Issue #5 - Cal-Act-Ivism

Cal-Act-Ivism

In each issue, The Pool shares stories of CalArtians who cherish their roles as what President Ravi S. Rajan calls Citizen Artists— alumnx who have found their own ways to, in Rajan’s words, “steer us toward a better future.”

This time around, we meet John Daversa (Music MFA 06)— trumpet virtuoso, arranger, and band leader extraordinaire. His new Grammy-winning album, American Dreamers: Voices of Hope, Music of Freedom, provided a platform to draw 53 »Dreamers« into recording studios for a powerful musical collaboration. Then, we drop in on the volunteer work that Nancy Barton (Art MFA 84, BFA 82; Art faculty 84–92) and Michael Cohen (Art BFA 92) are doing. In a remote mountaintop town in the Catskills, they bring the healing power of art—and a rare urban-rural experiment—to a community still recovering from a devastating flood.

John Daversa (right) with young musicians during recording session of American Dreamers.

JOHN DAVERSA

»Our project is all about coming together as Americans through music.« In the fall of 2017, when US Attorney General Jeff Sessions announced that the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) policy instituted by President Barack Obama in 2012 was being rescinded, the hopes and futures of an estimated 800,000 young people who were brought illegally to this country as children—a group known collectively as the Dreamers—were thrown back into doubt. And with that declaration, and the emotional and political turmoil following it, the theme and focus of the next album by jazz trumpeter and innovative big-band leader began to take shape. A year and a half later, at the 61st Grammy Awards held this past February in Los Angeles, 10 Dreamers who participated in the recording of that new album by the John Daversa Big Band—American Dreamers: Voice of Hope, Music of Freedom—stood alongside Daversa on the Staples Center stage as the album won its third Grammy of the evening, this time for Best Large Jazz Ensemble Album.

The album, which also won for Best Improvised Jazz Solo (on “Don’t Fence Me In”) and Best Arrangement, Instrumental or A Cappella (on “Stars and Stripes Forever”), features a spirited and soulful collaboration between Daversa’s big band and 53 DACA recipients, who play and sing on 9 different tracks. This special music spans a range from a reworked version of Led Zeppelin’s “Immigrant Song,” featuring new rap lyrics by a young man named Caliph (who came here at the age of 7 from Senegal), to “Deportee (Plane Wreck at Los Gatos),” anchored by the emotional singing of a young woman named Daisy (who came to the US from Venezuela with her family when she was 9, so that her sister could receive cancer treatment).

A VERY PERSONAL PROJECT

Daversa and the producers recorded an interview with each Dreamer, and the voice of a different young person introduces each track; they tell listeners a bit about how they came to this country, what their lives are like now, and what their dreams are for the future. The effect is powerful and moving. As critic Jim Hynes wrote in Glide: “Jazz has long been music of protest and freedom of expression. The dichotomy of the touching stories and the enthusiastic musical pieces is startling, and in its own way invigorating. This is one of, if not the most, important musical statements across several genres this year aimed at bringing unity and healing divisiveness.” “I’m a great-grandson of Italian immigrants, so this project was very personal to me,” a beaming Daversa told the Grammy audience upon accepting the album’s first award. He then gave a shout-out to Denzel, a young Dreamer and trombonist in the audience, who wanted to join the military but was denied because of his immigration status. Daversa concluded: “Our project is all about sharing stories like these and coming together as Americans through music.” American Dreamers has garnered rave reviews from jazz critics, and testimonials from political figures such as Senators Kamala Harris and Lindsay Graham. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi enthused, “May the soaring melodies and harmonies of these courageous Dreamers remind everyone who hears them of the beauty and resiliency of the human spirit, and of our responsibility to honor our heritage as a nation of immigrants.” DACA allowed children brought to the US under the age of 16 to be free from the fear of deportation and to obtain 2-year work permits, renewable upon meeting certain conditions. The term “Dreamers” originated during an earlier legislative effort to provide a path to citizenship for those who came here as undocumented children. The DREAM Act was a bipartisan proposal that would have offered protections similar to DACA, but was repeatedly voted down by the US Senate between 2001 and 2011. A successful touring artist, composer, producer, arranger, and band leader, Daversa also teaches and holds the position of chair of Studio Music and Jazz at The Frost

School of Music at the University of Miami. This talented musician says the idea for the album came out of a teleconference brainstorming session with producers Kabir Sehgal and Doug Davis in the months after the Trump administration rescinded DACA and then dangled protection for the Dreamers as a potential swap for Democratic approval of President Trump’s desired $5 billion border wall. “We thought maybe we could do something that would create a poetic, artful statement of awareness,” Daversa says, “so people can see what’s going on—we’d humanize what was being seen just in black and white, tell the stories of these fellow human beings and what they’re going through on a daily basis. Then we wondered, ‘What if we got some of them to participate on the album? And what if we reimagined songs of America, of what it means to be American?’ We all had goosebumps together through that conversation.” Almost immediately, Daversa worked up a list of songs and quickly began writing the arrangements, leaving a variety of openings and solo spaces so that as he and the producers reached out to the Dreamer community and found young musicians to participate, their playing would be woven into the music.

RECORDED ALL AROUND THE COUNTRY

The first recording session was in March of 2018 at the Frost School. By then, the team had connected with 14 different Dreamers who played violin, flute, piano, percussion, and other instruments. In the studio, they joined forces with a team of professional musicians and to lay down the core tracks. Then contributions of the other Dreamers were recorded individually, often in studios around the country, as Daversa continued searching for interested DACA recipients while keeping his regular tour schedule. “In Miami, one of the people who works in the office asked me what we were doing, and I told her,” Daversa recalls, “and she said, ‘A really good friend of mine in Houston is a singer’”—which is how Daisy came onboard to sing an emotionally wrenching rendition of “Deportee,” originally written as a poem by Woody Guthrie and later set to music. “It’s a little folk song that I completely tweaked around,” Daversa says. “The lyrics are pretty deep and sad, and we had to stop a number of times in the recording session because it just got so emotional. And to get Daisy through that, and for her to still paint the sound with the emotion she had … it was just so poignant, and so real.” Daversa is already at work on his next album, and though the theme is still under wraps, he says it will also deal with social issues. “I’ve really been turning towards an intention to write music that has purpose and meaning behind it,” he affirms. “Music is such a potent vehicle.”

MICHAEL COHEN

Walk into the brightly painted Prattsville Art Center on a typical spring Saturday in Prattsville, New York, and you enter a space unlike any other in these mountains, or in the big city three hours to the south, for that matter. Local teen Chris Martin skateboarded over to the restored 1840s building on Main Street first thing this morning and is hanging out with other kids in the little plywood-floored computer lab, as he often does on weekends. Martin likes making art now. In a video on the center’s website he says, “The art center has changed my life. … They have some interesting people here, they make all these events happen. …” Neighbors from down the road who dropped by to say hello are chatting with several artists in residence from New York City. An architect is conferring with center cofounder about design plans for the flood-damaged building’s dirt-floored back wing, which will soon be renovated into a performance space. They also discuss the upcoming residency of New Orleans Airlift, an arts organization formed in the wake of Hurricane Katrina that will—thanks to an NEA “Our Town” grant—create one of its famous “musical architecture” installations at the center.

NANCY BARTON. The Center has a cheerful, slightly anarchic spirit, and the couple credits their formative years at CalArts.

In another room, representatives from mountaintop social service agencies are on hand, ready to help area residents with everything from tax preparation to HIV testing. Local artist Edna Arloween is also here, sketching a portrait of the center’s director, who can’t stop smiling, her eyes twinkling behind her large sequined cat’s eye glasses. Arloween began painting at the center a few years ago, and her portraits of the Statue of Liberty were recently shown at a gallery in Hudson—her first show ever. “She was trying to decide how to pose the Statue of Liberty,” Barton recalls, “and she had some choices to make. I said, ‘You don’t have to do just one. Let’s look at a series, look at Andy Warhol. Let’s look at different ways to present the same thing.’ So she went on to make a series of paintings of the Statue of Liberty in different ethnicities, including one that is a Martian.”

The Prattsville Art Center is an ongoing experiment in bringing together all sorts of people to build community through art.

The range of Art Center activities includes visual art, music, and a variety of social events that promote community across generations.

Meanwhile, out back, kids are running around inside the Prankster People’s Museum, a playscape in the shape of a coyote head. Founded seven years ago by Nancy Barton and Michael Cohen in the wake of devastating flooding from Hurricane Irene, the Prattsville Art Center is an ongoing experiment in bringing together all sorts of people to build community— and help heal a nearly destroyed town—through art. Here, rural mixes it up with urban, small-town gathers around a wood stove with bright-lights-big-city, blue sometimes dances alongside red at an experimental jazz performance, and preconceptions are challenged daily. “It’s an attempt to bring together different sides of America,” Barton says, “which has become increasingly important in the intervening years since we started the art center.” Cohen agrees: “The dialogue happening here is something that I feel is really important in lowering the blood pressure of the country.”

"THE TOWN IS DESTROYED" Seven and a half years ago, the building that houses the art center (which was once a hardware store, then an antiques shop, and has always had residential space on the second floor) was battered and filled with 8 feet of mud. On the morning of August 28, 2011, Hurricane Irene, then a massive tropical storm, dumped 14 inches of rain over the Catskills, sending a wall of brown water surging into this remote working-class community with the force of Niagara Falls. No lives were lost, but the town was devastated; almost half its buildings—many of them lovingly restored Victorian homes—were swept away or destroyed. A 156-yearold covered bridge that had weathered countless storms vanished. New York Governor Andrew Cuomo helicoptered in a few days later and declared Prattsville the hardest hit area in the state. Barton and Cohen had discovered this remote mountaintop area 17 years previously while lost on their way to a hike on the northern edge of the Catskills. The couple had moved east from LA 5 years earlier when Barton was hired as undergraduate director at the Department of Art and Art Education at NYU Steinhardt. They loved New York City and had busy working lives there; but missing their restorative hiking jaunts in the San Gabriel Mountains, they began looking for new places to escape into nature. Soon they found the Catskills (Rip Van Winkle country), where there was still land that two artist-teachers could afford to buy. “We would come up and just collapse,” Barton recalls. Cohen concurs, “We could breathe again when we came up here.” They would drop in on the local grocery store or café, but their place was across the creek from Main Street and up a hill on 120 acres, so they didn’t spend a lot of time in town. Then came Irene. The couple’s house was on ground high enough to miss the flooding, but the terrified animals they saw scrambling outside during the torrential rains made it clear that something terrible was happening to

Schoharie Creek. A neighbor came by the next morning and said, “You know, the town is destroyed.” “It was very moving to see a place that had been a major part of our lives turn into something out of a science-fiction apocalypse scene,” Cohen recalls. Barton adds, “It was a very chaotic time. There was a very strong feeling that everyone wanted to pull together. … Everybody was wearing mud boots and carrying shovels. We had helicopters landing every day delivering food. The town was really cut off from the outside world for a month because all the roads were destroyed. People were just trying to figure out how to go forward.”

A SENSE OF PURPOSE AND JOY One day many months later, as the town grappled with how to rebuild, Barton was serving as a volunteer on a FEMA community revitalization committee. “A woman kept saying, ‘There's nothing for the young people to do here,’” she remembers. “And I thought, ‘Well, you know … I do a lot of work with young people. …’” “It happened organically,” Cohen recalls. “‘How can we help?’ Well, we know about art. …” So, with a few classes for local kids in the shell of that historic building on Main Street (which was originally slated by its owner for demolition) Prattsville’s first art center was born. A $200,000 Art Place America grant helped with the first round of restoration to the building. Since then, Barton and Cohen have logged countless volunteer hours of grant-writing, network-building, Facebook-posting, and doing everything else it takes to make a nonprofit stay afloat and grow, while somehow maintaining their careers (Cohen also works at NYU Steinhardt as an adjunct professor). Barton spends more time hunched over a computer pursuing funding than she’d like; she recently secured another NEA grant for a fourth annual summer music festival, with the theme of “Diversity on Main Street.” And between mentoring local youth and cooking dinners for the artists in residence, she presides over the whirl of activity with a sense of purpose and joy. “I think of it as an extension of my teaching career,” she says. “At the moment, this is my primary artistic practice.… This kind of creative place-making project is something that is closely related to my art, which was photography in collaboration with people sharing dreams and hopes unrealized in the rest of their lives.” The Center has a cheerful, slightly anarchic spirit, and the couple credits their formative years at CalArts as providing a blueprint of sorts for creating a community from the ground up. In fact, many fellow CalArtians have been involved as visiting artists, and alumnus Lyle Ashton Harris sits on the Center’s board. “I think of CalArts as a laboratory environment that’s not too overwhelmed with what’s commercial at the moment,” Cohen says, “and it has multidisciplinary arts going on all the time that people engage in as their creativity guides them. The Art Center plays that role too.”