Harmony Holiday

AO

Can we roll it back and talk about what growing up in Los Angeles was like for you?

HH

It was formative. I moved there from Iowa when I was five years old. My mom put me in the arts after my dad died as a kind of therapeutic, and I refused to leave. I grew up doing ballet very seriously and then in high school I immersed myself in literary arts. I edited my high school’s literary magazine Penstrokes and took it very seriously, even getting into with the principal over a censorship issue. During that phase I saw that movie Slam, starring Saul Williams. He was on the avant-garde of things like Def Poetry Jam, and we who loved writing then took what we could get from popular culture. I went to slams in LA at a place called Moondog right near the legendary Pink's Hot Dog spot, and really realized I was yearning for where language and music could meet in performance practice without the kind of self-parody some spoken word became, I wanted the same gesturing toward the musical line and break out of dance. Between Moondog and a place called Fais Do-Do, made popular in an episode of Insecure and my exposure to the strange world of Hollywood dance moms like Maria Shriver, then married to Arnold Schwarzenegger and Jamie Lee Curtis, I saw enough to need to write books about it to process any of it.

I was also into hip-hop, so I would go to an event called Project Blowed, which was a freestyle session that happened every Wednesday at the time. We would go to UCLA for their free hip hop shows. I remember going to see KRS-One and not knowing anything about hip hop yet. This is actually the beginning of my consciousness of “BLACK BACKSTAGE” now ceremonialized in my exhibition at The Kitchen. Being a 16 year old at UCLA trying to sneak into college performances to see hip hop and then these dudes take me and my friends backstage saying they’re the artist and they’re just like some lackeys. [Laughs.]

I went off to UC Berkeley and I continued to go to live shows whenever I could. I felt like it was part of my education in a way. I felt very sure that I needed to be engaging in live music to understand the things I was thinking about. I did this major called Rhetoric, and it’s a rare combination of critical theory, literature, and analysis. It was a precocious field of study for an undergrad. I thought I knew stuff about the world. I thought I grew up fast being in LA, having a pretty storied early childhood. But you don’t know enough about the world to be reading critical theory and doing the kind of analysis you’re doing from like 18 to 22. You think you do, but you really don’t. What I knew most about was the simulation that LA commands so well.

AO

I totally see a deconstructionist background in your writing.

HH

I did Rhetoric in undergrad, then an MFA. But, in a purely writing program, I felt like, “Where is the rigor of theory?” There’s no sphere of life in which I believe in one more than the other.

The only way I could actually get theory and practice together was…go outside. [Laughs.] And I think that’s been a big thing missing from academia and the life it tries to prescribe to every writer through the MFA. You can’t just theorize and you certainly can’t theorize your way into being a decent poet or thinker either. You actually have to live, outside of the classroom, and take risks that might put you at odds with pedagogy. I knew that. Finally, the space I now work in is kind of like that. I knew that one day I was going to have  an arts space that feels like a mixture of home and the club, because I feel like that’s what makes up my creative life practice in a way; not compartmentalizing in the ways we’re told we have to to to do our work, conflating work and play in the spirit of jazz music, as interdependent aspects of improvisation.

AO

[Laughs.] These are the makings of a modern day salon.

HH

It contains multitudes, literally because it opens with a three room space where there’s a lounge-y bar type area that you go into, and a black box theater. Then, there’s what we call the archives which is a more warehouse looking space. One of the things I’ve wanted to do and will do is bring in festivals curated and organized by some friends and I. LA can be so inhospitable unless you go to people’s houses. The people who can have a salon are the people with a big mansion or something like that. And we who live more modestly, where do we go?  So I’m like, let’s just go to the club. You know? We opened the venue up and all the musicians who were in town rolled up and we wound up having  dance parties with legendary jazz musicians. And this is the dream of our space. Play is a form of thinking, and leisure is underestimated as part of creative acts, crafts, and the way you get to excellence.

AO

Yes, right!

HH

The best artists are usually the people who know how to have fun, even if they’re very disciplined and their day-to-day demeanor is strict. One of the things I’ve learned from being involved with the space is that the most successful artists are the ones who are really curious. They’ll pop into an event where you would never expect to see them just because they’re interested in what’s happening. Just like how back in the day, Prince used to pop up to a party that was held in LA by my friend, James McCall, who helped run Low End Theory with his crew of homies at the time.

AO

Can you speak to how you approach interviews with this emphasis on the archival, kind of going off the distinction you made about time of play and time for work regarding artists?

HH

I’m specifically thinking about interviews more on their own terms and that are decontextualized from the magazine print cycles. I often use the term "oral histories" for the stuff we do at the venue, which is still maybe the wrong term. I’ve been trying to explore themes that don’t get talked about elsewhere, namely the theme of family members of popular musicians who are not with us anymore and focusing on those stories as opposed to the mythologized ones that we hear in the mainstream.

Just like what happened with Charles Mingus’s daughter; she was one of the first people I interviewed. Or for example, the Coltrane family. How come no one talks to or about Michelle Coltrane? As in, the stories within music that can only happen first hand. In that sense it’s not just about interviews as a medium, but connecting with people whose stories no one asks for, despite them being very integral to the origin of the story.

AO

Do you feel like your approach comes from your background in Rhetoric ? Where does the impulse towards unconcealment stem from for you?

HH

I think it stems all the way back to having a father who was a musician. Growing up people consistently said one thing about him to me because when he passed away I was very young. People would tell me who he was to them and it became this collection of oral histories that I had to save. Then, growing up and becoming more of a scholar and getting into real research, I would read interviews and start collecting his catalogs and doing more research on him as a recording artist rather than thinking through the lens of this person as my father. I realized that those stories were so antiseptic compared to hearing a colleague of his talk about him driving in a day from Iowa to Texas for a recording session. The rigor of rhetoric helped me to understand the why of it all. So it’s not just a linear biographical analysis that feels like a hallmark card, but more of trying to piece together the archetypal energies at work in a human being who was for the most part objectified as someone who created a body of work.

I'm always trying to interrogate where the person begins and where the brand begins. And why it matters. I’m always asking, “But why?”

AO

I want to ask you about citations as a part of theoretical writing.

HH

Citations are important. There are people who actually just straight up plagiarize, which is why citing is important. But the line between citation and sample does sometimes blur in the context of what is called black aesthetics, sometimes too much others not enough.Jazz is a template for one of the highest ways you could theorize thatWhile I think it’s maybe plateaued, if you look at the height of the experimental eras of jazz in 1959, 1960, or closer to ‘68, I would say that that era (especially when you get to the late Coltrane, Eric Dolphy and Albert Ayler) all these amazing jazz innovators are citing each other. It’s not in the literal, Western way that we think of citation; it’s discursive.

It’s similar to African dance. The movements of a ritual dance have been codified, which you teach in a class as repertoire. Then you improvise on them in performance which is where you are trying to get to by learning the repertoire. You need to have something to build on. My ideal of a writer is kind of like a jazz musician in that sense. You play the standard and we all know the standard together because we live this. So then, it’s clear that you're referencing their sound by how you construct your own. No one’s going to be mad at you for playing with the standard because you’ve manipulated it so well that it actually has a new point of view. It’s a really beautiful and structural way of citing in writing. But it’s very different from copying or emulating to a point of being weird and crowding someone’s idiosyncratic space.

AO

You’re having your first solo exhibition titled “BLACK BACKSTAGE” at The Kitchen in New York in a month. What is the show thinking about?

HH

I’m trying to cite an oral history of the things that happen outside of black mainstream performance and entertainment. I’m trying to undermine the habit of oversight and get to what I think is the heart of black creative life, which is when we actually are un-citable. The things that happen that you will never see as commodity, that are just conversations happening around and about and through performance but that can’t necessarily be performed and rehearsed or woven into the known identity of the performers we think about.

There’s a to be a sound sculpture mixed with an actual sculpture inspired by an idea Lonnie Holly asked me to realize when I was profiling him this past summer. I was telling him about the exhibition and the other elements, and he was like, “Wait, you need to make a stage.” [Laughs.] But then I thought, no I’m not just going to take his idea, though he practically demanded it. But he was right and I realized the stage needs to be a ruin because I work a lot with the idea of ruins and the black music emerging from those ruins.

AO

I’m happy you said you think a lot about ruins and black music coming out of the ruins, because there seems to be a critical engagement with time there; the temporal nature of ruins. Your book Mafaa is eponymously eschatological and then Hollywood Forever, Jazz Funeral for Uncle Tom, also clearly refer to the object of time. Can you say more about it?

HH

Yeah, that’s a good question because I haven’t really considered it in a confrontational way. I have written this word a lot, but it needs to be expanded upon. I believe in an omnidirectional memory. I’ve used that phrase before and I think there’s more to it than how I’ve used it in the past. I really believe in circularity, that the past is the future. And that time is kind of quantum, you’re pulling out elements of eras, molding that into the modern or so-called modern archetypes, and trying to make something that will allow you to survive in the current time that you're in.

AO

Yes, this notion of teleological collapsing feels so important in contextualizing the black musical tradition.

HH

Yeah, I mean in hip hop, you’re listening to people who are obsessed with time. Dilla, whoever, they’re all listening to old records looking for one little moment that they can bring with them into the present, almost like armor, a quiet armor of sound. I think that that’s important. That’s a form of citation too, it’s complicated when there’s money involved.

Sampling has now been codified enough to be codified into law, so that’s fine. But there was a time when that was also just as lawless as a tap dance or a footwork session, where it’s just like, I’m going to do your thing better. And I stole it, sorry. That’s hip hop. [Laughs.] I think we need to think about that in the context of literary consciousness and academia.

In writing, I always believe that you should have that edge, where you’re sharpening something by trying out the bleeding edge of it and not holding back from that. And that sometimes means not tidying up, if something comes to your mind. You say it in that moment, you edit it later, you sample your associations

AO

Can I ask when your collaboration and friendship with Fred Moten began?

HH

It began when I was finishing graduate school and I had just finished my thesis which was being made into a book. I think Fred heard about it, began teaching it, and invited me to a conference at Duke. He was one of the first professional emails I got. He had this very fun after party for the conference at his house. And he just got on a bass and was playing. Then we stayed in touch from there. He’s like one of the only people I see whenever I go to New York. I always make a point of going to Fred’s house and he has allowed me generously to bring friends with. He feels very safe, which is a big deal for a woman in these fields, to find people who feel that way.

AO

That’s so beautiful hearing you speak of him as a friend but also seeing how your work parallels one another. For example you both share a poetic relationship to Amiri Baraka. Can you talk about Baraka actually?

HH

I have a lot of his poems memorized because I’ve read them so much. And I knew him. And that was a formative part of me living in New York. Knowing him was formative to giving myself permission to move how I doin the world. Even though I knew Baraka, I don’t talk about it a lot because I wouldn’t want it to ever be written up as my mentor. I feel like that’s diminishing who he is.

I met him at the club. Part of my education was the club. I really felt like I was in grad school just venturing out into distant territories in the city while many peers were going to the local spot to kick it with the cohort. I befriended the jazz journalist for the New York Times, Ben Ratliff, and that started my comfort with going to jazz shows alone. I thought that would be a better space for me than academia in the long run and it turned out to be true. Ben brought me first to Jason Moran playing Monk at Town Hall, which was incredible. Ben and I just did a talk in the exhibition with Max Roach’s son and Melanie Charles. And I’m still in touch with Jason especially about our shared commitments to jazz esoterica.

AO

Oh amazing.

HH

I went to this one show at Blue Note alone. You couldn’t really ask that of most people while they’re in graduate school, whether  they wanted to see a random $50 show. Then it’s also jazz. [Laughs.] It’s extremely expensive. Plus you need to buy a 2 drink minimum and I was willing to invest in stuff like that, but I wasn’t going to ask most of my friends to do that.

AO

No, completely.

HH

I saw Baraka there alone too and I went up to him just to say, “I really love your work, I'm up at Columbia University,” and he was like,  “Oh period, let’s go get a whiskey”. It was that simple. He must have vetted me on some auric level. [Laughs.]

AO

Wait, that’s wild. [Laughs.]

HH

Yeah, it was. My archive is just filled with  emails going back and forth with him. We would meet at shows in the city. One time he was going to see Pharaoh Sanders with his wife and he invited me; just very sincere . He invited me to the house. It was all sweet. I just cite him because he’s in my heart in a way, in that way. He would impart things very deliberately, energetically, and literally. Saying things about how to conduct oneself and tacitly say things like, “Don’t let these dudes play you”.

He has a poem that's like an "Elegy for Miles," and one of the lines is basically, “You taught me no one could tell me shit unless they were something I could feel.” And I really did learn that from him. Coming out of knowing him, it has helped me in so many ways personally, spiritually, and professionally Now I can be in the world without looking for validation from the patriarchal gaze of any industry I’m in, or from any other horizontally oriented institution.

I am focused on what I feel I’m supposed to do. And also survival and hopefully thriving. I used to care a lot more about the corny-sides of the literary industry. It’s loveless. Now, I’ve moved over to the side of the people who love what they’re doing and do it for love. Fred’s involved with that, Amiri was involved in that, Esperanza Spalding, a lot of my musician friends, people who really love what they’re doing, those are the people I now surround myself with. I bring it up because it’s not just a lifestyle choice, it’s an actual choice that saves my ability to do work.

AO

Yes. That actually flows into a question I had about your Substack, “Black Music and Black Muses”. How did it emerge?

HH

Well, “Black Music” is echoing Baraka’s Black Music. I have felt that people have been sort of lukewarm about doing real, on the ground, in it, music writing, since Baraka's Blues People and Digging. A lot of that work since then has gone into academia, the closest thing is probably Fred’s In the Break.

I started the Substack to start writing song by song. I started writing about an Ike and Tina song. Why can’t we write about songs and look at cultural history through songs, was my prompt to myself, toward an expanded American songbook? We can, but it’s not going to be published in most of the existing publications, so this was my first foray into making my own. I’m actually starting a magazine later this year.

I'm just bored with the current structure. An album comes out, you review it, the press says stuff. I think the most interesting writing  feels like it’s accompanying things rather than dubbing them over with some critics' ideas. And it’s often atemporal.

You could write about the sweat of Jasmine Sullivan or something like that. They way Margo did for Ella. There’s just other ways to think about music. Music is so far ahead of any theorizing that’s happening in Black Studies, it is itself the theory, good poetry too, though some poetics have succumbed in way that music hasn’t, to neoliberalism’s aesthetic needs The more rigorous theorizing about language and break and mend happens in black music. So that’s really the point. And then to become a better poet I had to look to music. I wanted to write like a J Dilla sample, so I had to be obsessed with how he sampled. I don’t think that we need to necessarily have a million theories of things  if we were to pay attention to what people are actually making and how it makes us feel and orient ourselves.

AO

Totally. The title of your upcoming book with Semiotext(e) Life of the Party, has a double meaning? It’s also funny, the backstage is where the party is, not the front stage.

HH

Exactly. And also slightly inspired by Kanye West’s song, “Life of the Party,” on his album Donda. The life of the party is the death of the artist type thing. The party is feeding on and cannibalizing the life of the party. I wanted to kind of be sort of glib about it. I kind of wanted it to feel like attending a secret club too, inside and outside of the book.