The Wexner Center for the Arts, in the first of a series of collaborations with CAPA, kicks off the Fall 2022 performing arts season at Columbus’s historic Lincoln Theatre with Damon Locks’s Black Monument Ensemble on September 09, 2022, at 8:00 pm (tickets here).
Damon Locks has exemplified the sense of collaboration and adventure at the intersection of various Chicago scenes for over 30 years – in post-punk bands Trenchmouth (with Fred Armisen) and the Eternals; on various projects with pillars of the Chicago jazz scene like Rob Mazurek’s Exploding Star Orchestra, Ken Vandermark, and Jeff Parker; with his visual art (represented by the Goldfinch Gallery); and through his community engagement, including teaching at the Prisons and Neighborhood Arts Project at Stateville Correctional Center and the Sarah E. Goode STEM Academy.
The group he’s bringing to the Lincoln - Black Monument Ensemble - brings together some of the brightest lights on the current Chicago scene; Angel Bat Dawid, Ben Lamar Gay, Dana Hall, Arif Smith, and singers Phillip Armstrong, Monique Golding, Tramaine Parker, and Erica Rene (ed. note, Richie Parks and Eric Tre’von from the records will not be joining for the Columbus date). The group racked up deserved accolades over their two albums, 2019’s Where Future Unfolds and last year’s NOW. The latter landed on Bandcamp’s Best Punk and Best Jazz lists the month it came out and on a personal note, is one of the records I keep coming back to, I’m still unpacking. It fuses gospel vocal writing, powerful improvisation, and deep, hard grooves into a mix that recalls the best socially conscious party music of the last thirty years but is always focused on the world as it is and maybe what it could be.
I was lucky to talk to Locks over Zoom in advance of the show.
Black Monument Ensemble, photo by Eli Johnson
Richard Sanford: I don't want to use the word super-group. You kind of captured a lot of other artists who are having sort of a moment right now. Was that intentional? How did [the group] come to be?
Damon Locks: Well, I wish I could say I could predict who was going to have a moment, but no, I went on instinct. Originally, it was a solo project [called Sounds Like Now where] I was just really trying to process the world and its changing nature around race and culture and people's rights. I started doing sound pieces and I invited a percussionist, Damien Thompson, who I was friends with, to participate on one song at the time. Every time I performed it, people would respond really well, and they'd have conversations about what they heard. And as a musician that's been playing since I was a teenager, that normally doesn't happen. After the show, people just talk about whatever's on TV.
I kept building on that, and I kept it in my back pocket. And as I was buying and listening to more civil rights era material, it became super obvious. I mean, it was always obvious that gospel music was the voice or the soundtrack of the civil rights movement. And I started to think about the idea of putting a small choir or group of people together to sing. And as I felt like this had the appearance of a lot of elements from the '60s, I thought, well, maybe it's not simply gospel music, but it was literally Black voices that need to be heard.
I put the group together with Damien again, and the original five members of Black Monument, two of which, Phillip and Tramaine, are still singing with us. And we performed at my studio, my art studio; I opened the doors and put some chairs out, we just performed, and it clicked. And I just felt really fulfilled by it. Over time, I had this idea that I would build it, bring in a couple more musicians. And originally Tomeka Reid and Nicole Mitchell were going to join the group. And they were down to do it.
I was working on this performance and the dates changed [so] they couldn't do it. And I had gotten Dana Hall and Arif Smith on board, because Damien got a job in a different state and had to leave. We did this in-progress performance at the Museum of Contemporary Arts about, maybe, two or three months before the Garfield Park Conservatory performance [captured on Where Future Unfolds]. I got Ben LaMar Gay to perform with us. And everyone was like, "This is great. This is perfect." And then when we were working on that Garfield Park Conservatory [show], Ben's like, "I can't do it."
My studio was in Hyde Park, The Hyde Park Art Center. And I saw Angel perform at this event and thought maybe Angel will be the right person for this. I walked right down the street to Hyde Park Records where Angel [Bat Dawid] worked to ask if she'd be interested. She was on the phone when I walked in. I didn't really know her; we just knew each other through seeing each other. She said, "Oh, I'm talking to someone who just saw your MCA performance and they say it was fantastic." I was like, "Great." So, I pretended to look at records for a long time until she gets off the phone.
I said, "Angel, would you be interested in possibly playing with my ensemble?" And she was like, "Yes, yes. I can meet you anywhere. I can perform whatever rehearsal, blah, blah, blah." She was in, and it just clicked. And she hadn't released anything at the time. She hadn't quit Hyde Park Records yet. And right after we played, she quit her job and, boom, became the Angel that we know today.
RS: That's amazing.
DL: So, all of these things got in my way to steer me around because Tomeka and Nicole were my original members. There was a moment where it looked like when everyone was falling out, I knew that Jeff Parker [Tortoise, New Breed] was going to be in town for the time period of the performance. So, I was like, "Hey Jeff, do you want to play?" And Jeff's like, "Man, I would, but I'm going to be leaving right before." Tere are live other versions of this group in the multiverse that would've gone a different way, but the way that it went, I'm super happy with.
RS: They’re two beautiful records, but that's really interesting that when Tomeka Reid couldn't do it, you didn't find another cello player. When Nicole Mitchell didn't do it, you found another reed player, but someone who focuses mostly on clarinet [rather] than flute and sax. That's interesting to me. Did personalities matter more than the tonal quality of instruments?
DL: It was the vibe of the musician. That's what I was most interested in. I knew I wanted drums and percussion and mostly I think that guitar wouldn't have been the right choice, but I mean, Jeff can do anything. But I was more interested in voices. I wanted rhythm and voices. And to me, flute and clarinet are just more voices, more singing to me. You know? And I thought originally with Tomeka, I wanted that bottom end that was also super melodic. And when she couldn't make it, I didn't really replace that.
RS: Talk to me a little bit about how you chose the singers. My first exposure to you, I think, was that Exploding Star Orchestra record with Rob Mazurek you did vocals on. And I was surprised not to hear as much of your vocals on this.
DL: I never knew that this project was going to continue. I just knew I needed to get this out of my system. Originally, I thought maybe it would be young people in their teens because... I don't know. It just seemed that those were the voices I heard originally. I had seen a performance where there was a big choir of young people and they had pulled out about eight of them in this performance. And I was like, "Oh, this looks interesting. This is an interesting idea." I had the temerity to reach out to the executive director of the Chicago Children's Choir. And little did I know the Chicago Children's Choir is the biggest thing on the planet. If Kanye West or Chance needs a children's choir, that's who they go to. They travel across the world to do performances. And someone I knew was in contact with the executive director.
[With my residency at Hyde Park Arts Center] I was just like, "At least there's some platform." [The director] got back to me, but she was a busy person, so it kept falling through. And she said, "We can make this happen and it can be a collaboration and you wouldn't have to pay for anything at this." I set a date for it, and it was hard to get back because she's busy. And then eventually I was like, "Hey, this is coming quick." She said, "You might want to use adults because then you don't have to have parents involved in rehearsals. They can come to your rehearsal space and stuff."
I ended up paying out of pocket for the project, but she gave me five singers that were all familiar with each other; post-Chicago Children's Choir people. One of those folks was named Phillip Armstrong, who still plays with us now. I think they really thought I was a crazy person at first because they were like, "These are weird songs." But after we did it, they got it. And Phillip said, "I love this. I want to continue this." And when changes in the lineup happened, he was able to be like, "If so and so can't make it, I have someone for you." Now we have a fairly stable group of people that are singers, and they know the language.
I've always written the main vocal line and then I'll say things like, "I think this should be unison, but this part shouldn't be unison. Let me hear what you guys are thinking with this." They'll work something out. Or I write something for the freedom of them working it out. I'll be like... “I have a part that just goes (singing).” That's my original thing. And then I go, "Go crazy with it." All of a sudden, they're like... They're hitting these notes [I hadn’t thought of]. Because I've gotten to know how they work, it's the same exact thing I do with Dana and Arif, where I might have a drum sample and I'm like, "This leaves enough space for them to do whatever they want to do." And they inevitably come up with something that's like, "This is perfect. You have embellished on this rhythm in a way that makes it super interesting."
RS: That leads into a question I had about the samples. Do you usually start with a sample? Do you have a concept and you start working on a melody and then you try to fit samples into it later? Does it switch from song to song?
DL: It’s back and forth. Sometimes something like “Solar Power,” that was all melody. Wrote the whole thing top to bottom in that way. And then said, "Here's the song. Play along with it." A bunch of songs like “Maybe Now,” “Forever,” and “Momentary Space,” off the new record, those songs were written in quarantine. I mostly demoed all of those at my house and sang the main lines along with the samples and drum machines. And as you may have read when we recorded it, that was mostly everyone's first, second, or third take of trying the song in real life.
When we have time, like the new songs that we're developing now, I can start really skeletal, or I can start with samples and vocals and then build on it. And as we play it, things go and we're like, "This is good. Let's change that." Or, "Let's do that." I let it grow organically when we have time, but we didn't have time for two years. We couldn't be around each other.
RS: “Now (Forever Momentary Space)”, that first track on the new record,..that line, "Forever momentary space," felt to me almost like a koan. It almost felt like I want to unpack what those three words mean together, but I don't think I'll ever quite get there, which I found really appealing. Maybe I put too much weight on this because it's a lead off track. But to me it almost felt like a benediction. It almost felt like a prayer to start something off.
DL: Yeah. I think that “Now (Forever Momentary Space)” is the theme of the record. That's what the record is asking or saying. While writing the songs and as we developed, I didn't have a title for the album. But after we recorded everything, [the word] “now” kept popping up over and over and over again. And then it just became so obvious that the album needed to be called Now.
And “Forever Momentary Space,” I will do you the favor of not explaining what that means, unless you really want to. I can tell you what I think it means. But I do like to share that there's a short story, called "Jump” [published in Lightspeed Magazine] by a guy named Cadwell Turnbull. A beautiful, beautiful science fiction short story that inspired me over the pandemic.
RS: That's beautiful. The recording, at least some of it, I think, was outside. I think I both read that and there's a comment... I think it's in that song, I'm pretty sure it's Angel saying, "Make sure you don't cut those cicadas out. They sounded good."
DL: Yes. Yes, yes.
RS: There are a couple of moments of chatter that sound really moving throughout the record. But that one in particular about the cicadas being in tune...
DL: Yes. Yes. It was really, it was wild because the whole session with Angel and the vocalists, [they] were all outside. A month later, we came into a session with cornet, percussion, and drums, which was backwards. Normally, you don't record the drums after, but Arif and Dana are so good that I knew that they could play along with my samples and make it sound like they were playing [together]. And it does, to me. When I listen to “The Body is Electric”, it sounds like a party to me.
But when we were outside, we did it in the heat of August. I think one day was 89 degrees and the next day was 93 degrees with barely any shade. There was one tree for shade. I knew that the cicadas were going to be in every single mic. We weren't going to be able to get rid of them. And so, I was like, either this is going to work and be what it is or it's going to be completely unusable. And when we listened back, the cicadas crescendo'd and decrescendo'd so well with the music that it seems unbelievable. But when we listened back, we were like, "It's the most natural thing." And it caused me to question. I'm like, "Are they listening to the vibrations of the music and responding?" I don't know. But there were these beautiful decrescendos that would just happen. At the end of the song, you just hear the soft [sings].
And then Angel says, "That was a momentary space. That was a momentary space. Oh, they sound so good. How did that sound, Alex [Inglizian, the engineer]?" And another thing: energetically with COVID the whole recording situation was completely different. Normally, you would do some takes, everyone would walk into the control room, listen to the takes, decide if you needed to do another one. Right? We didn't know what was happening with COVID. Our engineer, his wife, was just about to have a baby. I used my own headphones when I wanted to check the digital A track because I didn't want him to get sick at all. So how we finished the take is I'd say, "How'd everyone feel?" And they said, "That felt good. Let's move on." Didn't even listen to it. We had to go, "I think that was good. Anyone mess up? Great."
DL: There was one song that I wrote based on sampling the horn and percussion in the studio on that second session. That song was called “The People Versus The Rest Of Us.”
RS: I kept going back to that song, it actually sparked my earlier question about what came first, sample or everything else. Because the stitching together of the samples - [the voice saying “It's no thing to make everybody say that you're good.” And then suddenly a child's voice saying they don't like you. And then that condescending question about why this clearly innocent man didn't take a plea deal. Those are from different sources, right?
DL: Yes, yes. Those are all different sources, yeah. I had an idea for a song; I had a base sample that I was really feeling. And so, when we were in the session, I just said, "Hey guys." Arif and Dana were together in the session. And then after they left, Ben came, because again, COVID. Right? We were keeping everyone safe. I said, "Hey, Arif, Dana, can we just mess around with this sample?" I played it [and] they played a whole bunch of different rhythms. Ben came in, did all of his tracks. At the end of his tracks I said, "Hey, Ben. Can you play along with this sample?" And then the engineer, Alex, sent me all rough mixes of those takes. And then I sampled all the parts I liked and then created an arc of that and then I added the [voice] samples to create this essay, which became “The People Versus The Rest Of Us.”
And samples, a lot of the vocal soundbites, their job isn't to tell you what to think. Their job is to lay out a set of things that you draw some conclusions to. It's like, that's what a collage is. You put these images in juxtaposition together and it makes a new image, right? [For example,] if you hear a person talking about... You do this thing, and you say, "Wow, how do you do that?" And you feel good, and you feel confident about yourself. And then you hear someone else say they don't like you, "What'd you say?" They don't like you. And then you hear this other thing about incarceration. You make up the story, the context of where we are today. Listening to that, plus the title. It's more powerful than something that if I wrote it out and told you what to think.
RS: 100%. And it's some of my favorite Ben LaMar Gay playing on the record; sounding he's leaning over the edge of a cliff the entire time over that big kind of dance groove that slowly fades away. That sort of angry dance music. And again, this may be too reductive, but I kept thinking [the fusion of funk and avant-garde] about Joe McPhee's Nation Time. Was that any kind of influence at all?
DL: I see Joe McPhee around all the time, actually, but Nation Time hasn't really been on regular rotation. But things like Eddie Gale's Black Rhythm Happening and Ghetto Music, are super influential. I highly recommend those if you don't know those two records. Max Roach has a record called It's Time where he has a big chorus with Abbey Lincoln singing. And of course, We Insist! The first album by Voices of East Harlem [Right On Be Free]. Attica Blues by Archie Shepp. All of these things are like, "Oh my God, these records are incredible." So those are things that I've gotten more into. I like them.
But I started to look at them as possibilities because the original things for this were the Original Freedom Singers, which had Bernice Reagan, who later formed Sweet Honey in The Rock. They were five singers that would sing at civil rights speeches. People would come for the singing and stay for the speeches. And so there have been several freedom singers, but the original five piece is the jam.
I was listening to that record, going... Back when it was just me, a percussionist, five singers, and samples, I was like, "This is where I want us to land." And my punk rock background and my love of samples. I knew that it would make it different, but if I shoot for that, then I'll get something fresh out of it. And then other things that have been discovered or unearthed. Because now I buy anything where people are having political, cultural conversations in jazz or soul with choirs, because then I can learn stuff from it.
RS: "Barbara Jones-Hogu and Elizabeth Catlett Discuss Liberation.” Why those two visual artists? I knew Catlett's work pretty well. I had to look up Barbara Jones-Hogu, sorry to say. I didn't know her at all.
DL: I'm happy you looked it up. Success. But I love their work. And there's a story. They knew each other here in Chicago and Elizabeth Catlett moved to Mexico. And at some point, Barbara Jones-Hogu went to go visit her, and Elizabeth Catlett had done a sculpture. A sculpture that was... I think it's called An Homage to a Black Girl or a Black Woman. Right? And it's a beautiful sculpture of a figure with her fist up in the air. Barbara Jones-Hogu, in response to that, does a piece called United. And it's a bunch of people with their fist in the air. And so, in my brain, I imagine what their conversation was when they're talking about their art. I decided to call that piece, “Barbara Jones-Hogu and Elizabeth Catlett Discuss Liberation” because in the song, the lyrics had a language: “A portrait done today, turns out a different way.” This is my idea of what their conversation could have been.
I also wanted to draw more connections, strong connections, to the history of visual arts and music and weave that into this narrative. I mean, there are so many important people like Emory Douglas, who was the illustrator for the Black Panthers or Octavia Butler, the writer. These are all people I'd be happy to draw into the conversation because they're all inspirations. And I feel like one of the things I'm interested in with Black Monument Ensemble is to be a part of that longer conversation. How do you keep that conversation going? How do you keep the voices of people from the past moving forward?
On “Colors That You Bring,” that features Lena Horne's voice saying, "I don't know what I'm going to do, but I'm not going to stop." How do you keep moving these voices forward so that they're still part of the conversation? Because they're asking questions and responding to society in a way that we still need to reckon with.
I think intention in art plays a huge role. I think I try to work with intention, and I think that intention does more work than we generally acknowledge. For example, I think about abstract painting, right? You go to a museum, you're with your friend, you're looking at a set of abstract pieces and you say, "I really like this one with the red triangle in it." And your friend says, "Oh, I like this one with the blue swishes in it." There's no reason. You don't know why. But in my mind, something about the intention of the artist, what the artist was thinking about, you're picking up on and you're resonating with. I want to work with intentions so you can pick up on those vibrations, the things that the artists put in there. If you get it, cool. If you don't, I think you're going to get the feeling. You're going to get something out of it.
And again, it's that collage, right? The act of collage, right? So even if you don't know who Lena Horne is, even if you don't know who Barbara Jones-Hogu... It's part of the picture, right? If you're making an image out of collage and you're like, "I'm going to cut this tree out of one picture and put it in outer space on Jupiter in the other." You have a whole new image and you're like, "Oh, what does it mean to have a tree on Jupiter in outer space?" But you're also getting... On the tree, you're getting the sunlight that was hitting the tree that day. You're getting the grain, you're getting the color from a totally different place. And that's affecting the way you see this image. When you're placing all these things in another context, you still get the world of that context in your work.
When Lena Horne says, "I don't know what I'm going to do, but I'm not going to stop." You don't have to know of Lena Horne, but you can hear her experience. You can hear it in her voice. You can hear what is happening in her life. The fact that it's late '60s and probably Malcolm X, Martin Luther King, Emmett Till, all these people, are probably dead. And she's operating in the civil rights movement being like, "I don't know what I'm going to do, but I'm not going to stop." And you don't have to know this, but you feel it when you hear her say it. You can hear it in her voice. That grain, that light, that color comes through in the sample as far as I'm concerned.
RS: From the head-nodding “Movement and You” to the expansive fire music grooves on “The Body Is Electric,” is groove, is dance important? I mean, you credited dancers on that first record, even though obviously --
DL: You can't see, you can't hear the dancers in the recording. Right. Before I formed Black Monument, I've been working with these dancers, called Move Me Soul, which were out of the Austin neighborhood. I started working with them [when] they were asked to respond to a show at the MCA about Merce Cunningham. I was asked to collaborate with them. And I had an amazing time making work with them. I thought, I want to incorporate that somehow into this project. And the project was still just in my mind.
It wasn't until that first performance that I got enough money, with Red Bull's help, that I could pay for costumes and pay five dancers. And that particular show was the first time we ran through all the songs, start to finish, with dancers. And some of the songs I was like, "Oh yeah. We never wrote an end to this song." We just had to figure it out when it happened. We didn't know who was going to exit when or what was going to happen.
So having dancers has always been really important to me. We often had a soloist that would dance. And my partner's a dancer, and I'm working with dancers quite often. And when we went on tour in Europe, we couldn't afford to bring another five people, so I was like, I guess I'm dancing. I needed to represent dance in the performance. And I think I was successful because The Guardian wrote about dance as a part of our review. I think movement is really important. Maybe it's because I've always loved dance, but I also DJ'd for 20 years. I want people to move.
At the same time, when thinking about the name Black Monument Ensemble, [the group] came about in the days when people were really asking questions about our monuments in America and people were pulling down monuments and asking for monuments to be replaced, right? And there was a part of me that said, "What would a Black monument look like?" And I thought to myself, "Maybe Black monuments aren't made of marble and stone. Maybe they're time based. Maybe we've been making monuments based on music and visual art and singing and dance. Maybe that's what Black monuments would actually be."
I do all the artwork for the records too. So, I'm like, represent visual work, dance, voice, drums, percussion, melody, all of these monuments are part of what is happening in it. It's not only an ensemble of players, we're also kind of representing these arts. Which is important to add in references to Barbara Jones-Hogu and Elizabeth Catlett or, in the liner notes, reference Octavia Butler. [Letting the listener know] all these things that will be happening throughout. And I hope to continue to have them happening.
RS: I’m glad you’re finally getting out to tour this record and I’m looking forward to seeing it. What’s next?
DL: I’m trying to grow the project as organically as possible. It's less important for us to be out there at every space that asks us to be there. My goal is to make experiences that are as important for the audience as for the group. If something sounds like it's going to be really positive, energetically interesting, and nutritious for the audience, for us, we'll be there. And I was just saying to my mom earlier - my mom's visiting, we played last night, so she came out for the show - that for me, [this] is a community based project. And our job is to be in connection and conversation with community.
The music is the evidence of that connection. The music isn't the thing that runs the show. It's the community and that communing, whether it's internally with just the group, whether it spreads out to the group and the dancers, whether it spreads out to the people that we meet out in the world. This is what we're trying to build and grow. The new songs that we have are slowly building organically and they'll be ready when they're ready. We're just trying to make sure that everyone is fed nutritiously and that we feel good about our relationships and then the music's going to be good.
There are multiple ways that groups have been run in the past and none of those really interested me. I'm not interested in docking someone's pay because they missed a change. Let's talk about how are you doing? How are you feeling? Do you feel good?
I mean, when I started working with Rob Mazurek and Exploding Star Orchestra, I had been in bands, post-punk bands. And our thing was you play the song, you reproduce the song as well as possible for the live show. Rob and the Exploding Star Orchestra? Totally different animal. It could be different every single time, right? When I first started working with Rob, I'd be like, "Rob, how was that gig last night? Do you have a recording of it? Should I do the same thing I did last time?" And Rob would say, "Did you enjoy it?" And I'd say, "Yeah, it was great." He was like, "Perfect. Let's enjoy it again."
And that really changed my mindset because he was like, "We're going to be in a totally different place and a totally different time. The light might be different. The stage might be totally different. Let's just be in that space the next time." Right? So, my mindset is when I'm talking to the people in my group, I'm like, "How are you feeling? Were you taken care of? Was the sound good for you? What was your experience?" That's paramount. We're going make good music if I do all of those things because I'm choosing super talented people.
Richard Sanford’s a Columbus native who tries to see and hear as much as he can. He writes about music, art, and theater here, on his personal blog, and at other outlets, including Columbus Underground, Agit Reader, and JazzColumbus. https://screenofdistance.wordpress.com/