 We're live. Hello, friends. We'll get started in just a moment. Thank you for being here tonight. We'll get going in just a moment as we wait for the room to fill a bit. Hello. Welcome. I'm Anissa. I am your librarian host tonight. And if you've ever been in a program with me, you know, I share a document of the links for tonight's event which lead back to library events and to our presenters. And I know tonight the resources are going to be flying. I always try to keep up. And this is a live document. So any books, any music, any records, particularly if we can link them back to San Francisco Public, I will add those to our document so you can just pick up that one link and find all of the great things about the library and about tonight's discussion. And I will continue to throw that in as we talk. All right. So thank you all for being here. I have, I'm very grateful to both Justin and Daphne for being here. Justin knows that I wanted to have Daphne in the virtual library or in person, which that still stands. Whenever you come back to the Bay Area, Daphne, there is a spot in person for you at the San Francisco Public Library. I hear that. Yes. So I'm really, really excited that we can make this happen. And this is part of June is Black Music Appreciation Month. If you didn't know that. So this is part of that celebration. And part of our gigantic summer stride, which is not just for kids. It's for all ages. And so, you know, if you do your 20 hours reading, going to events like this, or going out and exploring our great city, you too, at the end of 20 hours, will get that iconic San Francisco Public Library tote bag that we give away every summer. Our library does want to acknowledge that we occupy the unceded ancestral homeland of the wrong mutitial lonely people, who are the original inhabitants of the San Francisco Peninsula. We recognize that we benefit from living and working on their traditional homeland. And as uninvited guests, we pay our, we wish to pair our respects to the ancestors, elders, and relatives of the wrong mutitian community. Right now, I'm going to throw in the chat box some great links to where you can do this interactive map to find out what territory you're, you're occupying at the moment where you're staying. And a great all women led organization out of the East Bay called Segorte Land Trust and they're working in the land back movement and they are fierce. So check them out. And just some upcoming events happening are on the same page, which is a five month leave read at San Francisco Public, where we encourage you all of San Francisco to read the same book at the same time. This is our May, June selection, long with the tribe of the fatherless girls, a memoir, also fierce. Check it out. It's at all the libraries right now. You could walk in and find it on the shelf. Mini copies available. And T-Care Madden will be in Combo on June 21st with Matthew Clark-Davidson. We have bestselling author, award-winning Sarah Novick in conversation on Tuesday, June 13th in the virtual library. And Sarah's going to be discussing her book, True Biz, with a Q&A to follow. And this book is really about Sarah on writing and connecting with the deaf community. SFPL has a deaf center. So if that's a service you know that you need or someone you know needs, we have that at our library. We are partnering with the Writers Grotto, the San Francisco Writers Grotto all summer long. So June, July and August we have virtual events lined up. Come check that out. On July, June 27th we have Louise Nair and Salah Karest searching for home. And then one last thing I want to tell you all about because it's going to be so fun and I really want you all to come out. July 15th out at the new farm and that's out 10 Cargo Way down by Heron's Head Park in Bayview. And it is a gorgeous place. There's goats, there's chickens, free range running around. It's like the perfect place for family. You can just let your kids go and like be fine with it. But it's also a great place for all ages. It is a really community gathering. There's going to be music, the bookmobile, free books for all ages. We're going to have a few artists out there doing hands-on arts and crafts and getting creative. Two bands including Filipina Young Ladies rocking out and we'll have Ashiba doing some Caribbean music as well. So it's going to be a fun day, 12 to 5 July 15th. Don't miss it. All right. And with that I'm so excited again, like I said, to have the amazing SF royalty in the house. Dr. Daphne Brooks and Daphne is going to be in conversation today with Justin DeMong who is the chairman of the Before Columbus Foundation and the administrator of the American Book Awards which will be coming soon. All right. I'm going to stop sharing and turn it over to the both of you. There's going to be time for Q&A. You can start now if you'd like to put it in the chat or in the Q&A function and we will do those later. Welcome Daphne Brooks and Justin DeMong. Oh thank you. Thank you so much Anissa and again thanks to the San Francisco Public Library for their continuing support programs from the Before Columbus Foundation. It's a great pleasure and honor to welcome Professor Daphne Brooks of Yale University this evening. Daphne the author of liner notes for the revolution the intellectual life of black feminist sound. Daphne as a reader of your extraordinary work I came to it initially from a background not just of a literary scholar but primarily as a DJ spending many decades on the radio in San Francisco and Davis Oakland Berkeley Sacramento and reading the result of prodigious research and bringing with it such illuminating and abundant insight as you do. I must say it was like coming across an oasis in the midst of a desert and getting a long drink from the fountain of youth I'll tell you and part of the reason why it was such an enlivening and continues to be such an effervescent experience to share the work that you've brought our world is the fact that you excavate and revive and resuscitate so deeply within the tradition of the music and the culture that you describe that you direct our attention to and I I'll just say before opening up the conversation that I think most of us would acknowledge that no music has so thoroughly transformed the social political economic and spiritual spheres of our existence on planet earth as the great black music that we know today as blues and jazz and the many names of its children and its godchildren and so I want to begin our conversation by turning our attentions to that excavation which you have embarked on with so much as I said illumination, prodigious study but also tremendously charismatic and persuasive prose very elegant musical writing style and this excavation that I'm talking about brings us into the archive of memory and sound but when we talk about memory and sound and black music we're also talking about something that within the context of the united states of america and indeed the new world involves a bit of trepidation since so much of this memory has been deemed off limits not to be discussed not to be encroached on and this is particularly true when it comes to the lives of black women so welcoming Daphne Brooks this evening and beginning there Daphne could you share with us some of the challenges and difficulties in plumbing this archive and resuscitating these images which are so crucial to our inner and outer life well thank you first of all Justin I want to thank Anissa I want to thank the San Francisco public library for hosting this event for welcoming me for you know championing this book I would be remiss if I didn't point out the fact that this book is a love letter to the San Francisco Bay Area to the libraries that fed and nourished me to my late parents Nathaniel Hawthorne Brooks who left this earth 20 years ago this June 16th and Juanita Catherine Watson Brooks who left this earth this past February on the 18th of the month which is Tony Morrison's birthday it's a love letter to my older siblings who created a path of their own in the Bay Area my sister who is a beloved icon in Bay Area popular culture and media culture I say all of this to point out the fact that you know music is the social fabric of our lives as you've suggested here right and the social fabric of my life was an amalgamation of the music that was bequeathed to me in my family home and through the kind of journey that I took falling in love with books and music at the same time and so that that the richness of that world was something that buoyed me up and also served as the kind of historical memory that I couldn't always get in the classroom and I was I was quite lucky to have had great teachers starting in the San Francisco Bay Area Peninsula and Menlo Park, California, being a proud UC Berkeley alum the late great Barbara Christian the first black woman that would be tenured at UC Berkeley pioneered black feminist studies there were a lot of things in my world that allowed me to have access to the kind of the the historical prodigiousness of black life that I wasn't always getting from the institutions around me so I want to really emphasize that and say how grateful I am to all of that and I guess you know there were so many challenges in writing this book but I think the one that stays with me and that I like to talk to my students about at this point is the style of writing that I decided to pursue in this book and the importance of trying to get my arms around many different readers who I wanted to be in the room with it wasn't going to be an adequate endeavor if I was just writing an academic book for my colleagues at Yale at Berkeley etc etc and it wasn't going to be adequate if I was only writing to the the public-facing audiences that I engage with through a variety of different press outlets pitchfork the new york times etc etc I needed to be able to cultivate a kind of voice that could hold all of those audiences together and to be able to translate a multiplicity of ideas about black women's musical genius so that the rolling stone reader understand something about black feminism and my black feminist readers could understand something about rock and roll history and the importance of black women to rock and roll history so that was just a piece of it but that was a challenge for me and it was a challenge that I really embraced and relished the archival piece of what I went through with this book was a 12-year journey and you know I think we know enough now in scholarly studies my wonderful colleague at Columbia used to teach at UC Berkeley the great city of Hartman has shown us so much about what it means to to go into archives and to find all sorts of gaps and silences you know because we didn't get to build the libraries for ourselves you know we didn't we we were collecting especially someone like Zora Neil Hurston was collecting right but to be able to preserve you know our cultural forms our music our our our traditions of storytelling we had to do that through our vernacular practices and so when I was entering into archives to try to research more information about black women musicians in particular you know I was faced with having to think counter-intuitively often because you don't always get their voices right you get the voices of everyone who is handling them whether it's through the recording industry or especially through the music critics who had all sorts of ideas about black women musicians and who were more often than not obviously historically not black women themselves so trying to to piece together the authenticity and the truth of their experiences and the excellence and quality of their innovations was something that I wanted to think creatively about being able to bear witness to since their voices were sometimes not always but sometimes missing from the historical record what one of the great harvests that a reader finds with this book and I think it's conveyed by also the prose style which you mentioned a few moments ago which has a buoyancy and a swing if you like that lets us in on something that is so critically important to the larger project and we'll explore this idea further as we go along and it has to do with the the source of will and intention but commingled and interpolated with the imaginary to set a horizon on freedom that includes not just the sensuous experience of the singer or the songwriter or the composer but the entire world in which she is occupied and this has to do with again I'll get back to those points the intention and the will but as a kind of alchemic design with the imagination to set that horizon on freedom and move so much of this is about I think when we were talking just the other night if we were having this in person we would want to have a dance element that's a culmination of the whole thing yes so so I so I want to return to that about this alchemy of will intention and imagination the possibility of the practical form of freedom that's being expressed by the many women that you focus on and and the end the this oscillation between the inner and outer life where these artists not only see themselves as individuals but as a necessary and urgent part of a collective experience that they they designate and share in their artworks could you talk to us a little bit about that definitely oh sure yeah I mean I think I also so appreciate you know the observations that you're making here just and I want to hold on to this idea of you know how freedom manifests itself and in performance more broadly but especially in black radical tradition performance and that is always rooted in you know the the adventure of improvisation right the ways in which one is able to play through the changes and to navigate you know what is the unpredictability of life and that is you know the the black experience and to be able to to lean deeply into a kind of well of of invention that can transform you know and transfigure according to one's relationship with a broader community you know so the concept of the ensemble and jazz music culture and more broadly in black music culture I would argue in popular music culture is one in which you were always thinking of yourself as my friend Fred modan has put it as a soloist as opposed to a self right a soloist is is not is not a single self is what we always teach our students right if you're a soloist you are constituted by your relationship with the other players right in the ensemble and so to go to the the question that you were asking at the end there I mean this is this is the ways in which the musicians that I'm you know really embrace in this book the ways in which they were building repertoires that were rooted in relationships with other musicians was something that I really wanted to pay attention to and again to bear witness to and you know I had grown quite irritated with the ways in which popular music culture had and popular music criticism in particular had become invested in this idea of the exceptional and the singular right and we know there's all sorts of gendered and problematic ways that women especially and women of color performers have been talked about as divas and um the the kind of um perversion of that term um within the context of capitalist culture as being deeply individual and self-absorbed and narcissistic etc etc as opposed to the roots of the term as it relates to you know opera virtuoso right so that's a whole another conversation but I wanted to also to to be able to think of these musicians whether it's um Aretha or Beyonce or or Zora Neil Hurston or Mary the Williams or Abby Lincoln as being connected to a long history of listening to and being invested in a tradition of black women's musicality that they were carrying forward and bodying forth you know they're operating themselves as archives of historical memory I mean I've argued this many times now in my work that Beyonce is extraordinary for so many reasons um but one of the things that she's done because she had the privilege of being able to do it and I think she would be the first to say that is to operate as a kind of a conduit of historical memory for all of the black women performers who came before her there are many famous performances that she gave in which you know she called attention to that including moment of silence for Tina Turner her performance of the Grammys with Tina Turner which actually upset Aretha because she referred to Tina as Queen but that gets us into a conversation about divas again in more problematic ways but um you know I think she is such a powerful example of what the the 21st century um popular music industry with um you know all of its all of its problematic socioeconomic and um gendered and patriarchal dimensions it has still um created the conditions for someone like a Beyonce to be able to actually take hold of it and to manipulate it in a way that um you know history is so central to her repertoire and the history of black women's musicality is is something that she again bears witness to in her repertoire um so that's just one example of these connect the connective tissue that we can imagine these black women musicians as um holding onto and their relationship to other musicians and and this strategy of looking towards uh pre-columbian pre-european antiquity yes to the religious sources of inspiration and revival and resuscitation that have always characterized the great gift of black music in the new world and I and I would emphasize that that spirituality which is still so vibrant in the music today and has been for so long was never meant to survive in the first place I mean the the idea that african spirituality would be something of a deep wellspring and substance and imagination is a contradiction to the theological proposition of slavery in the first place and so when you delve into these areas which you you do so elegantly you help us to understand that and and one of the gifts of this book uh in in examining those details which I outlined all too briefly just now is that you you help the reader understand that there indeed is a difference between the recording which is in fact incidental to the ritual of the music itself that the music itself and its performance hey you know what this would be happening anyway we already do this we've been doing this for hundreds of years this this microphone and the wires that's okay but but but this is actually part of something else and you really help us understand that uh so vividly you know in in response to some of the economic and social violence of the music industry I would just remind you know casual listeners that those are awards for recordings recordings of music that actually deny uh as you help us understand more fully the deep wellspring of uh inspiration and spirituality that actually informs the many rituals which are unfolding in the the great uh black music could we pivot to that a bit I'd like to hear more of your your thoughts on that about the the critical difference between a recording as an archive and the actual music which is an expression of the culture from which it emanates and and how there's there's actually contradictions that deserve serious exploration there could you talk to us about that well I think that Zora's work as well first of all she was a polymath I mean people know her best as the author of one of the greatest novels of all time they're as watching god um but she was also a playwright and an anthropologist um she was a musician she was um um a multifaceted performer she was a diaspora historian she was sometimes we can think we're as a libertarian she was she was a contrarian she was she was a she was an outlaw um and I and I I love her pieces um but you know one chapter of the book is trying to really pay close attention to her fieldwork recordings that she made in the 1930s when she felt that it was very important to capture the sounds of um black sonic life in the south um in the early to mid 20th century um because she felt that you know um black vernacular practices um as a result of the great migration as a result of industrialization as a result of ongoing colonization um were were in a state of precarity um that they were fading away this was not an um an idea that was um zora's solely she had other harlan renaissance um brethren like gene tumor who wrote um in cane of the same kind of anxiety of um you know the the um the the the the quickly dissipating um forces of of black life cultural life um that were being affected um by so many other external pressures so the recordings were important um but she always made a point of arguing that they were not they they were they were in no way going to able to capture literally and figuratively um you know the fullness the complexity um the multifaceted components of black performative expression um what she did hope to do though was to um produce documents you know the kids would call it today receipts for her her northern colleagues at colombia and barnard her um alma mater that could really emphasize um that there was an entire lexicon of you know expression black cultural expression that was um deep and contradictory and um required great long lasting rigorous study and this was of course you know to intervene in um the the fetishization of of um black cultural life and black folk life in the 1920s and 30s you know resulting in you know um the rise of the primitivism movement and productions such as porgy and best which is i'm writing a book right now about porgy and best so then i will say i'll go on the record and saying that i believe that their eyes watching god was actually a a long-form rejoiner to porgy and best it was an interventionist rewrite of porgy and best but i i digress the point is that the recordings were important to her as um interventions in dominant intellectual culture but she she always emphasized that um black expressive life was fugitive that it could not be held and contained as you've suggested you know by any one tape recording um and that you know there were there are tracks you can listen to them if people want to go to the smithsonian website you can hear zora singing um you know making these recordings and there are songs that she was collecting in the field in which as she describes them on the recordings to her you know anthropological colleagues there this is a song that you know has 400 or more authors and it changes from town to town it changes from city to city so for her it was a matter of being able to contrast the recording with the scale and depth you know of black life that was that was kind of you know the eye the irony of what she was doing with her recordings was to call attention to everything that was not there i think what you're saying is of enormous monumental importance and it brings up many many different facets of of the book and some very long-standing arguments in the west anyway about aesthetics and their relationship to ethics beauty and their relationship to morality and very pointedly orality in its relationship to literacy literacy of course being something like a recording that is fixed when it's capable of pausing playing back turning up turning down whereas or orality and the methods of orality that are strategized and performed allow getting to the point that you were making about zora for a more supple and pliant interpretation of what is perhaps the same story of the same song perhaps ancient in its wisdom and characteristics but within the black american culture throughout the diaspora of the hemisphere can be used then as she shows us and as you have in this work to address the immediate circumstances the immediate material and spiritual circumstances of the singer the song and the environment that they're in i because it's not fixed because it because it is oral it has this capacity for illuminating the present moment in a way that a recording or a what's called the literate text could never actually do and this contrasts not just different ways of knowing and transmitting knowledge but more largely linear versus nonlinear organizations of time and space so could you talk to us a little bit about that now you've written a quite a bit about it in the book but i think this is an important point to amplify because you mentioned barbara christian and she addresses this as well about how because of this supple pliable buoyant welcoming nature of orality as a way of expressing knowledge in ways of knowing uh there's a a lot of barriers that are immediately broken down to inner histories and personal histories with black women that would otherwise be sequestered or suppressed so could you talk to us a little bit about that did you say a little bit more just in about what do you think about in the book i'm curious that that brings you to that oh okay well i can hear let me get to this particular quote from barbara christian uh-huh um our beloved barbara christian beloved from but now forgot um let's see here okay uh so i'll i'll read directly from your text here uh and this is uh in commentary about the great composer and pianist mary lou williams to call her a theorist then is to be reminded of barbara christian's revolutionary claim at the height of the 1980s academic canon wars that quote people of color have always theorized but informs quite different from the western form of abstract logic she continues and i'm inclined to say that our theorizing and i intentionally use the verb rather than the noun is often in narrative forms in the stories we create in riddles and proverbs in the play with language because dynamic rather than fixed ideas seemed more to our liking how else have we managed to survive with such spiritedness the assault on our bodies social institutions countries are very humanity yes so it seems to me uh you know again here you're helping our your reader understand how these modes of expression of in ways of knowledge that come through the culture and the music are unique to the form itself and otherwise wouldn't get through well that's barbara too yeah i mean that is that really is barbara yeah i mean i you know i i i found her her extremely famous essay that's the an excerpt from the race from theory for theory incredibly crucial to the claims that i wanted to make about these performers and in the case of mary lou williams an example of an artist who was producing theory about black life through her music and this is always the case this is this is an argument i think many of us who are black music critics would make is that you know the music supplies theories and philosophies about black life you know in the making and you know when it comes to mary lou williams with a song like nightlife which i write about in the book you know she's giving you an entire sermon on you know the meaning of time in in relation to you know black black sociality right um how to navigate time how to navigate an entire evening right this is an instrumentalist one of the the greatest composers and jazz pianist of all time if not the greatest right and um you know her her her compositions and her performances um offered us concepts and ideas and opinions about what it means when it meant to live a black life um in in the middle of the 20th century and she really stretched across you know all the major genres of jazz you know across the 20th century in her long career um but you know each of those performances one can extrapolate mary lou williams observations about you know a whole constellation of experiences in relation to african america right so i wanted to be able to to really to emphasize that and use her as an example of this thing that um you know that permeates the black music tradition across the board uh it's a it's a boldness and a rare courage and and tremendous tremendous authority of feeling throughout all of mary lou williams repertoire in her work and i i want to uh emphasize uh an underline the point uh that you're making to help those in the audience who may not quite be familiar with who mary lou williams is you're in for some big beautiful surprises when you find out uh but that is to say uh how uh radical and revolutionary was uh in its time for a woman to come forward and say hey you know what i'm going to play my music my compositions and my arrangements and i will be the leader i'm not i'm not going to necessarily adopt passively the repertoire of what is considered popular music i'll create my own yes and this uh uh again uh in its time and i think too many degrees still today was uh a decisively radical break yes in terms of the culture and and how music and cultural production was perceived mary lou williams really was kind of the exemplar in that regard which which led uh or opened uh towards uh other grand figures like abby lincoln mary lou williams also she mentored generations of jazz greats you know we all look to her you know there are some famous photographs of you know monk and jizzy gillespie and you know duke ellington all sitting around her right and and really you know again you know kind of absorbing the pedagogy you know of of her of her musical philosophies has manifested in her sounds and performances you know yeah that pedagogy and that again that critical listening the ability for musicians to build on the lessons of other musicians and the historical memory of other musicians and especially in the case of black women musicians the ways that they you know absorbed um the the models that were set for them you know and then pulled that tradition forward is something that i really wanted to to get down on the record um something that you know i think has been taken for granite in popular music history for a long time i think so i think so um earlier in the conversation you were just talking about uh the the role of of the soloist as being uh uh an expression not exactly um and and some of the more contemporary misuses of of uh the word diva and the designation of the individual who does it all on their own yeah and i'd like to hold some of our thoughts that we've brought about concerning mariela williams and and her uh radical turn and wave forward with what she helped to guide the music and other black women artists towards by uh thinking about abby lincoln and thinking about her in terms of someone who not only infused her own spiritual biography into her art and shared it with the world but also uh both in her music and visually kind of traced that entire arc of the individual so-called diva to a person who is deeply concerned with the collective and aligning their individual expression as as as part of that uh historical experience and i'll bring up a couple of images sort of as a chronology here that you're familiar with here's the famous cover of ebony magazine from 1957 wearing a very famous dress wearing mariela monroe's dress yeah which she performed in that dress in the the film with little richard the girl can't help it um very famous you know and the and really kind of marked abby lincoln early on in her career as being um you know a sex symbol in um in the in the genre of someone like dorthy dandridge and and this this is from let's see 1957 so so it's really uh actually just slightly before her career on records begins she'd already taken this yeah and she continues with that for a little while doesn't she here's the album affair a beautiful recording on on liberty she's continuing to explore and play with that image on her first album for riverside and then getting back to the point we start to see the turn which i think really begins with abby is blue where she very consciously adopts the themes of what is being faced in black life with enormous rigor and courage yeah including a work from langston hughes and that's right also from cry the beloved country yeah and beginning collaborations with oscar brown jr and then we see the abby that we start to know from straight ahead right ahead which has still got to be one of the most advanced aesthetically ethically morally yes and uh you've written about this in blue monk which i hope uh her and her lyrics will talk about a minute but very quickly here moving along we see now she is truly coming out i'm the mouth of moseca people and me mm-hmm and then lo and behold well yeah yeah there she is yeah and continuing with the strength of of the natural beauty of her woman yes abby lincoln is somebody that uh i think really amplifies so many of the salient points in your book uh could you share with us some of your thoughts as we look at these images and think about the connection with mary lou williams and that and that radical gesture that abby uh so valiantly brings to us in our moment today well i mean one thing to keep in mind about the connection between abby abby lincoln and mary lou williams and one sees this in their archives which you can find at the institute for jazz studies at wreckers university out here on the east coast in new jersey um their archives are incredibly rich and detailing the extent to which they really embraced the role of being cultural historians um rios for the the black community they really really you know um took extensive notes and in the case of mary lou williams and actually abby lincoln as well this isn't in the book where you can find this in the archives um you can find it mary lou williams um illustration in in the book and won't pull it out right now but they each you know mapped out these sort of visual ideas drawings and you know as well as poetry and um you know critical notes about black history that they wanted to be able to interpolate into their music um so they they took it really seriously the idea of you know being a black historian being an intellectual for the community and um melding that together with their innate sense of musicality and improvisatory experimentation so they were very similar in that way um and with abby lincoln she even went a step further mary lou williams did this in unpublished notes but abby lincoln was giving lectures at the new school and on on black feminisms and um she was writing articles that appeared in um in in jet and um she was writing letters to the editor to various jazz critics including nat hintoff and she got into dust-ups with you know irving gothman and others you know um so she really i i always like to believe that this was always the abby lincoln you know that was even in the red dress right it was just about being able to find um the platforms and the aesthetics and um a broad enough repertoire that could encompass all of that you know uh and and she was able to do that and of course her you know legendary partnership with um her husband for a significant stretch of time max roach was a powerful way in which she was able to kind of um take all of these passions about literature and history and art um and music and funnel them into a black freedom struggle um sounds so you know i mean i i will talk about Beyonce all night this is maybe something just and you didn't want to but i think she's Beyonce is an example of what abby lincoln was doing in the 60s because you know we could map if i had all her albums out we could map the evolution of Beyonce you know including the the pivot after the the harry bellafonte dust-up which i'm not going to suggest that he he was the reason for this but i think the timing was very interesting that his critique of the both of them of jay-z and Beyonce um you know came right before Beyonce delivered to us you know a series of just you know potent and unprecedented um you know sociopolitical activist statements about black feminism and and about black life and it started with black feminism so i think that's really important she comes out as a feminist and then embraces black lives matter so i just i think there's some very interesting resonances between abby lincoln and Beyonce just in case there there might be any young people who have to listen to this conversation um that's worth holding on to and and indeed um doing sort of a tiktok backwards we could find uh some of the origins with Mary Lou Williams and abby lincoln going back centuries even before musical recording with this very expansive presence that uh like Beyonce as you mentioned like abby lincoln and Mary Lou Williams where the woman artist has a social political economic and spiritual role both as a performer and musician but also as archivist as interpreter yep of the inner qualifications of the actual compositions themselves yeah changing over time this is something i think is really key and we haven't had a moment yet to uh drop in on it so maybe now is a good time it has to do with uh improvisation which we touched on a little bit and you mentioned uh uh poor game best i'm excited to see that work when it comes out yeah but uh where i'm going with that is the uh this tremendous uh body of song uh say from 1900 to 1950 we'll just call it an american popular song yeah which largely uh i believe it's fair to say survives because of its interpretation in jazz oh sure in other words were it not for it yeah okay so where i'm going with that is and how the soloist or the improviser uh from within the composition takes on an interpretive stance sure in which they reveal corners and details yeah magnify certain elements uh shadow others as a way of interpreting the work and bringing it into the present time it's one of the most miraculous and explosive aspects of of jazz from its origins right up into free jazz right up in yes and now could could you offer a little commentary on that because it's it's one of the features of the great black music that we see as a common thread that weaves together the entire vision yes no absolutely i mean i think you know one of the the gendered obstacles and being able to really um come to terms with the importance of improvisation as it relates to our great vocalists is that you know vocal performances um were um marginalized at the expense of a kind of um hierarchical investment in the instrumentalist as and the presumption that vocalists aren't instrumentalists as well so you know being able to understand um the ways that Ella Fitzgerald in interpreting the american songbook um is not only offering you know some of our most astonishing examples of the ways in which masterful improvisation works in popular music culture but she is giving us an example of what it means to to um to arrange in um in action and that's something that the French theorist Peter Zendia has written about and I admire his work a great deal he talks about arrangers as being listeners right and then an arrangement is a listening right and um to the extent that we can kind of understand vocalists who are you know improvising and um finding new and enlivening interpretive ways of handling um the object that is the song you know you are getting um a live form you know arrangement and rearrange arrangement and rearrangement of the of the material in question um and you know it's it's one of the things that in in feminist sound studies we've had to really you know fight to um to to put at the center of our studies is to take seriously you know what vocalists are doing somebody like Nancy Wilson who's a song stylist you know um that's it that's it um and enormously you know challenging and um invigorating and um sui generis and unique kind of role to play in the context of ensemble work um the the the Nancy Wilson of our generation to sale maclaurin salvant who i write about in the book um does unbelievable things like i had never seen before with um performing jelly roll mordens murder ballad which is you know a 40 minute song and what she's able to do um with that 40 minutes of folk material you know in jazz at Lincoln Center um i've i've never experienced anything like that before um that's that's radical arrangement in action and speaking about those uh radical arrangers who are also performers and interpreters archivists historians of their own i think of course of people like Betty Carter yes you know who's who's sense of uh drama in terms of theatrical proportion and timing is just astounding or you think of someone like Carmen McRae yes just as a stylist she's got a whole dramatically persona right all on our own yes yeah absolutely just like we're in the or in the popular context aretha patty labelle chakra absolutely yeah absolutely and and getting back to the point that i made you know earlier uh you know it it must be uh underlined i mean we're talking about a music that has affected in a positive way uh in a fertile fecund and welcoming way every corner of the planet there's nowhere on earth that hasn't been touched uh furtively and kindly and and warmly and welcomingly by the great black music and the women who created it you know so i now uh we're getting towards the top of the hour to have me and i want to thank you again for being really generous with us you know it's beautiful to have you here i know there's people who uh have have have questions for you so as uh in a moment i'll defer to anisa and we can start opening that up because i know there's folks that are excited that you're here but before we turn to the q and a i i just want to get a little more from you on the book and uh the magnificent uh rosetta records and rosetta writes right and uh came into my life as a teenager yes uh with this incredible collection of lil green and for folks who are familiar with uh rosetta records i have a few of them this is a feminist run executed educated and otherwise amplified label there's the great ethyl waters there here's here's some real business that you can bank on sorry but i can't take you women's railroad blues and to give you an idea of how thoughtful and valuable uh to the study of this music you'll see uh as as daphne teaches us in a book that rosetta writes offered um deep scholarship with with all her records these notes are an education in themselves and you devote uh some considerable space in line of notes for the revolution for rosetta records and rosetta reach could you share with us some of how that came to you and and why it was so important to include in your book well i really again i'm indebted to my mentors so hazel carby the great black feminist scholar at yale has told me about the rosetta records that she had purchased when she was teaching blues women's music courses at yale in the late 80s and early 90s and when i joined her as a colleague on the faculty at yale and started teaching black women in popular music culture there she said you know you should really take a look at these records and and that was really that was how it happened for me we're so lucky that professor carby had those albums the ones that you're holding up and there were um about a little more than three dozen that rosetta writes um put out on her own label um and professor carby was able to have yale purchased almost all of them for our collection so i've used them in the classroom but you know i became drawn to rosetta writes's story she actually passed away in fall of 2008 just as i was finishing teaching the class um and her story was really you know quite riveting and moving she was um uh jewish new yorker white jewish new yorker second wave feminist she was writing a book about menopause as she liked to always tell it in the late 70s and started listening to bessie smith and some of the other classic blues queens but then quickly discovered that most of their recordings were out of print and she took it upon herself with her divorce money to start her own independent record record label rosetta records she went beyond that though she wrote the liner notes so the the the essays the critical essays that accompany the recordings on the sleeves i.e. the the lining of the of the records the lps she wrote um essays that were really pointedly trying to recuperate the deep centrality of black women musicians as we've been discussing all night to to the foundations of not just american popular music culture but american culture in general so she was really pulling together feminist theory of the 1970s and 80s um with her politics and her musical sensibilities and writing these just you know really beautiful essays um essays that could go toe to toe with any of our you know greatest jazz music critics who you know often you know once again men um lennard feather um nat hentoff but also you know she's writing in one of the great rock music criticism of the 70s and 80s and i wanted to be able to to to bring her into the conversation of her understanding of what the intellectual history of black women's music is she went beyond the essays though she became a public historian she would mount these concerts in which she was able to gather together um some of the sisters who were still alive you know koko taylor um gosh sippy wallace you know they were they were you know coming into their deep into their golden years but she was able to bring them on to the stage um at symphony hall and other venues in new york city in the 1980s and um to bring that music to life and she's really for me just a superhero model of the kind of work that i do and um i wanted to make sure that we could think about the critics um who were looking after these musicians in my book as well as the musicians themselves um that's the broader history of black feminist sound um that i was trying um to present in a way that um you know could allow us to reevaluate how we think about popular music history altogether and and i think i speak for for many of us when i say we're deeply grateful to you for the extraordinary work that you've accomplished and brought our world um i do want to bring it back to anisa because i'm sure there's some questions out there anisa are you are you there in the i am here i am here um we have a question from annie uh she they say it's interesting about the archives and this was pretty in the start of your conversation do you see a change in how archives are handling black history and culture similar to the querying of the archive movement that's a great question thank you annie i think we are seeing um some changes and i think some of the things i'm excited about are the ways that archivists um are collaborating with academics and musicians in order to to think about how we can um you know manage the silences as we were talking about earlier um through creative means we're doing that yale i co-founded um a working group with my colleague brian kane also a cal alum um called black sound in the archive and that is a working group in which we we um conduct workshops in conjunction with our rare book and manuscript library and we're you know we look at we look at the song lyrics of langston hughes and um we we you know we look at the different um performances of summertime and we think about and try to piece together the ways in which those recordings and performances resonated in the time in which they emerged but also how we handle them in our present time so that's something we do with the students but we also bring musicians in we've had everybody from the aforementioned sissan mafor and salvant to reanna giddens early on i did a very large program with jack white um who's a very interesting blues archivist in addition to being this great you know rock and roll musician knows a lot about ethyl waters which would shock you he was actually one of the um his record label third man records helped to reissue the paramount records um entire catalogs which is one of the biggest and um largest race records um catalogs in american history um so we brought these folks in jason maran the jazz the great jazz pianist and we asked them to talk about how they handle our archives how they manage archives how they bring the archives back to life through their own musical rapporteurs and um you know it's my understanding both the talking with um librarians at the new york cup library where i'm in residence this year as well as my colleagues at yale and elsewhere that there really is a hope that we'll be able to do more of this kind of programming that brings the archives to to the public and that you know revivifies them through the ways in which musicians of today um manage them and care for them and look after them so thank you annie for that question thank you daphne i love it um there is also a question um thank you for the lecture looking forward to reading the book are there any black women in hip hop rap artists that you would consider as cultural historians oh oh that's such a great i have never got that question i've been on a book tour for a couple of years now oh man well i mean first first woman hip hop musician to be inducted into the rock ronald hall of fame although that's a shame but it's not that that she's being inducted but that she's the first missy elliot i think it's a great history she's also an afro futurist in many ways um and the ways that she has um you know used the archive you know used her kind of masterful um and really surprising and whimsical um you know excellence in sampling um to get us to kind of rethink hip hop history especially in those early missy missy elliot recordings absolutely amazing somebody like gene gray gray is someone you know working on a street level um um kind of engagement with um you know history of black urban life um absolutely extraordinary you know i think that there are inventive experimentalists somebody like azalea banks who i think has is is very polarizing figure has done some interesting things with um kind of taking fragments of popular music culture um and and um suturing them together in order to um create these kinds of fugitive um representations of blackness so you know one could also argue that you know all of our great hip hop artists are archivists and historians right because you're you're working with um all of these different postmodern fragments of sound and culture and piecing them in together into something new but that's really great i would i i definitely i think missy is the person the artist who who comes to mind as being you know the most electrifying still for me in many ways thank you i'm checking youtube right now the youtube viewer says they missed the liner notes very much yes thank you that i agree i'm right there with you um somebody who's who's still who's trying to bring the form back and i write about her in the book as janelle monne and her wonderland collective um um collaborators nate wonder and chuck lightning who you know fun fact went to more house and were black studies and philosophy majors they once came to my class at princeton where i used to teach before um yale and i said do you want to have a conversation like what justin and i are doing tonight and they said no thanks we're going to do a lecture we have a powerpoint we're going to start by talking about john pulsatra and move to web two points and that in a nutshell is how you get janelle monne in many ways but um um yes they they they've written um really just um exhilarating and surprising and um you know counterintuitive liner notes for her early recordings you know right through through her last recording i don't you know she's got a new album out coming out soon we'll see what she does um with this latest she is amazing she also has a book called out called the librarian i mean that's right she is just i am right by everything everything they do also yeah that's right gender fluid so um yeah i believe janelle monne will be uh someone that we will know quite in our future for a very long time um someone asked do you are you familiar with more mother and what do you think okay my god yes we tried to get her to come to an event that i organized last fall we did get the great diane reeves to come so that was great this was a um a conference in honor of another important extremely important black feminist scholar mentor to me farah jasmine griffin jazz studies great who teaches at columbia wrote one of the most important books about billy holiday and she's from philadelphia and so we had a session oh it takes you longer to explain this but the session is called critical karaoke it's something we've been doing for the past 20 years at the museum of popular music cultures annual music conference in seattle um and this this critical karaoke was um in honor of philadelphia and so we did ask more mother to come um she couldn't make it um now teaching at usc which is really exciting but to get to the heart of your question i think she's extraordinary i think i think her work um you know creates these overwhelming sonic palettes um that are you know world altering she does things with with sound um and with atmosphere um that are deeply sensorial and radically sensorial she's extraordinary so thank you for for bringing up more mother everyone should listen to more mother and last call for questions friends this is it youtube checking we're good i think we're good on questions i have one last question of course just enough i know i know um you know we were speaking uh moments ago about uh interpretive technique from within the song and many times uh artists some of whom you write about many times women in jazz interpret a song in a way that becomes the definitive version of this in sometimes a radical and unexpected ways i'm thinking now of Nina Simone's pirate jenny uh huh yes completely transforms uh baritone brecht and curt veils yeah it's an inspiration in her hands yeah can you can you definitely can you think of any other examples of specifically that where the radical interpretation by a black woman artist evolved to become the interpretation of the work which i think is fair to say about nina's live recording of pirate jenny i believe so are there any other examples of that that come to your mind i know that's that's kind of a big question to end on i mean i i yeah i couldn't i couldn't settle on one but i'm today i heard glad to sign the pips cover of yesterday and i wish it were the definitive version i'll say that it changes the entire tonal register of that song um it's incredible but i mean come on i mean eritha's you know otis said she took my song you know it's not my song anymore i ain't my song anymore respect you know i mean i think the the the really exciting thing is to be able to find these performances and recordings that um are doing this kind of work just day in and day out i mean nina did that all of the time you know just because it's on my mind right now but also because it's just extraordinary is nina's cover of summertime um from the hall performance she rewrites the opera you know she turns what is really you know a blackface blackface misogynist you know um folk erzatz anti-black you know folk caricature performance she turns it into um you know this cataclysmic kind of meditation on black intimacy you know between two characters who were you know constructed you know as a cartoonish imaginings of um you know white occupiers of black sound um she she goes to the heart of that material and turns it inside out so mm-hmm well i am uh this has really been a dream come true death yeah thank you for for making this happen and anisa again is always such a pleasure to work together uh with san francisco public library i will remind our audiences uh if you enjoyed this kind of programming i urge you to also support uh the before columbus foundation and our american book awards program you can find us online at before columbusfoundation.com where i encourage you to donate generously for more programming like this and of course the american book award program which honored uh professor brooks just last year for liner notes for the revolution the intellectual life of black feminist sound read the book and become that thing let it happen and next time we'll get a dance floor part of this here we go next time you're in the city we can like turn the whole atrium into the library uh into a dance floor we've done it before i'll be out there this summer so the records let's do it and um again yes this has been a i've been talking to justin about having you so i too am a big fan girl i appreciate you being here tonight and um library community i told you those resources would be flying with these two so here's the link for tonight's documents and also a big uh fan of your sister of course ronelle brooks yes ronelle in the morning when i moved to san francisco she had just joined k mel and i i just i can't even so amazing well i always i'm sorry to interrupt you but i say i've done you know maybe three dozen book events so for the past couple of years for this book and i've always told the story of how my you know my sister both you know created the conditions for me to fall in love with popular music culture but also being a proud alum of mills college you know she brought home all the black feminist literature that was unfolding in the revolution of the seventies and eighties to me and that combination is how i exist today so grateful to her thank you both and i mean it again email me when you come i will we will have a dance party it's on all right thank you everyone thank you library community thank you so much thank you daffney thank you thank you nita thank you nita just in