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yes! lord. brings together various cultural traditions—the neoclassical music of Steve Reich; the improvisatory drive of black church choral music; the chanting of the Blackpentecostal “yes” and “yes, lord”; and the sound of the Hammond organ. The word and concept “yes” in the Blackpentecostal Church is about openness, surrender, vulnerability.
Black life, blackqueer possibility, is the continual unfolding of the posture and practice of “yes,” the practice and posture of vulnerability and openness and letting-be, and allowance and yielding as a way of life.
premiered at Bridge Projects (Los Angeles, CA), April 2021.
In April 2019, Ashon Crawley organized “Antiphony, Otherwise: A Hammond Organ Symposium” at Yale University’s Institute of Sacred Music. For the 2018-19 school year, he was a fellow at the Institute and convened the one-day symposium that gathered scholars and practitioners to discuss the role of the Hammond Organ in Black Christian communities. The day ended with a curated sound event, “Testimony Songs and Devotion.” “Testimony Songs and Devotion” in 2019 and “Friday Joy Night Service” (below) both provided a space for thinking about questions of identity and religiosity, of sound and space.
In February 2018, with the Carter G. Woodson Institute at University of Virginia, Ashon Crawley lead a workshop about the Japanese art practice of kintsugi—thinking with participants about how art can allow us to think about breaking things, broken things, and how we can practice repair with one another in ways that pursue a more just, equitable, and sustainable world. Participants included students, faculty, staff from University of Virginia, and community members of the Charlottesville area.
“Friday Joy Night Service” was a curated sound event I organized in April 2017 in Los Angeles. While the audience sang, listened to, and clapped along with gospel songs that featured the musicianship of a Hammond organist, soul food—fried chicken, fried fish—was prepared for the spaces. The point was to think about how the sound of the Hammond organ cannot be easily disentangled from the feel of hand clapping and foot stomping or the smell of food, complete with an anticipatory drive towards the end of the “service” in order to eat. Sense experience is not easily divisible and the sound of the Hammond B-3 was utilized to assist in demonstrating this.
