The Quarantine Tapes

“Jazz is a music of freedom, as Sun Ra said, because we had to create, we had to fight, we had to struggle, we had to break down barriers.”

“Informed refusal, to me, is a crucial dimension of power. You don’t have real power if you can’t refuse, if you can’t say no to something.”

“The complete erosion of trust and truth in our country where no one knows what to believe...what will it take to restore faith in fact-based discourse? Because that has been substantially undermined.”

“The secret to connecting with other people is to deeply connect with ourselves.”

“I think, sadly, not enough attention is paid to preparedness in peacetime years. People go through these cycles of panic and neglect where a crisis hits, everyone freaks out, and the minute it’s over, attention to resources starts to dwindle and that’s exactly what we saw over the last several years. We’re even seeing it now in the middle of this outbreak where the pandemic isn’t even over and, already, people are relaxing into neglect.”

“I went from that place of believing that what I was doing was on the right side of the angels, if you will, to understanding that there were not only limitations to the utility in what I was doing, but then understanding that, actually, so much of what I was doing was a part of a larger social, economic problem in this nation that preceded, certainly, me and really beginning to search for other ways to address these issues.”

“We learned through Wikileaks and others how all our phone conversations, emails, and so on, were made available to state agencies or even to private agencies and so on and so on. I think that COVID just made us aware, or made it more visible, something that was already going on before.”

“Just the status of race in this country, it’s still aspirational for us, but I do think an awful lot of people are saying, 'I don’t think I ever quite understood. I’m taking this more seriously now'. At least, I hope that’s the case.”

“For me, personally, art is always about challenging the status quo.”

“For me it was remixing the function of the hieroglyph and it just feels like endless possibilities that I’m able to shape-shift, not just myself, but identity, representation, future, people, images--it’s just everything at once. It can be some of everything, which I love.”