Reflecting on the themes and conceptual elements of his evocative double album Christian aTunde Adjuah, the artist shares the connection between its title and his name and challenges us to expand our definitions of diversity.
Christian Scott aTunde Adjuah (CS): I always like to start by saying that I completed my name, not changed my name, because my entire life I have navigated the world as Scott. I came to the conclusion that I'd automatically accepted the types of things that led to me being called Scott. To be completely honest with you, the majority of the things that go hand-in-hand with blacks in America having these surnames, I absolutely abhor so it was really important for me to establish that my identity politics pointed towards something other than what was assigned to my forebears. When I am doing a contract, all of the names are there because I will never not be Scott but I want you to also acknowledge that this is a part of my history and
that I am not forgetting that it’s a part of my history.
Mai Sennaar (MS): I wanted to talk about the track Alkebu Lan. My father’s name is Alkebu-Lan and very seldom do I see that name anywhere else. What inspired that song?
CS: I love so much just being able to know that that was what certain people called the Land before the Greeks got there and named it Africa. You know, not everyone is comfortable brandishing a name that has such a weighted and dark history. Now, the interesting thing about this song is that within the last couple of months I’ve gotten about 40-50 emails and different things because there is a trumpeter who will remain nameless and is becoming a really acclaimed recording artist. He actually ripped the song and created one that basically sounds just like Alkebu Lan. He named it--I can't remember the exact title--it was something like "Africa Bop" or "Africa Song" and it incensed me. But at the end of the day, I always learned as a younger person that when you create something it becomes for the world, and if you're good at what you do, you're going to influence other people. So for that part of it, I don't really admonish the person. What I do have a problem with is taking the ideas of the song, its conceptual elements, and then naming the song "something, Africa" because I don't even know if this person knows why I named the song, what I named it. I feel like it's probably the biggest slap in the face for them to revert back to a name that automatically ties back into the name that I was trying to get away from.
MS: For an artist that's just starting out, that just wants to have their play produced or their song heard, sometimes they're not keen on protecting themselves. What advice would you give?
CS: It is incredibly important to make sure that you have things copywritten, trademarked, patented in terms of protecting your intellectual property. But sometimes you have to have more visceral approaches to protecting the things that you work for and that you love. Sometimes a copyright is not applicable to being able to protect yourself from an exploitative club owner or promoter, right? It’s important to get your business chops together, do as much reading as possible and get your legal stuff together because the vast majority of people that you're going to deal with in the business environment are about the bottom line. And that has absolutely nothing to do with the creative process. You have to do your due diligence and bounce your ideas off of people with different perspectives and weigh all of the things that you hear.
MS: This is very comprehensive.
CS: I don't mean to be longwinded…
MS: No, no, it's great, it's fantastic.
CS: I just want to make sure I cover all the bases.
Christian Scott aTunde Adjuah (CS): I always like to start by saying that I completed my name, not changed my name, because my entire life I have navigated the world as Scott. I came to the conclusion that I'd automatically accepted the types of things that led to me being called Scott. To be completely honest with you, the majority of the things that go hand-in-hand with blacks in America having these surnames, I absolutely abhor so it was really important for me to establish that my identity politics pointed towards something other than what was assigned to my forebears. When I am doing a contract, all of the names are there because I will never not be Scott but I want you to also acknowledge that this is a part of my history and
that I am not forgetting that it’s a part of my history.
Mai Sennaar (MS): I wanted to talk about the track Alkebu Lan. My father’s name is Alkebu-Lan and very seldom do I see that name anywhere else. What inspired that song?
CS: I love so much just being able to know that that was what certain people called the Land before the Greeks got there and named it Africa. You know, not everyone is comfortable brandishing a name that has such a weighted and dark history. Now, the interesting thing about this song is that within the last couple of months I’ve gotten about 40-50 emails and different things because there is a trumpeter who will remain nameless and is becoming a really acclaimed recording artist. He actually ripped the song and created one that basically sounds just like Alkebu Lan. He named it--I can't remember the exact title--it was something like "Africa Bop" or "Africa Song" and it incensed me. But at the end of the day, I always learned as a younger person that when you create something it becomes for the world, and if you're good at what you do, you're going to influence other people. So for that part of it, I don't really admonish the person. What I do have a problem with is taking the ideas of the song, its conceptual elements, and then naming the song "something, Africa" because I don't even know if this person knows why I named the song, what I named it. I feel like it's probably the biggest slap in the face for them to revert back to a name that automatically ties back into the name that I was trying to get away from.
MS: For an artist that's just starting out, that just wants to have their play produced or their song heard, sometimes they're not keen on protecting themselves. What advice would you give?
CS: It is incredibly important to make sure that you have things copywritten, trademarked, patented in terms of protecting your intellectual property. But sometimes you have to have more visceral approaches to protecting the things that you work for and that you love. Sometimes a copyright is not applicable to being able to protect yourself from an exploitative club owner or promoter, right? It’s important to get your business chops together, do as much reading as possible and get your legal stuff together because the vast majority of people that you're going to deal with in the business environment are about the bottom line. And that has absolutely nothing to do with the creative process. You have to do your due diligence and bounce your ideas off of people with different perspectives and weigh all of the things that you hear.
MS: This is very comprehensive.
CS: I don't mean to be longwinded…
MS: No, no, it's great, it's fantastic.
CS: I just want to make sure I cover all the bases.
"...the vast majority of people that you're going to deal with in the business environment are about the bottom line. And that has absolutely nothing to do with the creative process."
MS: There’s an interview after you won the Edison Award, and this is one of the main reasons why I wanted to interview you--you talk about being able to sell your CD’s quite successfully and then ended up having them shipped back to your doorstep, and all the trials that it led to…
CS: Yeah, those were rough times.
MS: It sounded very rough. I thought, he’s really resilient to have stuck with it [the music]. Could you share a little bit of that story with us?
CS: In terms of the situation with the Virgin Megastore and Tower Records...that was a really complicated time for me. I went through being heavily vetted by some of the best and most notable labels of the day when I was really young -- 16 years old. By the time that I was 18, I realized that their general approach to how someone becomes successful, was incredibly linear and lacked a lot of vision. And in my opinion, there were a lot of exploitative tendencies that my family didn't feel that I needed to be a party to at that age. I decided to start my own record label with a group of friends at Berklee. We did it like I saw the Hip-Hop guys do in the streets in New Orleans: making physical copies, going around by word-of-mouth, playing as much as possible, spreading the word through promotional materials and literally being on the streets selling things...catching people in places where they didn't expect to hear great music and letting them know that they didn't have to go through traditional channels to get it.
MS: And you were quite successful at this, it went pretty well for you guys, I understand.
CS: It went incredibly well for us that summer. I mean we even struck a deal with the college [Berklee] to be able to sell the stuff in front of the school. If we had issues we were around teachers who could impart wisdom to us. But I ended up having all types of situations happen once I started to enter into more traditional channels of trying to sell music. I was negotiating a new deal with a major label, actually their jazz label doesn't exist anymore, and I had spoken to the A&R Department about what I wanted the title of my record to be, what I wanted it to look like, sound like, all these things. I will never forget, there was a person that played my instrument that was dropped from another label and I got a call back from the A&R person saying that they were going to pursue doing the contract with him as opposed to doing it with me. At the time I was still a Berklee student and there was a lot I was concentrating on so that didn't bother me much. But I will never forget going into the record store, 6-9 months later and seeing my record title and my record concept sitting on a shelf. I called the A&R person and I was like, "Hey, you know this is my idea, my concept..." It was everything that I'd wanted to do, stuff that I had thought about for 6 years, and the A&R guy told me, "Welcome to the Music Business."
MS: Wow.
CS: Yeah! ...After that I went about the business of trying to get my records into stores in New York, Chicago, Boston, New Orleans, Los Angeles… and it went incredibly well. And part of the story that you know is my record was outselling that record we were talking about. I got home one night after class, and there were tons of boxes of my CD's that had been shipped back to my address. I asked the UPS guy, "What is this?” He said, "I don't know, you have to take that up with the folks that sent it." I went into the Virgin and Tower Records in Boston with my brother, the one that used to be on Mass Avenue right across the street from Berklee, with a video camera. They were like "You can't come in here with the camera." They had the security escort me out. Now mind you I am still looking at posters of my face on the Top 20 countdown, I had the number 2 or 3 record in the store but there were no more copies of it because they sent them all back. I went back the next day without the camera and spoke to a guy that was a sweetheart, his name was Ned Arnold and he actually ended up helping me get my deal later. He pulled me to the side and said, "Look man, I'm not supposed to tell you any of this stuff, but basically this label paid for co-op space to get your records off the shelves and you're consigning the records and can't really compete with them unless you're going to give up all of the profit." This old guy was heartbroken that he basically had to tell me to cut my losses. So I went back to hustling the records on the street [laughs] in the short term and then I started to deal with Concord Records.
"...with the guys in my band, we vehemently disagree with each other daily, and that's what makes the music sound the way it sounds. I've also always been a fan of music that sounded like struggle because that's what I've known in my life and still know. "
MS: That is so much to handle, especially that young. What was motivating you to not give up? Was it the music?
CS: To be honest with you it wasn't the music. When I was growing up, when I was really a small guy, my mother had cancer. She worked multiple jobs. Even when I was in college she was working all hours of the night just to make sure that my twin brother Kiel and I had enough money to eat. So the only reason in my mind’s eye that I went to Berklee was my Mom. I had already been on the road for 4 or 5 years and had made a name for myself. It really came from watching my mother's resilience; that affects you when you're a little kid and you see that. No matter how sick someone is they still get up and they sacrifice their energy and their time just to make sure you're okay, you know? If there's one thing that I've learned from my family it's that, in a lot of ways, life is like a fight. Most people's mindset about fighting is that it's the guy that can hit the hardest [that will win], but my life experiences have shown me that it's actually the guy that can take being hit incredibly hard and get up again that usually perseveres. So, you know, the situations with the record label…I was healthy, I was young, I was still in school, I was surrounded by a great support system in terms of my family and really great friends...guys like the Curtis Brothers (Luques & Zaccai Curtis) are probably the main guys. We went through a lot together. As a black male growing up in New Orleans, living in Boston at the time, it wasn't the first time that I had dealt with certain systemic things that basically put up walls. I've gotten really good at climbing over fences, I guess is a good way to put it.
MS: ...I found it fascinating that Film Scoring was one of your majors at Berklee could you talk about your interest in film scoring and what your favorite film score is?
CS: Oh, okay. Wow... It was really important to me at the time to figure out the best way to be able to pull emotions from the listener. And to do it in a way where the emotion is very visceral and doesn’t create ambiguity in terms of what it is that I am trying to say as a performer or as a composer.
MS: So was some of that of particular interest because you weren't going to be using lyrics?
CS: Actually, you know, I never really thought about that but I'm sure that has something to do with it. I think more than that though, I wanted to be able to make sure that whatever I was playing or I was writing came off. And a lot of times with jazz or with a lot of Western Classical music, R&B music, etc...we concentrate so hard on the things that are culturally indicative of these musical forms that we miss the fact that the music serves as a means of being able to relate to other people. And that is incredibly important to me. One of my favorite film composers is John Williams just in terms of the kinds of devices that he creates in his scores. They pull the listener in and also the themes that he creates in terms of character development. It also became about learning how these musical devices tap into the collective memory of listeners. Jazz in the last 25 years has turned into this incredibly harmonic music form, where the vast majority of the things that we do--even though I refer to my music as stretch music and that's a whole other thing…but jazz is predominantly a harmonic music now. Which means a lot of times, people don't concentrate on melody and it's hard to get people to hold onto something if there's no melody. So for a lot of my music, in terms of guitar lines or piano motifs and things, there's little different motifs I put in the music that someone can hold onto in addition to the melodies that keep them grounded in the composition so I don't lose them, you know? But all in all, my favorite film score, I'd have to say is A Streetcar Named Desire by Alex North.
CS: To be honest with you it wasn't the music. When I was growing up, when I was really a small guy, my mother had cancer. She worked multiple jobs. Even when I was in college she was working all hours of the night just to make sure that my twin brother Kiel and I had enough money to eat. So the only reason in my mind’s eye that I went to Berklee was my Mom. I had already been on the road for 4 or 5 years and had made a name for myself. It really came from watching my mother's resilience; that affects you when you're a little kid and you see that. No matter how sick someone is they still get up and they sacrifice their energy and their time just to make sure you're okay, you know? If there's one thing that I've learned from my family it's that, in a lot of ways, life is like a fight. Most people's mindset about fighting is that it's the guy that can hit the hardest [that will win], but my life experiences have shown me that it's actually the guy that can take being hit incredibly hard and get up again that usually perseveres. So, you know, the situations with the record label…I was healthy, I was young, I was still in school, I was surrounded by a great support system in terms of my family and really great friends...guys like the Curtis Brothers (Luques & Zaccai Curtis) are probably the main guys. We went through a lot together. As a black male growing up in New Orleans, living in Boston at the time, it wasn't the first time that I had dealt with certain systemic things that basically put up walls. I've gotten really good at climbing over fences, I guess is a good way to put it.
MS: ...I found it fascinating that Film Scoring was one of your majors at Berklee could you talk about your interest in film scoring and what your favorite film score is?
CS: Oh, okay. Wow... It was really important to me at the time to figure out the best way to be able to pull emotions from the listener. And to do it in a way where the emotion is very visceral and doesn’t create ambiguity in terms of what it is that I am trying to say as a performer or as a composer.
MS: So was some of that of particular interest because you weren't going to be using lyrics?
CS: Actually, you know, I never really thought about that but I'm sure that has something to do with it. I think more than that though, I wanted to be able to make sure that whatever I was playing or I was writing came off. And a lot of times with jazz or with a lot of Western Classical music, R&B music, etc...we concentrate so hard on the things that are culturally indicative of these musical forms that we miss the fact that the music serves as a means of being able to relate to other people. And that is incredibly important to me. One of my favorite film composers is John Williams just in terms of the kinds of devices that he creates in his scores. They pull the listener in and also the themes that he creates in terms of character development. It also became about learning how these musical devices tap into the collective memory of listeners. Jazz in the last 25 years has turned into this incredibly harmonic music form, where the vast majority of the things that we do--even though I refer to my music as stretch music and that's a whole other thing…but jazz is predominantly a harmonic music now. Which means a lot of times, people don't concentrate on melody and it's hard to get people to hold onto something if there's no melody. So for a lot of my music, in terms of guitar lines or piano motifs and things, there's little different motifs I put in the music that someone can hold onto in addition to the melodies that keep them grounded in the composition so I don't lose them, you know? But all in all, my favorite film score, I'd have to say is A Streetcar Named Desire by Alex North.
"...music serves as a means of being able to relate to other people. And that is incredibly important to me."
MS: Oh, wow! Oh yeah, that's a good one.
CS: I think a lot of people would be shocked by that, but you know, when I was small, I watched that movie with my grandfather [laughs], and immediately fell in love with what was going on.
MS: I was surprised by the score when I first saw that film. I found myself sort of distracted from the [story of the film] because of the score.
CS: Distracted--yeah!
MS: So, the mission of the Council on Legal Education Opportunity is to encourage diversity in the legal field. And so, in a general sense, how is diversity significant to you?
CS: Well, I think that what I create musically is about a reevaluation of how we communicate. Culturally we're taught communication styles and we never go about the business of reevaluating whether or not they're useful. When I think about my music, I like to think about it [like this]: you have 6 or 7 different people from different cultural, linguistic and musical backgrounds, trapped in a room and given a problem that none of them individually are prepared to tackle. In order to be able to tackle it, they’re going to have to reevaluate the way that they communicate. You know, I'm an identical twin. My brother Kiel is an incredible filmmaker, and he's working on a short right now...He’s an incredible critical thinker. We come from exactly the same background, we're literally an egg that's split, but you would be shocked by how different our perspectives are. It is incredibly important to have multiple perspectives on things. Like, in my band, historically there have been like 4 or 5 black guys and one white guy. Matt Stevens was in the band for so long, and a lot of times he was the lone white guy. People would be looking at us [the band] and they'd say “Well, there's probably five perspectives and then one perspective.” But the funny thing is, with the guys in my band, we vehemently disagree with each other daily, and that's what makes the music sound the way it sounds. I've also always been a fan of music that sounded like struggle because that's what I've known in my life and still know. To me it's more attractive to have those types of disagreements musically where you have to reevaluate the way that you communicate.
MS: I picked that up when I saw you at Bohemian Caverns, I was on the first row, and when you came out, the energy, was almost--it wasn't pleasant--it was sort of ferocious and palpable and some of that, I think, is because there is such a diversity of opinions and approaches to music on the stage.
CS: Yeah! In some ways, we're fighting each other…
MS: …What legal education and counsel has been of benefit to you?
CS: ...I didn't start off with good legal counsel. I was really lucky that my mother has been so diligent in researching things. I know a lot of artists that have made mistakes legally and end up bowing out because they feel like one mistake defines their career and that's there's nothing that they can do to fix it. So having good legal counsel is a very important thing. If I had to share one piece of advice that has helped the most, I would say, be aware of what's trending and what has happened historically in whatever context that you're walking into. You're going to make mistakes, and that's okay. The one constant is that the environment will change.
MS: Great. Well thank you so much. This was a fantastic conversation.
CS: The pleasure is mine, Mai.
CLEO Edge contributing writer Mai Sennaar is a screenwriter, playwright and a recent graduate of NYU. Her latest play The Fall of the Kings premieres at the 2014 Atlanta Black Theatre Festival this October