Samora & Elena Pinderhughes on Composing Transformations

Interview, Samora Pinderhughes, Elena Pinderhughes

By Shannon J. Effinger I Nov. 17, 2016

Siblings Samora (left) and Elena Pinderhughes collaborated on *The Transformations Suite*, which was released on Oct. 16.
(Photo: Courtesy of the artists)

Clearly, Elena, you’re an integral part of The Transformations Suite sound. But did you collaborate with Samora in the project’s conception?

Samora: Elena was very involved. Everything that I do, I always bounce it off of her. [Elena’s] kind of like my sounding board because she’s the person that I trust to tell me when something is good or not good, immediately. She makes me be rigorous about the process and about what’s working and what’s not working, especially for this project. It’s a large ensemble project, a group of 10 core musicians and then strings on top of that. With that kind of project, especially something I knew I would live with for a long time, I definitely wanted it to be the Duke Ellington type of thing—where you write for the people and not for the instruments.

The primary voice, as far as instruments go, was definitely Elena’s voice on the flute and as she was developing her singing voice, that became a part of it as well.

There are two singers on this album. Elena’s one and the other is Jebhreal Jackson. He actually was a dancer at Juilliard who has never trained as a singer. I also gave her the most important solo parts cause I knew she would kill it!

Elena: Once people hear the album, there’s also this incredible spoken-word and written part; you get to read and see the visuals. This isn’t just an album: There are visual components, there are audio components, everything, and all of that was Samora’s work.

Samora: My main collaborator, Jeremie Harris, wrote some of the lyrics with me. But I kind of did everything backwards. It was almost like an essay. I wrote program notes first before I wrote any music because I wanted it to be a suite and I kind of wanted it to be a manifesto, if you will, and a story.

There’s a rich precedent for protest music. Talk about some of the research that went into making the Suite.

Samora: A Love Supreme was definitely a very important record for this album. The most important record for the Suite was [Marvin Gaye’s] What’s Going On.

I would say the biggest influences on the record overall was James Baldwin because he’s always [been] the biggest influence for me. He’s kind of my hero. Particularly, his book of essays entitled The Cross of Redemption. Number two was Saul Williams. We use some of his words, with his blessing, in the piece from one of his collections entitled Said the Shotgun to the Head.

Musically, it was a hodgepodge of different things. As far as the research went, I definitely tried to listen to concept records the whole way through, just so that I could get an idea of what it would mean to have something that stands as a story in an hour.

When making a concept album like this, there is a danger of the statement overshadowing the art. Either in your composition or arranging, how did you balance those two aspects while making the album?

Samora: The first thing is to get really great musicians. That’s the most important thing, and to have a band, which I have been really lucky enough to have. We rehearsed and went out on the road before we recorded it. Just as I was talking about my own process, it was the same in rehearsals with Elena, [bassist] Clovis Nicolas, Jeremie and just everybody that [had input]: ‘We really don’t think that this works’ or ‘Let’s take this out.’

Because I worked with [dancer] Jebhreal and Jeremie on the words, who I met while he was in the theater program, it was always more than music. We were always thinking about how it could jump off the stage. We were always thinking about how it could be dynamic and how it could be presented as well as heard.