In Conversation: Tavarus Blackmon with Patti Kilroy

In Conversation: Conversation:

Tavarus Blackmon Patti Kilroy

Tavarus I’m here with Patty Kilroy: performer, musician extraordinaire, and a wonderful individual that I’ve had the opportunity to work with before.

First and foremost, how have you been holding up with performance space closures and art spaces shuttering? What has it been like as an artist, musician, performer during this time of COVID?

Patti I mean, it’s definitely been an adjustment. I was actually pretty new to the West Coast and Los Angeles when this all started. I had moved to the West Coast in 2019, so I was kind of building up. Most of my career up to that point had been in New York, and that’s where I had been based prior to that. But then when everything went remote, it was definitely hard to see recitals and performances getting canceled. It was definitely a bummer for me as an educator, because my students couldn’t gather and meet and rehearse and stuff. But I do feel pretty fortunate in that I am pretty comfortable already with using technology and finding solutions that way. So I’ve been having everybody record remotely, and I’ve been doing a lot of that work myself. So the transition over to that—to kind of just being stuck at home and finding ways to make music while at home—it hasn’t been too bad for me. I mean, don’t get me wrong, I really miss playing with other people in a room. I haven’t really done that since March, and I really look forward to when I’m able to do it again. But for me, I’ve actually been really forced to learn things that I’ve only casually dabbled in before—like I had never made performance videos seriously before.

Tavarus How has the last year affected your work as far as the difficult things we’ve experienced as a culture: like the death of George Floyd, and the activist marches that happened, and then to see how the Capital rioters were treated in comparison to let’s say, the Black Lives Matter protesters. Has this trickled into the studio at all? Is this influencing the way you’re thinking about your work in general?

Patti It’s interesting for me—or maybe interesting is the wrong word. I mean, I do think that the best thing that I can do as an artist, because I don’t feel like I can speak directly to the experience of all Black and Brown folks, so I don’t incorporate it directly in my art. But I do feel that I, as an artist, I can increase the representation of the works of Black and Brown composers. And in the repertoire I choose to play and the repertoire I choose to teach students, I often think very critically about where this repertoire is coming from. And what is its history? And how can I

accurately represent that in a way that we really think about it critically, without sugarcoating anything? In terms of how it factors directly into the work that I compose and stuff, it’s interesting. I don’t feel like the work that I’m making—like the compositions—necessarily speak directly to it. It’s definitely on my mind, and as an educator and as a performer of other works, I feel responsible to bring that repertoire into what I learn and share with people.

As an artist, you can always amplify the contributions of historically underrepresented composers and artists, and I don’t know personally if that’s where I feel the best use of the space that I take up. But yeah, it’s definitely on my mind, just how unfair—like the riots, the capital riot, I was so upset when I saw that. I prefer to kind of sit with the work of people that I feel are able to respond. I don’t want to make art about it though. It’s kind of where I’m at. I would rather amplify other people’s responses to it, rather than just make art myself and take up space. That’s how I feel.

Tavarus One of the things that I’ve begun to realize about my work is that it is basically about trauma and healing, and how I use difficult times as topics represented through gesture or stroke or color or mark to talk about ways to heal or to live with trauma. I’m curious how in your practice, how have you been initiating methods of healing in your work?

Patti I feel like for me, healing is about just re-educating people—misguided people—and making them aware of the inequities that exist and how history has been fucked up. And really, how there are so many people suffering to the benefit of a few folks, and how the resources of the world are so unevenly distributed. And working to make people aware of how those inequities exist in music—like what composers and what artists haven’t received adequate attention, and just pointing out those inequities. That really speaks more to my practices as an educator and a performer instead of as a composer. But I think about just pointing out those inequities. For example, in my practice videos right now, there are a bunch of jazz transcriptions. I’m just transcribing a little bit every day and working through solos. And I was working through violin solos, for example. There’s a lot of jazz violinists that were active in the early 20th century, mid 20th century. And you know, there’s a famous guy like Stephen Capelli. Then you look and there’s a whole book, 80 pages of solos by the guy. There are a couple solos by black violinists who are contemporary to him: Stuff Smith, Eddie South. This has been an opportunity for me to look at their lives and read about them as well as learn their playing styles. Then you look at how much more representation of Capelli’s work there is. How he lived longer, because his life was in many ways easier than that of Stuff Smith and Eddie South. He was able to leave more recordings that people then transcribed. The representation of Eddie South and Stuff Smith—there’s less and therefore they’re represented less. Why is that? Because they play amazingly, they’re amazing players. I think that they do really, really interesting stuff that’s different and just as great as Stephen Capelli. They’re represented so much less, so I think even just pointing that out is the sort of stuff I want to be doing. I listened to their stuff, and I really want to learn their stuff, way more than the 80 Capelli solos that are written down in this book.

So, I guess that’s how I’m thinking of healing very broadly in terms of raising awareness about underrepresentation in a way that I think is not right.

For me, I’m half Filipino and I think a lot about the political situation in the Philippines and the treatment of indigenous people in the Philippines. There’s a lot of indigenous tribes, particularly in the South, and the government is really just putting them in a position where they have to sell their land. They have a law in the Philippines called the Anti-Terror Law, which is interpreted very broadly and basically means that they can arrest you if they want to call you a terrorist, and a lot of activists are being red-tagged as terrorists right now. Personally, for me, reconciling this really complicated history of the Philippines and how the US was involved in bringing them to the situation that they’re at now, just by colonizing them for 50 years. I would say that is more directly healing for me and my mindset, but I also just think, as an educator, I’m thinking of healing more broadly—from an educator’s perspective.

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