As her fans are happy to remind her, it’s been five and a half long years since the release of Solange’s last album. But even the most impatient of her admirers would have to admit that this sly and deep-thinking R&B singer — whose 2019 “When I Get Home” made countless critic’s lists and spawned a short film set in her hometown of Houston — has kept busy over the past half-decade.
Under the auspices of the Saint Heron collective she founded in 2013, Solange, 38, has mounted performance-art pieces in museums and galleries around the world; composed a score for New York City Ballet; and even designed a line of glassware meant, in her words, to reveal “the sentience of household objects through the landscape of Black domesticity.” This year, Apple Music included Solange’s 2016 LP, “A Seat at the Table,” on its list of the 100 best albums of all time.
Her latest project is Eldorado Ballroom, a three-night series of wide-ranging musical performances set to open Thursday at Walt Disney Concert Hall. Named after a historic Black music hall in Houston’s Third Ward neighborhood — where Solange grew up with her older sister, pop superstar Beyoncé — the series follows an earlier installment held last year at New York’s Brooklyn Academy of Music; among the artists on the L.A. lineup are Patrice Rushen, Bilal, Moses Sumney, Dominique Johnson, J*Davey and the Gospel Music Workshop of America’s Women of Worship choir.
Solange called from her home in the New York area on a recent morning after taking in an Alvin Ailey exhibition at the Whitney Museum.
You strike me as someone for whom a sense of place is crucial to your work.
I’ve led a pretty nomadic life. I started touring when I was about 13, dancing for Destiny’s Child, and I’ve lived in six different cities in America. A lot of the work I’ve been doing lately has been grounded in creating tangible artifacts because I do move around so much. No matter where I am, there’s a familiarity that comes from these things.
I was just talking to a DJ I love from Paris named Crystallmess about how exciting it is to see regional music make a sort of comeback. Across a lot of genres — but specifically with hip-hop and R&B and drill and club and house and electronic music — you’re starting to see all of these very regional sonics burst out of these very specific regional subcultures. I love that because I feel like I carry a sense of Houston and the South with me in all of my practices.
So much of popular culture is built around the glorification of the star. With Saint Heron, you seem interested in dismantling that to some degree.
Saint Heron is really built through the spirit of collaboration, and I’m able to do and create things that I could never do on my own. People ask all the time: Is it an institution? Is it an agency? Is it an archive? I really hone in on calling it a living and breathing evolution because it started as a music blog.
When I came out with the “True” EP [in 2012], I felt very lonely at the time, being a Black artist in the indie music space. I knew there were so many other Black artists who were reinventing the wheel with R&B and innovating within the genre, and it really was about having a collective space and finding strength in numbers. I thought a lot about the Soulquarians and the Super Friends and this idea that a collective could have a much stronger voice if we celebrated each other and we also took ownership of our stories.
What has it evolved into?
About five years ago, I was sort of at a standstill. I felt like we achieved a lot of the things that we wanted to achieve, and I started to give a lot of thought to the archive that I felt was important to maintain and to protect. I envisioned my future grandchildren, amid this Black renaissance of art and music and culture, still having to go to white institutions to see and experience the archive. It was actually a very, very pivotal moment.
I went to Detroit, to the [Exhibit 3000] techno museum — it’s a really small, intimate space, and the archive was so intentional and so thoughtful. It gave me the wings to say that even at this micro level, this really matters. When you think about Jeff Mills and Juan Atkins and the global impact of what they’ve created, it doesn’t matter the size or the scale of the space. Those objects were able to have a permanence and tell a story that nobody else could.
I went to Chicago in the same trip, and I visited Theaster Gates’ Stony Island Arts Bank and was able to experience his archive of Johnson Publishing and of his ceramic work. Again, I was getting the message that the next evolution of Saint Heron is to build an archive of stories, films, performances, objects — living and breathing moments in time — and to create safekeeping for them, so that there’s a space where people in 20 or 30 years can go back to this Sampha song on a compilation or to this interview we did with Barkley Hendricks about his favorite music or to experience the photographs of Barbara Chase-Riboud during her time in Egypt.
You share this archiving instinct with your sister, who meticulously annotates everything she does.
I’m not sure if it’s the same for my sister, but for me it’s actually a very common story in Black families in that I recall growing up having maybe one photo from the age of birth until maybe 4. Our family was in between moves and something happened with our storage and things got lost. So all of my childhood pictures came from aunts or uncles or family friends. There’s definitely a science behind memory-making — being able to go back to the smell of a room or the sound of a room by having access to an image. And I didn’t have that. So there’s a lot of puzzle-piecing of my childhood based on stories and memories but not necessarily on a tangible archive.
The other part of it is that I often think about who I would be or who I would not be had I not had access to images and stories of the Black women who have helped define me and given me the courage to be unapologetically myself. I think about if I only knew Nina Simone’s music but I never saw any of her interviews or any photographs of her. I think about seeing Senga Nengudi’s art but not being able to see films of her dancing or hear about her time in Los Angeles and being under the bridge. I think about these moments of totality and about my Blackness and my womanness, and so much of that is because of the blueprints that I’ve been able to experience through the preservation of these women’s stories.
Honestly, anything I’ve done in the last five to seven years, I’m thinking about the year 2050 and about what all of this is gonna mean then.
In L.A. you’re premiering “Not Necessarily in Arms Reach,” a piece you wrote for two tubas. Why the tuba?
My earliest memories of the tuba were growing up hearing Texas Southern University’s marching band. My son’s father played football, and we were high-school sweethearts, so I would constantly be going to his games in both high school and in his time at Texas Southern. And to be quite honest, I was literally zoned out, just waiting for the band to come back out — like, OK, when is halftime? I just remember the low end that I would feel, because the thing about the Southern marching bands is they have tuba sections that have solo parts, and there’s an energy that they bring to the instrument. There’s a way they move with it. I mean, the tuba players are always the sauciest ones in the band.
I really, really come alive with bass, and there was a gravity in the tuba that always made me feel very full. In my vocal range, I haven’t really explored the lower end of my voice. I generally write melodically from more of a falsetto place. So there are things I can’t achieve with my voice, and once I started writing music for tuba I was able to tap into the more guttural parts of my body and express a nuance that I couldn’t even with synth bass or electric bass or upright bass. During “A Seat at the Table,” I started exchanging bass for tuba.
When I write for tuba, I sing all of the melodic parts and I transcribe them maybe three or four octaves down. So I’m able to sit and live with that for a while and continue to expand and edit and harmonize and build. There’s also something about the synergy of two tuba players facing each other — sort of the natural sculpture that takes place with their bodies and with the instrument. It feels like a monument. It’ll be really interesting to see how that exists in a space like Disney Hall that already is a monument.
Solange performs at the Camp Flog Gnaw Carnival in Los Angeles in 2019.
(Allen J. Schaben/Los Angeles Times)
You’ve programmed a performance of an orchestral piece by Patrice Rushen, whose career has moved between pop music and classical music. Does her path resonate with you?
Oh my God, a hundred percent. I remember on “A Seat at the Table,” I was working with Raphael Saadiq’s nephew, who’s a pianist who went to Berklee. His name is Dylan [Wiggins], and Patrice Rushen was his teacher. That completely blew my mind. I’ve been a huge fan of her music for so long, and not only her music but her style, her academia, her grace. I mean, all of it — the hair.
When I found out about [Rushen’s composition] “Sinfonia,” I listened to it religiously, and it really gave me wings before I started to write my piece for New York City Ballet to know that this was a space that had been occupied before. What I love about her is that she continues to perform her pop songs. She embraces the duality of all of these sides of her.
Why did you pair Bilal with the trio of Cooper-Moore, William Parker and Michael Wimberly?
I knew I wanted to incorporate Cooper-Moore into the program — his handmade instruments and the sort of sonic telescopes he’s been creating. And I knew I wanted a vocalist. I spent quite some time thinking about: Who could hang with those guys? I’d been jotting down names, and one day I was like, It’s Bilal. I got to experience watching him really use his voice as an instrument when we worked on a song, “Cosmic Journey,” on my second album. He made all sorts of sounds with his voice — horn sounds, piano sounds, bass sounds. And he’s an improv artist. That night in the studio, I watched him improv on a melody like 30 different ways in an hour.
You recently reposted something on Instagram where someone pointed out that we got new music from Mozart before we got a new Solange album. How do you think about the growing demand for your next record?
I actually died laughing. My fan base, they just crack me the hell up. But people forget that “A Seat at the Table” took me five years to make. I feel like you have to live if you want to write from a potent place. And I only write when I have something to say. I only write when I feel like if I don’t write, then I’m moving backwards or I’m regressing in my own personal healing journey. So with both “A Seat at the Table” and “When I Get Home,” I had something to say. There was an urgency that I needed to write those songs or else those stories were going to become a poison in my body.
André 3000 frustrated some hip-hop fans last year when he dropped an experimental jazz album instead of a rap record. Could you relate to where he is as an artist?
Definitely. I know what it feels like to have a dire need to express a part of yourself and to be courageous enough to silence all the noise and expectations around you and to step into that. It truly is an act of faith and, for many of us, an act of survival. I respected it tenfold.