In Conversation With Cleveland Native Janice A. Lowe, Poet and Musician

Janice Lowe (left) performing with NAMAROON Credit: Photo by Randy O. Norfus

Janice A. Lowe, a composer-poet and multidisciplinary artist, is the author of Leaving CLE: poems of nomadic dispersal (Miami University Press) and SWAM (Belladonna Collaborative.) A native of Cleveland, she was honored to write the foreword for the anthology World’d Too Much: The Poetry of Russell Atkins (Cleveland State University Press.) With Teri Ellen Cross Davis and Kelly Harris-DeBerry, Lowe was recently a featured speaker/performer at “Homecoming: Three Black Women Creatives Return to the Land.” Lowe has performed/recorded with many bands and has composed music for theater and dance companies across the country. The album Leaving CLE Songs of Nomadic Dispersal, performed by Janice Lowe & NAMAROON has been described by The Black Fantastic as a “killer musical offering” and by Helen Young as a “notable…experimental jazz record.” She is a co-founder of the Dark Room Collective.

Attendees of the free Great Lakes African American Writers Conference (GLAAWC) can enjoy Janice Lowe’s Alice Dunbar-Nelson Professional Keynote at the Louis Stokes Wing Main Auditorium of the CPL Main Branch on Saturday, September 30.

We caught up with Lowe to chat ahead of the event.

Your compositions often explore themes of home, displacement, and cultural identity. How do you translate these themes into your music and poetry?

My parents’ Great Migration story is very much a part of my poetry collection, Leaving CLE: poems of nomadic dispersal, which deals with how my flashbulb memories come from my experience of moving with my family to cities in the northeast, Midwest, mid-Atlantic and south. I have an acutely accurate recall of happenings around the times of most of the moves. I needed to write those poems in order to understand my parents’ dream trajectory and my complicated feelings about the moves. I am most fond of Cleveland, my birth city–where my close-knit family lived longest. We actually lived in Cleveland twice.

How do you approach shifting between different artistic contexts and genres?

After writing the manuscript, I composed underscoring for poems, interspersed the poems with instrumental or sung moments, or sometimes set entire poems to music. Pretty soon I shifted to writing arrangements for several instruments, including myself on piano and playing/singing my poetry readings as concerts. While listening to the page, the poems— even the densely-worded ones called to me to play piano and to offer them as singable entities, even though performing them as such was physically demanding. Making music of the poems helped me to resolve the difficulty of that last move from Cleveland—a city I learned to love through my dad, who did community work after coming home from his civil service job and my English teacher mom’s quest to have us partake of the city’s arts offerings. The transformation felt natural to my creative voice as a composer who collaborates with lyricists. I was finally bringing both sides of me together.

Your album Leaving CLE Songs of Nomadic Dispersal is a fusion of your poetry and musical compositions. How did you approach blending these two art forms?

Leaving CLE Songs as a recording came together organically as an evolution of performing the poems with musicians. Accompanying myself on piano while singing poetry of family and place connected me to a griot-inspired calling. These poems needed background singers, as well to function as a Greek chorus, reacting to and commenting on the drama inside the poem’s stories. Even with the numbers of words, I wanted to sing an intimate plaintive story or a kinetically-charged one or one that jumps outside the poem/lyric to dialogue with the audience, or one that has fun performing itself. Some of my early performer influences along those lines were Billie Holiday, Gil Scott-Heron and Parliament-Funkadelic.

How do you approach collaborating with other artists, such as Julie Ezelle Patton and Tyehimba Jess?

In performance, Julie Ezelle Patton blends visual art, music, poetry and improvised text. I’ve joined her as a pianist in co-creating extemporaneous text-soundscapes. When working with Julie, I am attentive to the happy accidents of found sounds, including sounds of spontaneous dance steps on wooden floor, breath, and playing off all that is collected and channeled.

As an improvising pianist, I’ve also performed and recorded with the band Irreversible Entanglements on their latest album, Protect Your Light; on flute and voice with the band Brahja; and on voice and electronics with Anne Waldman and Fast Speaking music.

Tyehimba Jess and I have collaborated on Millie and Christine McKoy Sister’s Syncopated Sonnets in Song, part song cycle, part theater and part visual which incorporates poems from Jess’s Pulitzer Prize-awarded collection, OLIO, about conjoined twin sisters, the performers Millie and Christine McKoy, who were born into slavery in North Carolina. The lines of the poems can be read in multi-directions. As a multidisciplinary piece, I’ve set the poems to music in ways that explore the various directions in which a reader can encounter the text. Tyehimba and began working together by asking the question, “What is the sound of being conjoined?” and by exploring the oneness of the sisters, who referred to herself in singular, as well as their separate minds.

Your performances often involve improvisation. Could you discuss your creative process when it comes to balancing composition and improvisation and creating a seamless performance? Do you use improvisation for your musical theater work?

In an improvised music context, I’ll compose a sketch of a tune, loosely organize it into movements and then, together with an ensemble, open things to full improvisation. I’ll spur spontaneous development with words that suggest color, kinetics, place emotion. I have collaborated as an improvising musician/composer on several theater pieces–most recently Dream, Girl! (Apollo Theater Salon-Series) and We Are Cambridge (RootUprising Dance Company). The amount of improvisation depends on what’s needed for a particular moment in the scene/story/sound world.

You’ve worked at Rutgers University, Teachers & Writers Collaborative and the Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics at Naropa University. How do you approach teaching and mentoring emerging artists and writers?

While teaching in the Summer Writing Program at Naropa, which encourages experimental teaching practices, I began developing ideas about teaching interdisciplinary creative writing. At Rutgers, I teach a multi-media writing class—Memoirist’s Mixtape that encourages students to mine, remix and collage their writing sound and video creations in ways that explore writing as an interactive, interdisciplinary entity.

What upcoming projects are you excited about, and how do you see your artistic journey evolving in the coming years?

With bookwriter-lyricist Stephanie L. Jones, I’m collaborating as composer on LIL BUDDA (The Sequel), an audience interactive theater performance and multi-media installation that explores the “smack dab in the multiverse of middle age story” of a Black social media personality, performer and influencer at the top of her popularity who quiets the noise in order to prioritize her relationships and work/life balance.

I’m interested in collaborating with neighborhoods, musicians/poets/artists to create public sound art installations that bring communities and artists together, from planning to implementation.

Bruce Morrow is a multimedia artist whose practice includes writing, filmmaking, and digital artmaking. His first short film, IN DREAMS BEGIN…, earned Best LGBTQ Jury and Audience Awards at the 2023 Paris Short Film Festival. He is a former fiction editor at Callaloo and a co-editor of “Shade: An Anthology of Short Fiction by Gay Men of African Descent.” He’s originally from Cleveland Heights, OH.

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