Tamar-kali’s Songs of Liberty
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“Americans tend to get swept up in symbolism,” Tamar-kali tells me, “not solutions.” We’re speaking a few weeks before the staging of her multi-genre performance piece Freedom Is a Constant Struggle, put on at New York City’s Lincoln Center on July 5, traditionally the day when Black Americans in the North celebrated independence and emancipation before the Civil War. Tamar-kali is the kind of artist who thinks deeply about meaning and history. Her career has mirrored the sweep of African-American intellectual life and alternative music since its inception, when she made a name for herself in the ’90s, in a burgeoning NYC music scene that would become known as Afro-punk. Later, she would turn her talents to orchestral music and begin a long, close collaborative relationship with filmmaker Dee Rees; the first feature film she scored was Rees’s Oscar-nominated 2017 historical drama Mudbound. For Freedom Is a Constant Struggle, Tamar-kali brought together her work with orchestral music and group vocal singing alongside excerpts of texts by Black writers and thinkers like Fredrick Douglass, Ida B. Wells and Fannie Lou Hamer. The piece is a multifaceted exploration of what freedom and Blackness mean in America. Below, Tamar-kali speaks with Harper’s Bazaar about her work.
HBZ: What’s your connection to the Georgia Sea Islands?
Tamar-kali: I am a Gullah Geechee woman. My mother was born on St. Helena Island in South Carolina in 1935. She came up to New York at the end of the great migration as a young woman. She came north for work, like a lot of folks from the South did at that time. The difference with our family is that the legacy of land was important. So the goal was to come north to be able to work long enough to retire and move home comfortably. Not to stay. Now why would you want to come up here and die in the concrete jungle when you have land? In one of the most beautiful areas in America? As a kid, that’s where I spent my summers up until puberty. I was always raised with a deep respect and love for home.
What connections do you see between Black musical forms and American orchestral music?
The connection of Black music to American orchestral music is pretty monumental and obvious to me, though I’m noticing people aren’t thinking of Black folks in that context. But the American orchestral palette is exactly the same palette used to create jazz. You have a community of people who’ve lived on this landmass and been a part of this experiment before it was even a country. So obviously we have contributions.
How did you begin composing orchestral music?
I grew up Catholic. My first formal experience with music is being a choral classical singer. Basically, I’m one of the kids that classical music lost. There was definitely a very paternalistic missionary mindset that I experienced around classical music. Just being in spaces where having any type of agency as a Black child, there was pushback. I wasn’t able to articulate it, necessarily, but I knew that formal training meant more of that. I had to understand that what I was rejecting was a very European-dominant—not Black-affirming nor anyone else other than classical European culture as the litmus test for excellence in humanity. That’s what I was reacting to, and that’s what I was rejecting. The music doesn’t hurt anybody. The music has always been a balm to me. A place of safety and shelter. It’s the shortcoming of human beings that have created unsafe spaces for folks.
In 1998, I found myself putting a chamber ensemble together called Psychochamber Ensemble. I realized much later on that that was me trying to re-create the sense of fellowship that I felt as a girl in Catholic school, doing liturgical classical music. I missed that fellowship, that space of the sound. But now I could just do it without Sister Mary Immaculate and feel safe.
How is composing orchestral music different from creating rock music?
I’ve been a scrapper my entire life, and my practice is still very much informed by the space in which I found my voice as an artist, which is punk rock and hardcore. Everything that I know around leadership, gatherings, colleagues—it all traces back to DIY ethos: making your flyers, finding simpatico compadres that you can book a show with, all the basics. It’s still the same skeleton, it’s just a different body. Like it fleshes out differently now. Doing something this scale is certainly intimidating and stress-inducing, but in a good way. It’s stretching me.
What I do is, I look to see who the best collaborators are gonna be. [Freedom panelists Melissa Cooper and Jon-Sesrie Goff] have been referred to me a few times by people I respect. If someone can match your energy, the spirit of rolling up your sleeves and getting it done, then that’s the partner you want.
What inspired the creation of Freedom Is a Constant Struggle?
It’s been about four years that I had been working on this. I had been doing a lot of thinking and being inspired by the stories of my ancestors specifically. There’s so much that Gullah Geechee folks have given to African-American culture, and people are none the wiser. I was thinking about all these amazing historical events—the fact that in the Port Royal Sound area, where my family is from, we’ve been liberated since 1861. It was something called the Port Royal Experiment, where we had Quakers, Unitarians from the Philadelphia area come down to prepare folks for freedom. There was a humanitarian aspect to what they were doing, but if you research the Port Royal Experiment, the main reason it was done was to see if the Negro would work without coercion. So that area has always been a part of the complicated legacy of the abolition movement. Freedom Is a Constant Struggle is an extension of that—giving some context for the civil rights movement. Usually when you say civil rights movement, people think 1960s. But really it starts with abolition. These conversations—about freedom and Blackness and America—are so old. People think we are moving too fast; we’re in this moment where people are pushing against progress, and they feel like it’s coming too rapidly. But it’s so interesting how many people are just unfamiliar with so many of the topics, conversations we’re having.
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