Music

Nnenna and Pierce Freelon make the Grammys a family affair

The Freelons are the only mother and son to be nominated for different awards in the same year

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    Nnenna Freelon and Pierce Freelon
    Nnenna Freelon (left) was nominated for best jazz vocal album. Her son Pierce (right) was nominated for best children’s music album. Samantha Everette
    By

    Whether or not they take home any hardware Sunday night, Durham, North Carolina-based Grammy nominees Nnenna Freelon and Pierce Freelon already have achieved a first in the awards’ 64-year history. They’re the only mother and son to be nominated for different awards in the same year — Nnenna in the best jazz vocal category for her album Time Traveler, and Pierce in the best children’s music album category for Black to the Future.

    Nnenna Freelon has been nominated five times previously, but Time Traveler is her first album in more than a decade. Black to the Future is Pierce Freelon’s second album. Both albums contend with the loss of Phil Freelon, Nnenna’s husband and Pierce’s father, a renowned architect who led the design team of the National Museum of African American History and Culture. He died of amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS) in 2019.

    Last week, I visited Nnenna Freelon’s lakeside home on the outskirts of Durham, which her husband designed, to discuss the Freelons’ historic achievement, their music and remembering Phil Freelon in their work.

    This conversation has been edited for length and clarity.

    What was the inspiration behind these albums? 

    Pierce: For me, I started diving into our family archives when my dad was ailing. We’re in this house now, which he designed, where he spent his last months, weeks, days. And that last six months, especially, I spent a lot of time right here as one of his primary caregivers. One of the activities we’d engage in was looking through old family videos. I bought a VHS player from the thrift store so we could plow through all these tapes, which typically he was never in because he was always the one holding the camera. He’d film us at recitals, birthdays and holiday gatherings, and mom’s early concerts from the 1980s. It was a nostalgic time traveling mechanism for us.

    It was also a very creative time for me. Creating music during that time was part of grieving his passing. But grief has this negative connotation of being down in the dumps. Some of it was celebratory, because he was such a funny, loving, caring, sweet guy. As we’re diving into this stuff, it wasn’t just boo-hoo. It was, ‘Yo, this dude is great, a wonderful role model and a healing presence in my life.’ The creative archiving was often joyful. And a lot of it was about fatherhood.

    After he passed in the summer of 2019, a lot of art started pouring out. And like a DJ or a producer in the hip-hop tradition, there’s a tradition of sampling. I had these crates — not vinyl records but VHS tapes. My first children’s album, D.A.D, was very much a reflection of that process. And about seven months later, I released Black to the Future from that same body of material that emerged when COVID happened and everything else came to a screeching halt.

    Nnenna Freelon

    Chris Charles

    Nnenna: It was a similar process, though not as organized as Pierce’s process was. Because grieving takes time. It takes energy, focus and attention. Phil and I had the opportunity to have deep conversations as he was dying. ALS is a horrible disease, but it does give you time. You see it coming. And you have an opportunity to use that time however you see fit. 

    Phil was interested in legacy — hence, part of his journey with Pierce, looking through old tapes. How do you want to be remembered? Phil said to me so many times, ‘Don’t stop singing.’ He felt bad that his illness brought me to a halt in my career. He made me promise that when he passed, I’d keep singing. And I promised, but it was hard to keep that promise. I didn’t know where my voice was. I was broken. I started on a project, a vanity present for him, but I didn’t finish it. But he did get to hear some of the unmixed tracks.

    Keeping that promise was hard. But the one place I found that I could explore was this ‘grief space.’ What sort of music did I want to put out there and remember and really lean into remembering? So that was where Time Traveler came from, as a way to soothe my own spirit. And then my sister died six months after Phil. My whole world was filled with transitions. I put the record out and divorced myself from any concern about how it would do.

    Nnenna, your last album, Homefree, was released in 2010. Were you recording much music between these two albums?

    Nnenna: People have asked me what took so long. First of all, there wasn’t a single record company that was interested, and we looked. But I was touring consistently, and I make my money when I tour. Not having a label and not having any interest from labels didn’t seem like a big deal. Pierce was actually on my last record.

    And then I found a partner with Origin Records, whose business model is different from other labels. They don’t own your masters [recordings]. That was important to me, especially since I had already recorded the music.

    These are two very different albums, but I’m curious about the extent of your collaboration as artists. Pierce, there are four generations of your family that make appearances on your album, including Nnenna. Is there a lot of artistic collaboration between you both?

    Pierce: We just got back from a big premiere at the Kennedy Center — we shared the stage on opening night. And over the years, we’ve had several creative collaborations. I think the tie that binds these two projects is Phil Freelon. Mom also has a podcast called Great Grief that dives a bit deeper into the grieving space.

    Mom would call me at 11 p.m. and talk for hours about her ideas about grieving. It’s been a beautiful blossoming of her voice. The world has known Nnenna Freelon as a jazz vocalist, but now there’s something about this particular conversation about grief that hopefully everyone will get to experience.

    Nnenna: That’s really interesting. Some people stand in opposition to grief. When Phil first died, people were calling and dropping off food. And then after a while, it got real quiet. And people are uncomfortable when they see you. Should they say anything or not?

    This young man, right here (Pointing to Pierce) — not only did I call him at 11, I’d call him at 1 a.m. Sometimes I’d be crying. He’d be in the middle of something, and not once did he say he couldn’t talk. Our relationship has deepened, which is one of the gifts of grief. We were both in a space of remembrance. Phil’s energy — Pierce and I were in the same room with him when he died — released, and you can walk away or you can grab some of it.

    Pierce Freelon

    Chris Charles

    Pierce, your children, Justice and Stella, appear on your albums. How has grieving the loss of their grandfather been for them?

    Pierce: About a year before my dad was diagnosed with ALS, my sister lost a child. (Pierce’s sister Maya is a visual artist. They also have a brother, Deen, who’s a professor of journalism at the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill.)

    Maya’s son’s name was Wonderful. And that was a family experience that we all shared. He had a disease called anencephaly, and she found out when she was three months pregnant. And he lived for three days after he was born, from Oct. 31 to Nov. 2.

    Our whole family was there. That was really an introduction for my children that life is impermanent, and death is part of our normal experience here. I think kids — and this is one reason that I’m drawn to making children’s music — assimilate information easily because everything is new to them. My sister approached her son’s illness not as a terrible thing, but she wanted to celebrate the life that he had. 

    A couple of years later, when my dad was in the final stretches of his time on this earth, we heard people often say, ‘He’s so young.’ I’d laugh to myself. Well, he’s been here for 6½ decades. Wonderful was young. He was alive for three days. That’s young. My dad had time to have a family and meet his grandkids. He achieved a lot in his professional career. He reeled in quite a few black-mouthed bass from that lake over there. He shot some skyhooks. He had pets. He lived a full life. And Wonderful did, too. From the moment he was born to the day he died it was a party, with cake and music.

    Nnenna: When Wonderful died, we were in a circle. We kissed his little feet and sang him on home. We were amazed he came all this way just to meet us. Wonderful paved the way for Phil’s transition in every way — to die with grace, to die with ease, to die with community, gratitude and joy. It taught all of us for when our time comes to go with no regrets and fear.

    On Sunday, you’ll be in Las Vegas for the Grammys. How do you envision the experience?

    Nnenna: Of course, I’d like to bring some hardware back to Durham. I’m trying to contain myself from leaping out of my chair right now. The Grammys were announced, and Pierce and I were both nominated. Then the Grammys were postponed. But that meant that I got to be a nominee for way longer. So, we’re living in this rarefied space. Being there is going to be awesome, and coming home is going to be awesome. I don’t see how we can lose, because we’ve already won. And Phil is in this mix. I feel his joy.

    Paul Wachter has written for The New York Times Magazine, Harper's, and The Atlantic. He lives in Chapel Hill, North Carolina.

    This Story Tagged: Music Grammys Jazz music Nnenna Freelon Phil Freelon Pierce Freelon
    Commentary

    The new anti-lynching law is an act of political theater

    It’s a century too late and leaves serious issues of racial justice unaddressed

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      U.S.-WASHINGTON, D.C.-BIDEN-ANTI-LYNCHING ACT-SIGNING
      President Joe Biden signs the Emmett Till AntiLynching Act in the Rose Garden of the White House in Washington on March 29. Liu Jie/Xinhua via Getty Images
      Jesse Washington By @jessewashington

      When President Joe Biden signed the Emmett Till Antilynching Act into law this week, he and the bill’s supporters said they were rectifying the federal government’s century of failure to outlaw a tool of racial terror. I saw the ceremony as something else: a hollow gesture that is blind to modern problems.

      In his remarks at the Rose Garden, Biden practically described the law as an instant relic. He talked about the killings of 4,400 Black people between 1877 and 1950 and said, “Lynching was (emphasis mine) pure terror to enforce the lie that not everyone, not everyone belongs in America, not everyone is created equal.”

      I understand this new law doesn’t define lynching only as something that happens at the end of a rope, but as any hate crime resulting in death or serious injury. The law could have been used, for example, to prosecute the white men who ran Ahmaud Arbery down in a Confederate-flagged pickup truck and shot him to death in 2020. Biden mentioned Arbery in his remarks, of course, since the 25-year-old Black jogger is the most prominent recent example of how Black people are still lynched today.

      But here’s the thing: When Black people first sought a federal anti-lynching law in 1900, we needed it because state courts would not or could not convict racial terrorists. That’s what happened with Emmett’s killers, who were freed by an all-white jury in 1955 and then admitted their crimes in a magazine article.

      But Arbery’s assailants were convicted of felony murder in state court in Georgia and sentenced to life in prison. Two of the three have no chance of parole. The verdicts were an overdue sign that, 10 years into the Black Lives Matter movement, juries have finally become more willing to convict racist killers. If Till was killed today, I have a solid measure of hope that the perpetrators would be punished without this new law.

      There is some value in having a federal backstop in case the state system breaks down. But the men who murdered Arbery also were convicted of federal hate crime charges. That leaves symbolism as the primary reason to pass this new law – while more important issues of racial justice remain unaddressed.

      One of those issues is ironically present in the Arbery story. What elevated Arbery’s case from racist tragedy to national outrage is that two local prosecutors declined to press charges. It wasn’t until a video of Arbery’s death set the internet ablaze that state authorities stepped in to ensure that Gregory McMichael, his son Travis and their neighbor William “Roddie” Bryan were punished.

      Bryan and the McMichaels are not the ones who got away with murder here. Metaphorically, that description fits former Glynn County District Attorney Jackie Johnson, the first prosecutor not to file charges. She has been charged with obstruction and violations of oath by a public officer, and faces a maximum of only five years in prison if convicted, which minimizes the severity of allowing people to hunt down a human being like an animal. We don’t know if charges will be filed against the second prosecutor, Waycross Judicial Circuit District Attorney George Barnhill; the results of a recently concluded state investigation have not been released.

      What Johnson and Barnhill did should be the federal crime, not the bygone lynchings Biden described. Johnson’s and Barnhill’s actions are not unusual in a justice system that refuses to punish prosecutors for even the most egregious misdeeds, which emboldens what has been credibly called an “epidemic of prosecutorial misconduct” that locks up the innocent while freeing the guilty.

      Arbery’s lynching was the starting point for the enormous racial justice protests of 2020, which created the political opportunity for Sen. Cory Booker and then-Sen. Kamala Harris to introduce the legislation signed by Biden. But it doesn’t deal with the deep-rooted, pernicious nature of what happened to Arbery.

      I suppose that with Congress so divided that even routine matters like funding the government become a high-wire staredown, Booker and Harris thought they should put some points on the board with a measure that you’d have to be pandering to a Klannish constituency to oppose. (Hello, Reps. Andrew Clyde, Thomas Massie and Chip Roy.) But to me, the law is reminiscent of another milquetoast piece of legislation, the 2021 law making Juneteenth a federal holiday. Reality check: You are asking us to celebrate the fact that Black people remained enslaved for two years past the Emancipation Proclamation.

      The people who benefit symbolically from the new anti-lynching law are the dead – ghosts like my namesake Jesse Washington, whose gruesome murder helped inspire the early movement to make lynching a federal crime. Those efforts were denied for more than 100 years, with Congress failing almost 200 times to pass anti-lynching legislation. To me, the value of finally closing that loop is washed away by the fact that its time has passed.

      “It is both a triumph and a tragedy that only now has our government officially outlawed the horror of lynching with this historic act,” said Bryan Stevenson, whose Equal Justice Initiative provided the lynching statistics cited by Biden. “This should have happened a century ago. But it’s not too late to commit to a new era in which we value the lives of all Americans.”

      Rashad Robinson, president of Color of Change, who was at the Rose Garden ceremony, said, “Seeing Congress condemn a tool of political oppression from the last century does not let them off the hook when it comes to addressing the tools of anti-Black political oppression in this century.”

      Some symbolic gestures do matter: official government apologies for slavery, because acknowledging guilt can help begin the healing. Removing the names of Confederates from streets and buildings, because it repudiates the falsehood of their heroism. Putting abolitionist Harriet Tubman on the $20 bill, because it broadcasts the worth of Black women.

      But this new law, however well-intentioned, misses the mark. It’s a backstop against racist state juries at a time when the front lines of racism have become corrupt prosecutions, mass incarceration and lack of access to health care. The fact that only three outliers voted against it shows that the battle has moved elsewhere.

      There are too many injustices in today’s America to waste time on problems of the past.

      Jesse Washington is a journalist and documentary filmmaker. He still gets buckets.

      This Story Tagged: Commentary Lynching Black History Race Social Justice Emmitt Till
      Commentary

      Grappling with ‘Atlanta’s’ new villain: white people

      The first two episodes of Season Three of the hit FX series have centered around white people in an uncomfortable way. And that’s the point.

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        ATL
        LaKeith Stanfield (left) as Darius and Zazie Beetz (right) as Van in Season Three of Atlanta. Coco Olakunle/FX
        By @DavidDTSS

        Season Two of Atlanta — the critically acclaimed FX show starring Donald Glover, Brian Tyree Henry, LaKeith Stanfield and Zazie Beetz, about rapper Paper Boi trying to make it in the city largely regarded as the Black mecca of the South — ended with the show’s main trio heading out for a European tour. Not only were Earn, Paper Boi and Darius on their way out of Atlanta, but the audience would be joining them. It’s a risky proposition to essentially eliminate the city that had become one of the show’s most enduring and defining characters, but the series has earned our trust over the past 15 episodes.

        The combination of the show now being set in Europe and the racial uprising in 2020 after the police murdered George Floyd (while Atlanta was on hiatus) seems to have led the series to highlight a new character that had been on the periphery for the first two seasons: white people.

        Season Three starts with two men — one white, one Black — on a boat on the show’s version of Lake Lanier. For the uninitiated, the popular Georgia vacation destination was built over a Black town whose residents were run off by racist violence. Lake Lanier is also known for the deaths that occur there each year, which many claim are linked to its dubious history. In the episode, much of the scene features the white man talking about the terror of whiteness before transforming into a fully formed demon. The message is clear: White people will terrorize us throughout the season.

        The first episode makes good on that promise by dramatizing the Hart family murder-suicide — the 2018 tragedy that befell six Black children when their adoptive white mothers drove them off a cliff, killing everyone in the SUV. The show also refers to some of the most prominent internet memes of all time — the kid dancing on his desk in excitement, the mom making her son dance until he cried, and the dad slapping his son. But it slowly reveals to the audience where it’s heading. The episode’s progression from those memes — which are hyperfamiliar to Black audiences — to a national story about two white women’s abusive and deadly parenting is the show’s writers taking our hand and guiding us to this new world of Atlanta, where the horrors of white supremacy will be at the forefront.

        I realized where the show was headed about halfway through the first episode and my stomach started to hurt. I wanted to turn my head. I wanted to change the channel. Yes, my reaction was, in part, because the real-life Hart family story is so heartbreaking. But I also felt discomfort because I’ve spent the last years watching Atlanta to get away from white folks.

        Atlanta has been at its best when it’s focused solely on Black folks, Black culture and Black Atlanta. Take, for instance, Barbershop, an episode about the mess we go through just to get fades; or FUBU, about trying to stay fresh in high school; or Streets on Lock, about being Black and detained. For the most part, whiteness and its oppressive tentacles have always been acknowledged and present on the show, but white people were never a focus. When they have appeared on Atlanta — like Earn’s radio buddy who uses the N-word or the overeager Juneteenth host — they’re mostly dismissible caricatures. And I liked it that way. Atlanta has always felt like ours. But now, it seems like we have to get used to white folks and it feels like they’re infringing on our thing — our Thursday night escape to a Black half-hour of TV now has to contend with terroristic white folks. Can’t we have anything?

        One of the beauties of Atlanta is its metacommentary and its anticipation of how audiences will react to certain moments. So the season’s second episode addresses this invasion head-on, introducing the white gaze. There’s even a scene where white folks gather and stare at a Black man as if he’s dying before actually killing him themselves. In the first two episodes, there’s no such thing as white folks being passive in the demise of Black folks.

        Paper Boi & Co. taking over Europe acts as a stark juxtaposition to the way white folks are invading the show. That tension comes to a head at the end of the second episode when Paper Boi looks out to a crowd of white fans and they’re all wearing blackface.

        It’s a not-so-subtle metaphor for the way Black folks, especially popular Black folks, address their white audiences and fans. What does it mean when a Black-as-hell show like Atlanta is loved by so many white people? It can make you feel like you’re doing something wrong. Like your commentary isn’t biting down nearly hard enough if you’re still universally beloved by the same white folks you’re admonishing or purposely trying to leave out. The way Paper Boi felt about those white folks in blackface staring at him — like he’s being intruded upon and he wants them to just be gone — is how this Atlanta viewer feels about the show’s new wrinkle.

        Atlanta has spent the last few years giving us a wholly Black space that couldn’t care less about where white folks fit into it. Now it’s creating a wholly Black space that looks at what happens when villainous white folks try to invade it. I don’t like it, and I want those villains to go away so I can enjoy my Blackness in peace.

        And I think that’s the point.

        David Dennis Jr. is a senior writer at Andscape and an American Mosaic Journalism Prize recipient. His book, The Movement Made Us, will be released in 2022. David is a graduate of Davidson College.

        This Story Tagged: Commentary Atlanta Donald Glover tv
        Commentary

        California task force narrowly approves plan to restrict reparations

        After bitter debate, group decides not all Black residents should be eligible

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          Racial Injustice Reparations
          In this Jan. 15, 2021, photo, California state Sen. Steven Bradford addresses a news conference at Dodger Stadium in Los Angeles. Bradford is a member of the state’s reparations task force. Irfan Khan/Los Angeles Times via AP, Pool, File
          Jesse Washington By @jessewashington

          Never mind all the people trying to prevent Black folks from receiving reparations. Even among those who want to compensate African Americans for the harm caused by slavery and state-sponsored racism, the path forward is difficult and acrimonious.

          That was my conclusion Tuesday night after watching what could have been a milestone in a growing national movement. California established a task force last year to formulate proposals for reparations, and after months of discussion and hearing testimony, the panel was voting on who should be eligible for compensation. Defining that “community of eligibility” brought long-simmering divisions to the surface and led to a tight vote that didn’t feel like it fully resolved the debate.

          The task force was considering a motion to define those eligible as “an African American descendant of a chattel enslaved person OR descendant of a free Black person living in the United States prior to the end of the 19th century.” In reparations terminology, that is called “lineal” eligibility for Black people who lived through slavery and the immediate aftermath.

          Five yes votes were needed to pass, but the initial motion only received four. Three members voted no because they wanted all of California’s 2.6 million Black citizens to be eligible for reparations. Two of the nine panelists abstained.

          The discussion quickly turned contentious, at times devolving into sniping, thinly veiled insults, political grandstanding and rebuttals of rebuttals. The meeting was virtual, with each panelist in their own box on a computer screen, adding to the sense of separation. In the public chat section, panelists were viciously attacked. It took more than three hours of debate for the task force to move forward.

          Those three hours exposed the challenges facing reparations even in a liberal stronghold like California – let alone the U.S. Congress. And they highlighted unresolved questions within the reparations movement itself: Are reparations for slavery, or racial injustice in general? What defines a person as a Black American?

          In recent years, the movement for reparations has moved from pie in the sky to serious consideration, and it gained momentum during the racial upheavals of 2020. California is the first state to take action, joining at least 11 cities.

          Unlike other places pursuing reparations under hostile circumstances, there were no white people standing in the way in California, no conservatives complaining about paying for something they didn’t do. Eight of the task force’s nine members are Black. Appointed by the governor and leaders of the state legislature, they include elected Democrats, civil rights lawyers, a former Freedom Rider, reparations scholars and a Japanese American lawyer who helped his people secure reparations for their racist incarceration during World War II.

          And the conflict was not something Black folks should be ashamed of or hide. The history of Black progress is filled with bitter yet principled debates over strategies and ideologies. Arguments that are challenged and strengthened can prevail. Many roads lead to freedom.

          All that said – Tuesday’s ruckus wasn’t as bad as what Malcolm X said about Martin Luther King Jr., but it got real.

          “It was crazy. The discussion got heated, there was a lot of shade thrown, a lot of words exchanged,” task force chair Kamilah Moore, an attorney and reparatory justice scholar, told me afterward. “This question around the community of eligibility has kind of loomed over the task force since we started 10 months ago. We’ve been kicking the can down the road, so I’m relieved that now we can use our time more constructively.

          “A lot of us on the task force, we all have our own views and understandings about what reparations is, and that colored today’s considerations,” she said.

          The panelists who favored lineal eligibility were Moore, San Diego city council member Monica Montgomery Steppe, University of California-Berkeley professor Jovan Scott Lewis and Amos Brown, a San Francisco pastor who was once arrested with King and is on the NAACP board of directors. Their basic argument was twofold: providing reparations to all Black Californians would be found unconstitutional, and the California law was written to compensate descendants.

          Those who wanted to compensate all Black Californians were civil rights lawyer and scholar Lisa Holder, state assembly member Reginald Jones-Sawyer and Loyola Marymount psychology professor Cheryl Grills. They argued that the law did not intend to exclude any Black people, that limiting reparations to descendants would ignore the continuing harm caused by slavery and racism, and that the continuing harm negated concerns about unconstitutionality.

          To exclude millions of Black citizens from compensation “is not reparations from an international human rights perspective,” Holder told the group. Grills said she found it ironic that after white people invented racial categories to oppress others, “now you are trying to restrict us from using the very thing they concocted.”

          “To deny all Black people from reparations would be another win for white supremacy,” Grills said.

          Those were statements of principle. Others went like this: “I worked in the mortuary business a long time,” Jones-Sawyer said. “This sounds like people bickering over an inheritance. Over money we ain’t got.”

          Those abstaining from the first vote were state Sen. Steven Bradford and lawyer Donald Tamaki, the only person on the panel who is not Black. Tamaki repeatedly tried to find common ground between the two factions. He noted that their differences were “not just about compensation or reparations, it’s about a group’s identity,” and said that when he was helping to secure reparations for Japanese Americans, “we had to exclude some people from our group also.”

          After numerous parliamentary objections and rulings, the motion to approve lineal descendants still could not pass. Frustrated, Brown launched into a sermon: “In the words of Martin Luther King, the title of his autobiography, we have to make strides toward freedom. … I’m saddened that it appears there is a feeling that we can’t take the first step. Are we going to be a friend to the enemy?”

          Holder introduced an amendment that would have made all of California’s Black citizens eligible, with “special lineage considerations” for descendants. But what did that mean, exactly? Descendants would get more money – 10% more, 50% – than an immigrant from Jamaica or Mali? Moore said under that approach, “this ceases to be a reparations task force. It becomes a racial equity and justice task force.” The amendment failed, with everyone holding their same positions as in the first vote.

          That created a procedural opening for Moore to call another vote on the original motion to provide reparations only to lineal descendants. But this time, Bradford voted yes. Tamaki voted no. Both had abstained on the first vote. The motion finally passed, 5 to 4.

          The panel will now send the eligibility definition to a group of economists, who are charged with coming up with proposals to fund reparations. The task force is scheduled to deliver a final report to the state legislature in June.

          After the meeting, almost 10 hours of testimony and debate, I asked Holder how she was feeling.

          “Honestly, I feel very tired. It was a long day. It required a lot, from everyone,” she said.

          “Reparations have been a long time coming. Arguably, we’ve been pushing for reparations since 1865 when the Civil War ended,” Holder said. “Now we are on the cusp of achieving reparations after almost 200 years. And so there’s a lot of passion around the issue, and everyone wants to get it right.

          “But the most important thing in the end is to achieve something that provides a measure of justice to our people.”

          Jesse Washington is a journalist and documentary filmmaker. He still gets buckets.

          This Story Tagged: Commentary Reparations California