Selendis SA Johnson is very invested in and reverent of various traditions though she’s anything but “traditional.” She grew up in San Rafael and various other small liberal towns in Marin County in Northern California, just on the other side of San Francisco’s Golden Gate Bridge. Music was a constant – she started playing drums at age 5, and by age 11, playing the Afro-Puerto Rican folk music known as bomba as part of a youth ensemble at Berkeley’s La Peña Cultural Center. “My mom was very serious about me knowing the history of jazz, and also black history,” Selendis recalls. “From a young childhood I was seriously made to know about music, almost more in a historical sense than even how to play it.” With Selendis’ mum working at San Francisco’s SFJAZZ Center and her father listening to Mingus and Monk, Selendis got a heady, early education in far-out sounds. Foreshadowing her current interest in the intersection between politics, history and radical jazz, one of her favorite pieces of music as a kid was “Fables of Faubus”, Charles Mingus’ 1959 political satire protesting Arkansas governor Orval Faubus, who sent the National Guard to prevent racial integration at Little Rock Central High School. “It was, of course, a really serious political song in the civil rights movement,” recalls Selendis fondly. “But it was also very funny. They’re making fun of this governor and I was seven and singing along.”

Although constantly immersed in sound, Selendis still hadn’t found her sweet spot playing music, and so she quit for a while. “I was feeling pretty guilty when I stopped playing music in high school,” she remembers. “But while I was on a break, I was listening to rock music and orchestral music, the kind of stuff they put in movie trailers that has this big, epic energy. When I came back around, I got really into Pharaoh Sanders – that big sound, tenor saxophone, spiritual themes, long improvisations. There was an energy there that I liked in other music that I was realising was also in jazz.”

She also realised she had never fully played jazz. “I finally signed up for a jazz class, and that was when I started to get really serious,” recalls Selendis. “I was teaching myself instruments and getting really passionate about it from a context of being self-directed. I think I was able to get better at it faster because I knew the music so well – I was always around all these local jazz musicians, so the idea or conventions of certain forms or sub-genres wasn’t something I had to learn.”

Pushing the Vibes

Selendis always wanted to be a multi-instrumentalist, but upon moving to New York City to attend college at the New School in 2018, it became apparent that the lifestyle might be difficult. “Once I was on the verge of being a professional musician I had to think about the logistics. I wanted to keep playing all these instruments but they’re not going to just be at every venue and rehearsal space, and I wasn’t going to be able to afford them. Even just being a vibraphonist is crazy on a professional level. It’s a huge table you bring everywhere with you; you pretty much can’t take it on public transit. So I really had to just settle and decide and make a lot of sacrifices. But then I got into meeting all these people, and I got to compose for them. Sometimes that was composition, but other times that was just something (which now I would call composition) that was more about just getting people together and having a vision, instead of just feeling like I had to do everything myself.”

Controlling multiple mallets at once, Selendis’ vibe on the vibraphone is kinetic and flowing yet wholly unexpected. Part of her unique style dates back to the pandemic, when she moved back home to Northern California and quit music again, reacting again to too many rules and too much pedagogy getting in the way. “Finally, at the start of 2021, I noted all the stuff that felt like indirect paths to what I was trying to get at – and I just stopped all of those things. COVID destroyed any illusion I had that I could always count on being able to play music with other people, so I thought I should be able to play solo and still have a powerful time. Every day I pretty much ended up practicing the vibraphone alone – no preparation, no songs learned, no planning, no genre-based direction, just fully improvised play.” This was challenging at first, but it forced Selendis to develop different methods for getting to the essence of the music. Sometimes she would read texts beforehand and let the emotional response inspire a performance. This is just one improvisational technique she took with her when she returned to New York, with a renewed sense of her musical self and the realisation that she would have to break from conventions and create her own path. 

“From my new standpoint, I could now approach other styles of music I was playing in a different way,” she explains. “I really started to prioritise communal work and that was very connected to the lessons that I had learned from finding my own reading and having my own experience instead of waiting for somebody to tell me what to do or give me a community.”

The Sum is Greater Than

Selendis has steadily grown a community around her over the last couple years, playing and organising shows with an eclectic mix of artists. She’s been part of TJ Milan-Bombara’s Filipino jazz-fusion project Angalo, played with Simon Hanes’ “chill-wave surf band” Tsons of Tsunami and co-created Palenque Monastery, a jazz sextet placing the works of Thelonious Monk in a historical-political context. The music has taken her to eclectic venues from rug stores, apartments and dive bars to experimental/noise/avant-garde gathering spots like The Stone, Ibeam and Roulette; a regular haunt is Brothers Wash + Dry, a former laundromat on a quiet corner of industrial Maspeth, Queens, where Selendis curates shows featuring intriguing combos that cross instruments, scenes and styles.

One such series “We Are Greater Than (The Sum [From 1 To Selendis’s {=?=} Choice] Of 4n): The Show Series”, which took place in Selendis’ Ridgewood, Queens apartment, featured mallets and reeds, cello, flute, tenor sax, upright bass, keyboard and clarinets. “I’m kind of an obsessively patterned thinker,” she says. “It’s hard for me to put things together and there not be a lot of symmetry going on. In the “We Are Greater Than” series, the name is a calculus equation and that very much rules how I book everything – it’s always four groups and in every group is the same number of people.” One performance might be four trios, the next might be four sets of duos, comprised of a mix of musicians who know each other and those that don’t. “From there, everybody’s brains are already going to start drawing connections like “What’s the instrumentation going on between these? How is it similar? How is it different?” I’m just trying to bring in these many different dimensions for there to be connections, so that I can secretly radically expand the number of people who are meeting each other musically and socially.”

Collektive Inspiration

The parallels between Selendis’ gatherings and the “loft jazz” scene of late ’60s and 1970s New York City are outsized – during that era, a collective of young, black, post-Coltrane free thinkers turned apartments, galleries, storefronts and abandoned industrial spaces into non-commercial venues that allowed them to radically explore sound, style, politics and spirituality without constraint. Trumpeter James DuBois, saxophonist Julius Hemphill, cornetist/composer Butch Morris, avant-garde jazz pianist Cecil Taylor, multi-instrumentalist Anthony Braxton and pioneering free jazz percussionist Milton Graves (a mentor of Monheim Triennale artists Greg Fox and Shahzad Ismaily) are among those who nurtured their craft in these improvisational spaces. The New York scene was itself inspired by St. Louis’s Black Artists Group (BAG) and Chicago’s Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians (AACM) (of which Braxton was a part). The continued desire to eke out these off-the-grid venues and the passion it takes to keep them going is essential work these days, thrown into high relief in modern-day New York, where the city becomes simultaneously more worn down and even more corporatised, real estate prices jacked up while again constricting the creative energies that draw people to the metropolis in the first place.

The influence of the AACM and its core group, the Art Ensemble, has been huge on Selendis, in particular the collective’s focus on composition, collective improvisation and incorporating multiple instruments and artforms into their performances, which often included reading poetry and radical political texts. “The Art Ensemble music itself and also the individual work of AACM artists like Joseph Jarman, Roscoe Mitchell and Malachi Favors has always been one of my biggest guiding lights,” she says, “just thinking in terms of how do you engage with the [jazz] tradition: politically, musically, socially? And the way they did stuff guides me too, in regards to thinking about lineage, after and before you.”

When John Zorn called Selendis to fill in for Matana Roberts at the legendary avant-garde NYC venue The Stone in fall 2023, she stayed up all night for days straight transcribing Art Ensemble of Chicago songs so she could cover them with her band. “I couldn’t find any transcription of their work, and also a lot of their stuff has a unique approach to composition – it’s not done in a European classical way. They don’t really do “normal” forms, so I was just in my bed listening and transcribing every night until like 5 a.m., then waking up at 8 a.m. and going to the studio to record [with Tsons of Tsunami]. It was insane, but I was just feeling very grateful to the tradition… and everything.”

Radical Big Band

If this seems like a huge undertaking, it is – Selendis likes to push herself to even bigger, more complex works with each performance. Earlier in 2023, at the age of 23, she returned to her alma mater, NYC’s The New School, to present Revolutionary Big Band Music, a performance where Selendis led a big band composed of New School students in performing several rare and radical epic jazz extended works: Cal Massey’s Black Liberation Movement Suite, originally commissioned in 1969 by Eldridge Cleaver for the Black Panther party, and Struggle for a New World Suite, a 2006 “symphony for improvisers” by Fred Ho, a Marxist social activist and composer whose work was deeply inspired by Massey.  

“When I got really into big ensemble music, the biggest inspiration for me was ‘Ascension’ by Coltrane; I think that has 10 people in it, and that’s just like everybody improvising with one basic idea and then soloing. And then there’s one track from the Jazz Composer’s Orchestra album that Pharaoh Sanders has a piece on and it’s so intense. It’s just total energy. By the time I was 18, the only recordings of stuff like that I could find were from the 1960s. I was like “Where is this going on now?” I wanted to hear that and I wanted to do that. From the time I moved to New York, I had a fantasy about doing something with a big band, but it felt so far off from my abilities. But I never lost the idea. And I did many different things to work my way up to possibly one day writing or arranging for ensembles that were getting bigger and bigger.”

“Then in 2022, I got exposed to the Cal Massey Black Liberation Movement suite piece being performed by Fred Ho, and that was like the go sign,” she continues. “At this point, I was starting to get a lot more serious about politics and the music and the Cal Massey piece is totally my zone of interest: it’s commemorative and reflective of the black liberation movement in a way that was positive and radical. And when I got to Fred Ho, he was conceptually thinking about the power of large ensemble stuff. For my piece, I was thinking a lot about my zone of music, my traditions, my relationship with the art form, the classical tradition and preserving its past in connection with other traditions.”

“When I was a kid, I was like “Big band is stupid. It’s the most boring jazz.” Because when I was in middle school, I went to these big band competitions; it was like taking a military music ideology into a jazz context. I didn’t like the traditional big band stuff like Count Basie, but I always loved orchestra music and its live performance. And the cool thing in classical is they perform their music for centuries in a way that we don’t really do in my zone – we don’t have big bands performing big works; and only a few pieces make it into a regular playable canon, like the Duke Ellington arrangement of The Nutcracker performed by high school bands. But to me it was like, “Why aren’t we performing this piece that was commissioned by the Black Panthers in 2022?” And so I did it.”

Struggle, Spontaneity and Space

Selendis also added a piece of her own to the performance: “Unity & Struggle (for Fred Ho)”, a response to the works of both Massey and Ho but pushing the improvisational boundaries further out. She asked the New School players to read Fred Ho’s “Unity and Struggle with Kalamu Ya Salaam” and “Unity and Struggle” by Amílcar Cabral, one of Africa’s foremost anti-colonial leaders, and told them to “apply the principles of unity and struggle, as you intuit from those two writings, to improvising together.”  
 
“I wanted to work my way into a much more improvisatory big band sound and approach but none of us had ever really done that,” Selendis explains. “And what are the fears of going into telling 15 people to improvise together? Either everybody is going to play a lot and not listen to each other, or nobody’s going to really step forward and throw anything out because they’re going to be scared. And that’s the enemy for me. So I connected very much to the idea of unity and struggle, which Amílcal Cabral wrote about within the context of the movement in Guinea Bissau and Cape Verde, and which Fred Ho wrote about in the context of his relationship to the writer Kalamu ya Salaam. This idea that you’re working together and simultaneously struggling against each other was a principle that I felt was really important to bring into this musical context. Working together means asserting things and listening to things and responding and struggling in a certain sense. It should be difficult and challenging. And those principles have been the foundation of our improvising and shows since.” 

Selendis has never stopped building with the SSAJ Big Band, which now comprises a cast of 35 rotating players and has grown to perform ever-bigger original works, such as Selendis’ “Symphony No. 1”, which premiered November 2024 in New York. The piece for 20 musicians – which includes everything from guitars and drums to cello, clarinet, trumpet and sax – is subtitled “I have always been transitioning (2017-2023)” and is structured around a shifting chronology of Johnson’s experience between the period of realising her trans-ness and beginning to live publicly with it.  

“When I began writing it, I was getting really stuck,” she recalls. “I was trying to write something which wasn’t going to be about anything, which I never do. So I decided to commit to the “bigness” of it and write about the biggest, most personal thing I could, which for me was the period between realising I was trans and then actually telling people, which was also the least visible period.” In the process of scoring “Symphony No. 1”, Selendis thought a lot about embellishment, fanciness and taking up space, reflecting on traditions of trans-womanhood and queer blackness, a spectrum that includes activist Miss Major, and vogue/ballroom/banjee culture. At the same time, she wanted to leave the piece instrumental, and open to interpretation. “It’s a symphony, but I very intentionally left it without movements; the piece started and ended in a way that left no clear divisions at any point, just one constant fluid movement. If anyone is trying to get really literal about representing years of their life, your experience of it is just like everything flowing together every day; there was no intermission for me during that time, which honestly was very overwhelming.” 

““Symphony No. 1” was a chance to try a lot of compositional ideas out, a lot of which thoroughly inform the piece that I’m writing for Monheim,” explains Selendis. “That was the first piece where I really went all out on trying this visual compositional format. I’m looking at something that’s a little bit bigger than an 8 1/2 x 11 sheet of paper, and addressing – in a list vertically downward – instructions given to certain instruments from the start of the piece to the end of the piece. I had not seen anything that’s been written like this; I got to it after years of frustration trying to work with traditional sheet music. I kept trying to write paragraphs into the little space between, like, the notes on the page and I was like “This is not making sense.” So I decided to flip it. When we go into those moments where something is more thoroughly “composed” might throw in some sheet music, but that part is the exception.” This also allows the material to be accessible to players who are not able to read sheet music. If the medium is the message, it makes perfect sense that as improvisational jazz breaks from Western classical tradition, its compositional form should as well. 

The Music of Revolution

The ethos of Selendis’ big band work will form the foundation of her performance at the 2025 Monheim Triennale. The group piece – which will incorporate eight or nine musicians improvising based on Selendis’ unique scoring methods – is tentatively called “Reflections on the German Revolution”. Musically, it will respond to Selendis’ interpretation of the events surrounding the German revolution in 1918-1919 that toppled Germany’s Kaiser-led monarchy, birthed the short-lived Weimar Republic and, some argue, paved the way for the rise of the Nazi movement. Selendis draws parallels between the violence, revolution, persecution and shifting political currents of the time and the current climate in the US, drawing connections to the Black Panthers, Fred Hampton and the history of black radical American politics, as well her lived experience as a black experimental American musician operating outside the jazz orthodoxy.

“I’m a big lover of history, and the ways that intersects with politics and the black radical tradition. And the idea of “The German Revolution” is something which gets referenced a lot in the traditions the black liberation movement situates itself within,” says Selendis, who emphazises how the Black Panthers, W.E.B. Dubois, Langston Hughes, Cedric Robinson and modern-day radicals have all studied the history of European and global revolutionary movements and woven that knowledge into thinking about how to approach contemporary intersectional struggle. 

“Black radical internationalists were always looking at and learning from the histories of European radical movements that they empathised with; you can see that super explicitly with black people’s connection writing about the Russian Revolution. People in the Panthers were thinking about Rosa Luxemburg. The way we exist as radicals in this country is a lot less racially segmented than it was in the 60s and 70s. So when we have something like the 2020 uprising, the George Floyd protests, people from all walks of life are participating, but it is being led by black American issues and leaders. People are thinking about and referencing other big protest movements which are constantly happening, and we’re always trying to learn from how they happen and from each other. This tradition is something which is connected with liberatory movements of the whole world, this isn’t just a thing for black people and it’s not a thing that learns only from black people.”

The first movement of the piece will reference 2020 in the U.S., when the murder of George Floyd by a Minneapolis police officer – which was caught on phone video – sparked months of nationwide Black Lives Matter protests. “There’s a very clear parallel to me between what happened in 2020 in this country and what happened in Germany in 1918 and 1919. Suddenly, with something happening in one place, individual cities were all going up in protest in entirely different ways and trying to work with each other. This sort of thing came up again around the country in spring 2024 with the Palestine encampments, and I’m noticing it happening with the Occupy movement. I think it’s going to start happening all the time and get more important in the next few years. And I want to engage with the fact that the revolutionary events in Germany in that time period look a lot like what I think people would imagine a revolution in the US would look like now. But in the end, that revolution was deemed unsuccessful, counterproductive, kind of stilted; it was a lot more confusing than how we like to talk about revolutions.” 

The piece will encompass eight players: Selendis on vibraphone and potentially trombone, a handful of New York City friends who have played with the SSAJ Big Band – like upright bassist Caroline Morton, drummer Josh Mathews and pianist/composer Hans-Young Binter – as well as Dusseldorf-based guitarist Christoph Götzen, sax player Francesca Fantini from Italy and trombonist Moritz Wesp, who lives in Cologne. “This one was mostly about wanting specific people to be there,” explains Selendis of how the instrumentation was chosen. “I love working with horns because I get them and I knew I needed to have a jazz rhythm section. The other thing I need is a trombonist. I love the trombone. This piece is about a very personal reflection and when there are trombonists in the group it feels more expressive on a personal level. This won’t be a normal jazz octet arrangement – it’s really focusing on individual voices and performances, and flowing between the instruments. The instruments are like a palette from which I can choose certain groups of instruments to play and emphasise different ones at different times.”  
 
“This one is definitely going to be a push for me,” acknowledges Selendis, who is looking forward to the conversation the music can start. “I’m never trying to convince anybody of anything. It’s about sharing history and engaging with the ways that people feel about things. This piece was going to get written whether or not it was being performed in Germany, but I’m glad it will be happening at Monheim. I’ve been deep in the historical research for this project for a while now and I want to reflect on what lessons there are to be gleaned in this moment from what happened then. This is a very personal piece on my experience learning about these events, which is honestly really emotional, and reflecting on a part of German history which I love and respect. I’m just very grateful for being called to do it, and I’m grateful for the patience of the German people with me exploring a controversial moment in their history.”