As the JGI's programs get rolling and we prepare to go live with our complete website, we thought you should meet some of the people responsible for bringing this project to life. The recent release of our co-founder Robert G. O’Meally’s latest book, Romare Bearden: Paris Blues: Painting Jazz, seemed as good an excuse as any. So we asked Aidan Levy, the JGI’s program director, to connect with Dr. O'Meally for a conversation about the interdisciplinary ideas bound up in both his new book and the JGI.

Stay tuned for more interdisciplinary conversations and programming like this in the months to come.

Aidan Levy: We can start by talking about your most recent book, Romare Bearden: Paris Blues: Painting Jazz (Rizzoli Electa), which has an introduction by Mickalene Thomas. How does that connect to the JGI mission and the idea of interdisciplinary jazz studies?

Robert O’Meally: Well, at precisely the time when we were talking with the Mellon Foundation about what we would do to advance jazz scholarship, build a jazz audience, and support jazz artists, I was finishing that book on Bearden. I was writing about the fact that Bearden and Billie Holiday were friends, and that Bearden and Claude McKay were close. It makes perfect sense to read Claude McKay’s Banjo and to look at Romare Bearden’s The Piano Lesson (Homage to Mary Lou) together, to consider Bearden’s portraits of Holiday as providing a way to look at the role of the artist—whether the musician, writer, or visual artist. And so it connected very much with the JGI for me. I got a note from John Szwed, with whom I was corresponding as I wrote that book. He said, the half has not been told, that African Americans created this incredible body of music, and then gifted it to the world, including to other artists, and to makers of other musics. It offered a model for what the music would be for a hundred years and more now—a kind of soundtrack for the world. But it also offered a model for conscientiousness in the arts and social interaction, whether you’re a filmmaker or a writer or anything else. Working on the Bearden book made vivid the righteousness of the JGI mission—as interdisciplinary and reaching out to audiences. The challenge of that book, honestly, as a writer, was not to embarrass myself in the face of Miles Davis. I wanted to write sentences that I could read in front of Coleman Hawkins and have him not think it was too square for him to listen to. But also, I wanted to help make the point that jazz exists across the arts and is beautiful beyond belief.

Since writing it, I talked with Frank Stewart, the photographer who worked with Bearden over many years. I said, “What was it like to work with him—was it jazz-like? Did he listen to jazz?” And he said, “Well, yeah, there’d be jazz on in the studio from time to time.” But, he said, “Honestly, you’d get to the studio, and he had just bought bits of rug fabric. Or he’d have a whole set of cotton swatches from the Garment District. And he’d be thinking about how this thing will connect with something else he’s doing, and the process was so jazz-like, as he was fitting one piece of fabric and then painting a bit over it, and so forth.”

AL: Well, it’s a beautiful book, and I hope that everybody reading this gets a copy, because it’s really something that belongs in any jazz lover’s collection, in any art lover’s collection—any lover of the arts and humanities. It’s an important contribution to Bearden studies, but also to jazz studies more generally. Recently, on January 24, you, Manthia Diawara, and Henry Threadgill presented a program called “Free Jazz on Film: Sun Ra, Cecil Taylor and Archie Shepp” at MoMA. Can you discuss how that program represents future possibilities for collaboration across the disciplines?

RO: First of all, thanks for the nice words about the book. That program at MoMA was an important harbinger of things to come. We have a wonderful conversation going with the public programming scholars and curators at MoMA. The largest point is to assert that this music is part of MoMA, in the sense that it’s part of the modern art movement across the world. And when we talk about modernism, we might talk about Virginia Woolf, and of course we talk about certain painters, sculptors, and philosophers, but we’re wise to remember the role of Louis Armstrong as part of what makes music modern—not just in the early 20th century and throughout that century, but on into our own time. There was a screening of three films: One presenting Sun Ra, another presenting Cecil Taylor in Paris, and Archie Shepp in North Africa. The point was that these three creators of the music were steadfastly political. Cecil kept talking about—this is the music from across the tracks. And there’s Archie, doing dances while he played, and while people in North Africa were pulsing to his music to make the point that, as Claude McKay says in Banjo, there’s a band that comprises the African diaspora and music is one of the leaders of all of that. To be able to hear that and see them on film was very exciting. And as if that wasn’t enough—just seeing those films—there was Henry Threadgill, who played in bands with all three of them, who could give reports on what it was like to look at a score by Cecil Taylor and try to figure out what to do with something that was more of a drawing than the usual set of staves. And he played with Sun Ra, whom he kept calling Sonny, as well as with Archie Shepp. So that was very exciting.

We had Josh Siegel, curator in MoMA’s Department of Film, and we had Manthia Diawara, who is a mighty filmmaker, scholar, and cultural theorist whose films typically include expert uses of music. Among his films are two important films about [Martinican poet and theorist] Édouard Glissant, who is one of the two or three most important jazz scholars of our time [Édouard Glissant: One World in Relation (2010) and Towards the New Baroque of Voices (2021)]. Now, most people wouldn’t say that right away. But the teacher of the teachers of what jazz is in the largest philosophical frame would include Glissant, and Manthia’s films about Glissant help us hear the music better. And so I’m hoping we’ll have project after project in which we join the musician and the filmmaker, not just in the usual sense—“Hey, let's play ’Mo Better Blues again.” No, let’s commission a musician to do a new soundtrack to a silent film. Let’s commission a musician and a filmmaker to act as a duo, and create a project together. Let’s take “Giant Steps” by [John Coltrane] and ask a filmmaker to create a film where the word “soundtrack” is irrelevant—where there’s a sense of collaboration across medium. So that event was a promise of things to come.

AL: So many exciting possibilities there. I have one final question for you, and it’s about our developing “Jazz in the Key Of” series, which we’re preparing to launch, starting with “Jazz in the Key of August Wilson.” Why is that an important project for the JGI?

RO: I’m very excited about two aspects of the “Jazz in the Key of” project within JGI. The first one is that Farah Jasmine Griffin has agreed to be our point person on that part of the project. And so now we’ve got as our guide a fantastically brilliant literary scholar and friend of jazz studies for many years, who’s written important books on Miles Davis and John Coltrane and Billie Holiday. So that’s highly exciting. Then, I’m excited about the idea of looking at August Wilson and remembering that there’s music in every single one of those plays. He conceived of Gem of the Ocean first as an opera. He thought of Seven Guitars at first as seven instrumentalists on stage, and they were speaking. So he’s got music on his mind all the way through, most obviously in Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom and in The Piano Lesson. But music is also key to Joe Turner’s Come and Gone. And so the idea is to create a program in which the readings from the plays of August Wilson are presented with a band playing the music that’s just right for those scenes—to make the point that music and Wilson are tied closely together.

Wilson also told the world that he was at MoMA, and he saw The Piano Lesson, the painting by Romare Bearden. He told his friends, “See that painting over there? That’s my next play.” He said the same thing about the Bearden work called Mill Hand’s Lunch Bucket: “That’s my next play.” He used both of those works as sets to some degree, but also as inspirations. And so we want to show those [visual] works with this project. “Jazz in the Key of…” is an invitation to community-wide collaboration, so if the spirit moves with us, we’ll have our readings, we’ll have our concerts, and we’ll have an exhibition of the paintings involved. In Gem of the Ocean, the character is told that in order to cleanse himself and go forward in life, he needs to follow a map through the “City of Bones.” And he says, “Well, where’s the map?” And the woman pulls out a quilt and says, “Here’s your map. You gotta read this to get home.” And if we have a show that puts together Bearden and those master quilters, like those of Gee’s Bend and elsewhere, along with music and the presentation of readings, I think we’ll have a reason for the whole community, and I mean Harlem now, but also the broader community of New York and the broader New York that is the world, to say Amen.

Join us tonight at Café Erzulie for the Soundoff Sessions, JGI’s free biweekly series highlighting NYC’s finest musicians followed by an open jam session. DJ Late4Dinner opens the night with an all vinyl set followed by drummer Michael Ode, and the open session. Doors at 7PM, Late4Dinner at 7:30, show at 9, session at 10:30.

Earlier in the evening, hear vocalist and JGI program assistant Faith Quashie tonight at 5pm at the Brooklyn Conservatory of Music’s Next Gen Jazz Fest, speaking on jam session culture, which she helps curate through the Soundoff Sessions. Moderated by Maurice Restrepo. More info and tickets here.