what Reich’s relationship would be to the more recent Vietnam war, and I didn’t feel as if the Vietnam war had a relationship to trains or the dates mentioned. The Cold War didn’t really seem to fit, and after all, wasn’t entirely a real war as much as a propaganda war for/against communism. The dates complied with the samples, but World War II seemed too early. Reich was only a child. I wasn’t really sure just upon listening to it. The mysteriousness of it all stayed with me until I finally looked it up.

Steve Reich did, in fact, use samples from trains, conductors, and survivors, before, during, and after World War II, both in the US and in Europe – despite the fact that he could not have participated in the war himself. That would explain the difference in emotional shifts, passivity, urgency, and the difference in train horn samples by Part II, where the shift to the disturbing subject of the holocaust is channeled.

Reich, during the time of the war, was a young child taking trains throughout the US to visit divorced parents. He had realized when he got older that as a Jew, had he and his family lived in Europe at that time, he would have not been alive. His earliest memories as a child, six, seven years old, would have been spent in a concentration camp, either to be written into his deathbed before the time he was even allowed to grow up, or the impact of trauma running in his blood for the rest of his life if he were to survive. Because he was so young during the war, there was no way he could have processed all of this information, and not to mention, the guilt surrounding being a Jew living in the States during WWII. This is probably why it was written and completed 30 or so years after the war.

The recording may have had an especially sinister effect on me not just because of Reich’s incredible ability to channel complex, dark emotions at a cinematic level, but because it reminded me of the history of my own family. The Berliners were German Jews that had narrowly escaped the holocaust by one generation due to Emile, my great great grandfather best known for his work on the carbon microphone and the Gramophone. He had immigrated from Hanover in the late 1800s to work on those very inventions in the States with the dream of starting his own company. And it all tells a mysteriously congruous story to Reich’s, albeit in a more metaphorical way. It seems Emile’s choice to immigrate that would help our family avoid the jaws of the Holocaust in Europe, in some strange twist of fate, delivered a different kind of devastation in the States. The Berliner inventors, Emile and Henry (my great grandfather), were both phased out of incredibly important American history, enduring a string of lost patents, divorced parents, legal battles, financial devastation, and ending with emasculation and the pressure and/or guilt that they have all succumbed to in some form or another as the single thing that may have barred them from a great deal of their legacy.

One of the things I realized later in life is that I should have read about Emile Berliner in my American history books detailing accounts of innovative early sonic inventions. Emile had invented the carbon microphone before Thomas Edison and lost the patent in a legal battle that went on for years. While the federal court claims to “unquestionably” ruled Thomas Edison as the inventor, Emile had proof of working on the invention years before the patent was filed. This is seen in particular when Alexander Bell communicated with Emile, not Edison, to help invent the first telephone, and bought the patent from him to use the microphone technology inside the telephone. There has been speculation that Edison got precedence because he was an American and Emile was both a German immigrant and a Jew.

Emile had underestimated the importance of the device that would manifest in not just American, but international history – the Gramophone, something he did secure a patent for. He, however, eventually sold the patent to the Victor Talking Machine Company (now known as RCA) to be able to fund his own independent studio and projects before he knew how influential the device would be. His U.S sales rep sold unauthorized copies of Emile’s records and reproductions of the Gramophone, eventually barring Emile from being able to sell his own products in the first place. Ultimately, he never got the money or recognition for his Gramophone or carbon microphone inventions that he really deserved.

In the process of the arduous legal battles with Edison and a calling for intellectual curiosity in pioneering inventions at the expense of his own notoriety, Emile suffered two nervous breakdowns, both which resulted in hospitalization. Emile did not die a rich man nor a righteous man, although he very much is to me and to the handful of folks who gave him his due in recording his history. (Thanks Smithsonian archives and the Grammy foundation). Yes, the Berliners didn’t die in the Holocaust. But by choosing to live in the states, it’s almost as if the karmic retribution may have been felt in other ways.

Where Emile began with aircraft engineering, my great grandfather Henry picked up. One of Emile’s final inventions was a lightweight internal combustion motor that would later assist in operating early aircraft like helicopters, and he even flew one of the first free standing helicopters ever documented. It was the stepping stone for future inventions, and it’s not a fault in documented history that Emile is not credited with the invention of the helicopter as much as just facilitating in its evolution. After Emile’s passing, it appears that Henry eventually lost interest in inventions. I don’t really know if this was because of all of the lost hope that Emile went through or because he genuinely was not passionate about it.

Henry eventually went to the managerial side of aviation companies, facing a stock market crash that shut down his first company, Berliner-Joyce Aircraft. They did build another one called ERCO, and Henry’s tri-plane helicopter model is still the oldest surviving helicopter model in the U.S on display at the College Park Aviation Museum. But that is more or less where his documented history ends – where the Smithsonian or the National History Museum or any surviving documentations of American history believes Berliners to have lost their relevancy and historical significance. I believe this is where the element of private suffering and emasculation really comes to surface. What I learned from my dad was that Henry, who fought in both World War I and World War II as an American Jew, lost his arm in the second war. There was never the right treatment for that kind of injury at that time. He was on morphine until the day he passed away. He was assisted by a caretaker the entire time. He had become a shell of himself through no fault of his own.

My grandfather, also named Henry, was a successful lawyer and banker, working for the district courts of Washington D.C. There is some eventual cadence of loss – he had lost his fortune around the time his kids grew up, after the Second National Federal Savings Bank that he founded was caught up in the regulatory crises of the late 1980s. While he was a prankster and a smart, charming man just like my dad, he may have never shook off the impression of seeing his own dad fade away. The appeal of money and success, which never really manifested in the careers of Emile or Henry Sr., formed the basis of so many American men’s senses of self worth in that heady postwar period. Growing up in a household dominated by strong women and a fading father’s influence, Henry likely always harbored some amount of deep insecurity. Proving one’s manliness through material success was a key value not just for his generation, but particularly for his household. It was the elite form of motivation. This set of expectations and values was handed down to my dad.

My dad was encouraged to capitalize on his intellectualism and enrolled at Columbia and Yale for computer science and English, respectively. But as if to subconsciously undo the notion of emasculation altogether, he never really wanted  to assign his life to a world of corporate interest or masculine values. He did, however, play bass in punk rock bands and built a skateboard ramp that made it to Thrasher magazine while at Columbia, all while still graduating Phi Beta Kappa, Magna. He broke the Berliners’ generational residence in Washington D.C, moved to California, and fell in love with my mom. 

You might know him professionally today as a technology administrator or a coding and lego robotics teacher. He also surfs at Ocean Beach every week and keeps the photo of him surfing at Mavericks in his home office. He drinks sour beers and tends to an herb garden. He has recovered from every single bone injury you can think of. He opened up for Primus and Train at the Fillmore, probably shirtless. He can bike up any massive hill in San Francisco without breaking a sweat while openly roasting the millennial tech nerd transplants who can’t. He has watched every David Lynch movie and listened to every Frank Zappa album and can complete the NY Times crossword and seven odd word puzzles in under two hours on a Sunday morning. He gets a rise out of telling the story of how he accidentally overdosed on Salvia – not when he was 24, mind you, but when he was 55 years old.

From a scholarly standpoint, sure. It may not leave the ideal impression – or at least the one his own dad may have wanted. But from a creative and curious standpoint, it rings a tremendous bell for the parts of life that have been buried under the shame of a great string of loss. An element of individuality, of unapologetic, endless curiosity that defined my dad as who he is – an element of invention in its colloquial, every-day kind of effort. And I believe that’s part of what made my brother and I grow up the way we did.

My brother and I, in some crazy full circle kind of moment, seemed to have harkened back to Emile. Sure, we didn’t go to engineering school or become inventors of sound transmitting devices, but we do invent sound every day as musicians. Unusual timbres, amalgamations of genre, soundscapes, improvisation, composition. And I can tell you right now that my brother is no more concerned with his masculinity or presence of superiority than I am becoming rich and famous. From Emile all the way up to my dad, I believe there is a through-line of curiosity for learning and discovery – the virtue that drove Emile’s Ashkenazi heritage all the way to the United States in a decision that prolonged our family tree (albeit at the hands of hardship). I would like to say that it has driven us, then and now, whether or not we are considered underdogs or irrelevant by documented American history, Ivy League universities, or any other sort of American societal standards of affluence. If there’s anything I can derive a Berliner signature by, it’s that.

I’d like to revisit that word Steve Reich has coined in his music – “phase shifting”. Minor changes accumulate over time in the music to eventually create an entirely new piece. Sometimes the phases can shift back to what they once were, or never again. This is the life that was possible for Reich in America as a Jew. He, too, is an inventor of sound – an innovator in avant-garde classical and experimental music, and regardless of whether or not folks want to designate him as a crucial part of the American musical canon, has undoubtedly turned the concept of sound invention into a life of constant learning and passion.

In that way, I find that Berliner-isms have not been lost upon us. It’s in every musician I know who commits themselves to being a student of sound for life. It’s for every individual whose trauma or generational guilt has in turn enabled them to tap into a special kind of empowerment, humor, wit, and style without even trying. For every stroke of fate that dealt genius in the same hand that it delivered harm and foul, for every facet of emotion, power, given or taken, that defines the very dynamic of life – therein lies the avenues for different trains. 

Ethan Iverson (and presumably, the rest of the jazz world),

I’m going to start with some disclaimers.

I know you didn’t mean to cause any harm by your Robert Glasper interview, what you allowed him to say, or how you responded to it. I know you probably do believe in the many women in your life. You respect them. You want everybody to have equal rights because, like you said, you’re a liberal. In other words, we know you never had the intention to contribute to sexism. Intention and implications can be very different things. I also know it’s not fun to be under siege of an internet attack where the majority of people don’t personally know you and aren’t forgiving, even when you did have good intentions in your response. The internet is the perfect platform to spew words you would be hesitant to express in person. The anonymity and distancing the internet creates resolves much of he guilt that might usually be associated with “ganging up” on someone. Additionally, forgiveness for ignorance is something that is easily forgotten in today’s PC world. I’m not going to attack you, but rather, explain with as much transparency as I can why people are making a big deal out of your words. Why it is okay (Robert Glasper) that calling out the interview and the sexism connoted by jazz culture, is one of “the most exciting thing(s) to talk about in jazz”. Women are finally claiming voicedness in a genre and industry that has rejected and demeaned them time and time again, and that is something to be visibly celebrated. This is by nature of adverse consequences and covert sexism that can occur from denial, deflection of blame, assuming the “liberal” label as a free pass to excuse negative contributions towards marginalized groups, and lack of action being taken, all of which I will delve into. And while I felt compelled to write this specifically following the interview’s publication, these are actions I have seen perpetuated by the misogynist jazz community as a whole.

You had said you were annoyed that the majority of the criticism did not come from women themselves. Here is my word, a 19 year old female jazz vibraphone and percussion student, presenting my personal experiences in the context of sexism. I hope I can help you and some of our male colleagues understand why we have to take something that is seemingly insignificant to you so seriously. The accumulation, dismissal, and defense of these issues is revealing itself in a disturbing, discouraging way that we simply cannot remain complicit about.

Lets observe a situation together. I am in ensemble at my college, The New School, normally run by drummer Matt Wilson. Matt is on tour so we have a sub, a relatively well known NYC bass player whose name I will not disclose. We play through one of our songs that was composed by our ensemble’s drummer. I am merely playing a melody. The teacher is shouting at me to play louder, claiming “Bobby Hutcherson didn’t play like that! Milt Jackson didn’t play that timid!” He had no idea I studied with Stefon Harris, who prioritizes full tone and projection and still gets into situations where he cannot be heard all the way. I am always sure when I am not mic’ed to play as loud as I can without compromising my technique or completely botching my tone, using the weight of the mallet head and gravity to my advantage. Our drummer happened to be overpowering the band, which he had done in countless settings whether or not I was present. Yet, it was on me, un-mic’ed, standing at 5’2 and barely 105 pounds with stick thin arms, using projection techniques taught to me by one of the modern day vibraphone masters. It was somehow my fault (side note – I later played a gig with Matt Wilson on drums and a group roughly of the same size, and one of the first things he said was “it’s nice to be able to actually hear you!”). This teacher spends the time telling the drummer to give more, not in a negative way that connotes low expectations, but in a grand and encouraging way. He keeps exclaiming “yes!”, calling out affirmations to the drummer who starts to lose the time for the sake of playing chops-heavy fills after every four bars. After the song, the teacher praises the drummer like crazy and the drummer’s ego rises with a giant smile, basking in approval. The sub says, “you must feel so good about yourself after that.” The drummer responds “yeah, I feel hella good about myself right now.” The rest of the band feels something is wrong in the air because of the utter contrast between the way I was spoken to and the way the drummer was spoken to, and they felt the drummer overstepping them as well as me. It’s uncomfortably silent. I try to just ignore it because at this rate, this has already happened to me on several occasions. Next, we play a song by our pianist which includes a fast blues solo section and things escalate. He hadn’t even heard me improvise at that point before he asked, “Sasha, can I ask…do you know the changes to an F blues?” As we all know, the F blues has to be the most standard jazz progression. It is almost always the first chord progression and the first key to learn. I could hardly say anything because his words felt so condescending and shocking and I didn’t want to show him emotional vulnerability. He stuttered and took it back after some of the band members made sounds of disbelief, muttering “of course you do…”. But the point was that something compelled him to say it in the first place. Meanwhile, the drummer didn’t pay any mind because he was still riding on self-affirmation from the last song. I am standing there humiliated because I have worked extremely hard at my craft, and anyone in the group with Matt Wilson qualifies as relatively advanced for the college age group (although by no means seasoned experts – I am aware of how much I still have to learn). I’ve got no reason to think that I am an insane talent or be told that by anyone, but I deserve respect at the very least and this teacher has the audacity to ask if I know the changes to a god damn blues. When the sub leaves, everyone has witnessed the discomfort besides our tuned-out drummer, leading to what was probably the hardest thing: not speaking up to verbally acknowledge what had happened, despite having felt it and witnessed it. Our drummer walks out of the room puffing his chest out like he knows he’s the shit. I roll out my vibraphone silently and try hard not to get emotional on my walk home. Because even when we’ve worked hard to earn our place; playing in the best conglomerate high school jazz orchestra in the U.S, getting full scholarships to music programs and schools, playing with some of the most internationally renowned musicians…ultimately, these things just don’t ever seem to let up in the face of sexism, and nobody wants to address it.

This situation well summarizes what it feels like to be a female instrumentalist in jazz. These preconceived notions happen all the time. Women have to speak up for ourselves and the rest of the female jazz community. This gets exhausting and frustrating when the male jazz community refuses responsibility for statements and actions that contribute to this debilitating bias towards their female peers. By stating “actually, I am enthralled by the intellectual capacity of women” as if to imply that it should come as a surprise to the world, you are contributing to this sexist culture in the jazz community. By Robert Glasper reducing a woman’s experience with music to something exclusively primal, void of cerebral potential, and sexual, he is contributing to this sexist culture in the jazz community. The fact that both of you refused to take accountability for your contributions to sexism, regardless of initial intention, is the reason why you and many other men can still get away with these kinds of statements that go as far as to install this preconception of inferiority. If you have a heart (and a degree of your oh so unquestionable male intellectual capacity), maybe you can listen to what I have to say.

We can start off the general sexism discussion by observing the past and considering artists like Mary Lou Williams, Lil Hardin, and Joanne Brackeem, who despite their tremendous talents were never considered quite good enough to be Earl Hines or McCoy Tyner, Art Tatum or Herbie Hancock, whoever it might be that constitutes the “greats” of jazz. The issue with this is that when the “greats” were established, it was during a time period of rampant sexist culture. In music, there was the notion that women were not allowed to play “hot” jazz for it being too masculine, unattractive, impulsive, or dominant. Women didn’t play that role in the field of entertainment. This is not to say the “greats” do not deserve to be the “greats”, as the “greats” were incredible game changers in the jazz field and earned their place as “greats”. But why weren’t those women right beside them? They certainly had the skill level to earn the name of one of the most iconic greats, but they never did. Mary Lou Williams gets 3 pages to Art Tatum’s 14 pages in nearly every jazz history textbook. Author Sherrie Tucker ruminates in her book Swing Shift about the very issue that we have all quietly ignored:

Prominent jazz and swing writers, then and in the years since, did not seek information about all-woman bands, while living sources who played in such groups could easily be located and were eager to be interviewed […] (this) suggests that the flow of the swing narratives is more likely the uncritical reproduction of dominant gender ideology than a case of careless omission.

The reasoning was that nobody dared question the meritocracy of the “greats” because that was just the way things have always been. There isn’t a genuine reason to support this theory other than sexism, but because of this sacredness of maintaining what was first decided of jazz meritocracy, it has never been addressed. People may question the jazz meritocracy at the very least, but they will do nothing about how they might be contributing to it despite claiming to have always been a human rights advocate, hiding behind that label, and thus being absolved of doing the work. They expect that the problem will somehow resolve itself or magically go away by using an identity label like “liberal” to get a free pass on addressing these issues, only contributing to them further because they are being ignored and excuses are being made to distract from personal accountability. This is what you, Ethan, have exemplified to a t.

It is important to note that also in this streamlined view of jazz history, there is not one woman mentioned on my instrument (the vibraphone) established as an important figure in jazz despite several having existed. Why has hardly anyone been vocal about what is wrong with the way we have presented the history of jazz and those who represent it? There were certainly female vibraphonists that existed, and if they did, it tells the same consistent story of dismissal. No one ever saw vibraphonist Terry Pollard beyond the shadow of Terry Gibbs, despite being arguably more talented then Gibbs himself. This also brings up an issue that remains at the forefront of modern day jazz patriarchy. It has been stated time and time again that she was “inexplicably overlooked”, and yet nobody had chosen to do anything to change the amount of recognition they claimed she deserved. They simply left her legacy at a missed opportunity. How is a young female vibraphonist not supposed to wonder if she too will fall into this pattern of being inexplicably overlooked? A lot of time has passed since then and now, but as far as I know, Pollard’s biography has remained “inexplicably overlooked,” and nobody has chosen to investigate why they might feel that way or what we can do about the way jazz percussion history is taught to give her the recognition she deserves. Is there any reason I should not wonder if I will end up with any sort of meaningful music legacy or independent, unaltered agency, if I am watching people with incredible talent consistently amount to a missed opportunity? Furthermore, how does it feel for young female musicians to begin studying a language and history that does not support them or represent them when it was completely plausible?. What is supposed to give me faith for today, for tomorrow, if people keep dismissing the sexism that is written into the core of our jazz education and discourse as if it will resolve itself?

This is evident and embedded in things beyond jazz history textbooks taught in institutions as “canonical” texts. Wikipedia lists only 24 female jazz musicians as relevant enough to have bio pages as of its most recent edit in 2013, and only includes categories for female saxophonists, pianists, vocalists, and guitarists. Countless productions like La la Land, Sex and the City, and commentary by self proclaimed feminist author and director Tina Fey (on the topic of internalization) normalize this idea that not only do women view jazz as intolerable and boring, but also imply that it is of a cerebral nature beyond what women can fathom. La La Land and Sex and The City were both written lacking racial awareness and accuracy while also featuring leading female characters who are appalled and bewildered by their male lover’s interest or participation in jazz music. Whiplash, in addition to presenting a wildly inaccurate depiction of music conservatories, featured almost no women or people of color despite jazz being African-American music that had many women present. If there are women, they play submissive or irrelevant roles. The girlfriend to the main character is viewed much like an accessory or a nuisance, women being secondary to their passions which they are apparently not capable of (or not important enough to mention in the light of male success). There are only two women in the whole conservatory, and none of them make the top combo. Real life mimics this same issue. My Facebook friends who talk about jazz competition make analogies and references to hip hop and jazz greats that have stereotypically depicted women as things of sexual desire that takes primacy over being a viable contestant, hard worker, or holding any position of literal or figurative power and intelligence. My friends will make references to this competition and refer to all “competitors” as men without second thought.

To further the conversation: how many big band concerts, productions and residencies put on by jazz clubs, etc. do you see with female jazz instrumentalists? The Brubeck Institute had their first female member only two years ago. Manhattan School of Music only had one female in their entire undergraduate jazz program for the 2016-2017 school year. With the exception of the vocalist competition, the Thelonious Monk Competition has had only two female instrumentalist winners in its 30 year onset. Melissa Aldana’s 2013 win still initiated the trivial “she probably won because she was a girl” statements, and she’s among one of today’s most skilled saxophonists. You’ll be lucky if you even get one female faculty member at a music institution. Jazz at Lincoln Center has never had a female member in their house band until 2017. I rarely go to Smalls, Smoke, Fat Cat, 55 Bar, or the Vanguard, and see instrumentalist women regularly that aren’t some variation of the same twelve or so women, among them people like Linda Oh, Esperanza Spalding, Tia Fuller, Maria Schneider, or Ingrid Jensen. There seems to be a recurring theme of staggeringly small amounts of women in jazz in particular representing music endorsement companies relative to the total number of women in the industry. It’s as if female jazz instrumentalists and representation (for reasons other than the historical value of visual appeal as a profit mechanism) is some sort of subconscious taboo thing, because lack of talent or attitude is clearly not the issue at hand.

Lets return to my personal experiences. In high school, I was the only girl in my entire jazz band. Note that this was in Oakland, one of the most liberal cities in the US. My male instructors appeared to be consistently threatened by my inquisitiveness and seriousness about my music, typically giving all the opportunities to the best men in the room. I had been literally told to shut up and listen to the teacher because he knows what he’s talking about when I had simply asked a clarifying question. As a result, when well-known jazz musicians came to visit, the teacher left my 15-year-old self to go unnoticed, placing the men in the room on a podium while I stood invisible to my heroes. Everyone claims that the solution to sexism requires women to be more adamant about respect and putting themselves out there that much more, but when they do, they often get shut up or are seen to be asking for more than they deserve. The only time my teacher would give me credit was when I played a school gig and helped him look good in front of other schools and directors instead of turning down those school gigs to play at SF Jazz or Monterey Jazz Fest like I often did. The less women I saw represented as time went on, in the jazz school staff members and the testosterone-fueled wank fest that is the late night session, the more my male friends and colleagues who witnessed me being a victim of sexism time and time again and did absolutely nothing to interfere, the harder it became to maintain strength.

In one situation, I was 16 and I showed up at Club Deluxe in San Francisco for the first time. A local musician on the scene had invited me to play. I wasn’t sure if I could go in because the majority of the music clubs in the Bay Area that host sessions are 21+, but the musician managed to slide me in behind him. The first thing I get from a strange guy in the audience is “it’s nice of you to carry your boyfriend’s equipment”. I calmly told him it was my own instrument, set up on the stage, and then sat out the first couple of songs. Another male instrumentalist who was there asked me why I wasn’t playing. I explained what it means to have a house band before others get to sit in. It has nothing to do with skill level, just who was called for the gig and specific instrumentation. The man then says, “oh don’t worry, when it’s your time, we’ll play something easy for you. Is Bb rhythm changes easy enough?”. This was exactly like the incident with the New School sub I had described earlier. It had made me extremely angry, and I was not about to be infantilized at this jazz club that was new to me. So I go on stage, blow through Bb rhythm changes, and everyone abandons their infantilizing comments to say something along the lines of “I’ve never seen a girl play that instrument!” or, “I didn’t know you could play so well”. I’ve also been at various sessions in places like New York and Atlanta and had guys crouch down on their knees condescendingly to ask me to pick what tunes I know as if I didn’t know more than one or two. In both situations, I was never simply given the chance to speak for myself about what tunes I would want to play. I gave them no prior indication of my skill level. There was no reason for someone to sit down and decide what song was easiest for me like a child, or be surprised if I do in fact sound as good as the men in the room.

If that was not enough of a challenge, sessions often brought on inevitable sexualization and harassment. This did not make these spaces comfortable for young ladies like me to play in. The sexual harassment can start before a young woman is made aware of its frequency and normalization in the jazz community, as was the case with me. As I am leaving The Deluxe that night I met Vince, I thank one of the musicians who got me on the gig. I felt pleased because it seemed like he would become a new mentor figure for me as another person who noticed my playing and was genuinely excited about my musical future. He was 39 years old, around the same age as my other mentors. Despite him and his house band musicians expressing genuine positivity towards my playing, an adversity occurred as a result of showing up consistently over time and playing with them. This musician ended up sexually harassing me multiple times before I could wrap my head around the sickness of it. He took advantage of my presence and my place of growth and safety and manipulated it for his own deplorable, selfish desires. Now, if you ever experience discrimination and you are young, alone, and relatively ignorant, you will have no idea how to respond the moment that it happens or you will be in denial. This musician’s actions made me uncomfortable, but I thought he was just a touchy person, and after all, he was the same age as my other music mentors. I couldn’t fathom someone like him doing that to his presumed mentee. Ultimately, I realized these were sexual advances, and if I didn’t submit to them, I would lose some of my gigs I had planned that summer that he was also on. At that age, I wanted to be on the scene so bad, and the San Francisco scene happens to be fairly small. One is often finding the same musicians on the same gigs in the city. He had taken advantage of me for his own sexual desires, and it was at the expense of my education and potential career. This then yielded a particular issue that is applicable in multiple work fields for women under a male “boss” or superior. First impressions and the things people say about you go a long way into influencing your career success. If you turn away a male musician who is interested in you sexually and has been on the scene longer as to enhance credibility, then he can tell everyone (before they hear you for themselves) that he doesn’t like your playing – out of anger for you not being sexually compliant. No one will know the true incentive behind that, and thus may obtain a negative bias towards you that’s not necessarily based on talent or work ethic. Again, this sexual manipulation happens at the expense of a young woman’s education. This was the issue I was caught in, the issue I watched my teachers who witnessed stand by and let happen. They didn’t question the copious drinks at my table, the touching, the evident inappropriate actions, me losing my safe space to learn and do what I love. Me becoming conditioned to associate sessions with the disrespectful men who violate me, and the men that know what’s wrong and choose to do nothing about it or normalize it. I didn’t want to acknowledge that I was a victim because I was afraid of admitting to not standing up for myself when I should have, failing to be the strong independent woman that so many expected me to be. I had no idea that this would end up happening so regularly in my future, and that my fellow women and I would be the only ones standing up for ourselves.

Objectification and disrespect of female musicians is apparent not just to us younger women in school, but to women who are incredibly successful professional musicians. At almost every jazz show I attend with a female player, one of my male colleagues has to comment on the woman’s appearance, talking over the performance, instead of taking the time to listen to what she is saying through the instrument. She does not get the same respect and attention and seriousness as the men. For example, I saw a show at The Jazz Standard where saxophonist Grace Kelly was playing, and my male friends all made comments regarding her presence about her butt and how she was dressed like one of the sluts from their high school. Somehow, a woman’s talents alone are not worth enough attention for serious competition or merit. Instead, she gets harassed for the personal choices she makes with her own body that have nothing to do with her music.

If these music environments are not predatory, they are incredibly cutthroat. After one of my earlier performances at Deluxe, Vince Lateano, long time drummer for Cal Tjader, asked me to play with him the next day, and wondered why he hadn’t seen me on the scene for very long. I told him that I was just a junior in high school. I couldn’t tell him the real reason, which was that it takes a lot of confidence for a teenage girl to take her vibes into a session alone, get up in front of a bunch of men who have been on the scene twice as long as a girl like me has been alive, and be expected to prove myself by blowing them away every single time. It is not only wildly nerve-wracking, but it is unrealistic because nobody can be that perfect of a musician. This is especially true regarding improvised music, which is necessarily bound to risk, requiring a huge degree of vulnerability. Yet, women are still expected to prove themselves 100% of the time without fault. If they don’t, they are fulfilling the stereotype. Its trivial existence in the first place is never questioned, and this provides no room to allow women to make mistakes and learn from them like anyone else improving their craft. One thing the movie Whiplash does get right is the idea that if a woman is not a perfect, wildly successful musician, then she is fulfilling the stereotype of women not being cerebrally fluent enough to hang and play jazz. In one scene of the movie, there is a first chair alto saxophonist in the conservatory’s big band who happens to be the only female musician in the band. As the teacher, Fletcher, walks over to her, he says, “Well, you’re in the first chair, let’s see if it’s just because you’re cute.” After she misses her entrance by a beat, he quickly cuts her off, saying, “Yep, that’s why.” The fact that this is seen, in contrast to the main character Andrew’s spotlighted insults and plight, as mild and a brief moment in the movie, only normalizes these kinds of discouraging insults further. It is also inherently flawed to equate imperfection or a lack of idealistic instrumental virtuosity to the stereotype of women being the inferior gender in jazz with no scientific basis. While Whiplash had many hyperbolic and inaccurate portrayals of jazz institutions, this was not one of them, and I can attest to this. At my supposedly progressive college, I was called “cute” for referencing a relatively rare Bill Evans record with Eddie Gomez and Jack DeJohnette that my teacher didn’t believe was ever a real record because “they never really played together” as a rhythm section. (The record is called Some Other Time: The Lost Session From the Black Forest). This encompasses an impossible learning environment: women are subconsciously viewed with lower expectations and scrutinized more for mistakes. This is all to say that everybody should be held to the same work ethic standards, and the fact that women are often held to lower standards by default is not only discouraging, but does not help women actually learn more. The psychological concept of the self-fulfilling prophecy proves that students perform better when they are in environments where teachers expect the most out of every student and set high standards for everyone, regardless of skill level, influencing how they feel about their progress and thus the actual progress they make. Every student deserves that much from their teachers, if a teacher’s goal is to get a student to extend their boundaries and challenge themselves.

Even the environments that claim to be unbiased are still contributing to the issue or not acting enough to counter it. Organizations like this obtain the notion that there is room for only an exclusive few extremely talented women at the top of jazz, and any more than that is too much. I have auditioned for a counselor teaching position at a jazz camp where they didn’t accept me because despite having all the credentials, they only needed to accept one woman to represent their program. We will never see the jazz world allow for two Esperanza Spaldings because women aren’t stereotypically supposed to have that much power at the forefront of success. You’ll never see more than one woman headlining a jazz festival, and it is not because there are not enough skilled female musicians. This adversely leads to women being skeptical of other women and their talents because of that elite exclusivity and hyper competitiveness that is imposed on them. This is counterintuitive to the necessity for women to create a community to lift each other up. You can imagine then how hard it is for women in jazz to strive for the utmost excellence in their work – because external forces rarely allow it to go that far or that many at once. Even those few women who have been deemed some of the utmost skilled musicians in the jazz community have endured this sexism. Terri Lynne Carrington would not have published something to Washington Post about jazz sexism and receiving it from her colleagues in her early education if she did not believe it was real. Recently in a December 2016 interview at the National Jazz Museum in Harlem, she recalls on a tour in which she was never asked to go to the “post gig hang” because her band mates didn’t feel like they could be themselves around her, have their guy’s night out to hit on girls, and make mildly misogynistic jokes, as if it should be normal in any sense or form whether or not women were present. Rachel Z Hakim has talked to me personally about her sexist experiences, and that approval from male audiences was an issue that always followed her. These are musicians who have lead their own wildly successful groups, in addition to having played with musicians like Wayne Shorter and Herbie Hancock on numerous occasions.

One can try to think of sexism and bias as a good thing because it can mean your hard work can pay off that much more in spite of the forces of discrimination wanting to hold you back. Or, in a strange way, it’s a blessing to be pushed harder than everyone else because only certain people are capable of enduring that. In some senses, that is true and I believe it has made me a more resilient person overall. It’s also impossible to complain about every little disadvantage you endure because it’s inefficient to make every act of discrimination an opportunity for a social justice warrior speech. If I worried about every little thing somebody said about me, I would drive myself crazy. I don’t always wish to disclose instances of sexual harassment because they are so personal and upsetting to tell. All things considered, ignoring these things on a regular basis and pretending like they do not affect you is easier said than done. It gets exhausting when nobody wants to call people out on it or bring awareness to it on any occasion whatsoever, simply remaining as a bystander. Now back to you, Ethan. This is why your self proclaimed liberal defensiveness and dismissal of these sexist issues has bothered so many. Why did so many musicians like you try to defend Robert Glasper instead of admitting that he said something that can be damaging to young girls participating in the jazz community, especially in the context of the elitist and discriminatory Trump era that you claim to despise? Why weren’t there more people calling out musical peers in the name of justice for all musicians? This is about creating awareness, not attacking. If you hurt someone as a result of doing what is right for another’s justice, then that is their problem and not yours.

I’m only 19 years old. I know the worst of this kind of thing is yet to come. College is also the perfect time to be slapped in the face with a heaping chunk of reality and hardship. In terms of awareness and activism and creating safe spaces for marginalized groups in general, we all have more work to do including myself. I will not lie when I say that I genuinely hope I get to learn and play with both you and Robert Glasper some day because you have both done incredibly admirable things in your fields, and I believe I could benefit from learning about it. But we need more respect for women in jazz, especially for the young girls who are starting out and deserve the highest expectations and hopes. It breaks my heart to see my female peers, at least five of which I’ve witnessed in the past year alone, become so let down by their jazz institutions and environments that they decided to drop out altogether. Something like this should not find its way between us and our educations and careers. We are missing out on the opportunity for new, amazing voices to be heard. Mobilizing that change is going to take more than watching it happen in front of you and claiming defense, or even worse – silence.