JJJJJerome Ellis’ Saxophone Clouds

[photo by Marc J Franklin]

Claudia Rankine’s book CITIZEN is a work of memoir and cultural criticism. Associative in structure, lyrical in form, the book weaves together personal experiences, thoughts on Serena Williams and Trayvon Martin and the ideas of thinkers like Homi Bhabha, Judith Butler and Patricia Williams. This montage powerfully argues that racism does not erase Black men and women, but makes them “hypervisible.” To call out this violence, like Serena Williams did with an umpire who made an unfair call, renders the target of such violence “insane, crass, crazy,” for it is only a “bad” player who calls attention to the rigged nature of the game.

After winning a McArthur in 2016, Rankine has focused her recent work around the study of whiteness, an area which – outside of academia – has been glaringly absent from mainstream critical and cultural discussion. The pseudo-invisibility of whiteness as a cultural focus is related to its dominance and the normalization of white power structures. The murders of Breonna Taylor, George Floyd, and countless other Black people at the hands of the police in the midst of a global pandemic fueled an international conversation on these issue; it’s a conversation that Rankine’s work has been acutely focused on.

In her prescient July 2019 NYTimes article “I Wanted to Know What White Men Thought About Their Privilege. So I Asked,” Rankine describes her field work asking white men to describe their awareness of their whiteness. Based in part on her experiences at airports across the country, Rankine’s article posits that “maybe these other male travelers could answer [her] questions about white privilege.” In the process, she takes note of the theatrical nature of these airport scenes between white men as they wait to board their flights.

Her theatrical work HELP, inspired by her article, was in previews at THE SHED in NYC in March 2020, before being paused for the COVID-19 shutdown.

JJJJJerome Ellis is a composer, saxophonist, multi-instrumentalist, producer. He was scoring the theatrical production of HELP.  In May 2020, we spoke with JJJJJerome about his work on the music and issues raised by the piece. [Our conversation has been edited for clarity.]

PLAY RECORDS: How did you get involved in HELP?

JJJJJEROME ELLIS: [Sound designer] Mikaal Sulaiman called me and said he had just been brought on to design the sound for this new project that Claudia Rankine was doing at The Shed [a new performance venue at Hudson Yards]. As far as I knew at the time, it didn't have a title yet. Taibi Magar was directing. Its timeline was very fast. Mikaal called me in November and the show was set to premiere in March. The script was still being written.

I said that I would do anything to work with her. Her voice is so vital.

So then I had a phone call with Mikaal, Taibi, and the choreographer, Shamel Pitts.

The idea was that there would be an ensemble of 19 white men. There were going to be four parts with dance, and they would want music for those parts. That’s all the music they would want.

So Taibi basically said, we want you to make about 15 minutes of music for these four moments of dance, and that's it.

There were many times where I was making music with Shamel in the room, at the same time that he was making dances. So there would be 19 white male dancers, and he'd be shaping them in a dance and I would be making music right as that’s happening.

And then very quickly, once we were in rehearsal, it became clear that there were going to be more moments of dance and that they weren't going to happen in the same spots. The script itself was also going to change.

PLAY RECORDS: It's so amazing that you can thrive on the changing scope of the piece. For many composers, that is difficult.

JJJJJEROME ELLIS: Since I knew the scope of time was so short, I was sort of ready for anything. But yeah, thriving on the change. Shamel also did that. It was a dream working with him. When we met we just immediately gelled on so many levels.

PLAY RECORDS: So, you make a lot of your own music, and you have a pretty clear voice and aesthetic. Often in the theater, composers are asked to be chameleons and write in different genres. With this piece, how much was your own voice part of the writing process versus creating music to meet the requests of your collaborators?

JJJJJEROME ELLIS: At this point I have developed a certain kind of fluency in enough genres and kind of moods and textures that I'm able to cover a certain amount of ground.

My music doesn't sit within one genre. It draws from hip hop and rap and trap, in [other] moments [it] draws from jazz and classical.

There's something about the genre-lessness that was suited here.

But for example, there is a moment of kind of absurdist dancing, with a group of politicians like Trump and Steve King. [The director] Taibi said, “It should feel like Hello Dolly. Like a classic, middle class, white American musical.” I was like… that is the furthest away from my aesthetic as you can get.

That was really challenging to write, but it eventually worked and I was very proud of it.

PLAY RECORDS:  What was it like just navigating ideas of whiteness from a musical perspective?

JJJJJEROME ELLIS: I had to turn off a lot of the impulses I have when I play jazz. Jazz was the first music I studied seriously, on saxophone. I had to turn off all these impulses. How does Hello Dolly engage with jazz on a harmonic level, on a rhythmic level, on a melodic level? In my own mind, you know, for me it's much more complex. I needed to make it sound more “white”: sparkly and tinkly and less painful. I was very proud of how it, it came out. That definitely is the moment in the show that is the furthest from my voice, I would say.

PLAY RECORDS: How did you define what role the music was going to play in the show?

JJJJJEROME ELLIS: I was given a lot of freedom on that front, from Taibi and from the Shed as producers, which I appreciated.

I think Shamel also had to navigate whiteness and blackness with movement and the body, and I could see, sitting next to him in rehearsals, that the same freedom was afforded to him.

There’s a progression in the play as it goes on a kind of racial journey.

In Act One, there’s that Hello Dolly moment, where you see politicians just being themselves and being able to say whatever they want.

It’s an invocation of White MAGA Style. Make America Great Again or Make America Clean Again. And the music has a cleanliness to the sound.

In Act Two, that sound is in transition. It breaks open in different ways. There’s a lot of momentum and density and polyphonic textures in the music.

Act Three is more hip hop influenced. There is a lot of bass, a lot of fuzz. And distortion.

You hear towards the end that there's, like, these saxophone clouds that kind of grow and it's just like, like this sensation of tearing.

This is a moment where the white men are starting to really hear Roslyn [Ruff, the only Black performer on stage]. These men are starting to be aware of their whiteness in a new way.

And so to me it was important to use more bass. In the sound plot, Mikaal got these subwoofers that could make people's bodies rattle. I was using all these really low frequency tones, to force the audience to really be aware of their bodies, the way that the white men [on stage] were.

And to me that had a lot to do with certain – what are for me – black genres of music: rap, the [specific use of the] kick and snare, and these really low tones.

I was thinking a lot about hip hop, both listening to hip hop and making it, the way the bass is so important. Like, when it makes the car rattle. The way it hits you on that level.

PLAY RECORDS: We are big fans of the music titled, “Beau Travail Solo.” How did you start? I love the way the piece starts with that sine wave. It’s so simple and mesmerizing. It feels like the oscillations change with each pitch. How did you come up with that?

JJJJJEROME ELLIS: This Commodores song “Nightshift” is mentioned in the scene and it leads up to this dance. At first I was like, Oh should we just play “Nightshift”? That's not as imaginative and probably going to be a rights issue. I mean this, this song is just so incredibly beautiful. It just held so much of the emotion of the scene for me. There's this mourning in it, this longing, but also so much joy .The bass line [is] so beautiful.

I started playing the bass line [of the song] very slowly, and my track [“Beau Travail Solo”] came out of that slowed down version.

[The performer] Jim [Borstelmann], who is dancing [during this piece] has to hit his chest and that F note triggers right when he hits his chest. The timing was so exact, you know, like I would be holding the A flat and then I would hit the F at that moment.

It really signaled a shift, Oh, there's something happening here, because the music is so in sync with this white man's body. It felt like an emanation from his body.

PLAY RECORDS: How did you create that level of precision? Did you set a fixed timeline for the piece, or were there always separate cues tied to the dancing?

JJJJJEROME ELLIS: Everything was tied to the dancing.  Most intensively during this dance solo. Most of the bass tones have a separate cue, eight or nine of them.

Once it became a dance, each of those bass notes became a different cue. Michael Wilhoite, the stage manager, would call it based on certain actions in the dance.

So Jim would twirl and then you would get the F and then he would land.

Then the saxophone cloud is its own queue.

And then there's a moment where all the dancers leap and that’s a cue to stop the saxophone cloud.

And then there's a moment where the beat drops and from then on it’s all one cue, premixed. There’s the drums, there's the saxophones, there’s the kind of piano dings.

Then there was another cue in QLab where a high cut filter would come in and cut the highs of the saxophones when Roslyn starts to speak.

PLAY RECORDS: So you're creating the filter in QLab?

JJJJJEROME ELLIS: Yeah. That cue was also the cue for the guys to change their movement when Roslyn was about to speak. Mikaal had put speakers on the stage as well, which was helpful for the men, because, again, like, in rehearsal I would just manually do a filter on my sampler when Roslyn is about to speak. And so a lot of that stuff had to be shifted in tech. There were things that I had been doing based on watching, now had to be entered into QLab and the cues had to be shifted.

PLAY RECORDS: So that’s one of the aspects of collaboration with a sound designer that’s easily overlooked.  It’s not just setting levels and mixing. You’re having to collaborate in QLab to make the recording as flexible as if it were being played live.

JJJJJEROME ELLIS: In rehearsals, I was playing live, so it all ended up perfectly. And then as soon as we entered tech, it was like, well, now I can't do it live. Then there were conversations about me being in the show, off to the side of the stage, playing live.

Actually, one day after rehearsal, as we were nearing tech, Claudia said, “What if you just did it live? Like, what if you're on stage?”

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[photo by Marc J Franklin]

I said, I'm very open to that. You know, it changes the landscape of the play vastly. It's not just Roslyn and 19 white men, but then as a black man on stage, on the side of the stage… It became clear to me that would require a whole kind of process of integrating me in the play that we might not have time to do in tech. So that got kind of tabled.

There would be this other layer to the story if I was in it. Shamel, who is a black man, and Jerome, as a black man, are choreographing and scoring these white men and that desire. . .

I was writing music for them to sing. They would gather around me at the piano, you know? So that is in itself a whole relationship. The guys were [honestly] missing me. They were like, “Oh, it would be so much easier if you would just be up here with us,” you know? I think that in itself is quite rich.

PLAY RECORDS: You have mentioned a few times the “saxophone clouds.” Could you tell us about that part of your composition?

JJJJJEROME ELLIS:: The saxophone cloud is a technique I've been doing since college. I saw [indie band] Grizzly Bear play in college. I was way up front and I saw Chris Taylor loop his woodwinds live. It was the first time I had seen that done live and I was immediately so struck by it. I've always craved having an orchestra at my disposal and never had the money to make that possible. I was immediately struck by that as a way of achieving a certain scale and vastness of sound using my saxophone. It’s something that I've been doing for so many years.

PLAY RECORDS: How does it work technically?

JJJJJEROME ELLIS:: Back then I would use a loop pedal, now I use an Roland SP-555 [sampler]. What I usually do is make a silent loop first. That's like eight seconds long. Then I overdub and just play one saxophone note. And then once I hear that going, I then play another and just pile them on top of each other. The SP 555 has a bunch of effects. So I often use some delay and overdrive. The cloud is five or six layers of saxophone playing on top of each other.

When I was working on HELP, I found that the cloud didn’t have the pain and crunch that I wanted. So I dropped some of the loops down an octave, then spaced them apart a few seconds so I could get more layering.

I played that for Shamel. We were in a dressing room at The Shed and I played him the higher octave. And then I was like, “You know what, let me drop this down.” He was like, “That's the sound.” And he was dancing while listening to it. That was another moment of such valuable collaboration with him.

To me, the saxophone cloud is often very useful in creating a sense of lift and expansiveness. I wanted this brief moment, where the saxophone clouds are peaking, and then they cut out immediately.  Then later on you hear them come back as something low.

What I especially like about the pitched-lower samples is that some people might not be able to tell it’s a saxophone.  In rehearsal, I was like, “Oh yeah, this is the part where the saxophones come in.” And people were like, “Saxophones, where are the saxophones?”

I like that feeling too, when you hear something and you can’t immediately trace it.