Carlos Lando Talks With Jimmy Greene About Grief Through Music
Our conversation with saxophonist Jimmy Greene was scheduled a month ago for August 28. With another fatal school shooting this week, the timing was eerily coincidental. Jimmy Greene lost his daughter Ana in the Sandy Hook school shooting back in 2012, an event that shook and shaped his family’s lives profoundly. His new release, “As We Are Now,” is the musical answer to the question everyone asks.
Carlos Lando: Yeah. "As We Are Now," in terms of what I have read up on and so forth, it's really a musical statement, addressing your personal well-being, the well-being of your family, and the community as well. More than 12 years after you lost your beloved daughter in the Sandy Hook tragedy in Newtown, Connecticut. Can you share with us a little bit how you're feeling these days and what went into that experience, how it must feel to have these moments of enlightenment and joy and at the same time, sadness can kind of creep into our wellbeing and our emotional being because it's always there. I guess the easiest way for me to put it is How are you feeling these days? How are you and your family?
Jimmy Greene: Well, that's a great question, Carlos. I think a lot of times when we talk about tragedy and trauma, we like to hear, at least it makes us feel better to hear, something terrible happened to somebody, but they survived and now they're doing great and they're doing these wonderful things. There's a linear kind of relationship, like you move from one and then you get to the other. And in my experience, it hasn't been like that. And I can speak for my family members too, that there are moments of great joy and moments of great sorrow, kind of mixed together all the time. I often say the sorrowful moments, they're more familiar now, and so easier, I guess, is not a really great word, but more familiar and more recognizable, so that they're more manageable. So the music of the album was commissioned by Chamber Music America, which is a great organization that has some really great commissioning and grant opportunities for composers and for artists. And this particular grant that I was awarded was from their new jazz works grant program. And so I was commissioned to write a suite of music, and I decided to write this around this theme of how we're doing now, and to really lean into the theme of there's not really one emotion that dominates over another. And I think that, for those of us who have been through traumatic loss, it definitely resonates in general. There's a lot of emotions that go into our daily lives and we've got to make space for them and normalize that it's okay to feel one way and then the opposite way at the same time. Both are valid.
The conversation continues below.
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