It Makes Us Who We Are:
Tomeka Reid and Damon Locks on Musical Improvisation, from Jazz to Punk Rock and Beyond
Despite having trained in different genres, classical musical conservatory and punk rock, respectively, Tomeka Reid and Damon Locks forged a friendship in the Chicago music scene. Over the years, these two artists have incorporated improvisation into their work in unique ways. Finding themselves both part of the Walker’s 2023–24 Performing Arts season, Reid and Locks sat down to discuss how collaboration, community, and life experience continually informs and reforms their music.
Damon Locks
You know this, but not everyone reading this might know: you were my original idea as a member for Black Monument Ensemble.
Tomeka Reid
I know, right? Isn’t that funny?
DL
You, Nicole, and the percussionist I was working with at the time, Damien Thompson. We came so close, just the dates didn’t work.
TR
Learning that we’re both from D.C., and we both went to the same junior high school, but 10 years apart—that was kind of wild. It was these merging worlds for us: similar friend circle, similar appreciation for the different music worlds that we’re in. I was mostly focused with jazz and improvised music, and you were coming out of punk hardcore music. Everything’s expanded from there.
DL
What are you bringing to the Walker this season?
TR
It is a chance for me to bring together two groups that formed in different places. When I was living in Chicago around 2015, I got an opportunity with the Hyde Park Jazz Festival to write some music for a string group. That birthed this Tet idea. I love strings, I love improvising, and I like working with other string players. It was a perfect opportunity to explore that.
When I moved to New York in 2016, I didn’t have the finances to bring the Chicago people to New York, so I started a New York version of the same group. In that case, I did music that was in response to some of my mother’s visual art. I’ve always wanted to record both of those works as well as possibly write a new book, and that is what I’ll be doing at the Walker. I feel really honored that I can combine both these groups.
It will be 16 pieces, and Conductor Taylor Ho Bynum is going to be doing some of the conducting There will be composed music, but then also moments [of] string improvisation, because what I love about this group is that everyone is a leader, and everyone has their own unique improvising style. Everybody’s an improviser. Oftentimes you can work with string players who may not be comfortable with improvising. I’m excited to have this whole band of string players that really want to get in there with the improvisation. How about you?
DL
Black Monument Ensemble will be playing, and I’m super excited to present the work. Although I’m sure we’ll play some of the classic jams, this year there is a lot of new material that’ll be coming out from Black Monument Ensemble. We formed the year before the Covid-19 pandemic and created work during the pandemic. There have been a lot of transitions, and now [that] we are in a space as a unit or a group of people, we get to slow down. This year I’m implementing new ways of working together, where there are small groups of us developing the harmonies while the percussionists are getting together to develop things as well. Since we’re comfortable and we know the assignment, we can take some time to really build. We all feel connected and understand each other, which makes me excited to see what this reveals, as opposed to so many years of creating new material and then having to perform it.
Did you have to get used to improvising as a player? Were you someone who was ready to improvise [out] from the gate?
TR
I definitely had to get acclimated to the environment and different sounds. I think it’s probably a similar feeling a lot of string players have, because usually you take lessons or play orchestras. Maybe you might get encouraged to do a jazz band or something in junior high school or high school, but usually you’re focusing on things that are on the page. Maybe if I had played saxophone or trumpet, where you might play in a smaller combo, it would be more familiar.
I’m even shocked sometimes at how much I enjoy it, because it wasn’t something my younger self would be into. I came from classical training, where you prepare a whole semester for one recital. With improvisation, people are watching you. They see your successes and your failures and [you are] vulnerable in real time. You have to be OK with that and being in the moment. That did take a lot of time for me to get used to. I like that there can be different possibilities.
DL
I feel like our musical education came in diametrically opposite ways. As I came up through punk and hardcore, the training came from making it up as you go along. Later, I was introduced to this idea of improvisation by Rob Mazurek, who was a fan of my vocalizing in Eternals. He asked if I would explore it in an orchestra. After I did, he said, “You’re in the group now.” I was like, “Oh, what does that mean?” It was trial by fire for improvisation. When I first started performing with Exploding Star Orchestra, Rob would just point at me. He might point at someone else in the group like Matt Bauder or John Herndon and be like, “Solo now.”
I thought, “What? I’ve got to come up with something right now? I’m not saxophonist—I’m a vocalist. Someone’s got to say words that people need to understand.” That kind of trial by fire taught me so much over the years. Early on, I made weird rules for myself, that while I was learning improvisation I wouldn’t use effects; it would have to just be me and the microphone. After I became more comfortable with what I was doing, I allowed myself to incorporate effects and samples. Eventually I figured out my own language of improvisation. I had to make up my own rules because I don’t know if I could have taken a class to figure out how to improvise with samples.
TR
It is so awesome that you say this because my own quartet record is coming out this year, and I am using some electronics on it. I had to write the press release, and what you are saying is exactly what I was trying to articulate for the longest time. I also resisted using electronics because I wanted to make sure I had explored as much possibility of my instrument with just the acoustic sound, before working with making electronics sounds acoustically. Now, I do feel like I have earnestly explored a lot or enough to incorporate electronics.
DL
I think that approaching how to do improvisation served me well. Even though Black Monument Ensemble is not an improvisational group, we have structures. Within those structures, there is plenty of room for every musician and vocalist to explore things within that structure. There are also things that we have set up, where we set up a sample loop that we’re working with knowing that I’m going to be changing that sample loop throughout. We play with a sentence, and then we’ll change it. There is a kind of freedom that comes from being open to real time. We say, “Here are the materials that we have to play with. Let’s see what happens in real time.”
I had a long period of time where I was in a band that learned the songs and did their best to perform those songs live, repeating the same thing over and over again. Now, a song could sound totally different each time we play. It could be twice as long. Whatever needs to happen to make it happen. Improvisation has really informed and become part of my trajectory.
TR
What was the moment you realized you wanted to be a musician, and what first steps did you take?
DL
I don’t know if I really thought about being a musician. I used to love superheroes. I was super interested in superheroes, as well as West Side Story and Jesus Christ Superstar. That I really connected with. People were creating these narratives and expressing them through music. I always liked music, but when I found punk, those musicians looked like superheroes to me.
If you look at a poster of the Sex Pistols or The Clash or someone like that, it looked like people dressed up as superheroes in real life. That is what attracted me to music to begin with. I think I was an artist who wanted to live in this other world, so I created bands where I could talk about ideas and weave them through with sound. I spent many years as a vocalist, but part of my job was also to frame the visuals—frame out the ideas that we were talking about. I was more of this director and front person, but I think it’s been in the last 15 years where I’ve been asking myself, “What is sound and what do you want to say with sound?”
When I stepped away from my band Eternals and started doing solo electronics, as well as Black Monument Ensemble, is when I was looking at the arc of a creation in a larger way. I had to come up with the frameworks for all of them. Some of it had to do with fashion. Some of it had to do with politics. Some of it had to do with wanting to dance. Some of it wanted to do with all these other aspects. These days I keep coming back to: What does sound do for people? How can you communicate ideas? What can it do to open up people’s minds? All those things are playing in my head. When did you know that you wanted to be a musician?
TR
When I was a kid, my mom would watch Soul Train and Solid Gold. Back then, I would think it’d be so fun to do some kind of performance. When I had the opportunity to play an instrument, I really wanted to play piano at first, but we lived in an apartment so that wasn’t really feasible. Later, when I got access to instrumental music in elementary school, I was really excited and thought it was really fun. I always loved being in the orchestra. I liked the idea that if I make a sound and you make a sound, we have this other sound that happens. I really loved that aspect.
My mom always said, “You better figure out what you’re going to be.” I thought, “I guess I'll be a musician.” It was just something I really, really enjoyed. I loved hearing strings in pop music. Listening to Curtis Mayfield and Soul to Soul with Reggae Philharmonic made me think it would be fun to do something like that. For a long time, I really wanted to be a musician, but I didn’t think that I would be leading ensembles in the way that I am. Just to be in a band or an ensemble was what I was really excited by.
DL
I think my life could have been a little different. I remember in third grade, I wanted to learn an instrument and I picked the saxophone.
But saxophone was expensive to rent, so I ended up playing guitar. My hand is shaped weird. So as a little kid, I tried to make these chords, but they were super impossible for me to make because two of my fingers are really high. It was a barrier, and I was like, “I can’t do this.” I retreated back into my visual art. But I like to think that if I had picked the correct instrument, or the saxophone wasn’t so expensive at the time, then maybe I would’ve had a different career because I’m really happy with who I turned out to be. If you trace back to Carl Anderson from Jesus Christ Superstar and mixed with The Clash, it adds up to where I am today. Whenever you [reflect] about your trajectory, I wish that I’d gone through all the rigor and the training. I went through a whole separate different kind of learning process, but I wish that I had done that process well.
TR
For me, I loved being from D.C., and I loved the punk scene there. I wish I could have done that. I really loved electric bass. When I was growing up, we couldn’t really afford a cello, but I got lucky with often being the only cello player at my school. They would let me keep one at home and use one at school. Because I was the only cello player, usually they would help me out. But I really, really wanted to play electric bass in a rock band, especially in high school, but we couldn’t afford one.
We all wish for different things, but if those things had happened, we wouldn’t be the people we are. When I was getting more into jazz, I used to feel, “Oh, man, I didn’t grow up in the church.” Instead, I listened to a lot of rock music growing up and was already feeling kind of like an awkward Black girl. I used to feel kind of bad about it, to be honest. Now I’m just so grateful for all the experiences that I’ve had. I don’t have to throw any of them away. I can keep it all and add more. It makes us who we are.▪︎
Experience Tomeka Reid Stringtet at the Walker March 2, 2024 and Damon Locks’s Black Monument Ensemble on April 20, 2024.
Presented in partnership with Liquid Music.
Learn more about the full 2023–24 Performing Arts Season and get tickets here.
)
)
)
)