Sunday blogs - on weddings + the art of the bildungsroman

On Weddings + The Art of the Bildungsroman

Bucket list #45: have a couple commit life long vows at the most important day of their lives together to the first song of your first album.

It's interesting because I always associate that album, Azalea, with my coming-of-age in New York. I wrote everything on that album in my first two years of college. San Francisco (Interlude) was about parting ways with my hometown and how your relationship to the places you grew up in change so rapidly as you get older. A Heroine's Manifesto was about my first experience voting in the 2016 election – the one that Trump won, cueing a slew of hate crimes, xenophobia, racism, and sexism, to be emboldened and brought to the unadulterated surface. Marigold was about one of my first major experiences being intimate with a woman. Between the World and Me, in honor of the Tai Nehisi Coates book, was about ruminating on my place in the jazz world as a white woman, witnessing the whitewashing of jazz academia alongside horrors of police brutality, stop-and-frisk, private prisons and unjust incarceration….The Spotless Mind on my first experience with psychedelics. And at the top, coming full circle, my fully improvised studio piece, Foreword, introducing myself, and sealing the bond between two humans in love to promise they will grow old together.

I was looking through old photos with a friend of her initial move to NYC in 2013, seeing all her initial encounters with people we have come to know as family and colleagues. People's bodies, personal style, tastes in music, sub-sections of the music scene – they have all changed so much in that time. It always makes me wonder how much I will change in the next 8 years. In 8 years I will be in my thirties. 8 years ago, I used to doubt whether I would even make it to my 30s. I wasn't sure my will to live was strong enough. I was grappling with my very first panic attacks, feelings of deep, painful inadequacy. I would write in the margins of my high school planner how much I couldn't wait to get out of the damn place and move to NYC. That was the only way I could see myself finding something worth living for besides my family and my instrument. How I thought, maybe, that's when things would finally get better. And 8 years later – even though not every nut and bolt was tightened – they did.

I always am surprised when folks bring up Azalea. I made the mistake of releasing that album without any publicity help whatsoever, so any way it circulated was directly through my own intimate fan base. Similar to my writing, I never know just how many folks are even paying attention. In retrospect, I hear some fantastic ideas, interesting audio effects, winding song forms, the seeds of things that would come to be definitive of my compositional and improvisational style. But I also hear so much that I had to learn. I hear unstable time, a lack of confidence, a voice that sounds like it's still questioning itself. I also live inside my own head, where I'm especially attuned to these things. Outsiders are not – they do not know your weaknesses as intimately as you do. It's in those instances that you realize how much impact you have on individuals without even knowing it because we get so consumed by our faults and self improvement than our capacity to add to others' lives in a significant way. That's where the selfish mindset self eradicates. It makes room for your unspeakable, unquantifiable, but nonetheless magnitudinal impact on the experiences and memories of others – including the most important moments of their lives.

One thing that changed as I got older (and consequently, learned to neutralize aspects of my depression) is the way I defined the value of a human being. I used to think success was what made you more or less important than someone, whether it be by way of fame, excellence, talent, money, or skill.This was also at the heart of my depression, a giant wall self erected between me and my artistry. In middle school, it was if I wasn't pretty enough, tall enough, popular enough, curvy or womanly enough. In high school, it was if I didn't get good enough grades, if I wasn't the best student in my class, if I wasn't one of the stronger musicians in jazz band. In college, it was if I wasn't selected by the administration to go to Bern (jazz festival in Switzerland), Monterey Jazz Fest, the international competition in Amsterdam. (They only suggested me for Bern in my very last semester. Of course, I was already on tour by my own means). I associated success with greater happiness, and furthermore, being more deserving of it.

This makes zero sense given that it is impossible for anybody to be successful, all of the time, and much success is born out of suffering, lessons learned, and those parts of life that none of us want to willingly go through. My bass player friend shared a post recently about advice that a bass player mentor gave him when he was younger and worried about not being huge on the scene soon enough. The mentor asked him to prioritize deepening his relationship with the bass and his relationship with life – everything else could be deemed ultimately superficial and, at best, luck of the draw. Being from Eastern Europe, he also explained how in the West we tend to be far more obsessed with capitalistic understandings of musical success, and it's hurting our artistry. Think about the Thelonious Monk competitions, the honor bands. These are so deeply concentrated in American jazz programs. Furthermore, I was in that self imposed trap, finding a point in my life where I never felt myself “winning” and “being successful”, since I was almost always rejected from those programs. And while it wasn't entirely my fault, growing up in this hyper capitalistic society where music presented itself as something to be corrected on, graded on, competed for, bearing the notion that only a few at the top were allowed to be the ones to “succeed” - the biggest hurdle I had ever gone through in my growing up was believing that story to have merit, and punishing myself for not being at the top.

Having been outside of music school for almost two years, I have felt the true hunger of this zero-sum-game type success melt at the premise of my commitment to simply getting better. Like my friend was told by his mentor, I found myself having a deeper relationship with my instrument and my own unique contributions to the music. Someone recently said that confidence is not about looking around and thinking you're the hottest thing in the room, but to not even acknowledge the rest of the room at all. It's that true, unfettered faith in how your voice stands alone. It's also incredibly scary to do. Sure enough, I have been happier in the last two years than I've ever been. I understand the music world as not so much this tiered competition, but rather, a complex web of matricies constituting all areas of the scene that different folks gravitate towards (or don't). Wherever you do, it's your own prerogative, and nobody really cares where you find yourself most passionate. The only folks that do seem to care are critics, who have the glory of judging music without actually having to go through the process of creating it. For that, they can (cordially) suck it. I've never cared less for what critics say in my whole life.

Through my work in the real jazz scene, I've found my life long friends, my ride or die musical peers, an undying support system knowing that we've abandoned that artificial success story we've been fed for so long. The idea that folks would like my sound for simply being my own sound was so novel to me a couple years ago, and I'm so thankful that I can feel this amount of unbridled pride in it. It's not always present, of course. I'm not always confident. I'm still finding my sound, and I'll probably be finding it my whole life. I have shows with less favorable audiences, either by not being packed houses or with noisy or reckless audience members who talk over the music. Not everyone will resonate with what I create – and that's fine. That's art. But I can find those individuals, fans, peers, mentors, who have revealed how much my music has changed their lives inside out, mark some of their most memorable life moments (such as their own wedding), and that will always be more than enough to sustain me through what I do.

I am aware of the irony of writing all of this while in the place of my upbringing before the age of 18 – northern California. I can safely say, it does not feel like what it once did to me. It's not just my dad's impending retirement, my childhood dog passing away, my childhood cat becoming bow legged and grey, that my room from middle school to high school is now set up for Airbnb stays with my old photos stored in a box in the closet. My ideologies have completely transformed. Situations that made me cry under the sheets of my bed in utter humiliation in high school become strangely commonplace. One may even grow numb to the feeling.

But the window outside my old bedroom window is exactly how it used to be. I still hear the chimes from the neighbor's house around 4:30pm, right when the afternoon wind starts kicking in. The rolling hills littered with apartment complexes and abandoned warehouses from the 80s still stand like familiar mementos, looking on to South San Francisco. Julia Cameron said to always take your inner child and store him/her deep inside your chest to nestle safely in your heart. You may even imagine holding their hand as they shake and sob and telling them everything will be okay. It is part of how we maintain a crucial connection to where we came from – we couldn't be the person we are today without that initial seed of human life. In that way, the advent of human life might be scary, but through all, it is quite beautiful.

When you get older, one emotion does not have to take the place of another. You realize the capability of life to be both and all, all at once.