I’m a jazz fan and player, and during the corona quarantine I started reaching beyond my normal playlist, and found the amazing work of Christian Scott aTunde Adjuah after stumbling across his stunning NPR Tiny Desk Concert. (If you don’t know this pioneering *stretch* jazz trumpeter and composer, look him up)
The flautist in his band, Elena Pinderhughes, he introduced as being only 20 in the 2015 recording, which is impressive in of itself. Upon looking her up, she has performed multiple times at the Obama White House, at Carnegie Hall, etc. So, it turns out she is a child prodigy.
Pinderhughes also sings. Her phrasing and swung rhythm is quite impressive, especially for a young person. For example in this 2013 video, where she must have been in junior high or high school, the push and pull against the beat, both in her singing and her flute playing (back to back, no less), creates the jazz flavor of suspension of time, eloquently.
As I found out that she is originally from Berkeley, California, my alma mater and home for many years, I became interested in her current work – whether perhaps I had seen her play out once at the Starry Plow, La Peña, Ashkanaz, or the Freight and Salvage, all venues I frequented.
Despite the fact that Christian Scott’s album titled by the same type of hip-hop and beyond jazz blend called “stretch jazz” featured Pinderhughes in the title – Stretch Music (Introducing Elena Pinderhughes) – Pinderhughes has not yet released a solo album in the last 5 years surprisingly.
She has played at so many high profile concerts, and recently accompanied funk jazz legend Herbie Hancock. Here’s an amazing solo she did at the Obama White House with Common, the famous hip-hop artist.
I’m not sure if they’re siblings, but here’s Samora Pinderhughes rapping accompanying Common at another Tiny Desk concert by the group August Greene.
On several write-ups and bios on Elena in 2015, there’s the following text:
“In 2015 Ms. Pinderhughes signed with SRP Music Group — responsible for signing Rihanna, among others — and began her journey as a solo artist. She is working on her debut project, which will showcase her voice and songwriting, and bring together her musicality, harmony, rhythm, and culture to create a specific sound all her own.”
This made no sense: she signed to a prestigious label, and 5 years later no album and hardly any social media presence? It was an enigma.
Upon looking on my usual music services, I found that Elena Pinderhughes had been reincarnated (most likely by SRP Music Group) as “Elena Ayodele.”
Such reincarnations are not uncommon in the music “industry” where artists become commodities, and one has to perform according to a contractual role.
I was a bit surprised though that SRP had both achieved constraining Elena’s output (for example, her sparse YouTube videos in the past 5 years) without producing the debut album. The only video they made, a trailer for the song “Roses,” released in 2017, has a scant few thousand views. Such an artist deserves better than that. But the literal suffocation with roses makes one think if Pinderhughes hasn’t also been suffocated under her contract.
The full version of the song can be heard here on Soundcloud.
The song itself is not bad, it has a nice complex melody, but the flue isn’t nearly as integrated as I’m sure many fans hoped. It’s much more trap than jazz, perhaps a little too stretch for many jazz fans.
As I got watching her rather bizarre, mock-epic, overblown production video, and saw the immense waste of roses – and of her talent, signed away and locked up with some mega shadow record label (thinking of Prince here) – I couldn’t but help remember an article during the early days about the corona flower industry crash.
Living in Holland, the world emporium for cut flowers, the images of empty auction houses struck a cord – the global commodity chains seem overwhelming. Roses were down 70% from last year.
To have such markets for life – performers or flowers – everything a means without an end, without a value in of itself, without any final pleasure or good or truth, but just to be consumed – the connections between Pinderhughes/Ayodele and the global flower market under corona times somehow dovetailed as tragedies with common sources.
Bloomburg writes: “The blooms are sold under the traditional Dutch auction system, in which prices start high then tick lower as a clock counts down. The first buyer to pounce wins. As the lots are bought, electric tractors pull long trains of wagons loaded with blooms from one side of the warehouse to the other. The average day sees more than 100,000 transactions. Most of the flowers end up elsewhere in Europe, in under 12 hours.”
Just as the global flows of flowers is tightly controlled by an artificial system of supply and demand, killing off interest in local flowers for the pruned porno version of flowers, I wondered about the health of Pinderhughes under her contract. Was she yet another artist being strangled by a thanatogical system? What would have been her creativity in these past 5 years if she had been enabled rather than constrained. If she could have been free to be all the different versions of herself, and stumble and evolve along the way?
As Bloomburg reported: “The crash of the $8.5 billion global trade in cut flowers shows how quickly and distinctively the new coronavirus is disrupting supply chains, even in places where it isn’t yet pervasive.” People lost their professions and tens of thousands lost their jobs in Africa, because of a pandemic that had yet to hit them. This is how global capitalism works – it takes away home markets and instead of creating interdependence, creates global fragility, where the poor are contingent upon the whims of the rich and there is no more self-sufficient local economy. It’s like dating: if you have nothing to offer, you’re going to look for your second half because you’re not complete. And no person can ever complete an incomplete person. That’s why the sacred marriage spoken of in alchemy has to do with self-sufficiency, becoming both man and woman to oneself, to not have to need the other. Only then does interdependence actually exist. Because then you can depend on each other; otherwise, its co-dependency.
A different example of a child prodigy which has worked is that of Jacob Collier. He turned town controlling contracts, even by Quincy Jones, and instead handled things on his terms, getting the best of both world. Perhaps with Pinderhughes her being a woman has played into the traditional misogyny of the music industry, the idea of women being “managed” by music firms, as the pressure for women in our society to present in particularly sexualized and stereotyped ways is far greater than men. As a fan of her work, I can only wish her freedom, creative license, and the respect of all those who she works with – because she deserves it.