AMIRTHA KIDAMBI

The vocalist and leader of the quartet (sometimes quintet) Elder Ones challenges Western musical dogma.

Photo by Chris Weiss

Elder Ones initially formed through a free improv context for a benefit for Michael Brown; he was killed by the police in 2014. Matana Roberts started something called Musicians Against Police Brutality, so Max Jaffe, Brandon Lopez, and I had done a free improvisation for that. During that period, I had started to write some solo music for myself and wrote a piece for Eric Garner. That piece kind of became the first piece for the band, which we started as a trio. And then I added Matt Nelson on the soprano saxophone. So it was drums, bass, soprano saxophone, voice, and harmonium. It started in that political context of thinking and reflecting on police violence, state violence, and police brutality.

That was such a germinating seed of the band and it became very much an imperative or directive, even though the first album, Holy Science, has no lyrics whatsoever. It's been described as spiritual free jazz or something like that. It definitely has drone elements and influences of Indian music. But then I think, because of that political imperative that was there from the beginning — there's that piece for Eric Garner, which is quite intense and it's sort of like big cathartic outbursts. So the band also became a really important way for me to process a lot of what was happening and hopefully for the audience to process it.

“It was a way to actually process, in real time, things that were happening that were really traumatic around us and the audience.”

In a way, because the pieces were wordless and because it was almost more in the realm of instrumental jazz where there's an impetus and a feeling behind it, but there aren't words directing you on what the music is about necessarily. But on that tour, when we were in the Midwest, it was a pretty weird place to be during that time. It was a way to actually process, in real time, things that were happening that were really traumatic around us and the audience. So that became the directive for me for the band. Even though that's not explicitly why I started the band, it just really seemed like that was where the band was useful. Useful for me, useful for other people, useful for the players, useful in the sense of actually dealing with some stuff.

Artwork by Justin Hopkins

On the album From Untruth, which I had started writing after Trump's inauguration in 2017 and has titles like “Eat the Rich” and “Decolonize the Mind,” I started writing words and it really has become explicitly about catharsis, processing, and dealing with these larger themes. The next record is also oriented in that way. Thinking about anti-Asian violence, thinking about crisis capitalism and disaster capitalism and the pandemic, about the labor movement. There's a piece about the farmer's protest that happened in India last year. Just thinking about the labor movement, even as it is unfolding here in the US, and the racial justice movement. It has now become very clear to me what the purpose of the band is, and it is nice in that way because it really gives me a sense of purpose and direction in terms of writing the music.

***

I don't remember a time when I didn't want to be a musician, so I don't know when it started for me [laughs]. I’ve been singing since I was three, primarily in a devotional music context, which is actually how I started playing with the instrument, the harmonium. That's what we used in our Hindu devotional and multi-faith group — actually, it was more universalist — that kind of believed in all religions, but Hinduism was the basis of it. We sang this devotional music called bhajan. So that's how I started singing and that's how I started playing. Then I gravitated towards every musical type of activity at school. I was in choir, I was in musical theater, I even taught myself how to play the clarinet so I could be in concert band.

I was really milking the public school system for everything I could [laughs]. My parents, when I was growing up, didn’t encourage the arts for me because that was not what they were interested in. I did study a South Indian classical dance called Bharatanatyam, and I think it’s partly because the lessons were just dirt cheap. The teacher charged, like, $20 for a week of classes and it was close to our house, so you had to be involved.

The dance actually had a huge influence on me in that I learned all the rhythms of Carnatic music, South Indian classical music, through my feet. You basically learn everything that the drummer does, so I think that really is in my music. I'm realizing more and more now it's so ingrained in my music, and I never got to study in Indian classical voice, which I really regret. I’ve been studying it on and off by myself for the past decade. It’s just that you need so much time to dedicate to something like that, so I wish I had had that when I was a kid.

But it was a very musical household in the sense that my mom was such a huge fan of Carnatic music. It was on in the house all the time. My sister and I are named after Carnatic music. I'm named after raga, my sister's named after part of the song form, so my mother is really passionate about music. I think she just didn't want that as a career for me, and that's a pretty typical immigrant story. They want something safe and secure where you're guaranteed to make money. There's a status thing in my community where you “rise” up from the working class and you get a six figure job or some-thing. I'm pretty anti-capitalist, so I wasn't trying to do that. But now they're very supportive and I always knew it was going to be music for me.

“My sister and I are named after Carnatic music. I'm named after raga, my sister's named after part of the song form, so my mother is really passionate about music.”

The only other thing I'd ever considered was political science; I was sort of an early activist. I was in high school and I was 15 when 9/11 and the start of the Iraq War happened. I think my upbringing also contributed to this because we were in this multi-faith community and the main thing that we did as part of our spiritual practice was service. So we served weekly at the homeless shelter or handed out food in the parks. We did all kinds of community service work.

It was just such a regular part of my life. I think seeing things like homelessness up close, especially when you're a very small kid, and under-standing the systemic stuff from a human perspective — I think that had a big influence.

***

I actually hate the word writing, and I use it myself, but it's so not how I approach creativity. It’s such a Western way of doing things. We use this word so ubiquitously and I'm realizing that it’s so strange because it's usually the last thing that happens in my creative process. And even then I'm trying to get rid of the written music aspect of it. I create through improvisation first and foremost, but maybe there's something that marks the improvisation. For example, that piece for Eric Garner, I was in my practice space when the video started circulating and I watched it.

This is when he was strangled by the NYPD in Staten Island. I think it was the first video people really saw of that happening in real time. And now we've seen so many videos. It's really horrible and it was such a shock to the system because I had never seen anything like that before. I was in a practice space and I turned off my phone. I didn't really know what to do. It was so horrible to see. So I just started improvising and out of that came these motifs in this whole-tone scale. I started working it out and then usually there's something that I want to write about that starts my improvising, or sometimes I'll just be improvising.

Then some little idea or some melody comes out — some baseline or some repetitive figure. I start to go inside that and work it out through singing it and through playing it. I end up with all these random fragments of ideas and then eventually, as I settle on the subject matter and what the piece is about, I start to edit all of that. I'll have tons of small sketches and a bunch of different ideas, and then I'll slowly start to put them together. The writing is the last part of it for me.

I've been doing this more through voice memos. I used to try to write it down in Western notation and it just never came out right. I don't think that notation works for everything. My vocal lines are very fluid. There's a certain kind of rhythmic complexity that isn't well captured, or I would have to sit down and really rack my brain on how to write it down. I do it through recordings and, at the very end before I take it to the band, I write it down because it seems to make the rehearsal process faster. But I actually want to decolonize that part of my practice too. I would rather teach people by ear. That’s what I'm hoping to start doing in the future, but with trained musicians, everybody's very reluctant to do that even though it’s just as valuable as being able to read music. But even with that material, I try to keep it really flexible so that people can improvise on top of it; you can use it as a jumping off point for each person in the band to also be creative.

“I actually hate the word writing, and I use it myself, but it's so not how I approach creativity. It's such a Western way of doing things.”

I never liked that I'm a classically trained, Western musician. I studied opera in college and classical music, and that's what I did until about 2011, and I hated that process. It's just like, Here's the music, do it exactly how it is written. Once I started doing my own music, I was like, Okay, well that's not how I want to treat performers. Even though it's my ideas as a starting point, I try to treat it as a starting point that we're all really going to shape together. And each person's going to be able to be creative within those ideas.

***

One challenge is just trying to survive. It's very hard to make a living as a musician. I'm doing it, but it's so unstable and it was already unstable before the pandemic. But then, of course, having two years of all of our gigs being canceled, and even now things are still getting canceled. If one person gets COVID, the gig is off. Trying to keep your eye on the ball and keep your spirits up when things are that uncertain is really tough.

Sometimes I’m spending more time writing emails than I am actually singing or writing, and a lot of people I talk to, that's what happens. You’re always hustling for the next thing and the next thing and the next thing. That cycle that capitalism creates is really not great for the artistic process, so I think a lot of us struggle with that. As a woman of color in music, in a scene that's definitely dominated by men — it's considered jazz, I guess, but it's pretty open. Even so, it's definitely a much more male-dominated space. I feel like that causes a lot of tension and issues.

Photo by Alex De La Hidalga

All the curators are white men, all the venue owners are white men, all the label owners are white men, all the people, all the journalists are white men, and it's just barely starting to change. So the kinds of questions I get asked, or I've had a record label try to exoticize me and make me play up my Indianness more. I’ve had The Wire, which is one of the most prominent experimental music magazines, just conflate my music with another Indian artist. They wrote a review of both of us together and our music really doesn't have that much in common at all. And they said that I was associated with this Indian music group in New York called Brooklyn Raga Massive, and I've literally never done anything with them.

They're basically like, “Oh, you're Indian.” They'll call me a Carnatic musician and I'm like, “Dude, I never studied it.” I'm studying it now, but they don't get facts straight about me. If anything, the music I was most involved in when I was young was punk and all this other stuff, but it gets totally erased because it’s simpler for them to be like, “You're this.” And in situations where I want to feel confident or knowledgeable about what I do, I realize I have a lot of imposter syndrome. I think a lot of POC folks, especially women of color, have this, which is when you feel like you don't belong in a space and so you feel really insecure.

“I don't think that notation works for everything. My vocal lines are very fluid.”

I had to write this piece for this more classical, new music ensemble — which is not really the world I'm in anymore even though I was fully trained in classical music. It should be a domain I'm comfortable in, but it's not something I really do as much anymore. I'm not a traditional composer. And when they asked me to write this piece, I was so insecure about it. I was just like, Oh, I'm not a real composer. I was so self-effacing. But then once we started playing the music, I was like, Oh wait, I do know what I'm doing. I do belong here.

Artwork by Justin Hopkins

For my colleagues who did study traditional music, it’s so much at the core of their work and it is in my work, but it's more subtle and other things come out. I do sometimes feel like it makes it harder for my work to be read or marketed because if a person is very traditionally coming out of Indian music, they can really draw lines around it and be like, "This is this product," and the white gaze can be really directed to it. Whereas if it's really messy and complicated — my music is like protest music. It's coming out of punk and very influenced by a lot of hip hop. Not necessarily in the style, but in the ethos of it.

I want my work to be ecstatic, cathartic, and socially and spiritually transformative. Music is very spiritual for me. I grew up with it as such a big part of my devotional practice. I do think there's something beyond our daily material existence that music allows us to tap into. I think even for someone who's not very spiritual, they would probably say they've had experiences, like seeing a concert, that moved them beyond the mundane. I want to think that music can have a larger impact just by evoking the names of people who have been killed through state violence or talking about certain topics or just redirecting people's attention to what's going on.

“I want my work to be ecstatic, cathartic, and socially and spiritually transformative.”

I wrote a piece about the killings of the Asian women in Georgia and when I played it to some pretty white audiences in the Midwest, the piece reminded them that, “Hey, this is still happening.”

We walk around with this stuff, this tension, and being able to be in a context where instead of it being just an escape or distracting you from that, it's almost like we’re going into it. We are doing it together collectively, me and the audience. Everyone together is thinking about these things and we're processing them. It's about fascism. It's about things we are deeply worried about, so it can really be a way to bring people together. I think that’s what spiritual traditions are good for is community and bringing people together and having them better themselves together in some way. I think it is similar to the spiritual practice that I grew up with where we would sing together and then we would go and do service together. It's all the same principle.

As told to Michaela Zee

This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity. All images courtesy of Amirtha Kidambi.