Quantum Listening: Black Sonic Monuments w/ esperanza spalding & Harmony Holiday

Join us for a special conversation on the music that Black audiences have claimed as monuments of their own with musician esperanza spalding and writer, filmmaker Harmony Holiday at The Underground Museum.

Born in 1984 in Portland, Oregon, esperanza spalding is an eaabibacliitoti* artist, trained and initiated in the North American (masculine) jazz lineage and tradition. Her work interweaves through various combinations of instrumental music, bass playing, improvisation, singing, composition, poetry, dance, therapeutic research, storytelling, teaching, regenerative agriculture, urban land and artist-sanctuary custodianship, and growing in love as a daughter, sister, cousin, niece, auntie, great-auntie, and friend, while collaboratively decolonizing within and through her hometown community. She founded and Co-Directs Prismid Sanctuary, a nonprofit that creates and stewards free artist residency, performance, and workshop space in Portland, Oregon.

Milton + esperanza is spalding’s first new album release since 2021's SONGWRIGHTS APOTHECARY LAB, which, along with 2019’s 12 Little Spells, both won Grammy Awards (Best Jazz Vocal Album). In 2023, spalding released a protest song entitled “Não Ao Marco Temporal” that was recorded in Rio and addresses the Temporal Framework, an initiative in Brazil that threatens Indigenous Brazilians’ land rights and poses a major risk to the Amazon rainforest.

A 5-time Grammy winner and 11-time nominee, spalding has previously released 8 full length albums and, in addition to working with her heroes including Nascimento and Shorter, has collaborated with Q-Tip, Janelle Monae, Robert Glasper, Terri Lyne Carrington and many others.

With her dance project Off Brand gOdds and her therapeutic music incubator Songwrights Apothecary Lab, she co-leads performance, teaching, workshop, and therapeutic-arts research residencies in collaboration with colleges and arts venues across the Americas and throughout the world. She is a 2024 recipient of the Doris Duke Foundation Artist Award and a 2016 Ford Foundation “Art of Change” Fellow.

*European-African ancestored being influenced by American cultures living in Indigenous Territories of Turtle Island

Harmony Holiday is a writer, dancer, and experimental filmmaker whose work surveys music, ancestry, death and rebirth, and celebrity. She is the author of 5 collections of poetry including Maafa (2022), and also curates an archive of griot poetics and a related performance and conversation series at LA’s 2220 Arts + Archives. At the core of her practice is a pursuit of visual and literary vocabularies that might best express the melancholic hope endemic to Black American social life. As Holiday navigates the depths of Black remembrance and loss, she sets her sights on the relationship between “the new”, “the archival,” and the spaces between them that defy linear time. She treats these energies as collectively improvising ensembles in which prose and poetry sit by turns comfortable and chaotic, next to images cribbed from Black artistic and private life. Most recently she has received awards from the Silver and Rabkin Foundations, and is completing a memoir Love is War for Miles, a biography of Abbey Lincoln, and a collection of poems.

This program is organized by Justen Leroy, Director of Public Programs and Community Outreach.