Been a minute – this update is about a paper I gave at this year’s IASPM US conference, held March 13-15 at USC’s Thornton School of Music in Los Angeles. I’m grateful for this community of scholars comprising IASPM that’s so consistently committed to thinking broadly about the significance of popular music and its greater ecology. A joint conference with PopCon this year, the theme “BABY, IT’S A LOOK” encouraged folks to think about the import of how fashion and visual culture are relevant to how pop musics are created and received. For me this meant thinking about Chief Xian aTunde Adjuah has been intentionally leaning into his self-representation for years, building and expressing a complex identity that, particularly with his recent records, is looking to maroon culture in NOLA and beyond. I ended up presenting some work at the conference thinking about his record/single Bark Out Thunder Roar Out Lightning that’s offering creolizing musical challenge to any kind of “politics of purity” in terms of personhood and musical genre as much as an indictment of politics—identity or otherwise—in the Unites States. Check out the tune/lyrics – it’s beautiful and simply gutting.
I kept up my tradition of having a clumsy title for my talk—”Sartorial Signifyin(g) on Maroon Culture with Chief Xian aTunde Adjuah”—playing into the conference theme. But I liked the ideas I as able to string together about creolizing musics, individuals, and cultures. Specifically inspired by Jennifer Ponce De León’s work on revolutionary aesthetics and Michael J. Monahan’s work on creolizing subjectivity. I’m interested in how Chief Adjuah’s ideas might be further relatable to the present genre drift we can see in the “jazz” space and also its potential connections (or not) to the recommendations of Black Feminism.
Monahan’s characterization of the creolizing subject as a corrective to the imagined static (white male) subject appropriate to citizenship is helpful for so many reasons:
The creolizing subject…is actively engaged with the ambiguity, permeability, and plasticity of the distinction between the internal and the external, the self and the other. In this way, the creolizing subject is displacing the atomistic social ontology we have inherited from European modernity…Purity takes itself to be a state that one can occupy or achieve (being), but in actuality it requires constant effort in the form of ongoing practices and rituals of purification (becoming), like domination, colonialism, and epistemic closure. The creolizing subject, however, openly affirms and celebrates humanity as an ongoing and open process. (Monahan 2011, 190)
The politics of purity, as unreal and demonstrably harmful as they are, are exactly what’s informing the so-called “reforms” happening in the US these weeks, affirmed via orders from the top down. Conservative US politics wants it both ways: adherence to static and de-historicized notions of identity in valences of race, gender, etc., while also claiming those things don’t matter, that the US is a meritocracy. Both are fallacies. We can learn A LOT from maroon cultures that have worked to make sense of life together outside dominating material and ideological conditions, recognizing and celebrating difference while together making something new together. To that end, Chief Adjuah’s music, instruments, and style are inspiring in how they work to make his alternative idea of the human family and conditions for social relation seem natural, desirable, or, at least, like the only possible, or even imaginable, reality despite hegemonic forces that would have you think otherwise.
In any case, check out the full text of my talk and slides HERE. I’m happy to be in process with y’all. And as always, be in touch with feedback, ideas, whatever.
PAPER ABSTRACT: In the pulsing opening of the eponymous song of his 2023 Ropeadope release, Bark Out Thunder Roar Out Lightning, Chief Xian aTunde Adjuah calls out: “Mau Mau, Maori, Egba, Igbo, Olmec, Aztec, Sioux…” invoking multiple nations connected by histories of self-determination in the face of imperial domination and diaspora. The fifteen-minute performance featuring Chief Adjuah’s voice and kora-like “Adjuah Bow” over Afro Indigenous drumming and droning bass is a recent manifestation of his ongoing genre-blind project, “Stretch Music.” Complementing his musical choices, the Chieftan of the Xodokan Nation of Maroons—a New Orleans Black Indians group—who is also recognized as Grand Griot of New Orleans, deploys a thoughtful self-presentation signifyin(g) on complex personhood. Perhaps best known as a “jazz” trumpeter (despite his opposition to the term) Chief Adjuah’s recent records and personal investments continue the creolizing project of New Orleans musics, drawing broadly from Afrodiasporic, American indigenous, and popular styles in a project of recovery and critical fabulation of ancestral memory. Beyond Stretch Music’s musical inclusivity, Chief Adjuah’s custom trumpet-related instruments and the newly created “Adjuah Bow” demonstrate an awareness of dramatic visual presentation in addition to the sonic. Moreover, his provocative jewelry and clothing that index West African and contemporary urban styles as much as New Orleans Black Indian ceremonial regalia further evince the superabundant hyper-signification of his plural identities. Developing ideas regarding diasporic identity from Stuart Hall and Thomas Turino, this paper investigates how, in the greater ecosystem of jazz musicians that either lean into the neo-classical jazz suit-and-tie or streetwear looks, Chief Adjuah’s sartorial signifyin(g) demonstrate his understanding of how self-presentation ties to his overall projects of self-determination, celebration of Maroon culture, and radical globalized connection.
AJ Kluth 