This post first appeared on Dec 4, 2017 in The Spoke published by The Albright Institute.

When we name something, we create it — a reflection on cultural identity and authenticity in music

I have not named very many things in my adult life. I do not have children and my pets have usually arrived with names already firmly in place. As a black, African American, biracial woman, however, I well know the importance of language and names. Ours is a history of being unnamed, renamed, and mis-named. We personally and keenly understand that the names we give people, animals, even things, inform how we view, receive, and interact with them. Therefore, when it came time to name my album, I knew that its name had work to do. It needed to hold this group of songs individually and collectively. It also needed to speak to its genre, jazz.

I have been working full-time as a singer for a decade. In this time, I have learned that as an artist, I have the responsibility and privilege to create art. My most recent artistic undertaking — writing and recording an album of original jazz songs — stems from this understanding. As I began work on my project, I resolved to write the songs that “arrived.” In other words, I did not decide to write an album of love songs, or songs about the seasons, or songs in certain keys. Instead, I chose to work through each of my song ideas as it presented itself, in the way that it presented itself.

Some songs came easily — a lyric and melody would arrive and I would follow them down their musical path until they reached their destinations. Others came in pieces or in dreams. Some were insistent. Others were reluctant to be revealed. In the end, I have written a collection of songs about my love for family and friends, about expressing — and being — one’s true self, and about living as a woman of color. To say that this collection of songs is varied might be an understatement.

So. How to name such a project? Names like “Songs I Wrote” and “Untitled” don’t do the work. As important, they cannot convey the rich complexity of what jazz does. For me, jazz sits at an intersection of the sounds, history and feeling of its many, many icons and the tones, stories and needs of present day jazz makers and listeners. The history and formation of jazz include combining the familiar, the new and the available in inventive and alternative ways.

My album’s title needed to hold all of this, to name all of this.

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I am not quite sure when I came up with the title “What the Music Says Do.” I know it was not my first idea for a title (or my last). I kept the name to myself for weeks, but the more time I spent with it, the more convinced I became that this was my title. It captured my experience of creating the album. My belief that an answer can always be found if I simply listen for the music and then, without ego or agenda, do what it tells me to do.

But names are funny, and sometimes they do things we don’t expect. When I launched my Kickstarter to crowdfund support for my work, the album’s name became public and people started to ask questions.

“Did you mean ‘What the Music Says’?”; No, I didn’t.

“Did you mean ‘Do What the Music Says?’”; No, not really.

“Should the title, perhaps, have a comma? As in, ‘What the Music Says, Do’.”

This last gentle query was from my mother, a former writing instructor. I am grateful to her for posing this question because in our conversation, I discovered that I was absolutely certain that this title has no comma.

As a black woman writing songs in an African American musical genre, it feels important to honor the syntax of the name of the spiritual that inspired my album title — “I’m Gonna Do What the Spirit Says Do.” My choice of the name “What the Music Says Do,” pays homage to one of the African American musical traditions from which jazz descended, spirituals, while resisting a frequent desire of dominant culture to tidy, correct or anglicize black language. I see the same desire to tidy, correct and anglicize jazz. A black art form, jazz is rooted in oral and aural traditions. This is not because black people were not or are not educated enough to write this music down. It is because this music (jazz) is a language in its own right. Dissecting it or notating it, often results in subjecting this language to a Western, European idea.

Jazz is transmitted from mouth to ear; from instrument to body. When I perform, I am sharing the jazz language with you — a language with its own syntax, semantics, and lexicon that cannot fully or faithfully be transcribed. The songs on my album are quite literally my voice. I have done what the music says to birth this album.

And I am the one who names it.

Early in my songwriting process, I was struggling because I felt like I was coming up with ideas for songs that didn’t have a lot of harmonic movement. Apparently, one of the beliefs (myths?) I was holding about jazz songs is that they need to have sophisticated harmonic movement (and probably 32 bars of it *smile*). Perhaps I subconsciously absorbed this idea from the legacy of songs from the Great American Songbook. These songs were written by some of our greatest jazz composers — Cole Porter, the Gershwin Brothers, Irving Berlin, Duke Ellington, etc. – and I had heard and learned a lot of them. (So, no pressure.)

Also, the first jazz tunes that I wrote had a lot of  harmonic movement, in some cases two or even three chord changes per measure.

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Needless to say I was feeling stuck (and that perhaps I had bitten off more than I could chew *rueful grin*) when some jazz instrumentalists — John Coltrane, Miles Davis, Wayne Shorter, Freddie Hubbard, etc. — came to my rescue.

In the instrumental world, the jazz song seemed to have a whole different function and personality. In some cases, the chord progressions were simpler (in others, they were decidedly NOT), but I noticed that often the melody and chords of the song (aka the head) were just the jumping off point. (Listen to Coltrane’s Giant Steps or Davis’ So What for two iconic examples of what I’m talking about.)

These songs allowed the players to expand and explore the core song idea. They didn’t necessarily need to be complex, just musical. With this observation, I was able to exhale and get moving. I returned to song ideas I had abandoned as too simple or not “jazzy” enough.

Awake is one of those tunes. It was quirky little bird story and melody that came to me during my February of 3-minute solos. But the chord progression was a mere three chords so I had moved on looking for something more complicated. (Silly me, I know from improvising that complicated doesn’t always make the best music.)

Awake was initially a swing song in my mind, but the tune came alive when I changed to a Latin feel (and added some very fine instrumentalists! *smile*).

Awake live at Jazz Central Studios. Featuring Nathan J. Greer (drums), Steven Hobert (keys), Solomon Parham (trumpet) and Ian Young (bass).

In November of last year, I learned that I received a grant award from the MN state arts board to write, record and release an album of original jazz songs. (Thanks, MSAB!)

In my proposal I said that “I want to sing jazz, and specifically jazz that I write in order to help broaden the definition of jazz vocals in the Twin Cities.” I had already written a couple of jazz tunes and believed I was ready for the challenge of composing an album’s worth of material.

I also knew that it would be an important growth project for me (that certainly has proved true!). Since beginning work on the project, I have worked with new musicians and performed more jazz gigs (both goals of mine). I have also had to dust off and update my transcribing and chart-writing skills.

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Now some people might approach writing an album by coming up with a theme for their project or a title for their CD, but I was pretty sure that if I tried either of those approaches I would never start writing. (If you’ve spent any time here, then you know that I am a far better finisher, than starter.) I also worried that having writing “assignments” might send me into a spiral of stuck and procrastination.

So I tried a bunch of other stuff.

• I signed up for online classes on songwriting and vocal development. And while it was helpful to have some external accountability (one of the classes had weekly check-in calls), I found a lot of the approaches to songwriting weren’t making much happen for me.For example, I tried looking at songs/jazz standards I really liked to figure out how they worked. What did I like about the melody or the chord progression? The instrumentation? The production? And while I truly think this was/is a good idea, I didn’t make a lot of progress with it.
• Writing titles for songs first did NOT work for me (at all).
• Thinking about types of songs was a little more useful. I felt like a jazz album should include some kind of blues and some kind of ballad. (Both of which have since manifested. *smile*)
• Next, I asked myself questions about the jazz songs (all two of them) that I had already written. In doing so, I realized with both songs their melodies arrived first, accompanied or followed very quickly by key words of the song.

Armed with the knowledge that melody and words worked for me (or at least it had two other times), I embarked on another 30 days of spontaneous songs. (Technically, it was 28 days because I did it for the month of February. *smile*)

(I sincerely thought about sharing that project with you here, Dear Reader, but I thought that adding the step of posting the improvs might keep me from creating them.)

After 28 days, I had a lot of ideas to explore. My commitment to myself was that I only had to record one 3-minute improvisation every day, but I frequently recorded two and sometimes three or four. I think this worked because I didn’t approach it as a songwriting activity, I revisited it as a creative/improv outlet.

As I had hoped, improvising every day got the music flowing. In fact, I woke up singing parts of the first verse of Maybe during that month.

Here’s my first “take” of the first verse

and here is a clip for a performance of Maybe six months later

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Sarah M. Greer is a fiscal year 2017 recipient of an Artist Initiative grant from the Minnesota State Arts Board. This activity is made possible by the voters of Minnesota through a grant from the Minnesota State Arts Board, thanks to a legislative appropriation by the Minnesota State Legislature; and by a grant from the National Endowment for the Arts.