Harlem

Duke Ellington’s Melodies Carried His Message of Social Justice

Ellington’s work shows his ability to infuse the blues into classical music and his commitment to tell the history of black America through song.

At a moment when there is a longstanding heated debate over how artists and pop culture figures should engage in social activism, the life and career of musical legend Edward Kennedy “Duke” Ellington offers a model of how to do it right.

Ellington was born on April 29, 1899 in Washington, D.C. His tight-knit black middle-class family nurtured his racial pride and shielded him from many of the difficulties of segregation in the nation’s capital. Washington was home to a sizeable black middle class, despite prevalent racism. That included the racial riots of 1919’s Red Summer, three months of bloody violence directed at black communities in cities from San Francisco to Chicago and Washington D.C.

Ellington’s development from a D.C. piano prodigy to the world’s elegant and sophisticated “Duke” is well documented. Yet a fusion of art and social activism also marked his more than 56-year career.

Ellington’s battle for social justice was personal. Films like the award-winning “Green Book” only hint at the costs of segregation for black performing artists during the 1950s and 60s.

Duke’s experiences reveal the reality.

Ellington and his Cotton Club Orchestra playing ‘The Mooche,’ 1928.

Cotton club to Scottsboro boys

Ellington first rose to fame at Harlem’s “whites only” Cotton Club in the 1920s. There, the only mingling of black and white happened on the piano keyboard itself, as black performers entered through back doors and could not interact with white customers.

Ellington quietly devoted his services to the NAACP and its racial equality activities in the 1930s. Whether it was demanding that black youth have equal entrance rights to segregated dance halls or holding benefit concerts for the Scottsboro Boys, nine black adolescents falsely imprisoned for rape in 1931, Ellington used his growing fame as a prominent band leader for a greater good.

In our literary and historical research on African American entertainment, Ellington’s ability to travel and perform across national boundaries stands out.

After success in Harlem’s night spots, Ellington composed, recorded and appeared in film shorts like 1935’s “Symphony in Black” as himself. He traveled the world with his orchestra, at first performing in the U.K. in the 1930s. Later, Ellington continued to perform on behalf of the U.S. State Department as a “jazz ambassador” in the 1960s and 70s. Audiences in such places as India, Syria, Turkey, Ethiopia and Zambia were given the opportunity to hear and dance to Ellington’s compositions.

However, not even international popularity ensured that hotels would host Ellington’s all-black ensemble during a tour in the UK in June 1933. Members scrambled to find boarding homes in London’s Bloomsbury neighborhood when mainstream hotels turned them away on account of their race.

Despite success, racism

Ellington’s 1932 “It Don’t Mean a Thing if It Ain’t Got That Swing” was the soundtrack for the nation’s swing era of the 1930s and 40s. The tune stayed on the Billboard charts for six weeks in 1932 and was inducted into the Grammy Hall of Fame in 2008.

But when Ellington traveled in the South, he still had to hire a private rail car to avoid crowded, poorly maintained “colored only” train seating, or hotels and restaurants that refused service to black Southerners.

Northern or western engagements in the 1930s and 1940s often proved no better. While there were no “white only” signs on the doors of these hotels or restaurants, establishments enforced segregation by telling black customers to enter through back doors or purchase their meals to go.

Bassist Milt Hinton recalled that Ellington and fellow band leader Count Basie often stayed at black-owned boarding houses rather than risk being thrown out or ignored.

White band managers attempted to protect the black bands they managed from these racist practices, but this still did not prevent Ellington from being denied service in a Salt Lake City hotel’s cafe in the 1940s.

Subtle style

Once the civil rights movement of the 1950s began to fight for racial equality through direct-action techniques like mass protests, boycotts and sit-ins, activists in the early 1950s criticized the older Ellington. His subtle activism style had focused on benefit concerts, and not “in the streets” protests.

But as the movement continued, Ellington included a non-segregation clause in his contracts and refused to play before segregated audiences by 1961. He maintained in an interview in the Baltimore Afro American newspaper that he had always been devoted to “the fight for first class citizenship.”

This was a devotion best seen in his music.

Ellington used his creative musical talents against racist beliefs that African Americans were inferior or unintelligent.

His diverse and wide-ranging catalog of music demanded the kind of serious attention and respect that had previously only been reserved for elite, white composers of classical music.

Songs such as “Black and Tan Fantasy” completely challenged what was then called “jungle music,” a negative term used to reference music inspired by the African diaspora. As a fusion of sacred and secular black culture, both the “Black and Tan Fantasy” composition and film combined the speaking traditions of black preachers with the humor and rhythms of black life.

‘Black and Tan Fantasy’ melded sacred and secular black culture.

Modern black variety shows such as “Wild ‘N Out” and “In Living Color” share a lineage with Ellington’s major stage production of 1941, “Jump for Joy.”

“Jump for Joy” combined comedy skits and music into a revue that featured African American stars of the mid-20th century, including actress, singer and dancer Dorothy Dandridge and poet Langston Hughes.

Ellington claimed that his production “would take Uncle Tom out of the theater and say things that would make the audience think.”

He used his music to showcase black excellence as a resistance tactic against the negative stereotypes of African Americans made popular in American blackface minstrelsy.

Ellington also used “Jump for Joy” to call out those who borrowed from black music without any credit or financial compensation to its creators.

Melody’s other purpose

Duke Ellington, Paramount Theater, New York, 1946. Credit: Library of Congress/William P. Gottlieb photographer

One of Ellington’s most powerful works is the orchestral piece “Black, Brown and Beige.”

This work shows his ability to infuse the blues into classical music and his commitment to tell the history of black America through song.

From the spirituals developed through the trials of slavery to the fight for civil rights and the modern rhythms of big band swing music, Ellington sought to tell a story about black life that was both beautiful and complex.

For Ellington, melody became message.

Michelle R. Scott, associate professor of history, University of Maryland, Baltimore County and Earl Brooks, assistant professor of English, University of Maryland, Baltimore County.

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

Why Marvel’s ‘Defenders’ Is Set to Be a Three-Wheeled Juggernaut

Expectations over ‘Defenders’ are high; they were much higher before the newest and last ‘defender’ of the quartet, the critically panned ‘Iron Fist’, arrived, derailing many things.

To be able to look forward to Defenders without the metallic aftertaste of Iron Fist would need an appreciation of the best parts of the other, spectacular superheroes.

Marvel’s ‘Defenders’. Credit: Netflix/Marvel

Spoiler alert

The entire clip is in CCTV black and white and set inside an elevator. One of the characters has a makeshift cowl on his head, a rag that covers his eyes. An African American, dressed in jeans and a sweatshirt, looks primed for a fight. A young man in a suit is facing the elevator doors, fidgeting. The fourth, a woman, looks upset, even in profile. She suddenly spots the camera, jumps up and swats at it. There’s nothing but static on the screen. This 17-second teaser of Marvel’s Defenders, released barely a week ago, has clocked over two million views. Set to stream on Netflix later this year, expectations over this ensemble series are high. They were much higher before the newest and last ‘defender’ of the quartet, the critically panned Iron Fist, arrived. It derailed many things.

When half the world was looking forward to the March 17 release of Iron Fist, the stage was set for a delicious one-upmanship of appreciation for four very impressive meta-human-themed series on Netflix: Daredevil, Luke Cage, Jessica Jones and Iron Fist. The analogy of a juggernaut offered itself nicely. The first three defenders on the scene were spectacular – each a delightfully unconventional, often stylised, take on superpowers. Jessica Jones is a good place to start.

Mind-bender

Until recently, female superheroes lived in a rather misogynistic world. They were dressed in costumes indistinguishable from body paint, and were often endowed with ‘softer’ powers while the men did the heavy-duty stuff. Most embarrassing was their generally one-note, unimaginative characterisation.

Marvel’s Jessica Jones sucker-punched every rule in the female superhero instruction manual. She didn’t pout, she grimaced. She dressed frumpily, drank herself to sleep. She generally didn’t give a damn. She wore her powers – enhanced strength, endurance and limited flight – very lightly, calling on them only when absolutely necessary, or when it was fun. A sex scene comes to mind.

Jones has so many layers she would put a lasagna to shame. She’s a skilled private investigator unencumbered by scruples who snapped pictures of her clients’ suspects from the shadows. She’s estranged from her sister, the one person she was close to. And when she finally makes a human connection (with another Defender), the relationship is based on a lie and doomed from the start.

Why is she the way she is? In answering this is where the series stands apart. Jones’s backstory isn’t a parallel track. It is the story itself. From her early childhood, crushed by an accident and an exploitative adoptive mother, right up to her running into Kilgrave.

The comic-book name apart, this is one of those characters who pushes his villainy to the limit without a hint of conscience or remorse. A supremely convincing David Tennant brings presence and palpable danger to this role of an absolute brat who’s used to getting his way. A man who controls people’s minds and makes them do his bidding. Smitten by Jones, he makes her his puppet, lover, bodyguard and executioner. Tennant as Kilgrave would be a wonderful surprise to those who’ve only seen him overcooking it as Barty Crouch Jr. in Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire.

Apart from Jones herself, the series is a delicious mix of characters played by non-A-listers like Rachel Taylor (Jessica’s step-sister), Wil Traval (ex-military, policeman briefly under Kilgrave’s control) and, not the least, Carrie-Ann Moss, who plays a shark of a lawyer in the midst of a divorce with her doctor wife, while having an affair with her assistant. These very adult themes – same sex relationships, PTSD, guilt, unequal relationships – are dealt with in a refreshingly adult manner.

Jessica Jones‘s is a grown up world. It isn’t made for the fanboys. That would be Daredevil’s turf, Hell’s Kitchen. That world has blind vigilantes, secret millennia-old cults, print journalists who are still relevant, and one of the most iconic villains ever to weigh in on TV: the Kingpin.

Defined by the villain

Some stories, usually the duller ones, are defined by the hero. Others become background to the villain. One can imagine what the makers of Daredevil must have been thinking – “So we’ve got a Catholic hero who’s perpetually conflicted about what he’s doing, vociferous against killing and works as a penniless lawyer by day. How do we make this interesting? Let’s create a really big bad guy.”

The Kingpin, self-proclaimed emancipator of Hell’s Kitchen, is a man of monolithic physical proportions and intelligence. His machinations for control of the community are at once brutal and intricate. A man of covert speed and obvious strength, an apex predator. But a man all the same, haunted by fears and by demons from the past, and capable of fierce love (Ayelet Zurer, who plays Superman’s mother in Man of Steel, is the love interest). Certainly more interesting as a character than Daredevil and played with astonishing energy and honesty by the 57-year-old Vincent D’Onofrio.

Vincent made his mark as Private Leonard Lawrence in Stanley Kubrick’s Full Metal Jacket (1987). Crime TV fans might know Vincent from his run as Detective Robert Goren in Law & Order: Criminal Intent. Or from a livelier turn in Men in Black, as Edgar the farmer who had an unfortunate encounter with an alien bug and became the bug’s skin for the rest of the movie. He was in Jurassic World, in which he played the avaricious security chief of InGen who later becomes a meal for velociraptors.

Charlie Cox, who plays the titular role, brings an earnestness and coiled physicality to the character. He gets beaten up more often than a hero ought to – but he hits back with convincing agility and acrobatics. Daredevil has, hands down, some of the best action set pieces ever on small screen. Brilliantly choreographed nighttime sequences are nicely bolstered by some solid courtroom drama and heroic journalism in the day.

While the Kingpin pretty much carried the first season on his sizeable shoulders, season two got more ambitious and brought in a rash of new characters, each with a very satisfying character arc. Stick, Elektra, the Punisher, each adds a fresh burst of adrenaline at just the right time. French-born Elodie Yung brings a foreign accent, a primal joy in killing and an intense love for Daredevil. A personal favourite is Jon Bernthal’s (The Walking Dead, Wolf of Wall Street) Punisher. He wakes up from a coma (bullet to the brain) and goes to town on a killing spree, disposing of entire mobs. In a voice like he’s gargling gravel, Bernthal manages to bring army humour and genuine pathos to the role. The Devil of Hell’s Kitchen has to work really hard when sparring – with fist or word – with the Punisher.

For those who had the misfortune of suffering through the Ben Affleck starrer, the Netflix version was…redemption – something every Defender is in pursuit of. Every Defender except Luke Cage, who simply wants to be left alone in Harlem, where conversation is punctuated by the snip of scissors in the local barber shop, where music still comes out of boom boxes and the air is thick with history.

Black magic

The whole point of Luke Cage is to celebrate all things African American. The entire series is saturated with black culture and aesthetic. While this particular sensibility isn’t all that rare in film – even film that isn’t made by or for a black demographic – it takes on a richer, more nuanced dimension when given context and time.

There’s a school of thought which suggests the word ‘nigger’ isn’t entirely taboo, that it has a place in defining the socio-economics, personality and identity of African Americans. In Luke Cage, the bad guys drop N-bombs as easily as flicking lint and some of the phrasing is rather catchy. For instance, Alfre Woodard, who plays local Councilwoman Mariah Dillard, says with an extended affectation, “Nigger pleeease.” It drips with disdain. Woodard is a powerful presence and kills it as a crooked politician who gradually rips off her mask of civility. The obvious bad guy, Mariah’s Cousin Cornell ‘Cottonmouth’ Stokes, seems the lesser evil. He’s also more watchable.

There’s a huge portrait of Biggie with a crown. Mahershala Ali towers above a punk he just beat to death. The crown frames his bloodied face. In another scene, he’s on the piano, riffing some jazz, lost in a wave of emotions from a scarring past. A small harem of women is sprawled on his scarlet-covered bed, listening. As Cottonmouth (he hates the moniker), Ali bludgeons people to death, shoots them, throws them off the roof and fires a bazooka at Luke Cage’s building. Despite it all, he makes us believe he’d rather be someone else.

It’s a powerful performance from the Academy-Award-winner. Though his early death ties up all the loose ends of his story, and wraps up the emotional arc beautifully, it leaves a credibility vacuum in the proceedings. One imagines that even the music – which features some incredible talent – gets a bit muted after he leaves.

The attitude of Luke Cage is contagious. There’s no ambiguity between the good guys and the bad (N-word speakers = bad). And unlike with Daredevil, the good guys seem to be more comfortable in their own skin. Having grown up in the same neighbourhood, exposed to the same set of circumstances and temptations afforded to the gang-bangers and choosing a life free of crime meant they earned their moral superiority. Empathy with the bad guy is automatic and a rejection of his life choices is free of ambivalence. Even the pontification is convincing.

“Do you even know who Crispus Attucks is?” Cage asks a punk who has a gun to his head. “A free black man. The first man to die for what became America.” They’re in front of a building named after Attucks. After recalling Attucks’s courage, he decides to step up from the shadows and take his place as a defender of Harlem. He then grabs the gun and shoots himself in his chiseled stomach. The punk bolts before the mangled bullet bounces off his impervious skin and hits the ground.

Gorgeous production quality, spectacular action, bold themes and memorable characters painstakingly built a fair amount of atmosphere for the larger Defenders’ saga. Crackling with dark energy, flashes of impending terror. Suddenly, in all that atmosphere, a golden balloon floated in, the string came loose and with a loud wheezing noise, the balloon flew in every direction, knocking down all the built-up mystery, smashing into the faces of the gravest characters. The balloon was embossed with the words ‘Iron Fist’.

Marvel’s milquetoast

‘The Hand’ is an ancient cult bent on global domination, with tentacles deep within corporates, government and organised crime; possessing an army of Ninjas; and have, incredibly, managed to reanimate the dead. In the Iron Fist, we’re given to believe that there’s a ‘good’ Hand and a ‘bad’ one. And then told they’re both bad, just that one of them isn’t as scary. Coming back from the dead is trivialised. Madam Gao is a centuries-old master of a drug den, staffed entirely by people whose eyes have been burned out. She’s reduced to a human fortune cookie. We’re given to believe she possesses the power of telekinesis, which she then never uses again, even to escape imprisonment. For a series supposedly about a hero with extraordinary martial arts skills, the action is weak. It never gets better.

It begins well enough, probably because the first episode is usually viewed through the rose-tinted glasses of expectation – and the memory of watching the other Defenders. Billionaire Danny Rand is the Iron Fist, the youngest of the Defenders, and the least conflicted with regard to his ‘destiny’. Unfortunately, that confidence stems from childishness and not much else. One soon realises that lines like “I don’t have a plan. We’ll figure something out when we get there” or “You know why you make such a bad Iron Fist. You have no idea where you’re going” are manifest symptoms of writer’s block because they never do figure anything out. The plot holes are ridiculous. Good actors are wasted: David Wenham (Australia), Tom Pelphrey, Jessica Stroup.

The plot holes and gaps are unforgivable. For someone who’s lived for 15 years in a parallel dimension accessible only through the Himalayas, Rand acclimatises himself far too quickly to New York. He carries an iPod with a playlist of the biggest hits from 20 years ago. How on Earth did he charge the gadget in a place without electricity? Davos, a fellow acolyte, comes to remind him of his destiny and take him back. He suddenly develops a county English accent. There are entire listicles online discussing the many bloopers that made the final cut.

Even the stellar efforts of the regulars – Carrie-Ann Moss (the lawyer Hogarth) and Rosario Dawson, who plays nurse Claire Temple across all four series, can’t rescue Iron Fist from mediocrity.

Considering the kind of backlash Iron Fist received from fans and critics, dissecting it any more would be like beating on a puppy. Beyond a point, it becomes a sad exercise. The puppy can’t fight back on any count.

Writing on the wall

The title art for the Defenders is graffiti. Considering what Iron First wrought, the fate of the impending series is a bit worrisome. How much damage can one bad apple do? Or have the makers of Defenders managed to elevate the proceedings somehow?

It took a rewatching of some of the best aspects of the other Defenders series to get over the metallic aftertaste of Iron Fist. The tittle tracks, for instance. While the Iron Fist’s isn’t completely terrible, it certainly is unimaginative. The animation is low quality and a bit monotonous. Daredevil’s is set to the beat of a racing heart. The visuals are of a city being drenched in scarlet blood. As the city takes shape, so does Daredevil – cowl first and then the rest of him. The Luke Cage opener is intimate. Landmarks and signboards of Harlem reflected on the hero’s sculpted body. It reflects the ponderous, inevitable power of the protagonist. Then there’s the pacing. Cage doesn’t jump, or run, or move really fast. When he starts swinging, he only needs to connect once. This gives the whole series an unhurried air. Daredevil happens in wave after wave of action. The waves are mostly predictable, but when they’re not, they tend to be even more effective. Jessica Jones plays things close to the chest at first, then goes all guns blazing. The Iron Fist is just… off. Atonal, inconsistent.

The background score and music in Iron Fist was forgettable, save for a few nice touches – when Rand and Wing indulge in a little post-coital tai chi, for instance. Daredevil packs heavy bass and some intense violins. The background score is top notch, particularly during the fight sequences and whenever the Punisher comes on screen. And Luke Cage? The music is the best part of the series. Raphael Saadiq, Jidenna and a host of others – veterans and new stars alike – perform live at Cottonmouth’s nightclub. Some of the most cinematic moments of the story are drummed up to perfection with some spectacular percussion. Blown up and brushed by trumpets and the slipstream from the plucked strings of an electric guitar.

So after all that, to trudge through the abysmal Iron Fist, perforated plot and discordant rhythm and wasted mystery, all set to insipid music – one could be forgiven for having developed some amount of scepticism.

Speculation that ought to be sweet isn’t entirely so. Nevertheless, there’s still much to look forward to. At the most basic, watching a man with impenetrable skin, a cynical superhuman no longer susceptible to mind control, a vigilante with heightened senses and a human weapon battle a maleficent horde ought to be something. So yes, when the Defenders converge, one will wait, watch and cheer, and wildly hope that the fourth defender puts a fist in it.

Anand Venkateswaran is a Chennai-based freelance writer.

Vijay Iyer’s Jazz is Defined by a Resistance to Itself

Renowned jazz musician Vijay Iyer can be categorised by his distaste for categories and foremost among these is jazz itself.

Vijay Iyer in concert. Credit: André P. Meyer-Vitali/Flickr CC BY 2.0

That jazz and “classical” forms of Indian music have had a history of affinity and interaction is profoundly odd. The two are – socially at least – opposites. Jazz began as the music of former slaves. Throughout its history, it has been tied to resistance and to the struggle for black liberation. It had to fight to even be considered music by the white cultural establishment. In India, the music we call Hindustani and Carnatic have been elite forms, patronised by courts and temples and practiced and listened to by the privileged. It is ironic, that someone like John Coltrane could feel such affinity for — and even name his son after — a bhadralok like Ravi Shankar. It’s a rich and contradictory history and it was unclear where to locate Vijay Iyer within it. So on a grey morning, we took the bus through light rain to meet Iyer at his house in Harlem.

Iyer was born in Albany to Tamil parents who, like most Indian immigrants during the Cold War, went to the US because of their scientific and technical expertise. He started learning the violin when he was three , while his sister learnt the piano. He didn’t listen to much Indian music growing up. “My parents had some records that they’d brought from India, but the stereo was mostly commandeered by my sister and I. We usually played pop and rock music.” The first record his sister brought home was Saturday Night Fever; the first record he owned was Eddy Grant’s Electric Avenue. “[My sister’s] friends were really into The Police so then I got really into them and the Beatles too. And then I was in a rock band in high school, so I had to learn about Led Zeppelin and Jimi Hendrix.”

He used his sister’s piano to teach himself how to play it. Late in high school, he swerved towards jazz because of the music of Thelonius Monk, who remains his most salient influence. In grad school, having played all throughout college, he decided – with the encouragement of saxophonist Steve Coleman – to become a musician. In the ’90s he began collaborating with the alto saxophonist, Rudresh Mahanthappa, with whom he’s made nine albums since then. As a duo, they’re remarkable not only because they can do anything, technically, but also because they can create and nuance almost any mood originally. There’s the jubilance of a song like ‘Configurations’, the melancholy of ‘Come Back’, the restrained anger and timely explosions of ‘Because of Guns’ (a reworking of Jimi Hendrix’s ‘Hey Joe’).

The pianists who influenced Iyer were all composers. “They were interested, not so much in just soloing over something, but in actually building something through improvisation.” From Carnatic music, but also from Greek and West African and Afro-Cuban music, he had borrowed various kinds of “rhythmic language”.

“In my music I’ve tried, for example, to play in five to the point where it’s just normal”. He’s also tried to tap into what he calls a “dance impulse” behind these kinds of music. “We in the West tend to believe that you can only dance to duple metres, but I’ve been to Greek weddings, I’ve been to Senegal, and it turns out people can dance to whatever they wanna dance to.”

A few days before interviewing him, we’d seen Iyer play at Columbia’s Miller Theatre. It was a full house. The audience was diverse in age, but not in colour. The night before, Iyer and his trio had played at Princeton, which I imagine was more sedate and white-collared.

Iyer plays at a lot of colleges and is a professor at Harvard, where he works on music and cognition. He just finished a residency at the Met Breuer. These details produce one narrative by which we can make sense of Iyer.

But it’s a narrative that angers him, a narrative that he vehemently resists.

“Pretty much every critic that’s written about me — and in the music business when you’re reviewed, it means a white man’s writing about you — has called my music ‘cerebral’. Or ‘mathematical’ – that’s another word they use. And that’s doubly racist”.

Doubly racist because it shows an inability to read Iyer’s music beyond the fact that he’s Indian-American. Treating his music as though it were an extension of his academic life allows us to think that although he plays in a subversive tradition, Iyer is a type we all recognise: the good Brahmin boy. Calling him ‘cerebral’, as Iyer puts it, is also “a way of excluding me from blackness”, because it implies that black music is the opposite: sensuous, unintellectual.

Valid as that is, it remains a narrative that’s hard to escape. The way Iyer speaks, the way he takes long pauses to search for the right word, – he says “the music we call jazz” instead of just ‘jazz’ and “what we call the political” rather than ‘the political’ – is reminiscent of the way a professor speaks. The titles of his works don’t do much to dispel the labels he abhors – Relativist’s Waltz, Panoptic Modes, Entropy and Time, Historicity. He says emphatically that Harvard hired him for his work as an artist. His music is often too rhythmically complex to be sung or danced to and seems pretty well suited to the academy.

Besides his work with Mahanthappa, Iyer’s primary musical engagement has been with his trio, in which he is accompanied by the bassist Stephan Crump and the drummer Marcus Gilmore. Their covers (‘Human Nature’, ‘Galang’, ‘Mystic Brew’), which take after Coltrane’s cover of ‘My Favourite Things’, are what I love most in Iyer’s works.

“The influence of Indian music on Jazz didn’t start with me or Rudresh; it’s not new,” he says. “John Coltrane took a song right from the top of the billboard charts, a song that everyone in America was familiar with and turned it, partly by stripping away most of its harmonics and building the piece around a drone, into a modal piece. It was his version of ragas, you know, and that emerged directly from his interaction with Hindustani music”.

Iyer’s own covers express what ‘My Favourite Things’ does: delight in virtuosity and in experimentation. They’re a celebration of the medium itself, of “music’s ability to take us places we didn’t know we could go”. And to celebrate the human instinct – which Iyer takes his musical impulse to be.

There’s something brilliantly casual about Coltrane’s borrowing of the most blandly familiar pop music and Indian classical music for the same piece – an enthusiasm that refuses to define itself in terms of the political or the cultural, that eludes categories. So I suspect Iyer is telling me something about himself by bringing this song up.

“I’m influenced not only by Indian music but also by John Coltrane, by everything he did, of which ‘My Favourite Things’ is just one of many”. He goes on to list the many pianists – all of whom are American – that have influenced him. The prompt was, “Describe the influence of Indian music on your playing.”

There’s an anxiety in his response and it’s the anxiety of someone used to his music being explained through his ethnicity. This might explain the restlessness and range of Iyer’s music, both in terms of its borrowings and of the way it moves. He has (as he is quick to remind me when I persist in talking about India) collaborated with West African and Afro-Cuban musicians; he has learnt from Greek wedding music. In a piece like ‘Mystic Brew’, or ‘Historicity’, shifts in pace, in rhythm, in mood, happen suddenly, like the musicians are impatient; they go abruptly from frenzied to mellow, from dizzyingly complex to just groovy. The music, like Iyer himself, resists stasis and does not want to be pinned down.

Paradoxically, it is precisely this that allows us to pin Iyer down. We can categorise him by his distaste for categories and foremost among these categories is jazz itself. He prefers “creative music”, which may as well be ‘music’. “Historically, it’s a category that’s allowed white critics to decide what gets included in it and it’s a music where most of the major practitioners — Miles, Coltrane, Lester Young — have rejected the label.” Jazz, then, or Iyer’s version of the music we call jazz, is defined by a resistance to itself, by a refusal to be whatever white critics thought were most essential about it. It is the same for Iyer’s Indianness.

Historical interactions between Indian and Black culture – in music at least – emerged in a Harlem whose atmosphere was marked by an energetic eclecticism. People like Don Cherry and the Coltranes (Alice and John) were in dialogue with many cultures, ideologies and music and they picked whatever they thought was cool from them. To isolate their relationship with one in search of a unique affinity is to miss the point of the entire ecosystem.

Note: This piece has been written with inputs from Alex Garnick, a student at Columbia University and a jazz musician.

Ashik Kumar is a writer from Chennai who studies at Columbia University.

How a $50 Homemade Sensor Could Change the Way We Fight Urban Heat

“The coolest thing about the Harlem Heat Project is how people experience the heat using these custom-made sensors.”

The sensor at the heart of the Harlem Heat Project. Its parts cost $50 to source and about two hours to piece together. Source: Adam Glenn

New York: “#117 is back with me. The host has been traveling,” Carlos Jusino says to his colleague while I hang around hoping to chat with him about a tiny contraption in his hand. We are standing on polished wooden floors in the basement of the 21st Century Academy for Community Leadership, a glass fronted building that looks entirely out of place on 152nd Street in Harlem, New York city. Some community members are here to attend a meeting about participatory budgeting and have just broken off into little groups to brainstorm based on which part of Harlem they reside in.

Harlem, a large neighbourhood in the northern part of Manhattan, is one of the worst places to spend the summer in the megacity. It has a high concentration of brick, concrete and asphalt structures. All these materials trap heat during the day and keep the mercury high at night. I read that in a report on WNYC’s site, a public radio station in New York. And among several startling facts about the “heat vulnerability” of Harlem, which is populated mostly by African Americans, is this: “Twice as many people from Central Harlem visit the emergency room for heat stress each year compared to the rest of the city.”

The day I met Jusino, the temperature was up in the “high eighties” as New Yorkers say (between 30º and 35º C), so we found a cool corridor near the stairwell to have a chat about the ‘Harlem Heat Project.’ Jusino is the IT guy for the Harlem-based ‘WE ACT for Environmental Justice’ and got roped into this project for his technical skills. He’s holding a two-centimetre-long sensor in his palm.

“The sensor itself is in three parts,” he begins. “A lithium polymer battery, a central micro-controller and a temperature and humidity monitor.” In all, the device is the size of a thumb with parts soldered onto a circuit board. Every component had been purchased from a hobby electronics website by John Keefe, the data news editor at WNYC. The parts for each sensor add up to $50, and took less than two hours to put together.

“Most of it was done by John,” says Jusino. “He even had a soldering party where people who knew how to solder or those who wanted to learn could come along. It was like a ‘Do it Yourself’ kit and the idea is to put together a cookbook of sorts so people can make their own sensors at home,” he says. The code is available freely on GitHub. It’s currently programmed in a way that wakes up the sensor every 15-20 minutes, checks the temperature and humidity around it, then writes down the data onto a little memory card along with the time of the measurement, and goes back to sleep.

“We wanted to tighten our focus to a neighbourhood and understand better at a community level about how heat affects people,” Adam Glenn, editor of Adapt NY, one of the partners on the project, had told me the day before I met Jusino. “Heat is a silent killer and we wanted look at ‘urban heat islands’, which are pockets within any city and are often not very well documented. There is very little data on indoor air temperatures and how it’s harmful to people’s lives.”

Essentially, how do people cope with the heat indoors? “Here was a public health crisis in the making and this project helps provide data that can affect change and help the community affect change. The city authorities acknowledged that they don’t have the kind of neighbourhood-specific data to understand what was happening in sections of the city.”

So, 30 odd-looking sensors went to live in different parts of Harlem and Washington Heights for the first time this summer. Many were hosted around 150th street, between Broadway and Amsterdam Avenues. Like on Diane Lane-Hyman’s night stand in her three-storey walk-up on 150th street. The elderly Diane is both a ‘host’ and an ‘ambassador’, which is how the project has been organised. Core ambassadors are connected to hosts and can be hosts themselves. They go to their individual hosts, know them personally, pick up data from sensors, and ask them a few questions about how they’ve been doing.

“We also want to collect people’s personal stories on how they are coping with the heat and match that with internal temperature data that is collected by the sensor and also the external satellite data that is collected from NASA satellites,” Jusino says.

While the main experiment was to work with the community on the placement of sensors, the team also picked up metadata on things like the type of building: was it a brownstone or a high rise; the orientation: is it south facing or east facing; presence of an air-conditioner, which would help scientists analyse the data within context; and so forth. However, Glenn had pointed out to me that going forward the project will have to “establish its own ground team to collect data rather than have ambassadors do it. He thinks “the biggest challenge has so far been the community engagement part of the project.”

It’s a pilot “research project” for now, centred around those community members who offered to volunteer for the project. “The coolest thing about the Harlem Heat Project is how people experience the heat using these custom-made sensors. A lot of people die because of heat ailments and mortality in general goes up in these heat wave situations,” says Prathap Ramamurthy, an assistant professor at the City College of New York and an informal advisor to the project. His research involves urban climate and urban heat islands.

“As a physical scientist, I am keen to understand how the building really modulates the climate and on an average summer day, even if you see temperature fluctuations outside, the average temperature inside buildings ends up being the same all day long.”

Ramamurthy is from Chennai, India. He believes such a project can be adapted to urban areas in India, too, especially given the huge numbers who fall prey to heat waves. “India is experiencing rapid urbanisation that is pulling people into cities with no concept of how it will affect temperatures. The construction that has been happening in urban spaces has amplified temperatures a lot,” he says. “The thing about India is that instead of engaging the government, a lot of private entities might be willing to do these kind of things using sensors that don’t even cost that much money.”

Jusino told me he is eager to see how years two and three go. “Imagine, by year three we could have 200 sensors on the ground with real time data.” The tech will evolve too. “The next generation of this sensor is going to be connected to a GSM network so it can send the data wirelessly through a cellular network to a central data warehouse. Though the board will be more expensive, the hope is that we can set up sensors in certain highly impacted hosts.”

“And say our host is very elderly and the temperature and humidity gets above a certain level – you can potentially receive a warning where we can pick up the phone, call the person to check on them and make sure they are drinking enough water and have someone to help them out and let them know of a cooling centre nearby.”

Since the last week of August, the sensors are being picked up by Jusino or dropped off by hosts for the data to be downloaded and analysed in WE ACT’s office in Harlem. The project’s partners will get together in the fall with community members to discuss what can be done to mitigate heat illness in Harlem. Two of the sensors that have come back with the hottest temperatures were actually in the public housing tenements. “There is also a parallel project that has been running for three years now called ‘Heat Seek’, which is the opposite, where sensors are used to identify how cold it gets within homes during the winter. So we could work towards connecting these two projects in the future.”

One short-term goal is to iron out some absurd data that Jusino has had to grapple with this year. “Some of the hosts are elderly and they end up picking up the sensor and bringing it in after a long walk around the neighbourhood to pick up groceries, so there is a little bit of a disconnect between what the sensor is actually doing and how it should remain stationary in their homes.” Ideally somewhere in the bedroom.

“We advise that the sensors are placed somewhere high up away from small hands… We had one sensor fly out the window because a kid got to it and another host misplaced her sensor and for about two weeks we were collecting data from inside her car!”

Sowmiya Ashok is an independent journalist based in New York. She tweets at @sowmiyashok.