The Woodshed

The Woodshed, the act of shedding, the several expansive efforts by jazz musicians to create autonomous workshops and schools; the consistently strenuous rehearsal practices of these same musicians; the calls from Miles or Mingus to join the band; the urgency of the first practice; the non-performative showmanship of it. Where does it go, how does it linger and haunt current music-making?

Is it different now? Do we know how to carry and pursue these dreams after decades of interruption and deferral and codification of what was once improvised into a set of givens? Reciprocal in that we wanted to study and shed skins together with or without an audience, in preparation for the stage, but also as a manner of rejecting the spotlight's hold on the music.

This is a day-long endeavor to hold these things together as practices, the root of any live event, and conversations / conventions that happen on the margins and in the specter of the stage, backstage. Where we return to ourselves before and after what is called a show; where we go to question and uproot the trappings of showmanship by being intensely casual and candid. Maybe this is one aspect of the future of Black performance, that practice becomes main event. We'll see.

Rules of Engagement

FOR PERFORMERS

The Woodshed is a jam session that invites Black musicians and sound artists–especially those interested in noise, bleep bloops, experimental music, the avant-garde, and as of yet undefined genres–to convene and make music together alongside an unannounced group of musicians and artists invited by the program organizers.

Doors open at 11:45am and Part One of the program begins at 12:00pm. Part Two doors open at 4:45pm and the program begins at 5:00pm. There will be two invited artists / performers, and a house band during each program section. The Woodshed hosts will call your name to invite you on-stage to perform. You will be performing on-stage with other musicians on the sign-up sheet and members of the house band.

Please show up early to sign up to play. There will be a sign up sheet available in the loft space upon entry to the program.

FOR AUDIENCES

The Woodshed prioritizes listening, and as such, the audience is a crucial part of the program! Positive feedback of all kinds is strongly encouraged (clapping, snapping, short shouts of encouragement).

Anyone disrupting or giving negative feedback to the performers (booing, trash talking) will be asked to stop, and if necessary, asked to leave. Have fun, stay engaged!

We encourage you to review the downloadable Rules of Engagement and Manifesto PDFs for additional insights about tech backline and participation alongside the program's framework.

BIOS

Harmony Holiday is a writer, dancer, and experimental filmmaker whose work surveys music, ancestry, death and rebirth, and celebrity. She is the author of 5 collections of poetry including MAAFA (2022), and also curates an archive of griot poetics and a related performance and conversation series at LA’s 2220Arts. At the core of her practice is a pursuit of visual and literary vocabularies that might best express the melancholic hope endemic to Black American social life. As Holiday navigates the depths of Black remembrance and loss, she sets her sights on the relationship between “the new”, “the archival,” and the spaces between them that defy linear time. She treats these energies as collectively improvising ensembles in which prose and poetry sit by turns comfortable and chaotic, next to images cribbed from Black artistic and private life. Most recently she has received awards from the Silver’s and Rabkin foundations, and is completing a memoir Love is War for Miles, a biography of Abbey Lincoln, and collection of poems.

Jeremy Toussaint-Baptiste’s work, spanning roles as both artist, composer, and performer, considers errant relations that push toward the limits of subjectivity. Tousiant-Bapiste’s fellowships and awards include the Camargo Foundation Core Program Fellowship; Bemis Center for Contemporary Arts Sound Artist-In-Residence; Bessie Award for Outstanding Music Composition and Sound Design, the Jerome Foundation Airspace Residency at Abrons Arts Center; and the Rauschenberg Residency 381. Recent exhibitions and performances include The Institute of Contemporary Art at VCU, 1708 Gallery, Richmond, VA; Berlin Atonal, Berlin, DE; MoMA PS1, Queens, NY; Performance Space, New York, NY; The Kitchen, Brooklyn, NY; Philadelphia Museum of Art, Philadelphia, PA; and The Studio Museum in Harlem, New York, NY.

Brooklyn-born and based musician, experimentalist, and multi-instrumentalist Taja Cheek, aka L’Rain, is mapping the enormity of how to change. Cheek has dipped her toes in every corner of the arts, through her work at some of the most prestigious art institutions in NYC and collaborations with the likes of Naama Tsabar, Kevin Beasley, Justin Allen, and others in the contemporary arts. Heavily blending genres (thus making new unnamable space for herself) including but not limited to gospel, jazz, and neo-soul, L’Rain fractures and mends our expectations of what musicians, especially Black women musicians, are categorized to do versus what they need to do (and actually do). Her music demands introspection from ready ears with an array of keyboards, synths, and hauntingly delicate vocals that create a genre entirely her own. L’Rain encourages us to listen, laugh, mourn, hum, linger, realize, know, accept, and release who we are, who and what we can be when we allow movements of change to be a necessary component of—not an antithesis to—rest.