Julian Reid / How Black History Made Jazz: Suffering, Joy, and Longing for Our True Home

Jazz pianist Julian Reid on music, theology, and improvisation. The keys element of The JuJu Exchange uses the history of blues, gospel, and jazz to discuss how we communicate emotionally and spiritually through music, teaching an important lesson in how to live and long for home while we remain exiles. Features score from The JuJu Exchange's latest release, The Eternal Boombox. Interview by Ryan McAnnally-Linz and Evan Rosa.

Julian Reid is a Chicago-based jazz pianist and producer, writer, and performer (not to mention B.A. Yale University, and M.Div. Emory University). The JuJu Exchange is a musical partnership also featuring Nico Segal (trumpet, Chance the Rapper; The Social Experiment) and Everett Reid—exploring creativity, justice, and the human experience through their hip-hop infused jazz. Their new 5-song project is called The Eternal Boombox.

Show Notes

• Music is invisible and tactile
• Music as a matter of faith
• How do we decide what is music and what is just sound?
• Pain and hope in Blues music
• “The Blues emerged as a way to communicate within the black community the pain and frustration and disappointment of failed black life post emancipation.”
• How the Blues emerged as a way to talk about the sorrows of life.
• The beauty of the mundane
• The birth of Gospel Blues and Georgia Tom
• Gospel sings about God, but carries on the pain of the blues
• Jazz and the middle class
• Amiri Bakara, Blues People
• “Jazz was communicating freedom of expression of aspiration, of ambition, of joy, maybe even some frivolity in American life.”
• The music theory behind emotion
• The theological implications of Blues chord progressions
• Exilic chords: how Blues denies the ear the chord resolution it wants to hear
• “Frustrating the notion of going home”
• Music theory and the meaning of home in Christianity
• “Music is a means by which I can signal the dysfunction of society, the lack of home in society”
• Jacob Blake and frustrated chords
• Blues is the music that is ‘beautifying but not justifying,’ that ‘points forward to something that’s not yet’
• The chord progressions of European imperialism
• How American music and Christian music centers us back ‘home’ in the chords, “as opposed to contending with the fact that we are still pilgrims and in a foreign land"
• Sugary chords avoid "the reality of us being in some real deep trouble”
• Julian’s band The JuJu exchange, and their latest EP The Eternal Boombox
• His album is on the stages of grief involved in processing the Pandemic
  • The first stage: shock, “I can’t see my eyes”
  • The second stage: anger, “Avalanche”
  • The third stage: bargaining, “Eternal boombox”
  • The fourth stage: depression, “And so on”
  • The fifth stage, acceptance/hope, “Glimmer”
• Music, Alzheimers, and how distorting the melody conveys issues with memory
• Jazz and agency
• Improvised music and expression in the moment
• Tension and comfort in Jazz phrasing
• How God can meet us in the midst of space, how God can meet us in the midst of creating wordless music”
• Do we need to articulate who God is?
• Improvisation and humility
• “Does the music breed honest dialogue with the Creator?”
• How music plays with social boundaries
• “Musicians that are just out for themselves sound like it”

More from The JuJu Exchange: 

• Listen to The Eternal Boombox EP: https://ditto.fm/theeternalboombox
• If you like what you hear and want to further the exchange, join us over at Patreon. This subscription service helps The JuJu Exchange stay independent: patreon.com/thejujuexchange
• Learn more about The JuJu Exchange on their website: https://www.thejuju.life/ 

From the episode:

• Cornel West, from Race Matters: “To be a jazz freedom fighter is to attempt to galvanize and energize world-weary people into forms of organization with accountable leadership that promote critical exchange and broad reflection. The interplay of individuality and unity is not one of uniformity and unanimity imposed from above but rather of conflict among diverse groupings that reach a dynamic consensus subject to questioning and criticism. As with a soloist in a jazz quartet, quintet or band, individuality is promoted in order to sustain and increase the creative tension with the group--a tension that yields higher levels of performance to achieve the aim of the collective project. This kind of critical and democratic sensibility flies in the face of any policing of borders and boundaries of 'blackness', 'maleness', 'femaleness', or 'whiteness'.”