The quartet heard on Coleman’s seventh album consisted of alto saxophone (Ornette Coleman), pocket trumpet (Don Cherry), drums (Ed Blackwell), and bass (Scott LaFaro). After listening to the album on repeat over several long car rides, I decided to “arrange” it, in a way, for instruments that I had sitting around my house. The instrumental rearrangement went like this: trumpet —> bassoon, saxophone —> clarinet, drums —> mridanga/pots and pans, bass —> guitar. I began by recording a bassoon improvisation while listening to “W.R.U.” in one ear, simply imitating what I heard without any plans or structures. I then recorded a mridanga improvisation while listening to my bassoon improvisation in one ear, this time playing in a kind of counterpoint, as if improvising in real time with myself. I then re-recorded my bassoon improvisation while listening to my mridanga improvisation in one ear, again improvising alongside rather than imitating. I repeated this process with guitar, clarinet, and pots and pans. After multiple rounds of these circular improvisational responses, I arrived at my own musical structure, clearly inspired by Ornette!, but also clearly distinct from it.

Each time I went through an improvisational cycle, I allowed more and more of my body—the pedagogy, musical histories, and sonic habits that are encoded in my body—to seep in and deviate from the imitations. Those sonic habits are not singularly identifiable as coming from one tradition or another; rather, they signify the act of inheritance that is perpetually taking place as my body makes sound. That inheritance comes from multiple locations, whether from my Saturday morning Karnatak vocal lessons in elementary school, or the Anglo-American musical histories I was steeped in as an undergraduate at UCSD and Eastman, or the the ‘60s free jazz albums I listened to for two hours during my Sunday drives to LA. These musics and histories are often presented as separate, fixed, regimented. But the colonial impulse to compartmentalize began to break down as I allowed those histories to converge in my body, through my hands, my air flow, in the way I made sound. This music is not a point of intersection, but a constantly morphing embroidery of habits and significations, always folding itself inside out.