This is a tradition of resistance to the term that's as old as the term itself, especially because that term has been used to commodify and reduce black creativity, and also to appropriate and sell it. That's what John Coltrane said in an interview with a Japanese journalist: "Jazz is a word they use to sell our music, but to me that word does not exist." And he's treated as one of the central figures in the history of jazz. So if he rejected it, then why is it weird when I do it? I'm in the tradition!

When I give a concert, I know they're not going to hear everything; there might be a lot going on. My individual perceptual and cognitive path through the music is just that: one path through music. My experience will be probably at some level different from other people's, and that multiplicity of experience has to be supported by the music. I might just focus on the cowbell the whole time - maybe I have a fever for more cowbell!

This is the last sentence of my dissertation: "What is soul in music if not powerfully embodied human presence?"

There are records I'll listen to one time and zero in on what's happening, and then I'll listen again to something I didn't notice the first time. The art of making records is something like this: you want to provide a multiplicity of experience in a single object, which is to say you want layers so that people can revisit and have something revealed to them that wasn't apparent the first time. We often will listen to the same music over and over again, and that tells you something, too.

I'm what they call a 'non-black person of color': NBPOC. It's easy and seductive and common to mobilize around these identity issues, but often that's done at the expense of considering structural anti-blackness. That puts everything in a slightly different light for me, especially because of where I am and why - where I am in the world of the arts, where I live, in Harlem - and the music that I've been able to make, whom I've been able to make it with, who has nurtured me. It's not just about solidarity. It's actually about debt.

I use are provisional terms, and they usually put any proper nouns in critical distance. I'm in a tradition of people who resist naming, fixity. That means it's a tradition of people who insist on mobility, who defy proper nouns and genres and those kinds of things. When I push back against the word 'jazz' it's because I've learned that from many, many elders who think that way. I'm not just being a jerk.

I like the idea of the objecthood of music being destabilized by process and things like improvisation. That's what empowers us; that's how we make each day new as players, as people.