Writing & Criticism: Selected Excerpts
"Impressions of A Love Supreme"
"We are standing in a line outside the venue, waiting in the January chill to listen to nearly two dozen musicians perform and pay tribute to John Coltrane's A Love Supreme, 60 years to the month after its release. People on the line are catching up, are meeting for the first time, are talking about this music we love. One heard the Sun Ra Arkestra play the night before at the Brooklyn marathon, another remembers seeing McCoy Tyner perform near the very end of his life. While they talk, the call to prayer sounds from a mosque down Atlantic Avenue, signaling to worshippers the Maghrib, a period of prayer marked by sunset and dusk. The chant's ornamented melody begins small and short, gradually growing in range and scope, before eventually fading out into the whir of traffic. Echoing in my mind are fragments of the poem Coltrane wrote that structures the fourth movement, "Psalm." "It all has to do with it," he writes [...]"
"Cécile McLorin Salvant's Ogresse at Carnegie Hall"
"Ogresse takes inspiration from a range of folklore, perhaps most conspicuously from the European tales that canonized the archetypal man-eating ogre. But while there are female ogres in that tradition, in creating a female antihero Salvant draws on more potent sources. The ogresse's treatment as an otherized grotesquery by the human characters is informed by the history of Sarah Baartman (the 19th Century's coercively-controlled sideshow attraction known as the "Hottentot Venus"), and the characterization of her simultaneously material and wild femininity is drawn from Salvant's reading of Vodou goddess Erzulie Fréda Dahomey.
It is in these contexts that Ogresse thematically centers a woman of color's hunger, loneliness, anger, longing and self-image; depicting her as at once monstrous, divine and utterly human. And the fundamental humanity of her character is the central theme of the piece. From its earliest minutes, her violent nature is presented not as the intrinsic trait of a monster, but a response to early-life trauma. [...]
Ogresse is ultimately asking us to consider what monstrosity actually is, and to reflect on our own responsibility for perpetuating cycles of violence through our inability or unwillingness to see all other people as fully realized selves, every bit as deserving of empathy, grace, value, and love as we ourselves wish, in our gentlest and most vulnerable moments, to be."
"Radical Community: Sara Serpa at The Stone"
"Over the four nights, they performed only two pieces not written by Sara or another member of the band: Jim Hall's "Careful," and "Les Bergers" from Messiaen's "La Nativité du Seigneur." That pairing alone suggests the degree of stylistic range and intermingling of disparate musical language that Serpa brought to the stage, but her adaptation of "Les Bergers" stood apart. Hearing a classical piece at a jazz show is already a rarity, and Messiaen is a particularly challenging composer to reinterpret. But Serpa delivered a stunning performance, remaining faithful to the original melodic motifs and themes while also using them as generative material for a striking improvised acapella interlude. Mark Turner's sax solo on the piece was similarly thoughtful and expressive.
Perhaps because of Serpa's tendency to blur the boundaries between her improvisation and composition, perhaps because she's a woman, or because she's a singer, her capacities as a composer tend to go underrecognized. But she is a subtle, sophisticated composer, whose songs range from sweetly melodic to sharply angular. Although she gave a lot of time to compositions by her bandmates, the whole range of her compositional voice was on display. "Sol Engandor" was lyrical and mysterious, "Object" was hypnotic, "Degrowth" was minimal and sincere, and "Os Outros" was tenderly uplifting.
But one song stood out, with its wordless duet of an introduction that gave way to a beautiful song about our existence in time and in relation to the ones we love. This was "A Mother's Heart," a meditation on the contrasting love and fear of motherhood, written for both her mother and her son."