JoVia Armstrong: Shaping the Future of Sound through Innovation and Education
This transcript is linked to the podcast and video versions of this interview, with complete show notes with many important links.
JoVia Armstrong:
We need more mentors. Typically, when I perform, I tell my audience how I'm someone who. I don't like to complain a lot. I like to do. And even with my friends, I give them two times to complain to me about something. And then after that, it's like, "All right, you got to do something about this." And so I hear people today complaining about the kids today and what the kids aren't doing, what the kids should be doing. And I look at them and I ask, "Well, what are you doing?" I don't mind taking time a few hours out of my day to go to a school and show students how to do something in music, how to change their violin into an electric violin so that they can run it through these fun guitar pedals and just try to blow their minds with things and show them, "Yeah, this is a thing I made in school and this is a resistor and this is a capacitor and this is a nine volt battery and this is a speaker. If you put these things together, you can make your own microphone, you can make your own headphones." And a part of that is also showing them that a lot of the stuff out here that we are buying, you can make it. We have 3D printers at libraries.
Leah Roseman:
Hi, you’re listening to Conversations with Musicians, with Leah Roseman. JoVia Armstrong is a an award-winning percussionist, composer and educator whose work blends rhythm, technology, and experimental composition. This year she was voted as one of the best percussionists in the world by DownBeat Magazine’s 74th Annual Critics Poll. She leads the electroacoustic ensemble Eunoia Society which explores sound as a healing tool and you’ll be hearing music from their first two albums, The Antidote Suite and Inception, which are linked in the show notes for you. In fact, I found out about JoVia when I interviewed Leslie De Shazor a couple of years ago for this podcast, and my episode with her is linked for you along with a few other suggested episodes. Today you’ll learn about JoVia’s collaborators and mentors including Nicole Mitchell and Francisco Mora Catlett as well as her development as a musician with the encouragement of her family. JoVia spoke with me about the importance of mentoring youth, self-reflection and self-care. She is currently Assistant Professor of music at the University of Virginia, where she teaches in the Composition and Computer Technology Program while researching the intersection of Black contemplative music, technology and urban space. You can watch this video on my YouTube or listen to the podcast, and I’ve also linked the transcript.It’s a joy to bring these inspiring episodes to you, and I do all the many jobs of research, production and publicity. Have a look at the show notes of this episode on my website, where you’ll find all the links, including different ways to support this podcast, and other episodes you’ll enjoy!
All right, Jovia, thanks so much for joining me.
JoVia Armstrong:
Hi, thank you for having me.
Leah Roseman:
I can see lots of gear behind you. I'm kind of curious because your keyboards, they're kind of up high. I guess that moves when you're playing?
JoVia Armstrong:
No, it doesn't. They're stable. It's just to save space. It's called an A rack, I think is what they call them. So I'm able to have three keyboards here and one gives me my vintage sounds. So whenever I want to channel the music of the '60s or '70s and I want that Fender Rhodes sound, I can use the one on the bottom because I can get a really nice B3 organ and Rhodes and Wurlitzer. And the one up top is a fancy synthesizer, so that can make a lot of creative sounds. And then the one in the middle is my midi keyboard. So just those three is what I use.
Leah Roseman:
Now I've been following your work since I interviewed Leslie DeShazor, your friend and longtime collaborator a few years ago.
JoVia Armstrong:
Yes.
Leah Roseman:
So I'll be linking her episode in the show notes for people. And I was curious to know if you're still playing together, but I looked on your YouTube and yeah, you still do some stuff together sometimes.
JoVia Armstrong:
Yeah, we do. She's touring with Hamilton so much that it's very difficult to get her. I have to learn about a show months in advance and then she has to go through a process of asking the folks at Hamilton if she could get that night off or that weekend off. And so it's just a little difficult. But yeah, we still collaborate. Whenever I can get her, I'll get her.
Leah Roseman:
So the last few years you've had a lot of personal and professional changes moving across the country. You're a Professor at University of Virginia now.
JoVia Armstrong:
Yeah.
Leah Roseman:
So I was curious if you want to dive into that a little bit, what you're doing with the students, your academic work.
JoVia Armstrong:
Yeah. I'm trying to make change in society. When I was growing up, I used to think that saying that children are our futures, I used to think that was such just a cliche, but the older you get, you start thinking like, "Hey, these young folks, they're going to be the thinkers and the movers and the shakers of the world." And so what I do at UVA is I try to expose those students to everything that I can because we assume that because they have access to the internet and Google and that we assume that they are educating themselves with all of the information that's out there and they're not. You learn that they are into what they're into and they're not necessarily doing these deep dives into research on different topics or histories, including music. If I were to mention a Fairlight or a Fender Rhodes to a student, a lot of them won't know what that is.
And so I try to expose them to all the different instruments that have existed from years in the past. And a lot of what I've learned too is that they have software. So their software does all these things, but all they see in the software is the name. They don't really know what the instrument is. And so something as simple as a hi-hat, they know to use it in their music, but they have not touched it. And so I expose them to those things. Now that's very simple. That's a very simple idea to say, "Hey, you don't know the difference between a B3 Hammond organ and this organ over here, so let me show you what these sounds do." And I do that because your best producers know these things. They know whether or not to use an organ or an accordion or some other instrument.
And then on the other side of things is the business. So I have a music business course there that I teach, and it's not really for anyone looking to go into the commercial side of the industry per se. It's mostly for independent artists. If they want to write their own music and pave their own way, that's what I show them. So the class is called Creative Strategies for the Independent Artist. And in that class I show them how do you put a tour together without an agent? It's so hard to get an agent, so incredibly hard. And so I just tell them, I ask the question, "Do you need one? What can you do for yourself right now without one? Until you get an agent, what can you do for yourself?" So I show them how to put a tour together, what an input list is, how to create a stage plot.
I have some really special activities. I brought my manager in last year and I had the class, I split the class up in two sides. One side represented me, the other side of the class represented him, and I had them negotiate our contract.
Leah Roseman:
That's good.
JoVia Armstrong:
And it was great. It was really good because all of these light bulbs turn on, you can see them. All of their eyes were like, "Wait a minute, this person's going to get 15% of everything you do, everything." And when you go on YouTube to check out different interviews of artist managers, these folks are taking 15% of not just the music, but also what you do outside of music. And I think it's horrible to exploit people that way. But either way, it's a good conversation. So after that special class, the next class, we have a conversation around it. What does it mean to manage someone?
Why is it that Walmart can have a manager and a manager has a salary cap and there's employees, but the role of the manager in that situation is just guiding the store where artists feel like, "Oh, the manager's going to guide me." And so you're kind of giving this agency to this person when you are the talent. And so I'm really just showing them how to think differently about their own careers. And I tell them, "If you want to go that route, you can. Whatever route you want to go in, you can go into that space." But I just want them to be aware of what's really happening and showing them that you can be an independent artist. You can have a manager, you can have these things, but just know what you're getting into.
Leah Roseman:
When you say that managers take 15% off other income earned outside music, what kind of things?
JoVia Armstrong:
Leah, you wouldn't believe it. If you have a side business, like a lawn mowing company, they feel like, "Oh, your business is doing well because of your music career. I got you here and so anything you do now is just going to bloom." So what I'm seeing is that this happens to a lot of very young artists because a manager will come along or a person who calls himself a manager and they'll see this 16-year-old kid with all this talent and say, "I'm going to help your music career." And so they feel like because they are starting with them from the very beginning, that anything that comes out of that music career, they deserve money, some type of percentage from that. So managers, they could book shows and they could get their percentage from that. Besides booking shows, they're basically making phone calls all day or emailing people back and forth.
At some point though, those phone calls come to you in your career. So in the beginning, yes, you have to do a lot of legwork and that is their reasoning behind it is I put in all this work in the very beginning for you. The thing is that it makes it complicated with someone like me who's been doing this for 30 something years already, who's already established. So for me to get an artist manager, they can't really respond with that. They can't say, "I brought you from the bottom and brought you up here." And so it looks a little different, but I've heard stories about that managers wanting percentages of the. They want publishing. They want publishing rights, they want copyrights. Yeah, it's tough. I think a lot of managers nowadays would just have to get many artists under their belt in order for this percentage to make sense to them.
But yeah, that's what I mean. I've heard these stories about, yeah, this person wanted a portion of this or that, this thing that I do that has nothing to do with music.
Leah Roseman:
So in terms of mentoring students in your role as professor, you're also teaching drums?
JoVia Armstrong:
No.
Leah Roseman:
And percussion? Oh, no.
JoVia Armstrong:
No. No. I mean, UVA already has people percussion instructors, so I'm not in that area. I'm in a different program, which is called Composition and Computer Technology. Yeah. So I'm on the composer side, not the performance side in the department.
Leah Roseman:
Well, I thought we could get into, I listened a lot to your Eunoia Society albums that they've been out for a few years, but somebody who's a longtime collaborator of yours is Nicole Mitchell, the flutist, and she was on the Antidote Suite, and I noticed you've been playing with her more recently too. Actually, the second track, Meditations on Oya, features Nicole Mitchell.
JoVia Armstrong:
Yeah. So Meditations on Oya, and I have to say this first, I composed the music for Inception first. I composed the Music for Inception in 2019, and the music for the Antidote Suite, I composed it later around 2021. And so I had gotten deeper into what makes music meditative or contemplative. So with that track, I had really got into drones and reverb and really thinking about their placement in the music as a composer, not just as someone who thought that meditative music is supposed to be soft and quiet and just kind of put you to sleep. It was more so about how do you use these elements as a composer to write a song that is unique and a song where you hear it and you would think, "Oh, this is Jovia Armstrong's song from the Antidote Suite." A lot of times if you go to a health spa or someplace for a massage or any place like that, they put on this music that's just this really, it sounds like a cloud of beautiful sound.
And I though to myself, "I never know who the artist is, who created this." And so there was no distinction for me with that music. And I just thought like, "Well, why do we think that this is all there is to meditative music? There's got to be something else there." And so with Meditations on Oya, you hear a lot of repetition, you hear the drone in the bass, you hear polyrhythms through the African drums, you hear improvisation, and you hear reverb, and you hear arpeggios. So those are all elements of music that I found to put us in contemplative states of mind or trance-induced states of mind.(Music: clip of Meditations on Oya from The Antidote Suite)
Yeah, Nicole and I met in the year 2000, so I've been working with her for 26 years. I'm on several of her records. We've toured together quite a bit. I was one of the percussionists on the Mandorla Awakening album, and so we traveled to many places in Europe.
And yeah, she's become, since we met, just like a big sister to me, a mentor, and she's really an amazing person to work with and learn from.
Leah Roseman:
What are some things you think you've learned from her?
JoVia Armstrong:
One is just understanding the record industry better. She's on the side of the industry that we don't. Most of the world knows the commercial side of the music industry, and then there's this other side where a lot of artists are a little bit more dependent on the DIY scene and grants and other types of funding through nonprofits. And so even with music, I've watched how she can compose music fairly quickly. She has this creative flow that I really enjoy about her work. And I want to say between her and my mentor, Francisco Mora Catlett, I've really learned through both of them about just the value of creativity, the liberation it gives you, but not just you, but also to your audience.
I can't really even put it into words what music does for us. There's a lot of books written on it, but it's so much deeper to me when it comes to liberation. And liberation is something that I really thrive for in not just my work, but my life, just to be able to get up and make a decision about whether or not I'm going to meditate for five minutes or meditate for 20 minutes or meditate for the whole day. And for me, that meditation, that moment of meditation and contemplation is where I enjoy getting to know myself. And when you really get to know yourself, I think you become free. I think you become more and more free. And I'm speaking internally, right? There's, of course, things outside of us externally that we can't control, but yeah, she's kind of a free bird.
Leah Roseman:
So her project, it's like Afro-folk futurism?
JoVia Armstrong:
One of them is, yeah. So the one we have together, Black Earth SWAY. Yeah. So what makes it, I guess, the Afrofuturism part is the electronics that we all use in the group. There's four of us, four women in that group, Nicole, myself, and the other two are a pianist. We had Alexis Lombre for a few years, but she decided to focus on her solo career. So now we have Zahili Zamora Gonzalez who lives in New York. And so Zahili is bringing in this Afro-Cuban jazz because she's from Cuba, and I have this Cajon, which is a box drum that originated out of Africa, but is well known in Peru. And so it's a very traditional folk instrument for Peruvians and also in Cuba. But I add these cymbals in, which kind of brings it into the future from tradition to this contemporary sound. And then we have Coco Elysses who's playing the Diddley Bow, which is a African American one string instrument. And she makes her own. They're beautiful. She puts jewels and she just adorns her instruments when she makes them.
And it's a folk instrument, of course, but she's also running the Diddley Bow through a bunch of guitar pedals to also bring it into the future. And so that's what makes it Afrofuturism jazz and funk, or I should say folk.
Leah Roseman:
I'd like to talk about both Inception and the Antidote Suite. Which one do you want to start with?
JoVia Armstrong:
The Antidote Suite.
Leah Roseman:
Okay. The Antidote Suite is such a special project. I want to get into the commission and Dr. Bridget Cooks, but I want people to hear a little bit of the music. And that first track, it's so beautiful, ambient Breathe. Do you want to just say a couple words on that and then people can hear a short clip?
JoVia Armstrong:
Yeah. I think at the time, so I was in grad school when I was working on this project, and it was commissioned by Bridget Cooks, who's a professor at UC Irvine where I was in school. And I, myself, as a grad student, just needed to breathe. So I was working on this concept of Black meditative music, wondering if it was a genre that existed outside of what we call spiritual jazz. And I was really learning about breath work at the time, and with Bridget Cooks, with her exhibit, I spoke to most of the visual artists who were involved, and some of the stories were just so deep and profound, and I found myself just wanting to breathe and thought that it would be a really great introduction for the record.(Music: clip of track 1 Breathe, The Antidote Suite)
Leah Roseman:
And in this project, you mixed sounds that were contributed by the artists in the exhibit?
JoVia Armstrong:
Well, it's two different things happening, right? There was the actual exhibit itself, which was in, I want to say, I believe four different art galleries. I created a soundscape for that space. And so the soundscape in the space was a mixture of some of the visual artists speaking. I went through the Library of Congress and also found recordings of Lorraine Hannsberry and other artists, poets speaking. And I tried to use those sounds and blend them in with this soundscape for the museum to set the atmosphere. On the record, the record was mostly sounds that came from our instruments. So the whole band used different types of processing through hardware, including Leslie with her violin, and that's how we created a lot of the sounds that you hear on the record. None of that was sampled except for, I think, the very, very beginning of Beautifully Black. I used a gentleman speaking about birds in the morning. So that was the only sample that I used in the whole record.
Leah Roseman:
So Bridget Cooks, University of California, Irvine. So did you work with her at all in your role as a grad student?
JoVia Armstrong:
Well, I initially met her because I think I had some general questions. I was getting into my research and trying to figure out what is it that I'm here for. And I saw her on the school's website and I liked her work and things that she was doing. And so I ended up just meeting her just to meet her. And also, there are not that many Black professors at a lot of schools, and so I just generally wanted to meet her. And we spoke and we got to know each other. And then, I don't know, maybe six months later she asked me if I could compose the music for that project. She went to another professor first, because that's typically what you do is you collaborate with other professors, but that professor recommended that she maybe utilize my skills in it, and I'm glad she did.
Leah Roseman:
So what was it like living in California?
JoVia Armstrong:
Oh, man. It's really, really hard to say because it was during the pandemic. Yeah. As a musician, a lot of times we think about either moving to New York or moving to LA or moving to Nashville. And I always thought that my spirit belonged in New York, but I didn't really. As a person who wanted a balance in life of nature and city life, New York wasn't it for me, which is why I ended up in Chicago. And then LA was just an expensive move. And so I just never got to a place in life where I had enough money to even go that route. I wasn't even really trying to get to LA, honestly. And so once I got to grad school, I was in Irvine for the first year and a half. And so that's when the pandemic hit and the school gave us an option to leave our grad housing and all the dorms.
And so most of us left. And so there was many students who went back home. I moved to LA because my sister and her husband were there and they lost their roommate. Her job because of the pandemic, her job put her on furlough. So she had to leave and go back to Maryland. And so my sister said, "Hey, since UC Irvine is allowing you all to leave, could you come here and just help us with the rent?" And so that's how I ended up in LA. But it was kind of disheartening because it's like you live in LA as a musician and you want to go out and network and perform and I couldn't. I did a couple of things when things kind of lifted a little bit, but the University of Virginia hired me right at the end. And so I had to leave.
So I didn't get a chance to be an LA musician. And when things started to lift, I did try to meet people and it was difficult. I mean, it's difficult meeting friends as an adult in a new space, in a new city. And it seemed that everyone in LA, everyone was like an industry person. And so if you really weren't in the industry, they weren't trying to waste time becoming your friend if there wasn't some type of common denominator. But I'm very happy here. Virginia has been great.
Leah Roseman:
And the sister that you were staying with, is that the same sister you used to listen to her records when you were a kid?
JoVia Armstrong:
Oh yeah. Well, okay. So you've done your research. My , that sister in LA, she went into architecture, so that's the world that she's in. The sister that got me into music, Joyce, her name is Joyce and she passed away after the first year of grad school, right before the pandemic. Thank you. Oh my goodness. She was such a music head. That woman listened to everything. And I call her a woman because she was 15 years older than me. And so I didn't even know she was my sister. I mean, when I was five, six years old, she lived with my grandmother who was eight houses down. And so I saw them all the time, but I just thought it was this cool lady that just liked to hang out with me. The concept of sister, because I didn't have a little sister yet. I had two older brothers and I said, "Oh, my sister. Cool." And she was just so cool. She was into Sheila E and she loved Prince, Sheila E, she loved hip hop, R&B, jazz. And she and I always had this dream of going to the Montreux Jazz Fest together, but she took me to my first concerts. I went to see the Doobie Brothers because of her Manhattan Transfer and Nancy Wilson and Joe Williams. And she would take me to the Detroit Jazz Festival every year. But yeah, she was the one who got me into drums. She brought me my first drum set when I was maybe around eight, nine years old. And ever since then, I've just been playing. But if you ask my dad, my dad says that I used to play on pots and pans when I was a baby.
Leah Roseman:
I'm so sorry for your loss of Joyce. I didn't know. What would you like people to know about her?
JoVia Armstrong:
She was just full of life. I mean, she walks in a room and it was just this energy. We call her Dee Dee because her name was Joyce Denise Davis. And so we call her Dee Dee. And Dee Dee would walk in the room and it's like she's here. And it's interesting. I want to say I think she influenced me the most within my womanhood because again, she seemed really free.
She wanted to do things that society tells us that women can't or shouldn't do. I remember she wanted a T-Top, a Thunderbird. She wanted it to be white and she got it. She got her white Thunderbird and it's just muscle car that she would drive around. She was just into a lot of different things and she did it without thinking about who's looking at her or who's judging her. The simplicity of these things that I did with her when I was a kid, when I say that she hung out with me, of course she wasn't taking me to bars. She was taking me to get her car washed or she was taking me to get McDonald's or these very simple errands around the city is what she did with me. And I really, I don't know, I grew up loving that. Even when I go out on dates with guys, they always want to do these extravagant things and I'm like, "Hey, can we just go to the park?" I'm pretty simple or yeah, don't buy me roses because those are going to die in a few days.I could use some drumsticks. Drumsticks come in a pack with 12.And so I've always been pretty simple and I enjoy these simple things of life. And I think that's why I also play the Cajon. It's a box and it's very simple and I take pride in wanting to discover the things that most people overlook.
Leah Roseman:
Well, let's talk about how you have this hybrid kit. So you're sitting on the Cajon, you have your drums and your mentor, Francisco Mora Catlett.
Hi, just a quick break from the episode to share which episodes I’ve linked in the show notes for you: Leslie DeShazor, Teagan Faran, Avi Kishna , Gerry Bryant, Vahn Black, Lisa Pegher and EmmoLei Sankofa among so many episodes since 2021. Sign up for my newsletter, where you’ll get exclusive information about upcoming guests, consider buying me a coffee on my Ko-fi page, or buying some unique podcast merch. You can also review this podcast, share it with your friends, and follow on your podcast app, YouTube, and social media. All this helps spread the word! Thanks. Now back to my conversation with JoVia.
JoVia Armstrong:
Yeah. So Francisco is another. He's been my mentor. I just spoke with him a couple of days ago. He and I are going to work on a project because I realized that my mentor is, he's aging finally. And so we're going to work on a project, but he also is an amazing percussionist and an amazing composer. His mom was a famous visual artist named Elizabeth Catlett, and she instilled so much in him. I mean, she was banned out of the US, I want to say back in the '60s. I can't remember the exact year, but she was very powerful and I look at her as a Black freedom fighter and her work is powerful. So that was instilled in him and he's instilled a lot of that in me. Francisco was born in DC, but raised in Mexico. When she left the US, that's where she was.
I guess because of his mother, he was a very futuristic, out there, progressive type of thinker. And so at some point he left Mexico to. He was a drummer in Mexico and he left to join the Sun Ra band. So he began touring with Sun Ra. He eventually went to Berklee College of Music in Boston. He eventually worked with Max Roach and was Max Roach's tour manager for a little bit, helping out with that and playing with Max. And he just has all these stories. He's also a historian. His memory is far better than mine. But within his years, he started going to Cuba. So he goes to Cuba multiple times a year. And so I met him when I was a freshman at Michigan State University, and he pretty much just started showing me how to play congas. He started showing me how to play Bata drums and teaching me about all of these rhythms and the people of Cuba and teaching me about the Orishas.
Still to this day, he encourages me to play this hybrid kit. I sometimes get kind of discouraged. I mean, not as of lately, but when I was really focused on this hybrid kit and wondering if people would like it and wondering if people would understand it, he would say, "You have to play it." He said, "This is what it's about, this innovation and this ingenuity," as he would say, "This is the thing that we are on earth to do is to explore." And I've always thought of myself as an explorer. And so I started to sit on this box with Musique Noire, which is how I met Leslie de Shazor, and we kept losing our percussionists in that group because they were moving to other countries. And so by the third or fourth percussionist, Michelle May, who leads the group, she said, "Well, she's leaving now, so who else do you want to get?" I said, "I'm a little tired of auditioning percussionists.Let me just see what I can do with the box." So I started to develop that idea from there and started to think, "Can I hold down an entire group playing just the Cajon?" And so that's how that developed, and that is what Fransico has been encouraging me to do all this time is keep going, keep going, don't stop, and don't worry about who likes it. Don't worry about if people are understanding it right now. They're going to understand it later.
I always think about his words when he talks about that, just to keep going.
Leah Roseman:
Jovia, with Musique Noire, what were you playing before you played the Cajon?
JoVia Armstrong:
I was playing Congas and cow bells, the other percussionist we had was playing more Middle Eastern instruments where I was doing more Afro-Cuban instruments, and the group was. I guess we had established ourselves as a world jazz ensemble, and so we were playing just music from all over the world. And so it made sense. I was kind of covering a different type of hand percussion that the other percussionist was doing.
Leah Roseman:
Well, I did want to ask you, you mentioned with Francisco, he's so full of stories and you've known him for so many years. Is there any story that comes to mind that you could tell us that he's told you over the years?
JoVia Armstrong:
No, not quite. My experience with him, I'm one of those people who. This is a little insight on, I guess, my personality. I'm a big picture person, and so you can read me a 300-page story. What I'm going to remember is the message, and all of the details for me were like, they just went up in the air. So what I get from Francisco is the message, and he has many messages. One is that, again, keep going, keep going, continue being curious. He's about 78 years old now. Francisco still takes classes at Berklee if he feels. He's very curious, and that's something that I really admire about Francisco, is that he is proof that in the world of art and probably other subject areas as well, we're always learning. There's always something new to learn. It's too much to learn in one lifetime.
Leah Roseman:
Yes, I agree. Before we leave The Antidote Suite, I really also enjoy track five, Shades and Shapes.
JoVia Armstrong:
Shades and Shapes was kind of like the culmination of what I saw in the visual art of those six artists that were involved with the Black Index, with Bridget Cook's exhibit. And there was one piece, I can't remember which artist did this piece, but it was like a white background with these black faces, and the faces were more like silhouettes, so you can only see the shades and shapes of these faces, but because of the shapes, you knew they were Black faces. It wasn't just the color of the shapes. I really just started to think about Black people and thinking about the many, many shades and shapes that we exist in, the darker shades, the lighter shades, and all these many shapes. And so this song, I pretty much tried to channel another person who inspired my work, which is Herbie Hancock. So I've never met him before, but he really changed my way of thinking about music and purity.
I want to say coming out of the school orchestras, coming out of Michigan State University, I had this as a young person, I had this, I want to say kind of rigid, purest idea about music. And one day I brought a DVD of Herbie Hancock's called Future to Future, and it was, I want to say the last concert of this tour he did for that album. And what I was amazed at was that he's this jazz musician who I already admired, but he's this jazz musician standing on stage with a standing room only crowd, and I had never seen that before. Most concerts I had been to where there's jazz, you sit down and you're quiet, and these people are standing up drinking beers and they're dancing, and he's also using electronics. Everyone on stage was using some type of drum machine or delays and reverb, and he had a DJ on stage, and he also had this concert, this tour was also in surround sound, so he was traveling with an engineer and they had a multichannel speaker system set up.
And so when I did Shades and Shapes, I was kind of channeling Herbie for that one, and it starts off with my kalimba or m'bira, and I have one within a quarter inch output, so I had that running into a delay pedal and a reverb pedal. And so it starts off with this. You can tell it's an m'bira, but you hear these delays and reverbs, and then it turns into this big cloud before the song starts. And so yeah, that's kind of my ode to Herbie.(Music: clip of Shades and Shapes, The Antidote Suite)
Leah Roseman:
And more recently, on your YouTube, I noticed a few months ago you did some performances at the Hey Nonny Women's Jazz Festival. So being a woman in jazz, a drummer, how important is it to have these spaces for women only?
JoVia Armstrong:
It's important to my sanity, and I hate saying that, but it's been the truth. I've had more pleasant experiences rehearsing and performing with women, and maybe it's just these particular women that I've worked with, but they show up on time. We have rehearsal, there might be drinks and hors d'oeuvres and crackers or something, but they show up on time, they show up prepared, and they communicate really well. They let me know what they need. We laugh at ourselves when we. I don't like using the word mistakes because I don't believe in mistakes, but when we do something that's not on the page and we say, "Oops," like, "Oh, my bad." And then someone else might say, "No, keep that." And so I like the energy that women bring to my projects because it makes it easier for me as an artist to tell them what I want and they pick up on it.
They don't deal with an ego of I know what I'm doing. It's more so like, "Oh, just tell me what you want. Oh, like this." Again, it's not that I haven't worked with men that didn't share this type of personality trait or attitude, but just overall, I've had more pleasant experiences with women musicians, and I'm not someone who cares about perfection or you don't have to be the most skilled musician in the building. I'm not looking for that either. I'm looking for musicians who want to learn, who want to come into my world and understand the music that I compose and are willing to take that chance, willing to escape, willing to experiment, willing to mess up, willing to do the thing that causes my ears to perk up and say, "Oh, what was that? Can you do that again?" That's what I'm looking for with musicians, and I'm looking for musicians who speak up when they need something.
I struggle a lot with men who won't respond to an email, even when I say, "Please let me know that you received the music," or recently someone text me at 10 o'clock at night and said, "Hey, I can work on the music in the morning. Can you send it to me?" And I'm like, "Well, I sent the email out two months ago and the rehearsal is tomorrow and we're doing this really hard music. Why didn't you say anything two months ago that you didn't get the music?" And so it brings out this anxiety that I didn't know I had when I'm working with men.
Leah Roseman:
You mentioned earlier about breath work and meditation, so I'm curious if you want to reflect on that a little bit, how that's changed for you over time and what your practice is most days.
JoVia Armstrong:
Yeah. I'm in this kind of a twisted world right now when it comes to. Well, for one, I want to say that I'm not a religious person. I'm not religious. Even though for most of this dissertation work that I did, I was leaning on writings through Buddhism. I like to say that I'm Buddhist leaning. So I do like a lot of the practices of Buddhism. I learned with the song Breathe. The other thing, I didn't mention this to you yet, is a part of my research was looking into caves and wondering why did people and why do people still go into caves to perform ceremonies or rituals or to pray and to meditate?
When you listen to a lot of this music, that is a huge reason why I use reverb. Reverb seems to be this place that we humans are drawn to and we think. We want to get into this space and think, and I've always wondered why. I did a talk back in October where I looked at reverb as the voice of God. I was wondering, is that why we went into caves because reflection, at home at night, before bed, we might reflect on the day or reflect on the week or reflect on a conversation we had or reflect on an interaction with someone that was a little awkward and weird. But reflection is exactly the term we use in audio, but we call it reverb. And you go into a cave, you have all of this reverb, which are really these reflections. When you speak out, your voice hits the surface of the cave and it comes back to you.
Somehow we get these answers that we need and we call it prayer. We may call it contemplation or meditation, but we're really speaking to ourselves and they do say in psychology that self-talk is really important. So you talk to yourself, but in these spaces where there's reverb, you get an answer back, which is the reflection or the reverb. And so with breath work, I have learned that being quiet, sometimes I get very strangely quiet with people sometimes, and it's not anything personal. It is just, for me, I'm super busy. I'm always around people, whether it's at shows, between sets, after the show, before the show, rehearsals, and then it's just a lot of energy of talking, listening and responding back and forth.
I have to get quiet. It's imperative and it's not a mechanical thought. It's not a, "All right, JoVia, you've been on tour for two weeks, you've met all these people, you've met all these fans, now it's time to get quiet." It's not a switch that I turn on. It is something within me that just automatically turns on and I don't know when it's going to hit me, where I just get super quiet. I'm not calling people. I'm not going outside on my porch to converse with my neighbors. It's because I need time to reflect and you can't reflect if you're talking all the time. I need time to think about what just happened, how was that tour? What can I do differently? We tried a new idea with that song. Did that go well? Maybe not. Maybe I should put that on a to-do list.
If I'm constantly communicating with people, I get drained. I notice that I sleep a lot before this happens. The last tour I just came off of, I came off the tour and I immediately had two or three more shows within seven days, and then I slept for 18 hours. Yeah, I slept and I've been kind of sleeping ever since then, like every day since then for the past month, these three hour midday naps, and then still going to sleep at 9:30 at night and sleeping for eight hours, I get really drained. And so breathing, just stopping, stopping and breathing is highly important. I've learned a lot through that practice of breathing. And if I don't do anything else as far as a practice is concerned, whether it's yoga or something else, that is the one thing that I really hold true to my heart is breathing and being quiet.
And it becomes really awkward for people because they take it personally and it's not. It's just, I'm in this space.
Leah Roseman:
Yeah, I completely relate. And I do breath work every day myself and this sort of sensory overload can be really problematic. A lot of musicians after shows, they want to hang out and go to loud places and that's the opposite for me.
You were saying about caves, I've always really been fascinated with caves and I've sought quite a few out. And I was able to go into this cave in France and it wasn't well known, but we were there and the guy took us in quite deep in and there was this really ancient painting up high and it was being obscured by, I think, I forget how old, it was very, very ancient. And it was just that feeling of somebody took the trouble with some kind of illumination to make their way and they had built boardwalks for us, but of course it was all like stalagmites and stalactites. They would've been in bare feet making their way and somehow did this incredible art.
JoVia Armstrong:
It's amazing. I read in one book, I can't remember which book it is at the moment, but it was a book on audio and I think multichannel sound systems and this person was writing about caves and he said that sometimes those pictures, the cave artwork would depict how large the cave was to let people know entering if there was danger or not. If it was a small cave, it might be a picture of a fox. And if it was a large cave, it would be a larger animal, like a rhino or something or a buffalo, I should say. And I guess the bigger the cave, the more dangerous it could be because some caves will have sunlight shine through, but others are just completely dark.
And with reverb, this is what I love about reverb and the whole idea of caves as well is that if you could picture yourself in darkness inside of a space like a cave where there's all of this reverb, all of these reflections, if someone calls your name, most of the time you cannot directly point out where they are because of all the boominess of the reverb. And so then also think about your sense of danger. If you heard a sound, you don't know where it's coming from. But outside of the cave in the open air, we can localize sound. If you hear a bird chirping, you know that that bird is on your left and back of you. Or if you hear a lion roar, you could say, "Oh, there's a lion coming after me. He's there and you run the opposite way." We're not necessarily dealing with reverb in the open air like we are inside the cave.
And so the other idea about the cave, when you think about reflections and reverb, it is sound reflecting off of the surfaces, but different parts of the surfaces. Some are closer to you than others. And so now we're affecting time. You know what I mean? So a sound, if you make a sound, depending on where the surfaces of the walls are, the wall that's closer to you, that sound is going to reflect back to you first before the one that's 30 feet away.
And so we start to think about, well, is time even real?What is time if I said a word, but the reflections, it's really about my perception. I'm perceiving a sound over here closer than that one. So your sense of time and space is skewed. And if you're in a room where nothing moves, you'll never know what time it is. You won't know what time it is. We have to see something moving. We can kind of judge how long it took for an ant to crawl from here to here when the sunlight comes up. I know when the sun hits my apartment over here, it's around four o'clock, 4:30. If that didn't happen, I wouldn't know what the time was. And so the cave to me is a really special place where you can get lost.
Leah Roseman:
Well, if we could just, I wanted to get back to your album Inception a little bit with the Eunoia Society. So I looked up what Eunoia means. Maybe you could speak to that first.
JoVia Armstrong:
Yeah. So it's a Greek word that means beautiful thinking, but in rhetoric, it's the goodwill that a speaker cultivates between themself and their audience. And that to me is super important. That was what I was not getting when I played in the orchestra. When I played in orchestras in my youth in college, I was desiring that interaction from the audience and I wasn't getting that because in that genre of music, you're not allowed to clap between movements, you're not allowed to cough or even sneeze. You don't make a sound as very still. And so as a performer, I really love that audience interaction. I love to see people's knees going up and down and their heads moving and some people would get up and dance. And that to me was the response I needed to let me know that what I was doing was creating joy, creating healing.
And that's really what I wanted to do. And I'm going to tell you a quick story.
You know how when you're a kid and people ask, "What do you want to be when you grow up?" When I was a kid, I would always say, "Oh, I want to be a cartoon." And people would laugh and say, "Oh, that's cute." And so after a few years I decided, "Well, I don't know if they're laughing with me or at me. And I know that I can't be a cartoon, but I'm a kid." So as kids, we're just going to say what comes to our mind because for an adult, the broom sweeps the floor, but for a kid, it's a baseball bat or it's a sword. And so I got rid of that idea of being a cartoon and I said, "I'm going to be a musician." Well, it was at my dissertation concert many years later that I performed and people came up to me after the show.
And because of the way I was dressed and my hair was white, people said, "Wow, you look like a superhero." And I looked at myself and I had channeled one of my favorite cartoons, which was X-Men. And Storm just so happened to be one of my favorite characters as a little girl because from one, at the time, I though she was Black. When I looked at all the other cartoons, she had this darker complexion. And so I related to her and she was powerful and she could control the winds and the storms and everything. And so I had to think about this after the dissertation concert and I went home and I thought I became the cartoon. But what is it about the cartoon that I really admired? It was the fact that the X-Men and Storm in particular were helping people. They were these people who were different, who had these special gifts, but they were trying to heal the world.
And I was able to do that, not because I looked like Storm, but because I became an educator for one. And so education for me is I am offering something. I'm trying to help my students realize who they are, self-actualize. But also as a musician, when I see people in the audience and there's that Eunoia happening, that makes me happy. That takes me back to what I always wanted to do growing up. It wasn't necessarily being the cartoon, it was the purpose or the thing that the cartoons were doing.
So that's what Eunoia really means for me.
Leah Roseman:
So on this album Inception, the first track, it ends with a percussion solo. So I though we could play a bit of that for people.
JoVia Armstrong:
Of course.(Music: clip percussion solo from track 1 Creation, Inception, Eunoia Society)
Leah Roseman:
And then another track, the second one, Embryo, is that an African mode, like the scale that's used?
JoVia Armstrong:
Not to my knowledge. It might be. I was pretty much thinking about my childhood and I wondered what does it sound like to an embryo in the belly? And so I just imagined these colors and this melody that was really simple, something very soft and kind of charming and soothing. And so that embryo for me was just kind of my imagination of what it would sound like as an embryo.(Music: clip of track 2 Embryo, Inception, Eunoia Society)
Leah Roseman:
Now, your parents were pretty supportive of your music?
JoVia Armstrong:
Most definitely. Yeah. After college, I moved back home because I graduated right after nine eleven and I couldn't find work in Chicago. So I moved back to Detroit and I fell into a bit of a depression because I knew I was a smart, smart kid and I had never had trouble finding work before. And so I remember my mom, I was picking up weight. I was just in this depression. And I remember my mom giving me some money because I wanted to go to the gym and she said, "Here, take this." And then my dad had always said, "Well, you're a composer, you should be writing music." And so there's a bass player out of Detroit named Rodney Whitaker who played with Lincoln Center for probably 20 years or more. He lived down the street from me and he gave me a piano. He had an acoustic piano.
And so I started writing and I wrote the first Musique Noire song. It was the first song I had ever written. It took me a year to write it, but that song is called Undiscovered D's and it's on our first record. Either way, I wrote that song and my dad said, "Yeah, you should be recording and doing more of this." I said, "Okay." And so my parents refinanced the house and they purchased a computer for me. They brought me a keyboard and audio interface and headphones and all the things I needed. And I didn't know how to connect anything. And so I would just learn through trial and error, which I think is sometimes the best way to learn about things. And so also YouTube wasn't around at this time either. So I was trying to read books and understand what EQ was and what compression was and side chain compression and all these different terms.
And because I couldn't hear the book, I'm twisting knobs and just hoping that whatever this writer is saying, okay, I think I got it. But yeah, my parents have always supported my music career. And even as a kid when I was practicing on my practice pad all day long, and my mom would just close the door. She never told me to stop.
I think there was one time in those six, maybe eight years where she said, "Hey, can you give me a break tonight?" But what would happen is I would practice, she would close the door and she always watched the news. She would just turn the news up. My dad was usually drilling or hammering on something. My sisters were always playing and it was just a noisy house. But my parents, they just wanted us to do things. And yeah, I appreciate and just really love my parents for doing that for me and just encouraging me to keep going.
Leah Roseman:
I though it might be interesting, JoVia, to close us off with mentoring, especially girls, because I know you did a lot of work when you were younger too in Chicago with that.
JoVia Armstrong:
Oh yeah.
Leah Roseman:
Wonderful. Well, thanks so much for that.
JoVia Armstrong:
Thank you.
Leah Roseman:
I hope you enjoyed this episode. Keep in mind, I've also linked directly several episodes you'll find interesting in the show notes of this one. Please do share this with your friends and check out episodes you may have missed at LeahRoseman.com. If you could buy me a coffee to support the series, that would be wonderful. I'm an independent podcaster and I really do need the help of my listeners. All the links are in the show notes. The podcast theme music was written by Nick Kold. Have a wonderful week.
