On My Practice

The Echoes Passage (Opening Reflection):

I believe that in the beginning, there was sound. What we are experiencing now are many, many, many echoes of that one sound. If we are tuned in, we can become vessels for those echoes. Stewards, even…

I am interested in what becomes possible when we collectively attend to them—how they might help us heal ourselves, our families, our communities, and our relationship to one another. Sound is how I connect with the Creator. It is how I remember and how I imagine. Through sound, I continue expanding my own capacity to hold and transmit the echoes.

I often wonder what other sounds want to come through me and what is required for me to become a better vessel. Remembering that I am not doing this work alone, but with divine help, has deeply aided my own journey through grief. It is my life's work to offer that possibility to others while remaining open to what they, in turn, might teach me.

Artist Statement:

My work exists at the intersection of music, memory, and public life, where sound becomes a method of preserving history and making it usable for the present. I approach performance as a form of archival practice—one that does not only store information, but activates it through voice, place, and collective experience.

I am interested in what it means to treat music as a living archive. In many of the spaces I work in—concert halls, museums, churches, streets, sacred sites, and post-industrial landscapes—history is not something that sits behind glass. It is something that moves through people. Songs carry testimonies that may never have been formally recorded. Voices hold stories that outlast the conditions that tried to erase them. Community gatherings become sites where memory is not only recalled, but renewed.

A significant part of my practice is rooted in Black expressive traditions where sound has always functioned as record, resistance, and survival. From spirituals and blues to contemporary spoken word and hip-hop collaborations, I understand these forms not only as artistic expressions but as technologies of remembrance. In this sense, performance becomes a way of holding history in motion.

I am also interested in the ways sound can function as remembrance, ritual, and communal care—creating spaces where memory, grief, healing, and ancestral presence can be encountered together.

My work often takes shape through sonic memorials, requiem spaces, grief sanctuaries, and site-specific acts of remembrance. Whether unfolding in civic spaces, sacred landscapes, museums, or cultural institutions, these works create opportunities for people to encounter personal and historical memory at once. They do not seek to resolve grief, but to give it form, dignity, shared space, and the possibility of communal healing.

I am also deeply invested in place-based work. Sites such as sacred burial grounds, historic churches, museums, and civic spaces usher in the work. In these contexts, architecture, landscape, and history are not backdrops but collaborators. They hold the stories of what has happened there before, and live sound offering open the way for those stories to come alive through and to those who are open and listening.

Across my practice, I return to the idea that artists are not neutral observers of history but participants in its preservation and interpretation. Cultural memory has been buried, erased and replaced with untruths that diminish our divinity. But we are coming to remember that what is divine never actually dies. It only transforms and remains accessible to all who regard the Creator, the breath and the spirit of all living things. At a time when Black history and other marginalized narratives are being contested or diminished, I see artistic practice as stewardship: a conviction and a calling.

In this way, my work asks a simple but urgent question: What does it mean to build an archive that is not static, but living?

For me, the answer is found in how we perform and remember that all life shares one sacred breath that holds the one sound from the beginning. In this wondering, perhaps we can collectively host sacred sound and divine remembrance that reaches beyond what we can see.