Fay Victor

-Trinidad 

One half of the Republic of Trinidad & Tobago, the southernmost island nation in the Caribbean. You can see Venezuela from Trinidad. Trinidad was the birthplace of my mother. I spent childhood summers there at my grandmother's home in Belmont, Port of Spain, Port of Spain being the capital of Trinidad. I felt so free flying there on my own, going there just after getting out of school here in NYC and then Long Island, where we moved when I was 10. As an immigrant kid growing up in New York, I was spoiled rotten when I got to my grandmother’s home. People would come from all around to see how much I’d grown and what I’d bought them. Things were placed in my suitcase with strict instructions that ​this should go to ​that uncle and ​that should go to ​this aunt. I was a strange fascination, but I didn’t mind. I was seeing and experiencing things people there thought they weren’t. Going there was like stepping into another world, a world where blackness was in power and everyone was proud of it. I still live off of witnessing that as a child. People walked with their heads held high, no matter how rich or poor they were. African roots and culture in the open such as a popular TV show “Best Village”, that displayed island talent with a big African dance component. My ideas of what beauty is and where I fit in that idea were formed in Trinidad. Seeing my beautiful dark-skinned aunt on TV as a fashion model for Clarks’ shoes to living just down the road from one of the most prestigious girls’ colleges in the country. School always ended at the end of July in Trinidad so for my first month there, I would see this parade of students, much older than me at the time with their amazing beauty walking down the street for lunch. Trinidad is a multicultural society and that was reflected in these young women. They walked proudly too. These young women formed my idea of what a beauty really is. I couldn’t have known then how important it would be. The stature, the pride in being brilliant and beautiful never left me and made me feel that I too one day could possess the same because I saw my own reflection in them. Representation is everything. 

-Amsterdam 

In a nutshell - my woodshed period as a musician and a great break from the hardness of NYC. I went there to visit and check out the scene, ending up falling in love with the city. After going back and forth, I decided to work out making Amsterdam home for a while. New York was too hard a music scene to tackle without any serious chops. I struggled to get going in New York, clear that I had lots of work to do. But how? But where? I didn’t have the money for music school and anyway at this time, the real jazz ‘cats’ learned on the bandstand. I believed that edict and sought to learn the music the same way. Amsterdam turned out to be that place and offered much more. I met my husband there and I had the luxury of time and space to figure things out. Living in a social democracy where I didn’t NEED to earn a lot of money to have a 

good quality life. I took advantage of being able to focus on music, performance and study (with the great pianist Curtis Clark for one). As an artist, moving there laid the groundwork for what I do today. I had time to experiment, make mistakes, fall on my face and get back up again. Time to deepen my craft and then my vision of who I wanted to be as a vocalist. So many questions got answered there and deeper questions emerged. Incredibly grateful for eight years I lived there and all that I got out of it. That time shaped my artistic life. 

-Misha Mengelberg 

My hero, mentor and friend.
A visionary musician, composer and bandleader with a deep reverence for the jazz heroes he adored such as Duke Ellington, Thelonious Monk and Herbie Nichols. Misha literally changed how improvised music and jazz was seen in the Netherlands. He demanded and got respect -- and money -- for it, bought it into the subsidized sector of classical music. Up until the late aughts, improvised music and the structures that support it in the Netherlands were given money by the state.
He was the first musician I encountered that didn’t feel limited by any idea. Liberating for me, that way of being gave me more permission to go in the way that felt right to me. We’d have the most amazing and surreal conversations! Misha also was the first to encourage me to write lyrics to Herbie Nichols and Thelonious Monk tunes. He always wanted to see what I was up to and when we’d chat, I’d share what I was working on. The more I wrote the more he encouraged it. Misha felt that Herbie Nichols melodies were ‘singable’, and I absolutely agree. Misha led by example of how to be just who you are no matter what anyone says. You never knew how Misha would react to anything. He was so damn honest! He was his own person, mind, being. I really, really miss him. 

-Three unsung heroes 

Sister Rosetta Tharpe, Herbie Nichols, Betty Davis
All somewhat recognized figures but I never thought they have gotten their due as innovators and influencers. 

-Jazz 

One of the greatest musics there is. Jazz music saved my life. The idea there was music that was about personal expression in community with others was life changing. Finding one’s own sound and the journey that it takes. The possibilities exist to explore so much of yourself through this music if you allow that to happen. 

Jazz is also a great portal for self expression to open up to other forms, hybrid forms or just finding a way to expand sound within jazz itself. All of those possibilities are there. Jazz is quintessentially American and anti-American at the same time. Anti-american in that it is anti-capitalist. It focuses on being in connection with one's soul or ‘deeper space’ then sharing 

that vulnerability with others. It fosters harmony and good will. Noone pursues a career in this jazz to make serious money. I KNOW I am a better person for being an improvising musician that comes out of jazz. It opened me up, it helped me truly see and hear others. It pointed the way for me to better hear myself. 

- "A thing that irritates me...."

…is how little the history of this music as Black Music is told. The context of the struggle and emancipation in this music. The underlying reasons the music expresses itself the way that it does. It feels like Black history and black musicians are being subtly erased from the story of what jazz is. 

-Greatest personal Influence 

My mother. She was a great influencer in what to DO and what NOT to do, which has guided my entire life. My mom was so wise and her guidance about how to live kept me going after she died when I was just 19. I am certain that had she not died, I wouldn’t have become a musician. My life plans were so different, but finding music in my early 20’s rekindled joy and happiness in my heart and led me to focus on music simply because of that! My initial plans were to go into International Law. That wasn’t what I was supposed to do. In life and death, my mother has shaped the flow of my life. 

I wrote a piece for my Mom, called Faith, The Gift while I was a Yaddo resident in 2018. It’s a 12 movement piece written for Nonet. I hope to present it one day. 

-Gender Justice 

This is a good moment to say this. I’ve felt from the beginning that as long as I do the work, I have the right to be on the bandstand. Period. I pursued a career based on merit while I developed my artistic voice, I take this journey seriously.
I make it a point NOT to internalize other people’s fucked up ideas about what my role should or should not be. It helps that I was raised to KNOW that I am smart with valid ideas and to never forget it. It’s hard to shake me, if I’ve made up my mind about something. So I will fight to defend that right as well and I’ve had to at times. Being a woman has never made me feel ‘othered’ in this music, despite how male dominated it is, especially when I started out in the early 90’s. 

Again, I show up to work and most of my time in this music, the musicians I’ve encountered on the bandstand have felt that, treating me accordingly. This is my personal point of view, stance and way of being in the world as an artist.

That being said, I am aware that not everyone can approach their battles this way and now that there are more women and non-binary artists in all aspects of the music, there is more support out there and the language is more transparent than it ever was. I am a proud member of the We Have Voice Collective, and we released a Code of Conduct for the Performing Arts in 2018. This labor intensive work as a collective came out of us taking a hard look at our work spaces and how we can help us all feel ‘safer’ as we move through the world of institutions, venues and personal spaces with others in pursuance of our work as artists. 

The United States is an extremely sexist society and there has been so much work in the past decade to have honest conversations around this. More work to be done. 

-My greatest artistic triumph 

There are a FEW but these TWO really stand out for me. 

Anthony Braxton commissioned me on his TriCentric Presenting Series, where my husband and I wrote Neighborhood Dynamics, an hour long work on gentrification in Bedford-Stuyvesant, Brooklyn from the inside out. We also presented this work before Anthony Braxton performed with his Nonet on the program! It was my first presentation as a composer of a larger work and Mr. Braxton sat right up above the stage to take the whole thing in. This piece featured Nicole Mitchell (flutes), Vincent Chancey (french horn), Anders Nilsson (guitar) and Ken Filiano(double bass) + myself (voice, composition). When we were finished, not only did we receive a strong reaction from the audience but Anthony Braxton himself LOVED it! He found the piece exciting, fresh and new from start to finish. He had many great things to share about how strong he felt the work was and I’ll never forget it. Later that evening he shared that “If I had any doubts about you as an artist, they are no more.” 

In 2013, I was asked by the great William Parker to be the vocalist for a piece called “Inscription for Cecil Taylor” A huge event, packed house + there must have been 25 of us on stage. Two bassists, 2 drummers, organ, piano, a bunch of horns and strings and other percussion and myself. It was a 90 minute blow out and I was closest to the incredible Dave Burrell, the pianist for this event. At the end of the concert, Dave asked me for my microphone to announce that the great Cecil Taylor was in the house! All of us on stage were shocked and thrilled. The amazing thing was that announcement caused the molecular make-up of the room to change. All of a sudden, all eyes were focused on the iconic Mr. Taylor. It was incredible to see that energy shift with about 500 people. I was also now slightly traumatized realizing that he may have heard me and I had no idea what I sounded like in a sound world such as this! It was a night of flying blind most of the time. 

As the show breaks up and we’re all getting off the stage, I see the drummer Jackson Krall coming to the stage with Mr. Taylor in tow, yelling over the crowd “Cecil Taylor wants to MEET you!”. Everyone stopped to see who Jackson was speaking to and he was speaking to me! I made my way off of the stage to meet Cecil Taylor. WOW. He held my hand and wouldn’t let go for a long time. We walked around the hall just like that as he shared his many thoughts. He loved what I did and one thing he said to me that I will share was “Betty Carter would have SHOT you!” 

LOL.
I still cannot believe it. 

-​Jazz Criticism

There’s been some brilliant writers that have written about jazz yet critics being gatekeepers for what is good or bad has never sat well with me, especially as a Black artist. It’s cool that most of my own work has received favorable reviews, yet I’ve seen many times that music that comes out of a Black or African space in its expression OR considered BEYOND Black expression gets sidelined by the press. There needs to be more diversity in jazz criticism hands down. More BIPOC, more women and non-binary writers. Really. Come on now. 

-Freesong 

Freesong started as a performative idea with the Fay Victor Ensemble, (the group I had for 10 years with Ken Filiano, Anders Nilsson & Michael TA Thompson) a group that my husband (bass guitarist/composer Jochem van Dijk) and I experimented with composition and improvisation in myriad forms. Since all the compositions started with the texts/lyrics and I use unusual text forms, the compositions also have a wide variety of shapes and contours with improvisation negotiated into the pieces in varying degrees. This practice within this group enabled a more fluid approach where the lines of improvisation and composition were intentionally blurred, devising group strategies to move back and forth between form and improvisation, melody, lyrics and sound exploration. The cool thing was I began applying these approaches with material from the jazz canon. I experimented with this in a quartet group with Misha Mengelberg called The FreeSong Quartet (with Wolter Wierbos-trombone + Ernst Glerum-double bass) working this way with tunes of Ellington, Herbie Nichols & Thelonious Monk. Finally, ‘FreeSong’ became an approach to not only opening up the structures of standards/tunes but the spaces in between also became equally as important. It was and is thrilling to approach performing music in this way. 

-Music and social consciousness 

As a jazz musician, you cannot have one without the other. Social consciousness is what this music is about and has been about from the beginning. One BIG reason I stopped singing standards out of the Great American Songbook and started writing more was because of how trite the subject matter of many of the songs were, coming out of Broadway. 

I wanted to talk about present day life, things I experience now. As a black woman walking through the world and actively cultivating my own lens, I’ve got a lot to say. There’s never been a question about whether it is OK to say what I feel in my music. That’s part of the calling, it’s been the fundamental search for me. What do I want to say? The questions are about HOW will I say what I want to say and what will work best to communicate it. 

-Favorite Jazz Vocalist 

HARD! I truly cannot pick a ‘favorite’
Influencers, ordered by their introduction to my musical life... 

Ella Fitzgerald
Abbey Lincoln
Sarah Vaughan
Carmen McCrae
Anita O’Day
Mel Torme
Eddie Jefferson
Betty Carter
Cassandra Wilson
Jeanne Lee 

-Herbie Nichols 

A major musical love for me.
Discovered a cheesy compilation record in my then boyfriend, now husband Jochem’s CD collection. Never heard his name but his face intrigued me, so I put the album on. Nichols’ composition ‘House Party Starting’ on that compilation pulled me in like a tractor. I decided I’d become a good enough vocalist to sing that composition one day. Soon - as in over 15 years - I’d learn to sing and write lyrics to House Party Starting and so many more of his incredible compositions. There is a deep joy in all the intellectual rigor of his music. Both of our mothers are from Trinidad. I feel a deep connection to his music and my goal in performing it is to show how singable his music is, how accessible and joyous it is, how much you can stretch and tangle with those sturdy melodies that Nichols’ wrote. I want everyone to fall in love with his amazing music and have his name featured more prominently in the jazz canon, not some weird anomaly. I started Herbie Nichols SUNG in 2013, a NYC based quintet with Anthony Coleman (piano), Michael Attias (alto saxophone), Ratzo Harris (double bass) and recently Tom Rainey 

Discovered his music when I lived in Amsterdam and it was a joy. 

(drums) has taken over the drum chair. I spent some time developing and deconstructing Nichols’ music with the fantastic German pianist Achim Kaufmann. We have a similar mindset regarding Nichols’ music - we honor it but want to mess with it too! I started a European trio with Achim and tenor player Tobias Delius. We did two small tours in Europe with that trio, recording a LIVE album of Nichols’ music at the Bimhuis in 2016. I couldn’t find a label to release it at the time. Hope to at some point. 

I’ll say that to my knowledge I’m the only Black bandleader that has a working Herbie Nichols project anywhere. I don’t want to be the only one either. His music is brilliant and more people should know about it and perform it. Last thing. Loving Nichols’ music was how I met Misha Mengelberg and then Roswell Rudd. 

-Teaching/Mentors 

Curtis Clark - pianist, composer, bandleader
Connie Crothers - pianist, composer, bandleader
Misha Mengelberg - pianist, composer, bandleader of ICP (Instant Composer’s Pool w Han Bennink) *pianist on Eric Dolphy’s Last Date
Roswell Rudd - trombonist, composer, bandleader 

-“My favorite clubs...”

…are the Bimhuis in Amsterdam and the 55BAR in New York City. 

-Mutations for Justice, Mantras for Change 

Mutations for Justice, Mantras for Change is a rolling diary of the current administration we’re in. It started out as my need to cope and deal with the barrage of information being hurled at us in the wake of the 2016 Election, where many people couldn’t believe what happened. That people couldn’t believe that Donald Trump got elected truly bothered me and I wondered where the FUCK did people think they were living?? Trump’s ideology IS the real ideology for the United States and the sooner we get real about that, the sooner we might get some deep work done. So to cope, I started writing the distillations of all the news to make sense of things for myself and that was the impetus for the project, which started in 2017 and is still a work in progress. The pieces are meme-like with mainly succinct messages that are repeated and developed through improvisation. The goal is to complete 45 pieces (up to 38 at this writing), leaving space to document this administration to the very end. Before Covid-19, there were some plans and performances for this project which I wanted to present in a large way before theelection. IcannotdothatnowbuttherewillbeapresentationofsomesortbeforeElection Day. Stay tuned. 

-Betty Carter 

Extremely important musician to me. She led the way out. As I worked my way through listening to the many jazz vocalists of repute, Betty Carter came across as a unique innovator, fiercely independent in her sound and thinking. She also improvised just as well and distinct as any other jazzer of note. I was fortunate to see Betty Carter live a few times before she died. Watching Betty live was an education I’m glad I got. It was super clear she was in charge of the music and the delivery of the expression of the entire band. In watching Betty Carter, I knew the type of bandleader I wanted to be. She led the way regarding open vocal forms that I’d heard up to that time, a favorite composition of hers that I devoured was ‘Dip Bag’ from an album called ‘It’s Not About The Melody’. Check that out. She was the first jazz vocalist where I heard different forms in her writing. Betty Carter worked so hard for years, starting her own record label to be the performer she wanted to be. Black women always have to work so hard to be SEEN. Great that Verve came knocking eventually but Betty started Bet-Car records in the 70’s selling records out of her car on the road. Deep respect and admiration to Betty Carter, I stand on her shoulders. 

-The meaning of tradition 

Tricky. My basic belief as a creative person is that I want to represent my own life and the times I live in. But to have some context about that, it’s important to understand the foundation of the forms in play. It will give my ‘current’ decision more intention. Like if I’m a tenor player that wants to study jazz and I begin at say, Chris Potter and look no further back in time than that, then I’m missing out on where Chris Potter came from and how he moved on to form his own voice on the instrument. Tenor playing in jazz didn’t start with Chris Potter and I’m sure he’d be the first one to say so. Pianist Curtis Clark, a great mentor told me when I needed to hear it that “one needs to get INSIDE the music, not just stay on top of it”, which is another way of putting it. 

Last thing: Tradition shouldn’t be a crutch either or a way to hide who you really are. Also, a person like myself and a million others that have other ideas about approaching well, everything, shouldn’t be judged on the basis of trying something new. People always show their fear of change when they malign someone for simply going a different way.

Like I said, tricky. 

-Three wishes 

*I wish that this country gets real about the fact that the entire origin of the country is in violence, conquest, landgrab, racism and white supremacy. We could go so far if this reality is broached. 

*Trump gets out of office and we overhaul the entire system to actually serve the constituents of this country, which is the real issue. Trump’s administration has been great in exposing how little we as citizens are entitled to get from the US government, even in a pandemic. Trump’s transparency revealed what has been at work all along, 

*I wish to have the opportunity to put on one of the larger works I have written in its entirety someday 

-Choice whom to have dinner with from “the other side”... 

James Baldwin or Zora Neale Hurston. Powerful writers and observers. Mr. Baldwin and Ms. Hurston were also very charismatic, humorous and powerful personalities that I know I’d have a great time in their company. I believe they’d make me laugh uncontrollably on top of all the wisdom they’d impart. I’d attempt to make them laugh too! 

-One question that should have been asked but wasn't.... 

These are good questions, took me on a journey. Good just the way it is.