Music Credit: “NY” written and performed by Kosta T, from the cd Soul Sand, used courtesy fo the Free Music Archive.

Jo Reed: From the National Endowment for the Arts, this is Art Works, I’m Josephine Reed…

Sarah Smarsh: Story is what I was born for.  It’s my birthright as far as I’m concerned coming from the family that I do, and it’s my great privilege that now I get paid to do that the way that the folks who taught me how to do it didn’t.

Jo Reed: You just heard Sarah Smarsh: she’s the author of Heartland: A Memoir of Working Hard and Being Broke in the Richest Country on Earth.  It was a 2018 National Book Award finalist and it’s been chosen as a 2022-2023 NEA Big Read title. Sarah grew up in rural Kansas—her father’s side of the family has been farming for five generations, but that stopped when his farm like so many other small holdings went under in the 1980s; Sarah is also the daughter of teenage mother who was herself the daughter of a teenage mother, but don’t even think of discounting them—both Jeannie and Grandma Betty are smart, fierce, and determined women. As the subtitle title of Heartland suggests—everyone in the family works hard, but money is always scarce and opportunities are limited—an illness spells catastrophe. And even though Sarah Smarsh is now a journalist and writer, Heartland is not an “up by my bootstraps story”….far from it. It’s a book that deeply explores the mostly silent and thorough way class operates in the United States. Sarah tells the story of her family against a broader background of systemic inequality and generational poverty, of public policies that impact and shape the lives of rural working poor, and how white privilege can exist within economic instability. Heartland combines sharp socioeconomic insights with the deep psychological understanding that comes from a lived experience in poverty. Driven to share this story, Sarah Smarsh spent 15 years researching and writing Heartland.

Sarah Smarsh: You know, we’re talking about years in the making.  Indeed that was the case for the writing process.  There are a lot of reasons it took a long time.  One actually has to do with the heart of the book’s themes, which is that I was living in poverty for much of the writing process, and so I was out holding down two or three jobs and then working on the book.  This is in my twenties.  But if we go back a little bit further, quite a bit further, actually.  The first moment that the book became a sort of spirit in my midst, I guess, I was just a child.  By my grandma’s telling I was all of eight years old and we were riding down a flat country highway in Kansas as we often were doing, living out in a rural area as we did, and I don’t remember this, but according to my grandma, and she told me this many years ago, before “Heartland” came out, I said to her, “Grandma, I’m going to write a book about you,” and when I was a kid that was sort of like my mission statement.  I was largely raised by my maternal grandmother.  She was very young when she became my grandma, was sort of a second mother to me, and I was always paying attention, as a would-be writer perhaps inevitably is, and I got a sense that there was something incredible about her story and the things that she had survived and seen and so that was something that I wanted to share with the world.  I just had this, I don’t know, just an innocent and earnest impulse in that direction as a kid who also very young knew that writing was my calling. 

Jo Reed: You grew up in rural Kansas where money was tight and opportunities were limited. What was the journey to actually writing the book?.

Sarah Smarsh: I was fortunate in that way, I made all of my decisions, Jo, around the, you know, becoming a writer very strategically.  I was first-generation college student and,  I went to journalism school.  I also got an English degree.  I did my graduate work in the realm of nonfiction writing.  I worked for the student paper at the University of Kansas and I also applied for a federally-funded program called the McNair Scholars program, which is created to help boost first-generation low-income and minority students into the academy, but the reason I applied was because they had a research stipend over the summer and I thought, “Heck, if I could be spending the summer researching and working on this book--” that I’ve already been thinking about for a decade at my tender age of 20, rather than waiting tables and bartender and painting houses or whatever, “--that sounds like a great deal.”  So it was just-- it was a very authentic, deep, sincere calling, I felt, and I can’t tell you why but I can tell you that the reason that I had the tenacity to stick with it through the years and the challenges, including about 10 years where agents were telling me, “No” to a largely finished manuscript in my twenties, was that I didn’t really have a choice.  You know, I felt like the book chose me and I had to make good on that calling, whether it would or would not be shared with the world, but I didn’t give up.  It’s a formative journey.

Jo Reed: Well, “Heartland” is both a memoir and a larger analysis of public policies and how those policies impacted your life and the lives of your family.  And one thread that’s woven through the book is that you’re the daughter of a teenage mother who’s the daughter of a teenage mother, and you discuss how that shaped their lives and shaped your life as well.

Sarah Smarsh: Yes.  You know, I mentioned a moment ago that I very first sort of conceived of the book as a story about my grandmother and that was how it began, but then it became much more expansive and I started weaving in, you know, as I matured as a reporter and a researcher and someone who’s in the business of writing about current events, and someone who also chose a profession of journalism for its sort of civic utility.  It was like, “Okay.  Well, there’s this story about my family that I care deeply about, but why does it matter?   I had a sense that there just weren’t very many stories from my place being told in a contemporary way and certainly not being linked to the public issues that were weighing so heavily on my private experience, and so as you say, the interweaving of the two, the personal and the public  forces that are shaping those domestic and private lives for all of us in so many ways, was something that became of interest to me.  It became sort of the core structural challenge of the book.  How do I write a story that’s very much personal?  It’s not a memoir in the classic sense of, “Here’s my experience of things and these are the craziest things that happened to me.”  That would’ve been a very different book.  It was more like, “Oh.”  This thing about me being a first-generation college student and this thing about me being a graduate student on the Columbia University campus, in this rarified Ivy League space and folks make fun of how I speak, or this thing about me being in a newsroom and, there’s nobody who has direct experience of poverty and maybe especially not rural poverty, and that’s to say nothing of race and all the other ways in which publishing and journalism and culture at large needs a diversification of voices.  The piece that I could bring to that puzzle had to do with rural poverty.  I didn’t see that story being told in a responsible, accurate way, as opposed to being leveraged for what by my estimation would be a polemic or maybe even a form of propaganda, and so the question for me then of what’s relevant to keep in the book and how to structure the book is what in here speaks to socioeconomic class in this country?  What about my family’s story and my specific tale, which has everything to do with being the daughter of a teenage mother living next to a windswept wheat field in rural Kansas, where are the pieces of our shared story that were defined and absolutely shaped by policy and culture around class in this country or our inability to acknowledge class as a factor in the shaping of American identity and outcomes?  And so when I start with being a woman in a woman’s body and the way that that interweaves with economic likelihoods and probabilities in this country, if you’re born into a particular rung on the proverbial socioeconomic ladder?  So that’s where I started, and it’s also because I was largely raised by, and most importantly shaped and formed by, women, working-class, working poor, rural women, and that is a space that is whitewashed, in racial terms.  It’s a very racially diverse space, some folks might not fully realize, but it’s also almost always represented by some sort of male archetype.  Usually a white male.  Hard hat, tool belt.  That’s actually kind of my dad. <laughs> You know, like, I know that guy.  A very gentle, progressive, decent version of that guy, as opposed to the prevailing stereotypes, but where are the women in the stories about the American working-class?  That aspect of my identity gives me advantage on rural policy and public policy in this moment and socioeconomic class that seemed important to highlight.

Jo Reed: I would love to have you read from the book, Sarah. Would you read the beginning of Chapter 5?

Sarah Smarsh: Sure.  Chapter 5 of  Heartland. “A House that Needs Shingles.”  “You probably would’ve lived in a strong old house purchased at its most broken moment and fixed with my hands.  That’s because I learned renovation skills from my own parents, whom I now think of as a sort of god and goddess of houses.  Dad was a carpenter who could see the ghosts of the people who died in old homes.  Mom had an eye for transforming interior spaces and got paid to find a house’s next inhabitants.  A construction worker and a poor neighborhood real estate agent aren’t what people think of as artists, but that’s what Nick and Jeannie were.  Dad could draw a home edition on the side of an envelope with a carpenter’s pencil and then make it real with material salvaged from commercial job sites where he made his hourly wage.  Mom could go into an estate sale with a fifty-dollar bill and come out with antique light fixtures and hardware to refit an entire neglected home.  Her effort, the difference between the property sitting on the market for six months and selling in two weeks.  I doubt either of them would’ve worked in that industry if given many other options.  Dad didn’t read books but had a habit of secretly jotting original poems onto lumber scraps.  Mom used the language and humor of an intellectual.  Theirs was not a world where natural gifts and interests decide your profession.  Dad inherited his craft from his father.  Mom was a saleswoman for whom charm was a professional asset and a house was the biggest possible commission.  But they both had talents about houses that school can’t teach and money can’t improve, as well as an appreciation for homes that had been deepened by depravation.”

Jo Reed: Okay.  That was Sarah Smarsh reading from Heartland. I marked that particular passage because it brought to mind something that you wrote in the book. You write, “We can’t really understand what made us who we are.  We can come to understand though what the world says we are,” and I thought of that when I was reading that part of Heartland. of the talents that your parents and your grandparents clearly had, but how limited they were in their choices.  They really didn’t have many opportunities to let those talents come forth, and obviously that is very sad for them, and not very good for society as a whole if I’m going to, you know, take a meta look at this either, and I would just like you to talk about the way people who are poor, people who don’t have a great deal of education, are seen in the culture as a whole.

Sarah Smarsh: I so appreciate that question, because it gives me an opportunity to just, like, love on people a little bit who need loving on, and that’s not just my family but anyone who can relate to their story of being full of promise, full of gifts to offer, and living in a situation in which not only are those gifts left untapped but then simultaneously they’re being devalued and told that they have very little worth.  So it’s like my experience as a kid, particularly with my mother, it’s very easy in a space like that to not appreciate yourself and to believe the messages and to think, “Well, the number on my paycheck somehow correlates to my inner worth, and therefore my worth must be pretty low.”  My mom for some reason, I think I used this phrase in the book about her, she had an “audacious dignity”, <laughs> and she knew she was beautiful, she knew she was brilliant.  She knew that she was strong.  Don’t get me wrong.  She had a lot of problems.  She survived a lot of trauma and I saw the effects of that firsthand, but the good and the strength in her were deeply understood and appreciated by her, and that made the ignoring of that aspect of who she was exquisitely painful for her to experience.  You know, I think that women of all classes, and certainly people of color of all classes, I imagine, can relate to this experience  that for her had to do with being a white woman in poverty.  So she had kind of like two layers of oppression and marginalization going on.  That female poverty, it was like she was dismissed in terms of her intelligence, but then the poverty piece meant that she just-- she had, you know, a few years ago there was that book “Lean In” that was sort of like advice to I guess kind of like middle and upper-middle class business women about, “This is how you kick ass and take names in the workplace and get what’s yours,”  but there’s so many women that they don’t even-- they’re not in that space.  They’re not even have one toe in a space in which one could advocate for one’s self in such a way.  It’s like to be cognizant of your own maybe even calling, you know.  My mother was a very talented creative in a lot of ways.  She was an artist and kind of a natural writer.  She never encouraged me to be a writer, but I always tell people, yes, I studied writing.  A lot of that had to do with getting the credentials that are necessary for the market, but storytelling and language, I learned that from my family.  None of them went to college.  You know, my mom left high school when she was 16 and got pregnant and had me. So, she had a natural gift to give, and she was every day experiencing the gulf between who and what she was and what the society was telling her she was and what she was and wasn’t allowed to do to live on one side of that gulf and have that knowledge and just be watching society keep not giving you a chance, keep not taking what you have to give.  Like you say, it isn’t just painful for the person, it’s a loss for society that those 40-plus million people who are struggling in those ways.  And, to be told, “You’ve got one job,” and it’s to bust your body, basically, whether that’s like, you know, stocking shelves or working in a field or swinging a hammer, and manual labor can be a beautiful thing.  I don’t have anything against it.  Some days I choose it.  But it’s the thing about the choice.  You know, I would love to live in a society where every little kid who walks into a classroom, no matter where they come from, what they look like, who their parents are, just have a chance to give what they were born to give.

Jo Reed: Class is something that is rarely discussed in American society.  In fact, it’s rarely recognized, and you’ve said that your family, though they were broke a lot, would absolutely not see themselves as poor but would define themselves as middle-class, and that certainly was true for me.  By any measure, I grew up poor, and I even hesitate to say that now, because if my mother were alive I could hear her saying, “What are you talking about?  You had enough to eat and you had clothes to wear and you had a roof over your head.  Sure, there wasn’t money for extras,” <laughs> but, you know….

Sarah Smarsh: Yes.

Jo Reed: And this is the woman who would talk 10 blocks to pay the light bill to save a three-cent stamp.

Sarah Smarsh: Yes. <laughs> Yes.

Jo Reed: But if we can’t define it, if we can’t even recognize it, how do you talk about it? <laughs>

Sarah Smarsh: Mm-hm.  Yes, I have been in one way or another writing and talking about class for 20 years now, much more intentionally now than at the outset. The longer I think about it the more I realize that, you know, my job isn’t necessarily to come up with the solutions, it is to, as a professional communicator and a trained writer and someone whose voice is my tool, to look at the language and to elevate awareness of class as, you know, like a missing word in our vocabulary, and not only is it a missing word but then there’s the problem of our incredibly lacking vocabulary for articulating it.  So to your point, like you, and as I wrote in the book, I hesitate even today <laughs> like you, and having written a book about it I have a real sensitivity to, “Well, who’s going to hear me say this?” and poverty is so relative, and there was a moment in fifth grade where I experienced long-term food insecurity, but for the most part I always had food to eat and there was always a roof over my head. And so there are a lot of things going on here.  One is when you are in poverty there is a group psychological defense mechanism that arises for good reason, I’m sure. There’s a big emphasis on counting your blessings and that might mean that sometimes you’re deemphasizing the very real problems, but I have a feeling that might be because how could you possibly keep going on if you were fully, every day, reckoning with the hard truth of the reality?  And so there’s a little bit of a glossing over your own suffering and your own hard knocks, and there’s a lot of, at least in my experience, putting somebody else in their place if they’re starting to, you know, let’s say whine is how, <laughs> you know, where I come from.  You’re just like talking about what the real problem is and it might be 100 percent accurate, but if then you’re waging a complaint?  What do you have to complain about?  You got enough to eat.  I think that the function that serves is to say, “We, in the end, we’re not going to be defeated by this situation,” and that might mean that very real trauma and difficulties are not being addressed in real-time, and how could they possibly be?  And meanwhile, by the way, no one can afford therapy and it’s not even part of the culture, and you’re just, like, putting one foot in front of the other to survive every day, and then that’s happening like within the home and within the community.  Then you zoom out to the society and the culture that informs those realities and you’ve got a country where we were founded on a myth that this is a meritocracy, where all are created equal and if you work hard you reap what you sow and it’s much more complicated than that.  We are not a meritocracy in the purse sense of the term, and one’s ability to access the American dream has everything to do with the skin color and gender and place and class that one was born into.  So that, the fact that we’re living in a country who’s story it tells itself --it’s a denial, and denial does not allow you to see the truth, and denial informs our language and it means that we have three words for class in this country, poor, middle-class and rich. And there have been all kinds of studies that, the vast majority of people-- it’s probably less true now but it’s been true in recent decades-- call themselves middle-class even if by every measure, you know, even if they’re like technically living below the poverty line as defined by the federal government, meanwhile, people who by many people’s estimations are downright wealthy are also claiming that.  It’s a relative experience.  It is a fluid experience, not static.  You can be broke and well off  three different times in the same lifetime, and meanwhile there’s shame attached to every one of those rungs of the ladder in different ways.  It is so hard to define and articulate to begin with, and then we have this culture and this story about ourselves that keeps us from even beginning to try, and so I am heartened by in recent years a little more attention to the topic.  I do think that it being handled terribly is almost worse than it not being handled at all, <laughs> and I do wish that more people would come forward with just kind of like a full-throated addressing of socioeconomic class as an aspect of American identity and experience.

Jo Reed: Because class isn’t just about money, it’s about access.  It’s about, honestly, I think, the ability to make mistakes that don’t utterly alter your life, and about forgiveness and the lack of forgiveness, and I think the difficulty of being able to relax.

Sarah Smarsh: Oh, yeah.  Being able to relax.  You know, <laughs> can I tell you that writing books, and even very well-received books, I’ve been fortunate that mine has been, it is generally not minting millionaires.  People aren’t getting rich writing books.  I still have some student loans and, you know, I’ve got a mortgage and I drive a not fancy car, and yet I am like in a world that is so different from the one in which I was reared in that.  My husband and I took a road trip a couple weeks ago out, kind of classic trip out into the American West and, you know, this is, again, about how relative class is.  There’s some families for whom what we did is like <laughs> roughing it, poor people trip, but for me it’s like to take a week where you’re not working and just enjoy being alive-- it’s like the third time in my whole life that I’ve done that and I have such a deep gratitude for that feeling, you know, to now have the privilege, the immense privilege, globally and even in this country, to have a week where you’re not working is something that is inaccessible to millions and millions of people in this country. You know, that’s the subtitle of my book is “A Memoir of Working Hard and Being Broke in the Richest Country on Earth.”  That last part, that’s the rub, <laughs> you know, is like this country has got plenty to go around, and not only that, but so much of that wealth is generated by, in labor terms, those same people that are never even going to get a road trip where they camp in a tent in Canyonlands National Park, you know?

Jo Reed: Well, you have the opportunity to give what you were born to give.  You went to the University of Kansas, as you said, the first generation in your family to go to college, and I wonder, given the lack of opportunity your folks had, how that impacted you as you navigated your way around the University of Kansas?

Sarah Smarsh: Well, this is where I first started to realize that we had been poor.  So having been on all sorts of campuses, I know that there are levels of society where, you know, to talk about a state university sounds like not very fancy.  To me it was the fanciest thing I’d ever imagined was like, “Wow, there’s this place full of people who get paid to think and they’re here teaching us how to think and we’re just going to like dwell in ideas for four years?”  You know, meanwhile I was holding down a lot of jobs and some of them involved manual labor, but  the project of let’s explore the arts and the sciences and all of these realms of knowledge that my family didn’t get to access was a beautiful thing, and it turns out even though there’s a stereotype of places like Kansas being all farmers, not so today, and even when I was a kid in the 1980s I was an extreme minority for growing up in an agricultural setting on a farm.  Even rural spaces are largely no longer people working on farms because of the intentional destruction of the family farm, basically.  So anyway, I show up as a first-generation student on this college campus where most kids were from, you know, like a middle-class background, and earlier you said class isn’t just about money, it’s about access, and it’s also about like just, you know, the things these other kids showed up on campus knowing.  I don’t mean like knowledge from books, you know.  I was a reader and my family was self-taught in many ways and I was sharp and I got A’s in the classroom.  That’s not what I’m talking about.  Just things like terms for how this level of society works I didn’t know, so kids kept talking about graduate school and I genuinely, you know, I think I was like a junior as an undergrad and getting A’s and a very high-achieving student before I totally understood what grad school was.  I kept thinking like, “I done went to college.”  You know, “Why are they talking about college after college?” and I, you know, of course I knew that there were certain professions that involved longer study and so on, but just terms like that where like I had never encountered them before. So there was just a learning curve in that way that made me realize, “You know, I might be smarter than some of my peers here in this classroom but they have an advantage in so many ways in that they’re driving the new car that they got for high school graduation.  Their parents are paying their way.”  I’d be in a classroom and the professor would make some offhand comment like, “Be sure to study for this test.  Your parents are paying good money for you to be here,” and it was these things they just, they started digging into me.  They started getting under my skin.  I started thinking like, “Wait a minute.  There is something different about me on this campus.”  Going back to how poorly we articulate class in this country, I had no language for it.  I would say to people, “I’m financially independent.” <laughs> That was like my term that I came up with when I was like 18 to try to explain, “There’s something about our experiences that are different in very important ways that are being glossed over problematically.”  And then it, you know, when I got the language for first-generation, I think, by the time I was a senior.  That was very validating and helpful.  It was a very, very small community that I found of people who were from something similar to my own background.  So it’s where my class awakening began was, appropriately enough, on a college campus.

Jo Reed: That does make sense.  I’m curious.  You’re still very, very much connected to your roots, but you’re also a professional, you’re a journalist, you’re a writer, so you have a foot in both worlds, and part of this book, I think, is a translation of one world to another.  Is that fair and is that part of what you wanted to do with this book?

Sarah Smarsh: That is fair, and I actually think and hope, I suppose, that the book works in two different ways.  You’re right that I’ve got a foot in two different worlds, and that’s the defining reality that allowed me to write this book in particular, which is seeking to kind of integrate levels and understandings within society that are so often segregated in class terms.  So I hope the book operates is twofold.  One is exactly as you say, I want folks who come from a different, maybe better off, as they say, background economically and who, if they’re just reading headlines today, might have one very specific and likely very negative vision of the place I come from. If they read this book I hope they come away with a deeper understanding, a story that’s complicated and nuanced and true beyond stereotypes. But then I also hear from folks for whom the book is a validation of what they lived and what they know firsthand. You know, I just wrote a book that I felt called to write.  I didn’t have a particular audience in mind.  I feel like the book is of service to the national conversation when it opens the eyes of middle or upper-middle-class readers, but the feedback that just like makes me buzz with a kind of full-circle gratitude is when folks who are either in poverty right now who have experienced it firsthand... And sometimes it’s rural and sometimes it’s not.  Sometimes it’s white and sometimes it’s not.  Sometimes it’s born U.S. citizen, sometimes it’s an immigrant story, but that when folks say to me, “There’s something in the story that I lived and I saw it,” and that validation of the people that are-- don’t have enough books, frankly, that are telling their story.  I don’t mean about them and I don’t mean in a rearview mirror by somebody that was passing through, but that come out of their own space and culture and truth.  I think in the end I wrote the book that I wish I would’ve had when I was a little girl, and so the feedback, reader feedback that really gets me in my heart the most, is people who were also that little girl.

Jo Reed: Story is just so important.  You write, actually, at the end of the book, your life’s work is to be heard, and there’s the ability to tell your own story on your own terms, and the importance to see yourself reflected in the culture authentically, I mean, at least sometimes.  And then, of course, it’s also crucial, and this is, you know, all the reasons I love stories so much, is to be able to listen and really hear and to be open to stories that are different.

Sarah Smarsh: Yeah.  Well, one of the reasons that I’m such a big fan of the Big Read program and the NEA and any endeavor to create dialogue around a story, whether it’s experienced by one reader or shared, as a community dialogue. The reason that I have such affection for those programs isn’t just that I’m a writer.  It’s that I’m somebody who very specifically chose to attempt to wield the craft of writing toward civic integrity and progress, and story absolutely is incredibly somehow, I think, the sort of like underutilized timeworn, ancient tool that we have for repairing society, and meanwhile somehow we live in this 24/7 media cycle and the inundation of information and the regurgitation of some stories ad nauseum and actually, that’s usually information that has been torn away from story is, and there’s great function and purpose and nobility in that form of reporting and we need it, to be sure, so I’m not criticizing that structure.  It’s just that somehow we’ve gone so deep into information that we have lost a kind of shared story and a sense of community dialogue that what, you know, in ancient times was a campfire and a very healing way of connecting to remember, “Oh, we are all responsible to one another here in this shared village in this small place.”  This global moment I think   we haven’t yet got our technologies under control in order to, yes, disseminate information and inform the public and bring journalism into its full potential, but to also then temper the worst profit-driven iterations of that and in its place have a deep dive, a deep story, a deep connection, whether at the individual level or shared, with the nuance and maybe, heck, even poetry that goes into a real story.  Whether that’s a nonfiction or fiction one, is less relevant to me than whether we as people are taking them in and talking about them and processing them and letting them into our soul and seeing what they do to us.  Usually what they do to us is make us more able to handle difficult realities when we understand that the truth of this place and this world is nuance and gray areas and questions that can’t be answered.  That’s generally not journalism’s function.  It’s a function of story, that has some sort of beauty that kind of lodges itself in the mind and sticks with you and changes you.  Story is what I was born for.  It’s my birthright as far as I’m concerned coming from the family that I do, and it’s my great privilege that now I get paid to do that the way that the folks who taught me how to do it didn’t.

Jo Reed: And I’m so curious about what your family thinks about the book because you share some lovely things about them, and the book certainly, while fraught in many places, is also filled with a lot of joy, which I like.  But you also talk about a lot of rough stuff in the book, foreclosure, substance abuse.  Did you share the book with them as you wrote it?  Were they, you know, part of the journey as you wrote the book?

Sarah Smarsh: They were part of the journey, and this is one additional way in which it’s not a really classic memoir.  I spent a lot of years interviewing my family reporter style for just the rote details of our family history were hard to piece together because poverty tends to kind of scatter records and nobody’s keeping precious albums and no one’s in, like, the newspaper, and community is very fleeting and it was a very turbulent and transient lifestyle that my family led for generations, most specifically on my mother’s side. And so I did a lot of consulting them just to piece together kind of the nuts and bolts of, “Okay.  How did we end up here?” and “Who did what?” and, “This was when?” and that year and that address.  But then I also interviewed them about things like, “How did you feel when...fill in the blank.?” and those are types of questions that folks in working poverty don’t get asked, reason one being their story typically isn’t regarded as mattering and folks who don’t matter don’t get asked how they feel and so it took some time to kind of get my family to open up in those ways.  What I found was that they, you know, while that experience felt very foreign to them and it was very strange kind of, you know, construction for me to be there as a journalist and they’re there as my family but yet the thing that allows me to write to intimately about them is that we are blood;  but the reason I took that tack is they were uncomfortable with opening up in those ways except that I, if I present it as work, you know, “This is my work,” work they understand and they respect, and it’s like, “Okay.  It’s crazy that this is your work but if this is your work I’ll answer these questions,” and they did so forthrightly and very bravely, and this was over the course of many years.  So yes, they were brought into the process.  As far as the reading, they never asked to read it.  But when it became a reality and.  this is specifically with my close family members, I gave them an opportunity to read it.  They chose not to, including my mother, and I think, is that they knew how hard it would be to read and they also trusted me to do right by them. In the acknowledgements of the book I talk about how my grandmother, who shared very deeply about some just unimaginable traumas that she lived over the course of her life, and she told me the reason that she was okay with whatever I put in the book was, the first reason was because it’s true. <laughs> That’s a very Grandma Betty answer.  If it’s true, it’s true, like it or not,” and two, that it might help somebody else.  So I’m very grateful to their spirit in that regard.  Also, I’m going to add, you know, it wasn’t easy.  It’s not that there weren’t hard moments.  It’s not that there weren’t, like, moments where someone struggled with, you know, “Oh, God.  Somebody’s going to read that thing and now I feel ashamed.”  And there were conversations like that, and I felt that way too.  Maybe more than anybody. <laughs> But they gave me their blessing and that meant everything to me.  There is a school of thought about memoir, if they don’t like it they can write their own version, but that’s kind of a middle-class take.  My family isn’t going to write their own version, because they don’t have the time or the schooling or the access, and so I felt a real responsibility to get it as right as possible.

Jo Reed: Sarah, we’re going to have to leave it there because we’re really out of time, but I could talk to you for hours.  Thank you so much.  You know, again, I’m so pleased that this is part of the NEA Big Read and communities will be reading it.  I’m so grateful that I read it and I’m very grateful to you for writing it.

Sarah Smarsh: I thank you so much for that feedback and I truly, I’m just-- I’m so looking forward to the events and conversations ahead and delighted to be on this podcast.  I look forward to sharing it, and you asked just beautiful questions, many of which nobody’s ever asked me, so thank you for that.

Jo Reed: Not at all.  My pleasure.  Thank you, Sarah.

That was Sarah Smarsh: Her book Heartland: A Memoir of Working Hard and Being Broke in the Richest Country on Earth is a   2022-2023 NEA Big Read title. You can keep up with Sarah at SarahSmarsh.com and find out about NEA Big Read initiative at arts.gov—we’ll have links in the show notes.

You’ve been listening to Art Works produced at the National Endowment for the Arts. Follow us wherever you get podcasts and leave us a rating on apple—it helps people to find us. For the National Endowment for the Arts, I’m Josephine Reed, thanks for listening.

Sarah Smarsh: One of the reasons that I’m such a big fan of the Big Read program and the NEA and any endeavor to create dialogue around a story, whether it’s experienced by one reader or shared…a community dialogue… the reason that I have such affection for those programs isn’t just that I’m a writer. It’s that I’m somebody who very specifically chose to attempt to wield the craft of writing toward civic integrity and progress, and story absolutely is incredibly somehow, I think, the underutilized timeworn, ancient tool that we have for repairing society. Meanwhile, we live in this 24/7 media cycle and the inundation of information and the regurgitation of some stories ad nauseum, and actually, those are usually information that has been torn away from story. That’s what most news reports are, and there’s great function and purpose and nobility in that form of reporting and we need it, to be sure, so I’m not criticizing that structure. It’s just that we’ve gone so deep into information that we have lost a kind of shared story and a sense of community dialogue that in ancient times was a campfire and a very healing way of connecting to remember, “Oh, we are all responsible to one another here in this shared village in this small place.”

Jo Reed: Welcome to “Quick Study,” the monthly podcast from the National Endowment for the Arts.  This is where we’ll share stats and stories to help us better understand the value of art in everyday life.  I’m copiloting “Quick Study” with Sunil Iyengar.  He’s the Director of Research & Analysis here at the Arts Endowment.  Hello, Sunil.

Sunil Iyengar: Hi, Jo.

Jo Reed: What are we talking about today?

Sunil Iyengar: <laughs> Well, for this edition of “Quick Study,” I thought I could maybe give you some quick studies, plural, or maybe--

Jo Reed: Ho, ho.

Sunil Iyengar: <laughs> I know.

Jo Reed: <laughs>

Sunil Iyengar: Or rather some summaries of three different research projects that they sort of shed light on the art sector’s well-being in 2021, year two of the pandemic.

Jo Reed: Okay.  Why are you calling it year two?

Sunil Iyengar: Well, it’s because it’s been consistently hard to get a handle on the real-time effects of COVID-19 for the arts community, at least where systematic data collection and reporting are concerned.  Most of the government data we have that would help us evaluate the situation are lagged by a year or two.  For instance, back in March we released national and state level figures about the economic value of arts and cultural production in 2020.  So that can be called the first year of the pandemic.  We did this with our colleagues at the Bureau of Economic Analysis at the U.S. Department of Commerce, so those 2020 figures show that while the total arts sector continued to punch in more than four percent overall GDP, that’s roughly 877 billion dollars.  Arts and cultural production still shrank at nearly twice the rate of the U.S. economy as a whole.  Presenters of performing arts events, theaters, concert halls and festivals, for example, saw 73 percent decline in their economic value, and performing arts organizations such as music groups or dance and theater troupes saw more than half their economic value erode all in the first year of the pandemic.  There were also severe drops in arts employment, as we all know.

Jo Reed: So it does sound like we have a pretty good understanding of how hard the arts economy was hit by the first wave of COVID.  Well, do we know anything about 2021?

Sunil Iyengar: So that’s the difficulty.  We do have some signals from federal data.  For example, we know that employment in the arts improved over 2021 but remained well below 2019 levels.  For knowledge about other indicators, such as arts attendance or the state of arts philanthropy, were turning to some of the reports coming out of the private sector.  So we have these reports out of the private sector.

Jo Reed: Okay.  So what are they saying about 2021?

Sunil Iyengar: So I’m not going to go into them in any great detail, just sort of skim the surface, but one that caught my eye is SMU data arts, an organization, their recent trend analysis of performing arts ticket sales for a hundred organizations.  The establishment of this unique data source was supported by an NEA grant.  Mining the data, researchers found that as vaccine options began to become available throughout 2021, there was initial enthusiasm for going out to arts events again.  Even a rebound in household ticket purchases, average ticket prices, and the number of performances offered.

Jo Reed: You know, I believe that.  I saw a documentary called “Reopening Night.”

Sunil Iyengar: Oh.

Jo Reed: And it was about reopening The Delacorte Theater in 2021.  You know, that’s in New York City’s Central Park.

Sunil Iyengar: Yeah.

Jo Reed: It’s free Shakespeare in the park.  Opening Night it is pouring rain.  Pouring rain.  And people are standing in line in this rain for hours, in order to sit in the rain, because it’s outdoor theater to watch theater.  I was so moved by that, and so I think people are just thrilled for live performance again.

Sunil Iyengar: Yeah, and I think we saw that kind of enthusiasm, the exuberance, you know, especially when things were starting to reopen again I think last fall, but as the year wore on, that is 2021, ticket demand actually slowed down despite wider-spread availability of vaccines.  Especially in U.S. counties with high rates of vaccination there were fewer ticket sales over time as breakthrough cases of COVID started to occur and as new variants such as Omicron took hold.  So those who had stayed away in early 2021 when there had been a slight reawakening because of vaccine availability continued to stay away while those who had ventured out were less inclined to do so now and participated in performing arts events at lower rates.  The bottom line according to the researchers is that ticket sales became less responsive to vaccination rates and more responsive to COVID cases.  Again, this happened especially in counties that already had high rates of vaccination, which the researchers note, are also counties with older populations.

Jo Reed: Well, that makes sense, right, because of the vulnerability of older populations.  But I’m assuming that also had really particular impact for live performance.

Sunil Iyengar: Yeah.  We know from our own data, the NEA’s data, that older adults and the generations they represent historically have made up a large share of attendees at music--

Jo Reed: Of course.

Sunil Iyengar: --dance and theater events over the last several years, so unless we start seeing some commensurate growth in the numbers of younger and middle-aged adults who go to arts events, there may be a serious overall decline in audiences if the pattern continues.  A new report actually by LaPaca Cohen and Slover Linette Audience Research is based on a survey of older adults in the U.S.  It concludes that adults between 55 and 65 years of age expressed a clear preference for spending at least half their time in person when participating in arts and cultural activities.  This was a higher rate than for any other age group surveyed, so it does suggest a large number of adults eager to encounter arts events in person, at least, or, you know, like to do that at least as much as they go online for such experiences, particularly among older adults.

Jo Reed: Well, what do we know about their online participation in the arts?

 Sunil Iyengar: So the 2021 survey showed that well over half of adults did online arts and cultural activities in the previous year.  While the rates were lower for older adults than for younger adults, the opportunity to, quote “learn something new” was perceived by older adults as a leading benefit of online arts participation.  By contrast, for younger adults, the biggest kick they got out of it was quote “to have fun.” <laughs>

Jo Reed: Yeah.

Sunil Iyengar: So when it comes to overall values for older adults, regardless of whether they participate in the arts in person, online or don’t participate at all, social connectedness emerged as more important to older than younger adults.

Jo Reed: Huh.

Sunil Iyengar: Those themes are worth considering for arts and cultural programmers.

Jo Reed: That’s so interesting.  Okay.  So those are your two studies about 2021 and COVID, but you mentioned a third?

Sunil Iyengar: Yeah, that’s right.  This one’s really just a data point but it seems pretty significant.  So there’s something called the Giving USA initiative which tracks the annual state of philanthropy in the U.S., and it’s concluded recently that giving for arts culture and the humanities grew 27.5 percent over 2020 levels, to about 23.5 billion dollars.  That’s a 21.8 percent climb after adjusting for inflation.  So that’s really historic growth in arts philanthropy from individuals, foundations and corporate donors.  As far as I can tell it’s more than for any other sector of philanthropy in 2021.

Jo Reed: Well, that seems to be good news, right?

Sunil Iyengar: Yeah, apparently it is, but we still need to learn whether those dollars flowed to arts organizations of different sizes and disciplines and how broadly they reached artists and arts workers, for example.  But we also wait to see if this cash infusion, along with federal relief, you know, through the American Rescue Plan and other legislation, help to improve the participation rates we discussed earlier.  This year we’re sponsoring two national surveys of arts participation that should get us closer to understanding how successful arts organizations have been in meeting mission and serving the general public with a diverse host of offerings, in person and online.  So plenty more to come, Jo.

Jo Reed: Definitely plenty more to come, and we’re counting on you, Sunil.

Sunil Iyengar: <laughs> I hope so.

<laughter>

Sunil Iyengar: I mean, I hope I can deliver, I should’ve said.

Jo Reed: I’m sure you can.

Sunil Iyengar: <laughs>

Jo Reed: Listen, many thanks, and I’ll talk to you next month.

Sunil Iyengar: Great to talk with you.  Thanks, Jo.

Jo Reed: That was Sunil Iyengar.  He’s the Director of Research & Analysis here at the National Endowment for the Arts.  This has been “Quick Study.”  The music is “We Are One” from Scott Holmes Music.  It’s licensed through Creative Commons.  Until next time, I’m Josephine Reed.  Thanks for listening.

Music Credits:

"Melin" from the album When Was That?  Composed by Henry Threadgill, performed by The Henry Threadgill Sextet.

"In for a Penny, In for a Pound," from the album In for a Penny, In for a Pound. Composed by Henry Threadgill and performed by Zooid.

 “Untitled Tango” from the album Air Song, Composed by Henry Threadgill and performed by Air.

"NY" written and performed by Kosta T, from the album Soul Sand. Free Music Archive, 2015.

Jo Reed: For the National Endowment for the Arts, this is Art Works, I’m Josephine reed.

The National Endowment for the Arts has just announced its 2023 NEA Jazz Masters. And they are…drum roll please… musicians Regina Carter, Kenny Garrett, and Louis Hayes, as well as Sue Mingus, who’s  receiving the award for Jazz Advocacy. They’ll be celebrated at a public concert, April 1, 2023, in Washington DC in collaboration with the Kennedy Center. And you’ll be hearing from them on this podcast as the concert approaches.  But I’m going to begin my celebrating now by revisiting my interview with a 2021 Jazz Master—the groundbreaking composer, musician and band leader Henry Threadgill who’s been on the leading edge of avant-garde jazz since the 1960s.

A multi-instrumentalist who focused on the alto sax, clarinet and later the flute, Threadgill was 19 when he met Muhal Richard Abrams. He played in Abrams’ experimental band which evolved into the Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians or AACM, an influential collective of musicians.  Henry Threadgill explored the edges of improvisation with trios and ensembles of varying sizes composing new work and experimenting with instrumentation by including instruments like cello, tuba and multiple guitars to play his complicated compositions. In fact, Henry Threadgill received an NEA Jazz Composition Fellowship in 1974 and went onto to receive any number of awards including the 2016 Pulitzer Prize for music for his album “In for a Penny, In for a Pound. ” Born on the South Side of Chicago, Henry Threadgill came up in a musically varied world where the sounds of gospel, blues and marching bands all blended comfortably together and that’s where I began our 2021 conversation by asking him about his earliest musical influences.

Henry Threadgill: Well, there was no television. Radio had all the music that you were going to hear inside the house wherever you lived. The only music that you heard outside was if you went to a church or you were standing at a parade. I can remember the music from the time I was three years old listening to the radio and that music was classical European music of Serbian music because the largest Serbian community is in Chicago and it was Polish music because also that’s the largest Polish community and then you had rhythm and blues and blues and jazz and gospel music on the radio. So that was something that I would listen to on a daily basis. This is before I started grammar school and then I would hear music at my two different grandmother’s churches. One church was a Baptist church and this was a very sophisticated choir that read music and sang a lot of anthems and it was the church that my father’s mother belonged to. My other grandmother, my mother’s mother, that’s where the music I loved the most. This was a Church of God and Christ. They had a singing minister there named Singing Sammy Lewis. He was a minister and he sang and there was something about singing ministers. There was something about them, their ability to deliver words in song was exceptional. So I was influenced and captive by all these things when I was three and four years old.

Jo Reed: And when did you begin to play an instrument yourself and what was it?

Henry Threadgill: The first instrument I played was the piano. I started playing the piano when I was about three and a half years old. What happened was this, the music that was famous at that time was Boogie-woogie, Meade Lux Lewis, Albert Ammons, this was the music that was being played all across America. It was kind of like Scott Joplin’s music, kind of like rags in a way. Boogie-woogie took over and I heard that music on the radio and I didn’t even know that there was a piano in the house <laughs> till that music came on the radio. I discovered this piano in the hallway and I would sit at the piano all day with the radio on waiting for that music to come on. I started to learn how to play that music. I taught myself to play the piano by sitting and waiting every day for Boogie-woogie to be played. My hands were so small at that time, I was very frustrated. I remember I used to be very upset. That was the beginning of my whole musical life. I learned how to play Boogie-woogie when I was about three, three and half years old. Later when I was in grammar school and I began to take lessons, I wasn’t very happy with the music teacher I had at that time. So I really didn’t pay much attention. I would still play at the piano on my own. When I graduated from grammar school, I went to Englewood High School. The first concert, jazz concert, I went to was at the high school. My best friend played trumpet and that I would begin to play to the saxophone and he told me that there was going to be a concert on a Tuesday night and that we should go and hear it. I went to that concert and it was Stan Getz, I think it was Chet Baker, it was about 25 cents to go hear Stan Getz at my high school on a Tuesday night. So by the time I got to my second year, I was playing the tenor saxophone.

Jo Reed: You said when you first heard Charlie Parker, he opened a door for you. What did you hear and how did that door open?

Henry Threadgill: When I first heard Charlie Parker, yes a door did open. The door to improvise music. I heard improvised music in a different way. Let me back up before Charlie Parker. My influence in terms of music was blues, Muddy Waters and Harlan Wolff, Jimmy Reed, this is what the music that I grew up on and this was the music that had the most impact in my life. I don’t know of anyone that had more impact on me than Harlan Wolff. <music playing> And then gospel music was born in Chicago. I grew up on this music. Mahalia Jackson is in Chicago. I heard her sing live I don’t know how many times and I heard Clay Evans and James Cleveland and all of these other great singers, but that music was not a improvised music. Of course, they had some variations that they would execute in this music, but Charlie Parker had stretched the boundaries. The music I had heard prior to Charlie Parker, the swing era music, it just had not opened up to that complex degree. That’s why I said when I heard Charlie Parker, a door opened. It opened up your ears as to what can you actually hear and what can you actually do.

Jo Reed: When did you meet Muhal Richard Abrams?

Henry Threadgill: Well, I graduated from high school in 1962 and went to Wilson Junior College. This was a liberal arts two year college and they had an incredible music department. All of the art departments were incredible and the school was loaded with artists. I just can’t begin to tell you. Jack DeJohnette, Roscoe Mitchell, Joseph John and Melacap [ph?], they was Eddie Harris, Bunky Green. This was just some of the people that were there and we had a music club. We were charged with putting up different concerts. We would have classical concerts and we would have jazz concerts and I don’t know who it was. It could have been Melacap Favors [ph?] that suggested getting Muhal to play, but I didn’t know Muhal at that time. So he came with a quintet and that’s when I met him. We talked after the concert and he invited me to come to the Experimental Band which was rehearsing at that time at a place called C and C’s Lounge. This is where the Experimental Band started. This is the prelude to the AACM, Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians. So I went there and played for a bit and then he told me I could bring in some music. I brought in some music. It was very short period because it was in 1966 at this point and I had gotten drafted at this point. So I left. Right before I left the AACM had been on its way to being formed.

Jo Reed: You were drafted into the Army. Is that what happened?

Henry Threadgill: I wasn’t exactly drafted. I was working at the University of Chicago Hospital trying to make some money so that I could go to the American Conservatory of Music in the fall and I was going to school part-time which was not allowed. If you didn’t have a full course then you didn’t have a deferment. The draft board in my neighborhood called me up, told me to come down and said “Mr. Threadgill, I got good news and bad news.” I said <laughs> “What do you mean by that?” He said “You’ve been caught working and not going <laughs> to school full-time. So they’re about to draft you.” He said “They haven’t, but they’re getting ready to draft you because they discovered that you weren’t in school.” So he said “What you can do is this.” He said “You’re a professional musician.” I said “I guess so.” He said “Well, join the draft as a professional musician just like doctors, all other professional people.” I said “What does that mean?” He said “A doctor can only practice medicine, a musician can only practice music. If you join the draft then that’s the only thing you can do in the service and if they violate that they have to discharge you with an honorable discharge.” I said “Okay.” He said “The only thing is you’ll have to stay one year longer.” The draft was two years. He said “That means that you’ll have to be in there for three years.” He said “But that can be adjusted, too. If any musical organization or institution call for your services, you can do two and a half years,” and that’s when the ACM wrote while I still in the service and said that they wanted me to come and teach at the school. So I was only in the service for two and a half years. <laughs>

Jo Reed: I think the AACM is such an important organization in modern music. I’d like if you would talk about the vision that propelled the AACM and the philosophy that knitted all of you together.

Henry Threadgill: It was really Muhal’s singular vision concerning writing your own music and presenting your own music and developing and studying music, not jazz. The agenda was music. He believed deeply in that and we all picked that up. You can’t really say there was such a thing as a AACM school. Each one of us was school in our own. We had our different ideas and different approaches and it required a great deal of discipline in terms of the concept of democracy. Let me tell you what I mean by that. To complete you serve another person and to keep your ideas off the table and not to critique, to be completely at their service regardless of what they ask you to do. The idea is to let those people realize whatever their concepts are without any interference from anyone and interjected any kind of critiques whatsoever. Our job was to serve one another 100 percent. That was the basis of everything.

Jo Reed: You know, what I find just so extraordinary about the AACM is that, well, so many things, but originality, personal vision was really stressed, but so was respect for other traditions and having a grounding in so many other musics and that’s really been a constant for your throughout your career.

Henry Threadgill: You’re absolutely right. The idea that all music from humanity is really what we were looking at and one great thing at the time, Chicago was so rich in terms of the blues and gospel music. We had that and the other thing that we had at the same time was the University of Chicago Contemporary Players Orchestra. They played the most advanced and the most difficult contemporary music from America and Europe. This is where I first heard and met The Rez, Paul Hindemith, oh, I can’t say. I met a number of great composers at these. We actually worked two or three blocks apart in the same area of the city. The first time I heard the live recording of Tia Lenore by Schoenberg,  I heard it there. The first electronic music I heard was there that I heard The Rezes’ Electronique. The piece I heard that there and then the Chicago Symphony under Fritz Reiner at that time when I studied conductor. I was studying conducting in college and Fritz Reiner was playing some very interesting music and Mark Danun who followed him had a extremely contemporary repertory and it was on the margin that he actually commissioned Muhal to write a piece for the Symphony and he had something like 10 saxophones in the orchestra.

Jo Reed: This period in Chicago was crazy because wasn’t Sun Ra playing then, too?

Henry Threadgill: I started going to Sun Ra’s rehearsal when I was about 15 years old, I guess, something like that. Sun Ra was rehearsing in the neighborhood right where I lived in Englewood. He rehearsed in the back of a meat market which sold wild game. So there was raccoons and bears.

Jo Reed: Are you kidding?

Henry Threadgill: And possums hanging from the ceiling. No, I’m not. It was a Greek wild game market and the owner of it liked Sun Ra’s music and so at night in the back of the market he would let Sun Ra rehearse in the back of the market and it was extremely cold back there. That was the only downside. I used to go there with my friend just about two or three nights a week and sit there and listen to him rehearse and try to follow the music.

Jo Reed: As we said, AACM, that approach to music, it’s finding your voice and a personal vision and I’m wondering what that process was like for you of finding a voice. I mean, it’s one thing to just say it, but then you have to trust your voice, develop that voice, learn to express it.

Henry Threadgill: Yes, that’s true to find a voice. The Midwest, Chicago, it was not New York. The fast pace of New York and New York is the marketplace. You go to New York with a finished product. It’s hard to go to New York and start putting groups together. That takes a lot of time and energy. So we had time on our hand and it was a cheaper way of living, too. We didn’t pay so much. So we had time and we took advantage of it. I tried different things. I tried all kinds of combinations of groups before I got to Air, the trio Air which everything started by Steve McCall and Fred Hopkins and then my whole life changed. <music playing> Steve had come back from Paris because remember in the ‘60s, Paris was it. New York was not it. The music world was in Paris. Everybody was in Paris. The track back in the ‘70s, there was a change. People started to return from Paris and New York all of a sudden became a new migration center. New York got reenergized. So we came in about ’70, I think, ’74. I think ’75, ’75, Air. We played a concert. It was in January-February and it was really cold and it was a lot of snow. It looked like Chicago. The snow was up to your knees and we play La MaMa, at La MaMa Annex and some people said nobody’s coming to hear you all because nobody ever heard of you people from Chicago named Air. We said “That’s okay. We’re going to play anyway.” It was cold in the place. They didn’t have any heat. We had three nights, Friday, Saturday and Sunday night in this place. The people that came Friday night they went out and spread the word. Saturday night there was a line down the street and Sunday night it was a line down the street. Some of the people kind of like philanthropists type of supporters came in and heard us and the next thing you know we were playing at Carnegie Hall in April. <laughs> That’s how fast they turned around. <laughs>

Jo Reed: That’s amazing. I know you had said you don’t like the word jazz and you don’t consider yourself a jazz musician anymore. Can you explain why and what your thinking is about that?

Henry Threadgill: The word jazz had been abused and misused. That’s why I don’t like it. It’s became like a pot that people throw everything and it’s lost its distinction. Just put something or put that over there, soft jazz, hard jazz, this kind of jazz, that jazz. So that’s why I don’t like it and that’s why I don’t use it. I prefer the word creative music. Creative improvised music and would say improvised music.

Jo Reed: You’ve also said that live music is the way to hear music and you never made a record with the Society’s Situation Dance Band. You only performed live with them.

Henry Threadgill: I never wanted to make a record with that. I grew up going to dances when I was kid, right, and there would be live music, great bands would be playing. We would go to dances and so I didn’t want to record this. This was just for people to react to it and dance. Studios have a way of becoming self-conscious and you don’t have an audience. How do you go into a studio and play dance music if there’s nobody dancing? <laughs> You know what I mean? You can’t even tell if you’re doing a good job. <laughs>

Jo Reed: Your work encompasses such a wide range of music with a wide range of compositional techniques and a wide range of groups. In fact, many groups throughout your career.

Henry Threadgill: I’m going to just give a little quick overview history of the groups that I’ve had. The first group I had was Air. Air, the compositional techniques that I was developing were mostly in the major minor world and a chromatic world. Chromatic world sometimes sound like you’re sound like you’re doing something that’s free. I never did play free music. After that I came to Sextett and I was still doing writing music in the same kind of way and I also had a second group that I never recorded which was a great group called the Wind String Ensemble. That was tuba, cello, violin, viola and I played alto and flute. Now, the Sextett which I thought of as a reduced orchestra, it had a wind section, a brass section, a string section and percussion section. That’s how I thought of it. The percussion section had two drummers. I considered it one part. It just had two people playing different things the way you would have in a orchestra. It would be one person on the snare drum, another person be on temp and another person be on tambourine. You could have four people playing and it’s still one part. It’s the percussion part. Then I had the strings which was the cello and base and then the trombone and the trumpet was the brass and then I covered the reeds. <music playing> But the music I was writing at that time was still within the major minor system of music. Major scales, minor scales and combinations thereof. After that group came Very Very Circus. Very Very Circus, again, I was still stretching the boundaries of the major minor system and then when I got to Make a Move, I got as far as I could actually go in terms of this major minor idea and in this period that I made major discoveries about new was to write music and that led to the group Zooid and the system of music that started with Make a Move, but I worked everything out with Zooid. So every group that I had it had something to do with how far I had made it compositionally. I would change groups because the compositional ideas had changed. When I got everything I could out of something then I would change. I would never just change for novelty. I never even thought of doing anything like that. After I completely exhausted the orchestrational and compositional techniques that involved that particular ensemble then I would start to move to the next level and I’ve been fortunate that I could do that that I saw something beyond the horizon to move to.

Jo Reed: You mentioned Zooid and how long for, what, 18 years.

Henry Threadgill: At least 15-16 years now.

Jo Reed: How did that band start and what were you looking for?

Henry Threadgill: Well, first thing was I was looking for the players because I knew what the instruments I was hearing. So Tyreek Bemberdene, the oud player, who is now in Morocco. He’s a filmmaker, also a great filmmaker. Jose Davila, the trombonist, tuba player. He had been with me in Very Very Circus and other configurations and guitar player Liberty Ellman. Liberty Ellman recommended Elliott Kavee to trombone with us. The first Zooid record where Deaf [ph?] has appeared from Cuba, he was the first drummer with us and then I found Elliott. Dana Leone, the trombone and cello player, great artist. So I had cello, guitar and oud as the string section and tuba, drums and myself. That was the sound I was after. So we rehearsed for one year in New York City before we played. They had to learn a new language because, see, I had come up with another musical language and it wasn’t just you could just come in and read this music. You had to understand the language. We spent a year learning the language and how to work with it because we had to improvise in this language and after a little over a year and something we played our first engagement somewhere. I don’t even remember the first place, but these were special people. I don’t know how many people would have stayed with me for over a year just rehearsing with not the promise of a recording, not the promise of playing a concert or anything.

Jo Reed: Again, you’re very deliberate in the way you create your compositions. So you create a composition that has room for the musicians you play with to improvise within that structure, that musical structure that you create. Is that a fair way of saying it?

Henry Threadgill: That’s correct. Yeah. There’s room for improvisation. Yeah. Most of the time the music appears more seamless. A lot of times you can’t tell whether we’re improvising or reading music. It’s a greater ideal is to go for something like that, something that’s more seamless.

Jo Reed: When you’re composing, do you find yourself consumed by it as you’re working on it or do you leave it aside for a while, walk away, maybe leave it for a week, a month and then come back to it? I’m curious how that works with you?

Henry Threadgill: Composing is like going back to square one every time. <laughs> You don’t know what it’s going to be. You accomplish something and you say oh, wow. That was a nice step that I pulled back there, that step A and B. I think I’ll try that the next time. Next time there’s no room for A and B. <laughs> No place to execute A and B. So every time there’s a new experience and the music, see, the composition starts to dictate. You, the composer and writer, you have control, but you only have so much control. You ever heard of writer, I’m talking about literary writers, say that like they created this character. Now the character is in charge. You ever heard a writer say that?

Jo Reed: Yes. Definitely.

Henry Threadgill: The same thing happens with the music. You have to let the music go where it’s going, stop trying to control it sometimes. I never know quite what it’s going to be. Sometimes like, say, I leave things intentionally so that I can get a fresh look at it because it does get consuming and sometimes you just need to step back.

Jo Reed: And I’m assuming you’re hearing this in your head as you’re composing.

Henry Threadgill: Yeah.

Jo Reed: When you go and you were actually giving the music to the musicians does it happen that you think oh, that sounded very differently in my head. This isn’t quite working when I’m hearing the musicians do it.

Henry Threadgill: You know, my philosophy is this for one thing. The object for me is to make music. So I write it down, I bring it and somebody make a mistake. I say oh, that’s wonderful. Let me change this and put the mistake in because that’s the object for me. I’m not stuck on what I did. Remember music means nothing until you lift it up off the paper. It has no meaning. That’s what a conductor is doing. When a conductor is standing up there with a score in front of it and the orchestra. I don’t care whose music it is… Beethoven’s. What the conductor is doing is saying too many violins is playing right there. Let me have less second violins. Trumpets start doubling so and so over there. He basically said a half a teaspoon of salt and two teaspoons of pepper. The composition said a whole teaspoon of salt and three teaspoons of pepper. That’s what’s on the paper, but when you start to lift it up you find out it won’t bake. <laughs>

Jo Reed: And is that what you mean when you said artistic process and product are inseparable?

Henry Threadgill: Yes. Yes. It’s exactly. Yeah. The process. You have to find out, you imagine something, you write a script and the writer, he sits in the audience and as actors come on stage and he laughs at this comedic lines. Well, he wrote it, didn’t he, but nobody else is laughing. <laughs> So you have to really look around and see if it’s working. You got to put it up. You have to play it live. That’s the other thing about live music, live art. You have to resurrect it to find out will it stand that it has to be put up and also the impact. I listen to records when a kid, but when I used to stand up as a kid in front Harlan Wolff and Muddy Waters, it was nothing like that. I wouldn’t even be in time anymore. I’d be standing there. It’d be just like I walked through some portal or something.

Jo Reed: That’s a nice way of putting it. You’ve spent a lot of time in India, in Caracas and traveling throughout the world and, obviously, all these places have different musical rhythms and I wonder about immersing yourself in those cultures and the influence that has on your work.

Henry Threadgill: You know, it’s almost impossible for me to quantify in any kind of way what I learned from different cultures. When we say music, music is a part of some culture and if you emulate on the surface certain music it becomes obvious that you’re just like pandering to something or doing something that’s so obviously not very serious. Like you said in places like India and stuff, I mean, I listen to music there, but it’s not just listening to the music. It’s the way people walk. It’s the rhythm of the language. It’s the spices in the food. It’s all of those things. All of those things is what inform your creative process, not just the obviousness of like classical music or something. No, it’s far more than that. I think in dance, theater, all of these different mediums, we learn from other parts of humanity on the globe. As you reach out you get a bigger reward the further you reach out. <laughs>

Jo Reed: Well, as listeners we get big rewards, too, from the work that comes out of it and you’ve received so many awards I can’t even begin to mentionable of them, but I do want to mention two and one was the 2016 Pulitzer Prize in Music. Congratulations. I know you don’t like to call yourself a jazz musician, but you’re the third living jazz musician to receive that and it was for “In for a Penny, In for a Pound” which you recorded with Zooid. <music plays> That had to have been really gratifying for you.

Henry Threadgill: Oh, it was. It certainly was. I mean, I wasn’t expecting it. I remembered that the record company had asked my copyist for the score and a audio file on it, but that had been like a year back and I didn’t think about it. When they called me up, a matter of fact it was the record company called me and was telling me to see you won the Pulitzer Prize, but I said “For what?” <laughs> Did I do something right or did I do something wrong? <laughs> It was really something. It’s a level of recognition for what you do. There’s no words for it. It’s really great, a great honor, a great honor. That honor and the honors of being the Harlem Stage and the Welico [ph?] Arts Center where they have your work perform where the musicians came and played on my work to honor me. That’s another great honor. When people in your time play your music then you figure you must be doing something right. <laughs>

Jo Reed: Well, you really must be doing something right because you have been named the 2021 NEA Jazz Master and I wonder if you can say what that means for you.

Henry Threadgill: Well, this honor is the highest honor that the country gives. The honor is not just to me. I didn’t get here on my own. All of these people that’s been in my life, all of the influences, so much I’ve learned, I can’t even articulate and give all the names of all of the teachers, friends, parents and even silent supporters. That’s who’s standing here that sitting here taking this award with me. It’s not just an award to Henry Threadgill, it’s that part of this community and this country that produced and nurtured Henry Threadgill is why I got that award. That’s what that award means. It means that you said something about not just me, but all those people that did something to make this a better place for everybody in this country through art.

Jo Reed: And I think that is a great place to leave it. Henry, many congratulations and thank you for years of your beautiful, wonderful work.

Henry Threadgill: Thank you, Jo. My pleasure.

Jo Reed: That was 2021 NEA Jazz Master composer and multi-instrumentalist Henry Threadgill. Once again, the NEA just named its 2023 Jazz Masters. They are Regina Carter, Kenny Garrett, and Louis Hayes, and Sue Mingus.  You can find their bios at arts.gov. And I’ll be speaking with them as the April 1 celebration approaches.  You’ve been listening to Artworks produced by the National Endowment for the Arts. Follow us wherever you get your podcast and leave us a rating on Apple, it helps people to find us. I’m Josephine Reed. Thanks for listening.

Henry Threadgill: The object for me is to make music. So I write it down, I bring it and somebody make a mistake. I say oh, that’s wonderful. Let me change this and put the mistake in because that’s the object for me. I’m not stuck on what I did. Remember music means nothing until you lift it up off the paper. It has no meaning. That’s what a conductor is doing. When a conductor is standing up there with a score in front of it and the orchestra. I don’t care whose music it is… Wagner or Beethoven’s. What the conductor is doing is saying too many violins is playing right there. Let me have less second violins. Trumpets start doubling so and so over there. He basically said a half a teaspoon of salt and two teaspoons of pepper. The composition said a whole teaspoon of salt and three teaspoons of pepper. That’s what’s on the paper, but when you start to lift it up you find out it won’t bake. <laughs>