Tamar-kali’s Songs of Liberty

The genre-defying artist’s latest work for Lincoln Center, Freedom Is a Constant Struggle, is a meditation on sovereignty, creating community, and the impact of Gullah Geechee traditions on American music

“Americans tend to get swept up in symbolism,” Tamar-kali tells me, “not solutions.” We’re speaking a few weeks before the staging of her multi-genre performance piece Freedom Is a Constant Struggle, put on at New York City’s Lincoln Center on July 5, traditionally the day when Black Americans in the North celebrated independence and emancipation before the Civil War. Tamar-kali is the kind of artist who thinks deeply about meaning and history. Her career has mirrored the sweep of African-American intellectual life and alternative music since its inception, when she made a name for herself in the ’90s, in a burgeoning NYC music scene that would become known as Afro-punk. Later, she would turn her talents to orchestral music and begin a long, close collaborative relationship with filmmaker Dee Rees; the first feature film she scored was Rees’s Oscar-nominated 2017 historical drama Mudbound. For Freedom Is a Constant Struggle, Tamar-kali brought together her work with orchestral music and group vocal singing alongside excerpts of texts by Black writers and thinkers like Frederick Douglass, Ida B. Wells, and Fannie Lou Hamer. The piece is a multifaceted exploration of what freedom and Blackness mean in America. Below, Tamar-kali speaks with Harper’s Bazaar about her work.

Read full story on Harper's Bazaar here