When composer Tamar-kali goes fishing in the South Carolina lowlands, she thinks of her ancestors – the Gullah Geechee – singing spirituals like “Wade in the Water.” And she imagines Harriet Tubman arriving on Union gunboats in the summer of 1863, when those ancestors actually had to wade through the water to their freedom.
The Gullah Geechee, whom Tubman called Black Moses, helped create a rich book of spirituals that melded biblical imagery with their own plight. “You think of a people who hold this belief as a form of dealing with their lot in life,” said Tamar-kali, “which is the absolute removal of their agency, their humanity, as movable slaves.”
Tamar-kali, who lives in Brooklyn, is always thinking about history, and it permeates her music. The biggest expression to date is her “Sea Island Symphony: Red Rice, Cotton and Indigo,” a new work for orchestra and vocalists that will have its world premiere Wednesday in Manhattan as part of Lincoln Center’s Summer for the City.
The programmatic symphony traces the Gullah Geechee story from the Civil War to the rise of Robert Smalls, a Carolina man who was born into slavery and became a United States Congressman in 1875.
“I’m a full-concept girl,” says Tamar-kali, who began working on the piece in 2019. “I started it and then I realized: oh, this is not a small thing. Because it’s like I’m really going with the accompaniment of the muses.”
The symphony’s world premiere, performed by American Composers Orchestra, is the culmination of a series she curated entitled “Freedom Is a Constant Struggle,” which features panel discussions on the complex and often neglected history of American black composers and classical music. . Tamar-kali said it was important to her that the play be contextualized and that the series took place around Independence Day to emphasize that “the end of colonial British rule only symbolized independence for a very small population.”
The four-part “Sea Island Symphony” is the most ambitious addition yet to a career as a composer and performing musician that spanned punk rock, film scores and opera. Tamar-kali’s eclectic output is the product of wildly varied inputs – her family’s juke joint in the Sea Islands, blues and jazz, and the Ashkenazi cantor melodies and classical music she absorbed growing up in New York City.
Tamar-kali describes herself as ‘a child who lost classical music’. She received formal music training at a Catholic girls’ school in Brooklyn in the 1980s, where she studied theory and voice in a classical choir. But her experience there — she called it “an institutional space with a post-colonial missionary mindset” — gave her “no desire to continue that journey that essentially felt like a war to me,” she said. “So I figured out early on that I would deal with music on my own terms.”
She landed in the New York music scene screaming – shredding an electric guitar and spouting lyrics of defiance through punk rock, becoming a fixture at Joe’s Pub. Shanta Thake, Lincoln Center’s new artistic director, was an early fan. “If you were to visually describe her walking around, she’s so fierce,” Thake said. “There’s a warrior rage for who she is onstage, and such a mastery of the audience, of the songs themselves.”
Another fan from the Joe’s Pub days was composer Daniel Bernard Roumain, now a professor at Arizona State University. Living in Harlem in the early 2000s, Roumain invited Tamar-kali to his apartment, where they recorded a raucous electric version of Kate Bush’s “Running Up That Hill.”
“She was this pioneering New York artist who was bold and brash, avant-garde,” said Roumain, “incredibly powerful and incredibly inventive. She was a destiny and her career, even at the time, was a milestone.
Tamar-kali transcended punk and founded the Psychochamber Ensemble, an all-female string and choir group that also covered Kate Bush. She dove back into classical music and realized, if only in hindsight, that she was trying to recreate the community she had experienced in the school choir – but now in a safe space while retaining her agency. “I didn’t even realize I was trying to heal myself,” she said.
It didn’t take long for Tamar-kali’s character sequences and sense of storytelling to attract film directors. She made her scoring debut with Dee Rees’ “Mudbound” in 2017. She recently scored a PBS documentary about the Gullah Geechee, “After Sherman”, and is working on John Ridley’s biopic of Shirley Chisholm starring Regina King.
The film work is acoustic and often room-sized, with a handcrafted quality, shot in her studio in Brooklyn’s Dumbo neighborhood. She often records her own singing voice. Her music is always vocal in a way, Roumain said: “It is always boundless, always wants to speak. In some ways it is beyond comprehension.”
She composes most of her music with her voice, which she then translates into software and synth mockups before being interpreted by other musicians.
It was Roumain who nominated Tamar-kali in 2019 for an Arizona state commission that became the seed for “Sea Island Symphony,” a work she stylistically describes as Americana, a synthesis of all her influences. “It just sounds… it sounds like me,” she said.
The finished symphony opens with a movement depicting the Port Royal Experiment of 1861, in which the Gullah had to fend for themselves in the undesirable swamps of the low country, with lyrics sung by a tenor representing a newly freed person.
The second part travels forward to the Combahee River Raid of 1863, when Tubman led a Union military operation to rescue over 700 enslaved people, and claims the true origin of the song “Kum ba yah”. “It’s not about making amends or being all happy and sweet,” Tamar-kali said. “It is a call for the intervention of the higher power: ‘Come over here, my lord.'”
The segment culminates in a ring scream, a call-and-response circle that enslaved Africans developed to preserve their heritage while strategically avoiding offending their white captors. The singers are accompanied by a ‘scream stick’, historically often a mop or broom handle, as drums were banned at the time.
The third part is a scenic piece inspired by General Sherman’s Special Field Order No. 15, an 1865 military order that granted the newly liberated people of the area ownership of the Gullah Geechee corridor. Although Tamar-kali’s mother grew up in Beaufort County, South Carolina, neither mother nor daughter knew of this brief idyll as their ancestors owned land – land that was soon repossessed.
The final part follows the story of Robert Smalls, who used his navigation skills to sail to freedom; he joined the Union army and later became a congressman. While Smalls’ name is all over his hometown, Beaufort, it’s another piece of history that Tamar-kali didn’t discover until adulthood.
Tamar-kali said she hoped to eventually bring the symphony to the low country and to Washington DC. She insisted this premiere was part of a free summer program, meaning it’s just one night, with a small budget and very limited rehearsal.
Having grown up attending free concerts in Brooklyn and Central Park, she knows that “the most multicultural, multigenerational audience, from the most diverse socioeconomic backgrounds, exists with free public programming,” she said, adding that it is “the gateway to diversity in the halls, but it is overlooked and underfunded.”
Classical music lost her once. She wants it to find more people like her.
