Byron Au Yong: Pomelo

The Henry Art Gallery and Jack Straw Cultural Center have influenced composer Byron Au Yong’s imagination for over 25 years. While studying at the University of Washington in the 1990s, he often went to the Henry and recalls sitting in James Turrell’s Soft Cell. Au Yong’s projects with Jack Straw include the New Media Gallery exhibitions Kidnapping Water: Bottled Operas and YIJU 移居, along with five albums. As the child of immigrants, his interdisciplinary work attends to intercultural collaboration and the ways people connect with the places they call home. Au Yong currently teaches Introduction to Performing Arts and Social Justice, Music and Social Protest, and other courses at the University of San Francisco.

instructions for sonic imagination and strength inspired by Yoko Ono’s Grapefruit

Titles are instructions:

1. open a door to the horizon . . .
2. tiptoe with the birds . . .
3. find yourself humming . . .
4. honor peaceful time between the trees . . .
5. draw circles with your torso . . .
6. round the bend around . . .
7. open a door to the horizon . . .

Artist Notes:

Where are you now?
I am probably sitting.

If not, then perhaps I am picking pomelo.
Did your face light up?
Are you picking pomelo too?

Pomelo are the largest citrus.
Imagine a supersized grapefruit.

Yoko Ono published a book called Grapefruit in 1964.
Each page is an instruction I find useful when I’m lost.
I look here to dream with a grounded absurdity:

“Imagine the clouds dripping.
Dig a hole in your garden to put them in.”

Grapefruit offers ways to liberate stuck minds.
Picking pomelo gets me out of a chair to reach into a tree.
Pomelo are citrus maxima, yet look small amidst the branches.

Similarly, the instructions are short and all-encompassing.
Likewise, these audio miniatures are brief and expansive.

I encourage you to get out of your chair.
Go where clouds float above.
And dance all around.

Epilogue:

Grapefruit inspired Yoko Ono’s husband, John Lennon, yet he omitted her conceptual and lyric contributions. In 2017, after nearly 50 years, Ono finally received credit on the song “Imagine.”

Where do you find yourself during the dual pandemics of COVID-19 and systemic inequities?

Every morning, even the tiniest birds chirp. Their songs are bright and intricate. I imagine them telling the world to celebrate or mourn. These sounds are a reminder and a warning.

Chenoa Egawa

Chenoa Egawa is Coast Salish of the Lummi and S’Klallam Nations of Washington State. Egawa is a medicine woman; traditional ceremonial singer; recording artist; environmental activist; co-author and co-illustrator (with her brother, Keith Egawa) of two children’s books, Tani’s Search for the Heart and The Whale Child (North Atlantic Books); painter; nature photographer; Qigong teacher, and budding sound artist, dedicated to bringing healing to our Mother Earth and to people of all origins. She is a voice bringing Native wisdom and perspectives to the world when these teachings are particularly poignant reminders of our shared responsibility to live with respect for ourselves, one another, and all that gives us life.

1. Waves on the Salish Sea (0:00–0:47)
Water is Life. Journeying to the mountaintops through rain, snow, glaciers, and snowpack; into the rivers, streams, and creeks; seeping deep underground into aquifers and springs; out to the great oceans, and back up into the atmosphere again - clean, pure water generously nourishes all life. Without water there would be no life on our planet. All life is born from, or with, water, and thus Water is Life - a divine and living spirit that carries wisdom, memory, stories, and teachings. These wave sounds lapping upon the shore were recorded on the Salish Sea during an incoming tide.

2. Ducks Feeding on the Mud Flats at Low Tide (with Fighter Jet) (0:47–2:40)
As the tide goes out the mud flats become a feeding ground for ducks, dunlin, and other waterfowl. The loud booming noise comes from a fighter pilot flying circles over the valley. Beneath the sound of the fighter jet you can hear the sweet, innocent, and crisp sounds of ducks feeding, and song—a prayer—for the continuation of all of the Earth's sacred creatures.

3. Songbirds in the Wetlands (2:40–4:10)
There are many species of song birds in the wetlands of Skagit Valley. The main song here is the beautiful sound of the Song Sparrow. On occasion, you can hear a duck or two quacking in the background!

Every creature plays an important and vital role in maintaining a healthy biodiversity in their respective habitats. Songbirds’ numbers across North America have been diminishing greatly over the last several decades due to habitat loss from industrial agriculture and the increased use of pesticides.

4. Frogs in the Wetlands (4:10–6:59)
The individual mating calls and the chorus of Pacific Green Tree Frogs heard here signify the coming of Spring in the Skagit Valley and the promise of new growth and new life. The survival of frogs of all species worldwide are threatened. One of the main threats to frogs today is also loss of habitat. There are, of course, numerous other factors.

5. Snow Geese (aka, Lesser Snow Geese) Bathing in a Pond (6:59–9:46)
I visit the snow geese several times each winter, but this was the first time I saw and heard the sound of hundreds of snow geese bathing. On this track you are hearing the sound of their powerful wings beating in the water as they bathe themselves, and their enthusiastic honking!

6. Bald Eagles and Wind (9:46–11:29)
Part 1: I have visited this eagle couple many times over the years. Eagles mate for life. Each year I see them repair and fortify their nest for their next offspring. This eagle couple lives in the Skagit Valley year around. As many times as I’ve visited these two eagles, this was the first time I listened closely to their communication with one another as they worked on their nest together. You can also hear the strong winds blowing.

Part 2: Four Bald Eagles preparing for the hunt near a huge flock of grazing snow geese in the late afternoon.

7. Snow Geese at Sunset (11:29–14:30)
The sound of waves enter, as the Water of Life carries the listener to the final locale where thousands of snow geese are feeding in the fields, and on high alert, as the eagles are close. At the end of the track all of the snow geese take off in an uproarious wave when an eagle swoops in on attack. Their wings are beating powerfully in unison, causing a huge wind to whip through the atmosphere as they become airborne.

Bill and Naima Lowe

Bass trombonist and tubaist Bill Lowe has worked for over fifty years as a performer, composer, producer, and educator. He’s worked with masters of African-American music across all genres, from musical legends like Dizzy Gillespie, Eartha Kitt, and Clark Terry and avant-garde leaders like Muhal Richard Abrams, Henry Threadgill, and Cecil Taylor, to under-heralded greats like Frank Foster, George Russell, James ‘Jabbo’ Ware, and Bill Barron. Longtime member of the Aardvark Jazz Orchestra and the Makanda Project, Lowe has co-led the Boston Jazz Repertory Orchestra, the Bill Lowe/Phillipe Crettien Quintet, and JUBA; co-produced Boston’s annual John Coltrane Memorial Concert; and composed several major works. Current projects include the creation of Kabnis, the Gothic Detective Musical, a setting of Jean Toomer's novel Cane as a drama with music, dance, and video. Lowe has taught at several universities, lectured across the world from Cuba to Paris, and mentored countless young musicians.

Naima Lowe comes from a long line of Black people who make things. She’s got parents, grandparents, great-grandparents, and great-great-grandparents who are musicians, fashion designers, teachers, waitresses, and farm laborers. She’s steeped in a lineage of Black cultural production characterized by alchemic survival strategies known as collaboration and improvisation. Lowe has exhibited videos, performances, and installations at Anthology Film Archive, Wing Luke Museum, MiX Experimental Film Festival, Jack Straw Cultural Center, Judson Church, and Seattle Contemporary Arts. Her B.A. is from Brown University, MFA from Temple University, and she’s been part of various residencies including the Millay Colony, Vermont Studio Center, and Bemis Center for Contemporary Arts. Lowe is also the creator of independent art and design imprint Trial and Error.

97 Days Between
by The Lowes
8:48, 2021

Naima Lowe - Vocals and Percussion
Bill Lowe - Tuba and Bass Trombone
Taylor Ho Bynum - Cornet, Flugelhorn, pBone

Engineering and Mastering: Mark Kuykendall and Joe Stewart 
Final Mix: Naima Lowe with Jordan Wright 

(The full 16 introductory bars of Billie Holiday’s Pennies From Heaven feels self-consciously, even slyly, perfect. The air caught between the notes is just on the edge of sarcastic, but then again don’t we all just want to be loved?)

97 Days Between enumerates time, grief, and incalculable distance. The narrative is derived from Naima’s daily documentation of the emotional toll of living through the first ninety-seven days of the COVID-19 pandemic. The piece tracks a mix of mundane tasks under quarantine, challenging interpersonal transformations, and the myriad of watershed historical events that occurred during that time frame. “During those first several months of the pandemic,” Naima notes, “I was hyper aware of the ways that time and space seemed to collapse on itself, fractured by the varying paces with which people came to accept and respond to the crisis. Every conversation about the pandemic seemed marked by utterly incomprehensible calculations as everyone was suddenly tasked with becoming an armchair epidemiologist. The comparisons made between data sets were (are) almost absurd to think about: 98% survival rate vs. 3 million dead. The cost to the economy of thousands dying vs. the cost to the economy of thousands not working. How does one “calculate” loss and gains during a time like this? It seemed only feasible by zooming into the hyper specific experience of day to day living.”

Naima’s humorously melancholy countdown recounts familiar emotions that we’re supposed to forget in these celebratory “post-pandemic” times, and dances gracefully with Bill’s cheeky Tuba rendition of the melody from Pennies from Heaven. This sweet and sad conversation between father and daughter anchors the improvisations that twist, turn and tangle around the work. Bill and cornetist Taylor Ho Bynum have thirty years of conversations in brass to bring to bear, offering chops on top of chops; confidently enjoying their opportunity to follow Naima’s textual cues from halfway across the continent. Not inconsequentially, this was their first time seeing and playing together in person in almost two years. There’s joy and fun being purposefully brought to bear in the face of all this sorrow. Naima, with growing confidence as a musical performer, and still separated by so much time and distance, taps and spins and clangs mysteriously melodic percussive tones around her own voice. She’s working by herself, but is also never alone. 

The mix is spatial by design (best heard through a good pair of headphones) and swings with just as much intention as the instrumentation. There’s air and metal; math and poetry; confidence and tentativeness; togetherness and isolation; history and the present; and a long year between here and there - all brought to bear in a complex of improvisational moments that speak to the loving pedagogies of Black musical tradition that The Lowes bring to their work together.

A version of this piece appears in Naima's exhibition A Token Is a Stand In for Something of Value, curated by Grace Deveney and presented by The Oklahoma Visual Arts Coalition's Art 365 Triennial Exhibition of contemporary Oklahoma artists.

The Lowes

Father/Daughter supergroup Bill and Naima Lowe have been improvising together since the day they met 42 years ago. They are steeped in the alchemic Black survival strategy known as improvisation, and see their individual creative outputs as indistinct from their commitments to teaching, learning, and social justice. With individual careers spanning five decades, multiple universities, and a breadth of international performance and exhibition records, they’ve been formally collaborating over the past three years as The Lowes. Together they’re performing, recording, and offering workshops on Black cultural production, using their combined 70+ years’ experience as artists, educators, and writers to tell good stories and make music that swings.

“Our practice emerges from a critical core belief: Black cultural production is expansive, inclusive, collaborative, and intimately linked to Black survival. Improvisation, as an embodiment of Black ingenuity and generosity, offers a shared vocabulary and cross-generational cultural touchstone. We embrace tensions between structure and spontaneity, tradition and innovation, individuality and collectivism. We align ourselves with Black feminist epistemologies, resiting dichotomous categories of personal/conceptual, abstraction/realism, political/formal. Instead we braid these threads, affirming the centrality of Blackness as subject and object of wonder.”