Chatting with concerti double bassist Kebra Seyoun Charles, also known as Keb, invites me into their lifelong commitment to classical music. A reflective spirit, they perform works by composers they value and understand. They also compose and perform their own music, which they term counter-classical.

“I want people to see classical music as a popular art form,” admits Keb after a few words on the first Viennese school, a group of musicians including Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart and Ludwig Van Beethoven, who composed globally beloved sonatas and symphonies with new melody and dazzling accompaniment. 

Though classical music is the term for a specific era, in the American language, it’s also a term that groups together philharmonic, chamber, symphonic, concerto, sonata, opera, music, and any similitudes or derivatives. Keb loves that music. 

It is misunderstood music. That Frédéric Chopin was a self-taught pianist in an age of revolution, albeit as a salon musician, does not gain him a comparison with other self-taught piano players in revolutionary times. It is wrongly understood to be the music of rigid social organizations and not of the heart. 

Keb has followed their love of this music to the New England Conservatory of Music and to Julliard, and now, they are a member of the Sphinx soloist program. Sphinx soloists are laureates of The Sphinx Competition, which offers Black and Latinx string classical musicians the chance to receive mentorship from established professionals, access to instruments, scholarships, and a total of $100,000 in prizes.

As a composer, Keb writes in a tonal, Baroque, and Classical idiom because those styles come from a time when people were dancing to classical music. They renew Classical compositions, such as those of Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, and neoclassical works, such as those of Sergei Prokofiev, by infusing them with jazz and gospel. Counterpoint, used by Keb’s favorite composers J.S. Bach and Mozart, is also at the foundation of their compositions. 

Having grown up around African drumming and in a Seventh-day Adventist gospel church, they have been socialized by dance and trance. Then, there’s the fact that Keb loves to dance. They dance at Nowadays, for example, which is a nightclub in Queens that is known for its dance nights and cultivates the camaraderie of dance culture. Classical music in 20th century Paris and Berlin come to mind, as do the cabarets, such as Le Chat Noir, Auberge du Clou, and the cafés that shaped the music of Claude Debussy and Erik Satie. 

“People want to identify with and want to sing music. I keep my music tonal and bring in repetition. Pop music and Baroque music both feature repetitive, identifiable things,” Keb says with resolve, obviously willing to take on any polemic about music.

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“Classical music was most popular when it was being used for dance,” they assert. Is popular dance culture ready for classical dance music? “Do whatever you want to the music,” Keb says. Tap your feet. Waving your hands in the air to Keb’s bass would be as cool as any plié or pirouette. Keb is currently writing a ballet about being non-binary, which shows several vignettes of the life a non-binary person in New York.

How should one dress for popular classical dance music? In a forsythia, daffodil, or snowdrop colored dress, with a flower in one’s hair to mean spring? The point is, that if danced, engaging with the music becomes its mode of expression.

“How can I connect with people musically if I can’t connect with them socially or just by speaking to them?” Keb offers with a smile. The enigmatic surface of the music, often wrongly identified with race and class, is understood to be an illusion. They compose the most on the train. It’s fascinating that Keb grounds their music in crowds and in the counterpoint of the music of Baroque times, and not so much in the inwardness of musical liberalism. Brahms, who epitomized this liberalism, not Bach, seems a lot closer to the tree of multicultural liberalism that is contemporary American culture. Keb’s music is a return to divinity and the community, in an age where many Pastors, Rabbis, and congregations are at the front lines of advocating for a new society, in the face of obvious social erosion. 

The double bass, to Keb, is an extension of themself. It is a vehicle of their expression and voice, and they hope that their audience hears it as representative of their thoughts and feelings. The bass, to them, is incredibly versatile. As a classical and solo bassist, Keb embraces how unconventional being a solo classical bassist is. 

One realizes pretty quickly how to articulate Keb is about classical music in general, and about the music that they loves. “I play bass. I play concerti. I love the gospel,” is how they put it in the fewest words. They’ve found themself in the composer Béla Bartók, whom they say immersed himself in Roma culture, as they also immerse themself in culture to compose. Edvard Grieg reminds them of summer on their computer, listening non-stop to a philosopher and composer who, like them, attempted to reimagine Baroque music. 

Keb’s musical ambitions mirror much of the poetry of their time, thinking of what Terrence Hayes, or A.E. Stallings, have made of the sonnet, and of the beauty, and power, of contemporary formalism. Wouldn’t it be nice to dance to a Terrence Hayes sonnet? “Literature inspires me in the way that form allows a piece to make sense. When I think of literature, I think of structuring ideas, which I get a lot of inspiration,” Keb tells me.

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Classical music has been fundamentally impacted by recordings. It was limited somewhat by sheets, but nowhere like it is now. “Is it in tune, and is it in time? With those, you can do anything,” Keb says. Perfection, some argue, has become the main priority because of this. Keb values freedom in the music, and to them, what it’s supposed to sound like is often lost to history and should not limit a classical musician.

Tuning in to Keb’s thoughts can also be like listening to Bach’s music, which works with dissonant parts to make a harmonious whole, become social thought. Counter-classical music no longer wants to invite a certain person to the concert hall or to prohibitively priced music. It embraces Bach and Mozart, as much as it does Nina Simone, Florence Price, and Adolphus Hailstork. In other words, it does not undo or upset classical music. Keb considers themself and their interests as part of a larger continuum. For this reason, they point to Nina Simone playing Bach, and to the classical music chords in Miley Cyrus’s music. 

A new William Grant Still, or Antonín Dvořák? A new moment in American classical music is more like it. Furthermore, is Keb’s music not a search for a societal coda, that part of a composition that ends a composition, based on classical music? They’re completing a complex musical argument, as Beethoven also did, through dance. It’s a coda after which comes new social life. 

Composing the music that we consider to be classical music in the United States did not come into its own until the 20th century, and its present height is no older than jazz music. Keb is the future of a practice still in its relative youth, of a still blooming tree. They ask us to join in the lightness of this endeavor and offer ourselves renewed music.

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About Adolf Alzuphar

Adolf Alzuphar is a music critic. He also contributes to The Brooklyn Rail, and to the LA Review of Books.

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