8 Bars with Dawn Norfleet, Ph.D.
Our guest is flutist, composer, bandleader and educator Dawn Norfleet, Ph.D.
8 bars with, is a series on Educated Guesses where we offer up 8 questions to a special guest for them to ponder and freestyle on. The questions aren't necessarily questions as much as they are prompts or linguistic ink blots meant to stimulate thought. The responses can be short and pithy, long and loquacious or somewhere in between.
The Inglewood, CA-based flutist/composer/vocalist/educator Dawn Norfleet, Ph.D was hailed by author/scholar Robin D.G. Kelley as a “renaissance woman.” Norfleet started playing the flute in the 5th grade. An alumna of Wellesley College, she earned an M.A. in music composition and a Ph.D. in ethnomusicology from Columbia University. Her dissertation was entitled Hip-Hop Culture in New York City: The Role of Verbal-Musical Performance Defining Community. She worked as a jazz artist in New York and later moved back to California.
Dr. Norfleet has performed and recorded with many accomplished musicians including Vijay Iyer, Helen Sung, Karyn White, and on saxophonist Kamasi Washington’s four releases; The Epic, Truth, Harmony of Difference and Heaven And Earth. Norfleet’s three releases as a leader include: Love Will Find You (2011), Rain (2012), and Something So Ordinary (2012). A classical composer, Dr. Norfleet’s forthcoming commissions include a string quartet piece commissioned by the Gabriela Lena Creative Academy of Music (GLFCAM), and a solo piano composition co-commission by Liza Stepanova and GLFCAM. Dr. Norfleet currently teaches jazz and African music at the University of California, Irvine and a hip-hop course at Chaffey College.
1. The family that plays together…
I grew up in a musical family, but my big brother, who played keyboards, was the one who got all the attention! I was the talented bookworm and too shy to sing in public, and self-taught as a flutist and songwriter. My father, an organist, was an "entertainer" at a couple of restaurants. Think proto-karaoke. He was a baritone singer. He played easy listening, country and western, blues, and organ jazz.
My brother, Michael, played with mom and dad (especially with my dad, since they were both keyboardists), and when he started getting busy with his own musical life after age 12, my dad started letting me sing sometimes, as the cute kid. After the divorce, my dad would invite me to sing at his job, which became increasingly infrequent, until he passed in '94. I didn't play with my mom and brother until I moved back to L.A.--after I'd gotten a professional kickstart as a musician in NYC.
2. Flute influences
Of course the usuals: Hubert Laws and Dave Valentin. But I'm more directly influenced by sounds and voices.
3. Compositional Influences
Stevie Wonder, Maurice White/Charles Stepney, Claudio Monteverdi, Steely Dan (order depends on the day)
4. Favorite Black pop music of the 70's
Stevie Wonder, Earth, Wind & Fire
5. Going East (Wellesley College and Wesleyan University)
Music was the last thing I intended to major in. I thought I wanted to be a lawyer, until I got to college. Wellesley had a small but solid, strictly classical music department. I was the only Black woman. I had a small group of friends who loved jazz. A couple of them had gone to Wesleyan and raved about it, so I spent a year at Wesleyan, in my junior year. As it turned out, this was when I first took myself seriously as a musician. I took jazz theory courses with Dr. Bill Barron, Kenny Barron’s brother, and South Indian solkattu with master percussionist Ranganathan, and was a member of the Wesleyan Improvising and Composing Ensemble, led by Bill Lowe. The teaching assistant for one of my classes, Royal Hartigan, encouraged me to study music in grad school. I returned to Wellesley my senior year.
I didn't feel that I'd given Wellesley a chance. And so I decided to go back to Wellesley and just live my musical life to the fullest there. And that included getting more involved in jazz. I also got into classical composition at Wellesley. I started getting into Schoenberg, Alan Berg, that kind of atonal stuff. And it was intriguing. I've been songwriting since I was 15. And I started composing jazz at Wesleyan. I had three composition streams. I had the songwriting. I had my jazz compositions, and I had this new classical/concert music stuff.
6. A jazz woman in New York
I'd actually put down the flutes for about two years after I finished college, when I moved to New York to study composition at Columbia. And I thought, wow, you know, there are people who are better than me. And then one day I decided to go to this open mic night with a friend that was a musical director over there. And so I thought, okay I'll do this. And that kind of led me into the jazz scene.
I remember there was a Monday night jam session at the Iridium hosted by Dennis Jeter, a trumpet player who worked with Wynton Marsalis. I remember walking into the scene like it was a movie. There were these young Black men playing jazz. And I had never seen that before! And it was just such a beautiful scene. It was very captivating, and I felt like I was literally walking into history, because where I came from, you didn't really see Black folks playing jazz. Frequenting these smoky jazz haunts became part of my life.
7. Discovering Hip-Hop
For my Ph.D dissertation, I was looking at underground hip-hop, specifically, the MC. So I had to look at what was is culture? Why was it culture, as opposed to a movement? Why do people in the community, say hip hop community, as opposed to hip hop movement? Why did people feel the way they did? And it was something that was really intriguing to me.
Now, how I was led into this whole underground thing was through finding out that improvisation occurred in hip-hop, underground hip-hop and what hip-hop communities considered true hip-hop. I had no idea that people improvised, I didn't know about freestyling, and all of that. So when I found out about it, and I saw it happen, I my brain exploded. So that's what drew me in freestyling improvisation: the feeling of just being around people who were obsessed with integrity, and challenging themselves artistically and creatively.
8. Life as a 21st century teacher
I feel blessed to be teaching. I've been teaching the history of jazz. I also teach a hip-hop course and I've taught a course that is kind of like a chronological study of innovation and genius in Black music, and I really want to develop that more. I never want to teach something the same way. I'm always trying to incorporate something new.
9. Bonus Question:
Musically Raising Jean Toomer’s Cane
That obsession started when I was at Wesleyan. I took a course in early African American literature, from Phyllis Wheatley to the Harlem Renaissance. And one of the things we had to read was Jean Toomer’s Cane. I'm not the kind of person who's fascinated with poetry. I've written poems sometimes. But reading it is not really my thing. But Cane drew me in. And I had decided that I was going to somehow work with Toomer’s words, and set them to music. So I started in 1990, and it's been a steady thing that I do from time to time. I think I've done about five pieces including “Her Lips Are Copper Wire” from Cane, and “And Pass” from an unpublished poem.