I use tags on this website to help folks navigate my creative output. There are two types of tags used here: genre & personnel. Personnel is self explanatory, but genre could use a little unpacking.

My practice is centered on emphasizing the intertwined nature of various music traditions. While genre can be helpful in in our communication, it can also reinforce a fragmented, alienated cultural world view. Genre classification can obscure important, but less easily observable cultural dynamics, reduce the complexity of history, and it can reinforce various reified notions of value—e.g., commodified value, nationalist value, etc.

I intentionally play with cultural symbols. Sometimes I blow them apart or ignore them, and other times I sit well within their boundaries. My study and practice spans a wide array of traditions, and certain parts of my output may lean more in one direction or another genre or tradition wise. I want to be explicit about this in my presentation to help folks navigate the documentation of my work present here. My use of genre in the tagging system that you see on this website should be understood in this light. To compensate for the downside of using genres, I often use two or three genre tags to help better communicate, as well as push back against any notion of these categories as isolated.

Here are some notes about specific genre tags that I use:

“New Music”: Anything that uses ideas that connect with the European avant-garde and/or was made in a context associated with “New Music.”

Composition: Setting aside debates on the difference between composition and improvisation, I use composition here only when there was explicit musical planning when there may not seem to have been any. Composition or planning of various sorts is of course embedded in other genre tags.

Electronics: Anything in which electronics of any kind play a central role in actively shaping sounds, beyond amplification or pre-dialed-in synthesized sounds.

Free Jazz: Anything in which open-ended improvisation is central. I’m using this instead of (and have decided not to supplement it with) “improvised music,” in order to honor the centrality of Black musicians in organizing and struggling to open up space for creative improvised music in this country and around the world. This is even though many of these folks do not like either the genres constituent terms: “free” / “jazz.” I also take issue with both terms, but I think this is best given our current historical moment. I’m using free jazz of the presence or absence of what might (stereotypically? reductionistically?) be considered “Black” musical elements. Like Miles, I’d really just prefer to just say “call it anything”... but, here we find ourselves.

Jazz: Anything that explicitly uses aesthetic musical or surface level relational elements consistent with those present in the jazz tradition—e.g., head / solo arrangements, “swing,” jazz harmony, etc.
Performance Art: Anything that heavily centers extra musical conceptual elements expressed performatively.