It’s a rare and wonderful occasion that we welcome Cleveland-based Afrofuturist musical collective Mourning [A] BLKstar to Portland. The multi-generational, gender- and genre-nonconforming amalgam of Black culture melds live instrumentation with hip-hop production, blending soul, r&b, jazz and more, and make their SPACE debut on July 20.
To honor what will be a very special night, we held a discussion between the band’s co-founder, RA Washington and Kafari, Portland’s beloved composer, pianist and musician, who opens the show.
RA (pronounced “rah”) is a poet, writer, composer and co-founder of the band since their inception in 2015. Kafari toured with the band in 2018, making the conversation—like Thursday’s show—a kind of reunion between them. Both artists spoke with SPACE communications manager Nick Schroeder via Zoom on July 12th.
In their broad and philosophical conversation, the warmth shared between the two musicians was evident. RA and Kafari talked at length about their mutual admiration and respect, the divine feminine, music as a healing force, the Black ecstatic tradition, capitalism, the ego and more.
Tickets and more info are available here.
The interview has been edited for length and clarity by Nick Schroeder.
SPACE: I’m very grateful to speak with you both. Could you talk a little bit about how you all met and started collaborating?
Kafari: One of my best friends in the world, we were on tour across the Midwest about six years ago, and she was like, You gotta meet my friend RA. He’s an incredible author and musician and runs this bookstore in Cleveland. I just think that you guys would love each other.
We go through Cleveland, and I get to see RA perform. I get to play [at] his bookstore, and instantly I resonated with RA. Before I ever heard Mourning [A] BLKstar, I knew that this would be someone I really wanted to stay connected to. His creative multiplicity was something that really struck me, all the different ways that he is creative in the world. For me, that’s something that’s been difficult but important to embrace over the years—that I have to be a multifaceted creator. That’s just who I am.
When I finally got to hear Mourning [A] BLKstar in early 2018 I was floored by their chemistry. I wanted to ask you, RA—I have this theory that the best bands, at the root of them is deep friendship. What has kept Mourning [A] Blackstar not just together all these years, but thriving and growing? Every time I see you, you guys are on a new wave and the energy that you bring to every show is authentic.
RA Washington: I think it’s a couple of things. For one, I think that we all recognize that Mourning [A] BLKstar has a matriarchal spirit. It reminds us of a divine feminine spirit, and reminds us of this earth. Every member is tapping into that, and that’s what bonds us, a reverence toward our mother figures. Even though there’s a lot of male-presenting members, the entity itself is feminine divine. There’s a gentleness there and a place for rest and encouragement and mutual admiration that exists across a lot of different backgrounds. Everyone is full of emotional intelligence, and I recognize that and feel that. I think that’s the main driver of our continued longevity and viewpoint exuberance.
It’s very much set up in child’s pose. Because our method of composition is in the Black ecstatic tradition. Even though we compose, everyone writes their own parts. I don’t think people have really been able to be in organizations or bands where there’s a band leader, but the band leader doesn’t tell you what to do. I think that’s appealing, and because it’s in legacy to Black ecstatic traditions and free improvisation and utterance and these kinds of things, it taps into our genetic memories. Even if that’s not what you were invested in music for, it comes out of you. Over time, it’s become pretty clear that our method of creating together has some healing properties.
Kafari: It’s no surprise at all that so much [care] goes into the environment. I think that the environment is such a crucial component of any creative activity—the atmosphere, the energy and the relationship-building.
From having had the experience to tour with you guys in 2018, on the southern tour with Algiers with Lee Bains, it really struck me, the gentleness you speak of and the ways that people take care of each other and the ways that people protect each other, the way that rest gets honored, the way that people’s capacities get respected. It really sets up this adventurousness on stage, this ability to create and to be improvisational and to be present. I always really respected and admired that about you.
RA Washington: I appreciate you saying that. That’s one of the reasons why it was so easy to incorporate you, because you come from that spirit as well. You’re such a generous spirit, and you’re such a loving person, and so talented. I pretty much think you could plug into any creative endeavor and find a space, which is a rare, rare gift.
Kafari: Thank you.
RA Washington: Yeah, I really do. My art brain explodes when I meet people like you. I have to actually calm down because I’m like, Ooh, they could do this, and they can do this and they can do this. Next thing you know, you haven’t asked anybody what they want to do.
When we met, I was like, Okay, first of all, do not share your dreams of Kafari to Kafari. Allow for Kafari to discover and plot themselves and just be open. That’s my chore and my incredible honor in my position in Mourning [A] BLKstar. To see how these spirits could be together, but also not plot too far, and not take on a very European impresario mindset.
Kafari: It’s a huge achievement to be able to have many very creative, talented, and versatile people [in the band]. I’ve seen the many side projects of individual members of Mourning [A] BLKstar. I’ve thought a lot about how you learned to empower people to step into their own greatness and create a part that is only theirs. That’s gratifying when you have a part that you made on your own. It’s a very impressive feat, that community of relationship-building, of artists being and working together. I think Mourning [A] BLKstar is one of the rarest projects for that reason. When I first saw you guys in 2018, and had the privilege of being a part of it, it really exploded my sense of like what was possible in a band.
RA Washington: Ashe. Thank you for that reflection. A lot of the spirit of it, and my personal approach, is coming from a feeling. I wish I could say that I sat down and theorized and plotted from that perspective, because it would be very gratifying to my ego to be able to say that, but it was spirit-led and it was me leaning into my gut.
Who I founded the band with, the first people that believed in it—LaToya [Kent] and James [Longs] and Kyle [Kidd]—they all had their own visions. What they brought to it was a sense of adventure and openness and an incredible connection to their own power and spirit. They’re so self-possessed as people. You can’t really move them off their square. Nothing rattles them. They’re not ego-driven. They know what they are and what they contribute. When you have that kind of energy involved at the start, even if emotionally you are not there, you have to meet them there. So there’s been a lot of personal growth for me within the band, just having to respond to its creation and having to change fast, you know?
Kafari: Yes.
RA Washington: Not a lot to time to process or be in your feelings about any of it. Not a lot of time to figure out, like, What about me? Where’s my credit gonna come from? Any of those human concerns. You just really have to meet them where they are because you respect them and you love them. You have to be in that higher space. I think it’s very hard for people that are writers to be in the spirit space, because it’s such an individual kind of thing. It’s such an authorship methodology.
It definitely wasn’t like I was set up to be in something like this, as far as what I was up to the 20-plus years before it existed. I kind of find myself a new person. I don’t really know how to connect the different selves to this new person because the ways in which I would go about pursuing those ambitions is gone. I’m just sitting here with this huge body of work, and I don’t remember why. [laughs.] I don’t remember why I did all that, what I was trying to serve or what external gratification I was looking for.
Kafari: What is the target you’re aiming for now, either individually in your role in Morning [A] BLKstar or collectively?
RA Washington: I’m not really aiming for anything. I’m trying to gently coax all of us to not be in a scarcity mindset and [to] think from an abundance place. We’re trying to change some of the music business’s modalities when it comes to credit and pay. We’re coming up against living in a media desert and not being from a coastal city and being such a large ensemble and the economics behind all that. [We’re] trying to figure out healthy ways to pursue some of our agenda in terms of making it sustainable for everyone so that people don’t have to push so hard and sacrifice so much.
But no real plotting past that. I feel like what is for us will be for us, and what’s not for us will avoid us. [We’re] just staying open, staying in an abundance mindset, not letting the day-to-day dictate our moves, and really celebrating our community and the different bands we know. And embracing the fact that we’re one of those organizations that are—we’re the artists’ artists. We’re your favorite artist’s favorite band in a lot of respects. When that happens, the dollars are different when you’re talking about capitalism, because it’s us artists that really embrace what we’re making. We’re all in the same boat. It’s not popular with the crowds, so to speak.
That’s been the thing that we’re navigating as a group, because different people have different ideas about what that means. It’s always been the case for me personally [that] if you’re a reader, or if you like visual art, you might not necessarily run into my stuff, but your favorite painter’s favorite painter knows who I am and I’m in their group shows, or your favorite writer knows who I am and I’m in their anthology. Just not letting whatever that means in the now dictate what I make, is the key. To still be in love with making. That’s a lot easier now than it was.
Kafari: I was just talking with a friend about this a couple of days ago, [how] not enough do we celebrate inspiration and achievement—wanting to make things. When we make art, we start off as these fans, right? Like, Oh man, I love music, I love writing, I love this author and that painter. You’re such a fan! You start making, you start the journey with this craft. You go through these ebbs and flows and you have these moments of being so inspired. Through many seasons of growth and change and life transitions, I started to realize that being in love with making is one way to define success as an artist. I want to continue to be in love with making. No definition of success that I could ever choose or adopt would not have that as a part of it. I have to love making in order to still feel excited about what I want to share.
RA Washington: Yeah, you have that in spades. It’s really a pleasure to watch you play because you can see that joy and that command and the time you spent. Having that level of mastery, it makes sense that you love making, that you love everything about the piano—its percussion history, its melody, its harmony. You love how the keys feel, you love the innovations within technology. But you also love the limitations of your money, [how] you have to keep it in a certain container because you don’t have the resources to go past that, so that gives your music a certain earthiness and a certain vibrance and a connection to God, really. When I listen to it, it moves me like that. And you kind of lose time. I watch you, and you’re gone. You’re definitely not responding to the environment, from an I’m showing you something-place. It’s more like we’re all under a pillow fort with you. It’s beautiful to see.
Kafari: Thank you so much. I definitely have tried to tap into that collective experience, just being excited to share something that I find healing, that I find soulful in my own way. I was listening to this interview, Wynton Marsalis was asked, Is music made for the listener or for the artist? And Wynton was like, Well the artist is the first listener.
RA Washington: Hmm!
Kafari: I thought that was such a brilliant answer. We’re part of the crowd too in a way, part of the experience, part of the performance. We get to experience gratification, pleasure, as we practice this, as we perform it. It’s like, Man I’m excited to hear what we do tonight. You know?
RA Washington: Yeah. When we first started, I would esconce myself off-stage or off to the side so I could watch and cue everything. That’s what I thought I was doing, [that] I need to be in this position as the conductor to cue everything so everybody can see me. What I ultimately realized is that by being in that position, I’m watching the show too. I’m having the same experience as the audience, and I’m able to call songs based on how it feels in the room and call audibles. I’m not really noticing my performance, per se, I’m just watching it unfold and I’m participating. That’s a very honorable and a very blessed place to be. I didn’t always take it from that point of view, but now I feel very grateful because there’s not a lot of people who compose who get to watch their compositions in their lifetime.
I’ve had that experience where Mourning [A] BLKstar is on stage and I’m in the audience too. When I was sick [in 2019], I was out for a year, and they were still traveling and playing. Just the fact that my parts could be covered A) within the collective and B) that I got an opportunity to see them play—and it didn’t sound different, the only difference was that I didn’t see myself up there—that is such a humbling and incredibly…it alters your DNA, it really does. To know that something that you helped create can exist without you changes how you feel about it. It made it far more precious to be a part. It’s not like if you take me out of it that it suffers.
When I found that out, oh man, I had a hard time. I had a real hard time. I was like, Damn, this shit sounds insane! And a really good friend of mine, an older man, was like, Yeah, you get to see your compositions. Who gets to do that? I mean, other than the cats that can go to the Lincoln Center and watch a ceremonial end-of-life concert, who gets to do that in this day and age? Unless you’re working in modern classical music, you might go to a concert where someone’s playing your things, but at a punk club? Speakers banging. Drums is banging. You in the audience? That doesn’t happen.
Kafari: Can I hear more about the range of emotions that you experienced and what it felt like to come back?
RA Washington: I felt humbled. I came back on my knees. Not in a mournful way. Not like please-take-me back—it wasn’t that kind of situation. It was like, oh man, I almost died. And I wouldn’t have been here for this. So I felt very grateful. At the same time when it was going on, I felt sad because I wasn’t participating. They were having all these great experiences and the reviews were coming back and my friends in different cities was hitting me up like, man, your band was slapping off!
Kafari: [laughs]
RA Washington: The record was coming out, The Cycle, and they were getting ready for all the promo and the press. They were taking pictures and I wasn’t in any of them. It was the ultimate test of do you believe in the principles you’ve espoused? I came out of it not only knowing for sure that I am the person I state that I am, but I finally felt comfortable being that person, after. I didn’t harbor any ill effects.
I mean, it was a nice rollout too. We got a lot of love, a lot of positive feedback. And so I saw those pictures a lot. A lot. People are interesting when it comes to social media. They’ll share with you and they’ll comment, oh, why aren’t you in this picture? I chose not to make excuses. I was sick and it was important for the band to keep on going. [I had to] just be honest with it. It allowed for me not to hide what happened, and to be in a testifying place. Then also I was like, that’s never gonna happen to me again. I had to address the health concerns. Now I’m just like a whole new body and I’m getting to experience BLKstar as a healthy body, and now it is different when we play.
I wish I could remember any specific moments but I don’t like to live in the past. Hopefully, with us talking about it, people can be encouraged for whatever they’re going through, that there’s a way forward. Perseverance matters, intent matters. You can biohack your neurons and you could change the way you think. You could practice shutting down feedback loops that are hindering you from what’s for you. I’m a testament of that. I’m sitting here with you both. A full-fledged believer in the ability of the human mind to change, the human body to heal itself, for paradigm shifts to occur. Even if you’re an old dog. You can teach an old dog new tricks. Definitely. I appreciate you asking.
SPACE: Do you want to share what you were sick with?
RA Washington: Yeah, I had congestive heart failure. My heart was pumping at 10 percent. When that happens, the body thinks that it needs to retain fluid, and I was basically drowning inside my own body. I was in ICU for around two months, and there was a couple of times where it looked like I wasn’t gonna make it.
The band very much wanted to continue. So it was like, how do we make that happen? I was able to rehearse the band and record myself doing my parts and then play them with a DJ so everything can fit seamlessly. We had like a 25-set song repertoire that was prepared in that way. The band could just choose with that how they want to go about keeping us going. Kudos to them for having the vision to want to keep going. I’m not sure if I would have made that choice. Maybe, I don’t know. But it also shows the value of an idea.
SPACE: Well, kudos to you all, going from that era right into the pandemic, which must have changed all of your schedules and dynamics. It’s a testament to the strength of yours and the strength of the band to emerge after that several-year long period of transition.
RA Washington: Yeah, it was rough, but somehow joyous. We found ways to still gather and we didn’t really follow the pandemic rules. We still practiced and we still wrote and we got opportunities to work in different ways, to keep the energy up. But it was very hard not to do the tour for [2020 album] The Cycle. It definitely set our timeline back. But I think it might be for the good, I don’t know. We’ll see what happens.
SPACE: Does this tour feel like it’s part of The Cycle? Or do you have another record coming out?
RA Washington: We’re cooking a couple of records at the moment. One of them is in the can. And one of them we’re still bandying about which songs we like, and who we want to work with to put it out. It’s wide open for us. There was a prolific nature to the band at its start. It was like a record almost every 10 months, so this has been a long [time]. It’s been three years since The Cycle came out. We did release a collaboration record with a dance company called Celestial Bodies, but a proper record soon, for sure.
To answer your question, yeah, of course, we’re still touring The Cycle. Some of those songs are still in the set. The set that we’re coming through Portland with is going to be an adventure of all that. We’re really trying to embrace the Black repertory tradition. Kind of like as if we were Alvin Ailey’s dance company, you might see Revelations if you see them tour. We try to embrace that. We’re building a songbook for our own future. We kept ourselves together. We own them as an entity and an LLC. We share the copyrights as a group. There’s no author but the group and we hope that that is a model going forward for other bands and other creatives, especially those of us that have been subjectively marginalized in this history of America.
Mourning [A] BLKstar and Kafari play SPACE on Thursday, July 20th at 8 pm (7:30 pm doors). Tickets are on sale now.