This Side: Start

“Sometimes you've just got to do it.”

D.A. explains how his most recent project began. A turntable sits to his right. A snare drum leans just inside the mouth of a shelf surrounded by hundreds of CD’s and strings of lights twisting from the shelves up the walls to the ceiling. “So, I booked two days of studio time, not knowing what was going to come out of it. After the second day of recording, I was like, okay, the spirits are here with me. I feel held in this process. During that time, I was listening to a lot of Alice Coltrane. I'd found a record of hers called World Galaxy, one of the albums that she made after her husband John died. She was in the process of contextualizing and expanding his music horizontally and vertically. She was not yet singing, but she was adding orchestral voices, like strings. It was beautiful to me. Reflecting back to my roots as a young person, I was listening to John Coltrane and aware of Alice Coltrane, but never had the sort of fortitude and curiosity to really dig into it. Music is this thing that will stay in our subconscious and in our dream space and influence things, whether or not we are actively pursuing it. The music pursues us even if we don't pursue the music, right?”‍

That Side: Play

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“I asked the studio engineer, after laying down one track of saxophone, to keep layering other saxophones." D.A.’s. hands press the air to place each layer in the space. “We didn't start a new session, we just kept layering tracks.” At the end of a 30-40 minute performance, I asked him to edit it down to 20 minutes of the saxophone drone, and we listened to it and, wow…it was already sounding immersive, like a surround sound piece. A month later, after going to Ethiopia and having time to reflect, we went back in and added more voices. I brought a videographer, recorded footage of the process, and started down the road of figuring out how to actually create an immersive experience with this recording. I brought it to a film and TV post-production studio, and we did an eight-channel surround sound of the piece. I wanted to figure out how I could get this into listeners’ hands. So we brainstormed: You could press four vinyl records and have them play simultaneously—two tracks on each record. Two times four is eight. And I thought, who would be crazy enough to do that? Well...I'm a Scorpio, so I leaned into that like, 'let me be big about this thing. Let me do something. Let me lean into the desire of my creativity.' I approached the record label, and they were like, ‘Let's do this!’ So we started in 2017 and it took us five or six years to get it done." D.A. takes a breath. "The act of listening to music collectively is something that I don't get to do as much as I'd like to. Part of what I wanted was to create a release, like a physical album that very few people could listen to alone.”

‍Another Side: In Stereo

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D.A. encourages me to reach out to Michael Tsegaye, the photographer he’s collaborated with for years to create the visual language of the record. “Though we have similar kinds of inspiration, we are two different people with very different life experiences and different practices. He, in photographs, me in music.” I schedule a Zoom across the Atlantic. It is evening in Addis Ababa when Michael & I speak. “We met in Addis while D.A. was here visiting family. Since then? Yeah, we've been in touch.” He smiles and leans in. “But for this special project, he was looking for images that corresponded to his idea of the music. So I was sending images, and finally we arrived at pictures of the Afar volcanic area, the area where Lucy was born.” Lucy, the oldest known human ancestor, was discovered in this region. “If you see the images…it looks like the skin of an old person, like a grandmother. The land looks like a human body, like skin. And that's how we got into it. It's a celebration of our ancestors. When we die, we become the soil. We become part of the land. That's how we envisioned it. For me, it opened up a new medium. I've never worked with sound. I've never seen music played like this with four records with surround effects. As soon as I heard the music, something opened up. I'm used to printing photos and putting them on the wall. But I started thinking, how I can integrate my work, not just with music, but sound in general.” Enharmonic is a musical term. It describes a tone that bears different names depending on the context. A bit of silence hangs between us as I think about this. I thank him for the call. Beaming, he moves into his evening, and I into my morning.

The Other Side: Amplify

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I ask D.A. about his relationship to spirituality. "On the back of the record, it says ‘Dedicated to Alice Coltrane’ because I feel like she was really there with me at the studio. I was carrying her spirit with me. I think when we ask spirits and ancestors for guidance, they'll give it to us, you know? Sometimes, whether we want it or not, they'll give it to us. You may have heard that the ancestor Wayne Shorter, transitioned today at 4 a.m. I saw the official release from his social media. It said that one of his last wishes, the last thing he offered, was the idea that it was time to leave this body and come back in another body and continue the mission.” D. A. nods, chin to chest, deeply. “I think it's a beautiful sentiment, one that I haven't heard quite like that. And I think in a way, we're all continuing the mission, right? The more that you get introduced to the idea of ancestors and the way the ancestors are with us, influence us, help guide us, and teach us, the deeper you realize spirit is. In a lot of ways, I feel like I'm just at the beginning of a spiritual journey and this first dragonchild record is really a way of honoring that spiritual practice. The music has always been spiritual, but this is the first time that spirit is coming front and center." I feel the end of our time is the needle lifting up from a record. Inhales and exhales, laughter, and our goodbyes, a harmony that echoes on, and through me.

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About Abena Koomson Davis

Abena Koomson-Davis is a performer, educator, and wordsmith. She is the Musical Director for the Resistance Revival Chorus, and Chair of the Ethics Department in the Middle Division at Ethical Culture Fieldston School.

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