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Southern California Fires Hit the Jazz Community
Roy McCurdy and his wife had just finished eating dinner and were relaxing over coffee in their Altadena home, when he…
Defiance aptly described the shared stance of Amirtha Kidambi (left) and Maria Grand.
(Photo: Julia Anrather)In Brooklyn’s tight-knit community of socially committed musical improvisers, Amirtha Kidambi is a particularly compelling voice.
As a singer and soldier in the fight against injustice, she has collaborated closely with such stalwarts of the movement as Muhal Richard Abrams and William Parker. Her own protest group, Elder Ones, has won acclaim.
So it was hardly a surprise that a modest gathering of the faithful curated by Kidambi — one held in a secret location, the onetime home of a civil-rights pioneer — would pack an uncompromising punch.
The event, held Feb. 15, offered three varied takes on how free improvisation, tempered by some pointed words, becomes subversive expression. Two of the takes — one featuring flutist Justine Lee Hooper, who opened the program; the other featuring the duo of trumpeter Kwami Winfield and guitarist Adam Turay, who closed it — made extensive, if starkly contrasting, use of electronics and prerecorded material.
In between those sets, the duo of Kidambi and tenor saxophonist-vocalist Maria Grand offered an all-acoustic presentation notable for the ways in which two Kidambi-authored songs served as launch pads for a series of interlocking improvisations. As they unfolded, the improvisations transformed the highly personal works into messages of political resistance.
Such messages have, since the November election, been muted in many quarters. In that context, it is telling that publicity about the event was limited to targeted emails and an insider Instagram account. Once vetted, potential attendees were told where to go and advised to enter through a back alley or quietly through the front door. A blinking green light by the door was the only sign marking the location.
Behind the door, the mood was one of spirited solidarity. All the proceeds, collected in a pay-what-you-wish bucket, went to the musicians. That, and an event organizer’s open offer of the home for political meetings — the organizer was one of the duplex’s current occupants — lent weight to her labeling of the event an anti-capitalist venture.
But it seemed to invite a broader description, one combining concert, house party, political rally and, with post-election depression rife, a kind of group-therapy session. At times, the event took on the urgency of the community-building cultural happenings cooked up in the forbidden spaces of Lower Manhattan’s Alphabet City in the early 1980s.
“What we’ve been doing, we’re not going to stop doing,” Kidambi told the assembled crowd, about 20 hardy souls who had braved an icy snowstorm to attend. “This is kind of how we survive.”
In opening the program, Hooper at first appeared a delicate, if deft, survivor. Caressing a metal flute, Hooper fashioned fragile lines that drifted lazily on an electronic river, its level rising and falling as Hooper, dexterously working the effects pedal, controlled the flow. Then, picking up a wood flute, Hooper closed the set by conjuring an oceanside scene, gingerly layering airy filigrees atop the recorded comping of an acoustic guitar and real-world sounds of the sea.
The impact could simply have been light and luxuriant throughout. But Hooper had some steel inside, lacing the music with prerecorded words delivered in tones by turns fiery and teary. The words, an impressive call to action from the late transgender advocate Cecilia Gentili, implored the listener to “take this fear, these restrictions, this anger you’re feeling in this moment, and let that inspire you to do even more for our community.” That, in turn, inspired Hooper to muster a personal shout-out.
“Cecilia!” Hooper repeatedly declaimed. The crowd responded in kind. And, in the suddenness of that moment, whatever delicacy had attached to Hooper’s presentation morphed into defiance.
Defiance aptly described the stance of Kidambi and Grand, who, having worked together in duo and in Mary Halvorson’s Code Girl ensemble a half-decade ago, renewed and arguably strengthened their bond in this winter-of-discontent encounter.
The duo last worked at Roulette in October 2020. Despite a pandemic-size audience, sparks flew, as they did at the February event from the first number, “God Is Change.” The piece mined both the apocalyptic novel of that name and the 2020 wildfires in the Bay Area, where Kidambi grew up. Since then, the song had gained new currency as the issue of wildfires and their relationship to both climate change and disaster insurance had exploded.
Kidambi, citing a vast underpayment to a friend who had lost much in the fires, called out the system. Then she and Grand stepped up and, in pure tones of remarkably similar quality, coolly rendered the unsettling lyrics in a studied cadence made all the more powerful for its dispassion.
“All my life I knew the time would come,” they sang, “when we would have to turn and run when haze is blotting out the sun and will for many years to come.”
The words of “Thinking Of You” may have hit even closer to home. “I’m thinking of you and all you have put me through … I’m stronger for your abuse,” Kidambi sang in a narrative of trauma drawn directly from her life. That narrative was one to which Grand could also personally relate.
But it was only when the duo ditched the words that the story broke free of the specific. In an escalating colloquy entwining Kidambi’s voice and Grand’s horn — syllabic vocalizations against instrumental half-phrases; human screams against metallic squawks; glissandi against glissandi — the women played off each other with growing intensity until they seemed to reach an emotional convergence. The pain of the past was then palpable while that of the present was predictable, given the patriarchal bent of those atop the political food chain.
The intensity became ferocity in the evening’s final set. Winfield, armed with a digital processor, prepared cassettes and a four-track tape recorder, joined Turay, pedals and electric guitar at the ready, for some calculated chaos. Together, they ignited a musical firestorm that, amid the setting, implied a parallel with the political firestorm being stoked at home and abroad.
Then the implicit became explicit. The noise came to a head-spinning halt, yielding to an old-school folk tune of Turay’s, “Babies’ Blood.” As Winfield squeezed sounds from her cornet, Turay strummed his guitar and, in a raspy voice à la Bob Dylan, posed a question that was, for all concerned, an unambiguously rhetorical one.
“Are you ready for collective liberation?” he sang. “The fascist, racist empire’s got to die.” DB
Gerald and John Clayton at the family home in Altadena during a photo shoot for the June 2022 cover of DownBeat. The house was lost during the Los Angeles fires.
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