Three Musings on Healing the Creative Spirit
written by Aakash Mittal
Bahlest Eeble Readings Cycle 14 Fellow
The first piece that I composed was titled Some Last Minute Blues. It was my sophomore year in high school and I had been playing saxophone for less than a year. Yet I was obsessed. I was listening to jazz and practicing morning, noon, and night. I must have been around fourteen or fifteen years old when the assistant band director, Mr. Perez, challenged me to write a tune for our jazz combo to play at the upcoming High School Jazz festival. Being a teenager, I waited until the last minute to write the piece. Hence the title.
The "festival" was a local event hosted by a state university where school bands would play for a panel of adjudicators. After playing our two pieces, including what must have been the world premiere of Some Last Minute Blues, two of the panelists joined us on stage to offer their critique. Both of them were music professors from the Jazz department of the university. One of them was the head of the department and the other one was a piano professor with a long list of performance credits with the who's-who of jazz on his resumé.
"What kind of tune would you call this?" The director asked me about my piece. I didn't know it at the time but it was not a real question. The adjudicator had a specific answer in mind and he wasn't actually interested in how I identified my music. After all, I was just a kid. Fortunately I had thought this through ahead of time and I had been very intentional about the style of the piece. My interest in Jazz had come from my love for the Black American dance form Lindy Hop and the swing dance scene that surrounded it. As a dancer I learned numerous forms under the swing umbrella such as Charleston, Balboa, and Shim Sham. "It's a jump blues," I answered. Both professors looked at each other and their faces erupted in a grin. They began to jump up and down in a goofy manner. It didn't take me long to realize they were making fun of me and it felt terrible. After they finished jumping, the pianist said more to the director than to me, "What is a jump blues?" His voice was skeptical as if I had made up the musical form out of pretension. "It's a shuffle!" The director exclaimed looking at our motley crew of small town kids. Then looking at me the director said, "You wrote a shuffle." He then proceeded to teach us how to play a shuffle.
This memory has stayed with me as one of my first encounters with the power dynamics, bullying, and general meanness that can occur within the field of music. I wish I could say that this interaction was an anomaly in a long and healthy creative life. Rather, this kind of harshness would show itself again and again, taking on various shapes and forms even as my music career flourished. To ensure my creative survival, exploring modalities of healing became a necessary part of my work.* Exploring healing, studying healing, and practicing healing has become a critical component of my creative life. In addition to considering the sonic implications of my work, I now consider the way my work is being rehearsed and how it is being presented. The transmission that occurs during a concert between performers, audiences, composers, producers, and ecosystems is an opportunity for healing. Our creative spirits are powerful, resourceful, and incredibly resilient. Yet overtime cultural beliefs in scarcity, self criticism, and working within a harsh industry can create lasting harmful effects on our music and our lives. Therefore, I wish to share three musings, imaginings and envisionings on healing the creative spirit that are currently at the forefront of my journey.
1. Feel Good About Your Creative Work
Imagine. You pick up an object or an instrument you have never played and you start making sounds. There are no right or wrong sounds. You experiment. You question. You discover a sound and latch on to it. Variations emerge from the repetition. It is both in your control and mysterious. Your childlike curiosity grins. It does not matter how this moment of play will manifest in a future score or a ticketed performance. You put the object or instrument down knowing this is part of your creative work and you feel good about it.
Envision. The quartet plays the final note of your latest score. The three other people who attended applaud. You stand or nod when recognized. Of course you know there is more to learn and new sounds to discover. Now that you have heard the premiere you may make a few more changes. You also know this piece is joining a larger body of work that you have created. You know that you are part of a long continuum of artists, elders and ancestors moving both forward and back through time. You feel good about your creative work.
I want to start with how we feel about the work we create because we are so often trained to diminish ourselves long before we pick up an instrument or put pencil to paper. I believe that the way we respond to our creative work is often a learned behavior. We are taught to self-deprecate as a form of “humility,” or to meet success with criticism as a sign of charging ahead toward greater excellence. We learn that being creative and vulnerable can be dangerous. We witness the harsh criticisms bestowed upon other people within our friend groups and communities.
But what if we turn that around? What if we acknowledge that "we are doing a great job" regardless of how a piece comes together artistically or commercially? What if our learned behavior was to breathe in how wondrous it is that we get to make music with and for other people? What if we could trust ourselves and our process, knowing that each piece is part of a larger body of work?
This learned behavior takes practice. If you think of the number of times you or someone else has diminished your creative efforts either directly or subversively, that repetition reinforced your current beliefs about your work. Building a new pattern of thought will be a different process for everyone and it will take practice. Fortunately, as musicians we are well versed in the art of practicing.
Ponder. How do you feel about your creative work? What is something you can do to unconditionally love your creativity? If you are like me and it helps to have someone give you permission then let me do that for you. It is okay to feel good about your work. In fact it is okay to feel GREAT about your work. It is okay to feel great about your work regardless of how many people attend the premiere, how much money you make from it, whether the music community applauds it or not, and whether the work is complete or in progress.
2. The Creative Work You Do Is Enough
Imagine. You are working on a score and the deadline is looming. You feel the pressure of needing time to write, edit and engrave. Yet from your day job to family obligations or an unexpected flat tire, the day gets away from you. The piece was brewing in your imagination throughout the day. You trust your process and you know that for today, this is enough.
Envision. You are in your creative work space. Rather than following practice routines or strict times tables, you spend the time you have riding the wave of your inspiration. Painting turns into playing piano which morphs again into sketching ideas with pen and paper. At the end of your time there is no measurable "progress" toward the end of your score. You trust your process and know that your process is enough.
In my experience the culture of our music communities includes a scarcity mindset. As a student I was bombarded by the idea that you can never practice enough, you can never learn enough repertoire, and you can never take enough lessons. As a young professional I found there were never enough gigs, there was never enough budget, and when you did get a gig there was rarely enough audience to please the venue owner. As my career grew, more and more scarcities were added to the list. I never applied for enough grants, I never got enough press, I never attended enough conferences, and I never had enough time for composing.
The mindset of "never enough" had disastrous results on my life. It led from tendonitis caused by over practicing to a fear of practicing at all. It led to taking every gig regardless of the cost to my personal life. It led to writer's block and creative dry spells. And at the end of it I still felt "not enough." It was around this time in my healing journey that I read a line by shame researcher Brene Brown, "The opposite of scarcity is not abundance; the opposite of scarcity is simply enough."
What does it mean to be an artist that is enough? The scarcity mindset is often defended as a necessary motivation in the drive toward excellence. However I want to pause, take a breath, and ask a question: Is addressing the feeling of scarcity really why we make music? I think that most of my colleagues would say no.
I believe that letting go of the scarcity mindset will help us unleash what is possible. Instead of filling an endless hole of "not enough" we can let inspiration be our guide. Our relationships and the world we live in will motivate projects. We will create new rituals for people to gather around and experience. Whether you write half a piece or one hundred pieces, let that be enough and see where your muse takes you.
Ponder. Where in your creative life do you feel enough? Where do you feel scarcity? What kind of rituals or practices would help you release the scarcity mindset and reimagine what it means to be enough?
3. You Are the Music Industry
Imagine. You are a composer charged with creating a new experience for your community. The work is highly anticipated. Your community members check in with you and offer enthusiasm and encouragement. There is no deadline unless you need one to finish. The community values you and your work. They support you materially and emotionally through the process. They understand the import of the work’s role in gathering people together for a shared experience. In this community art is sacred and worthy of communal resources. Your premiere is not evaluated based on turnout, ticket sales, or press reviews. Money is not part of this ritual. While the art is seen as an act of service to the community, the artist is taken care of and their needs and wants are met.
Envision. You stand in a room of people conversing and enjoying each other's company. One of the threads that tie this group together is that everyone works intersectionality within a process of designing music, sounding music, and producing music so that people may experience it. In this room everyone is allowed to be vulnerable and messy. In this room the roles people play in creating music are important and they are not expected to be a person’s complete identity. In this room there is no hierarchy. In this room there is respect for the wisdom of the elders of this community and joy in the unbridled passion of the young.
There is healing that needs to be done within the music industry. Whether you make your income from music or not when we get on stage we often enter a web of gender discrimination, racial profiling, and ableism. To walk into a room that has a stage we have to continuously strategize, confront gatekeeping, and code switch. It is exhausting to say the least and it results in many wonderful artists no longer creating or presenting work.
Much of my music training was within academic institutions or with people who were trained in academic institutions. I was taught to develop skills that would allow me to "fit in" to the music industry as imagined by these institutions. While some of my colleagues are blessed with finding tremendous success in this model (hard won success at that) for me it is often a place of dead ends, frustration and rejection. Some of this is due to my positionality as someone of mixed ethnicity who creates music that is not fully jazz, not fully Indian, and not fully New Music. Rather than feeling bad about my work, and assuming rejection stemmed from my work not being "enough," I found healing in the realization that "I am the music industry."
The music industry is comprised of people. People who play music, people who tune pianos, people who clean the hall, people who publish the scores, people who sit at the box office, people who book the concerts, people who write reviews, people who own the record labels. As a person, you can play any role in the music industry at any time. This gives you power over your art and your career.
In addition to chasing the opportunities offered by other people in the industry, it can be healing to be the person creating the opportunities. Yes, it is a lot of work to write a score, organize a premiere, and publish the music. However we already established that the piece you wrote is enough and it is okay for you to feel great about that work. Creating opportunities for yourself and others puts you in a position of leadership. It gives you control over your vision and your career. It can be healing to know that not only is your work good enough, but it can also be presented in the world and experienced by other people.
Over two decades after the premiere of Some Last Minute Blues I found myself at another milestone in my creative journey. Following seven years of work and development on my set of trio music titled Nocturne I was ready to release an album of the music. I utilized my experience within the industry to "play the game" and "hustle" an album release performance. This concert was a catalyst moment in my career featuring several established musicians in the New York scene. I hired a known publicist to support the concert. I had built a following in the city and I was confident I could bring out an audience. I had established personal relationships with a dozen venues in the city. I was ready. Surely one of the many venues for creative music in NYC would do me the honor of booking my show.
Nope.
I have a spreadsheet listing every venue I pitched my show to, every followup, and the date they said no or I ran out of time to follow up anymore. My harsh critical voice said, "Perhaps you are not good enough? Perhaps you should not feel good about this project?" And then I remembered the time when I wrote Some Last Minute Blues and that "I am the music industry."
At the same time that those two professors were critiquing my work at the High School Jazz festival, I was already creating opportunities for myself. Hungry to play jazz, and living in a small town in Northern Colorado, I assembled my own band and found coffee shops for us to play in for tips. We rarely made money but we were playing. Over time our music grew, we grew, and the opportunities presented to us grew. Remembering this and confronting what felt like my inability to "fit in" to the music industry in NYC, I decided to produce my own show. I booked a hall, hired a publicist, rehearsed the band, and released my album. In addition to being a screaming success, it was tremendously healing. Since I was the presenter I offered free tickets to every venue booker on my spreadsheet that said no to me. I had placed myself in a position of power and it allowed me to be generous and strengthen those relationships further. I was able to present my work the way I wanted to present it.
Healing the Creative Spirit
In American society I often feel that healing is framed as a return to a previous “more perfect” state. In my studies with Milford Graves, my thinking evolved to conceptualize healing as a transformation into our next state of being. Similarly, I have been taught by elders, mentors, and therapists that healing is non-linear. It can be just as improvised, experimental, and ephemeral as our creative life. They taught me that moving toward a state of being that feels good to you is a form of healing. Feeling good about your creative work is healing. Knowing that you are enough is healing. Empowering yourself within the music industry can be healing. There are infinite modalities of healing to help soothe the numerous forms of hurt we can experience.
Ponder. What if our collective magnum opus was to build cultures, communities, and industries that prioritize healing ourselves, each other, and our ecosystems?
What would that sound like?
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*I want to name some of the mentors and elders who introduced me to various modalities of healing in this footnote. Tia Fuller was the first person to plant the seed in my mind that music could be healing. She did it at a music camp at the same institution I write about in this essay a few years later. Imani Uzuri has played an important role in my understanding of healing within various modalities. Milford Graves showed me how to study healing from a technical and physical perspective. Many of my current thoughts around healing come from my work with him. Muhammed Garland is guiding me on my personal healing journey.
As an artist I seek to heal my communities, music pedagogy and myself through my work. Through the intersections of improvisation, Hindustani raga music and western notation I strive to combat anti-Indian sentiments, challenge patriarchy and eliminate the harshness that is often prevalent in music education. This odyssey has led me to seek out mentors and elders within a variety of musical traditions. From 2013 to 2015 I studied Hindustani Raga Music with Prattyush Banerjee in Kolkata, India with a fellowship from the American Institute of Indian Studies. My time in India inspired a series of new pieces titled Nocturne. Nocturne is my latest recording as a bandleader. The album was hailed as "a magical, evocative suite" by New York Music Daily. Upon moving to Brooklyn New York I began a long study of music, creativity, biology and healing with Milford Graves. It was during this time that I began to further explore the relationship between movement, imagination and sound in my work. 2021 marks twenty years of my work as a performer, composer and teacher. I live in Brooklyn, NY with my wife Jayanthi Bunyan. When I'm not making music I love to cook, play games and drink tea.
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