SPCUNY Artist
Valerie Tevere
Collaborators
“The Slow Drop Musicians’ Village” is one component of the multidisciplinary project “The Slow Drop” by Angel Nevarez and Valerie Tevere.
Collaborating musicians include Danny Abel, Sam Albright, Denise Bonis, Tom Chute, Sula Janet Evans, Helen Gillet, Edward Lee Jr., Thomas McDonald, Margie Perez, Troy Sawyer, Gabriel Velasco, and Chip Wilson. The October 8, 2022 event was curated by Anna Mecugni and included a participatory ancestral tribute to Musicians’ Village founding resident Council Chief Joseph Jenkins in the Black Indian tradition, featuring Big Chiefs Kevin Goodman and Kevin Turner who co-curated the production with Maroon Queen Reesie (Cherice Harrison-Nelson).
The Slow Drop
A project by Valerie Tevere and Angel Nevarez
The Slow Drop is a multidisciplinary project which includes a spatial music performance, a multi-channel video and sound installation, and a series of photographic portraits of musician collaborators.
The Slow Drop began with the question: What might a creative response sound like in the wake of climate change? Artistic reactions to climate change are necessary to build understanding of the realities of changing landscapes. Cities like New Orleans are at the frontline of climate change, whose urgency leads us to think critically in order to probe new narrative spaces for transformation.
The first component of The Slow Drop was a spatial music performance that took place on October 8, 2022 in Musicians’ Village, New Orleans, LA. The performance titled The Slow Drop: Musicians’ Village was built upon the musical talents of residents of New Orleans Musicians’ Village —a 2006 housing initiative in the Upper Ninth Ward that provided financial assistance to bring musicians back to the neighborhood after the devastation left by Hurricane Katrina. Collaborating musicians include Danny Abel, Sam Albright, Denise Bonis, Tom Chute, Sula Janet Evans, Helen Gillet, Edward Lee Jr., Thomas McDonald, Margie Perez, Troy Sawyer, Gabriel Velasco, and Chip Wilson.
The Slow Drop: Musicians’ Village was an acoustic experience–a neighborhood score–formed through the combination of social engagement, music production and collaborative improvisation across Musicians’ Village. The neighborhood score consists of melodic textures, percussive accents, and vibrant tones that reference the ecology and the layered acoustic environment of New Orleans.
The score included improvised music and voices evoking dramatic tensions one may associate with a ravaging storm.
Neighbors, audiences, and passers-by experienced a fluid musical performance by residents of Musicians’ Village performing from the porches and yards of their own homes; as audiences moved through Musicians’ Village, distinct idiosyncratic scores emerged as each composed their own listening route through the neighborhood. The tambor of the drums mixed with modulated vocalizations and brass tempos, singularizing one’s act of listening as foreground and background, near and far sounds, ambience and rhythm. These analogous performances accumulated across Musicians’ Village as a neighborhood score.
The video and audio intermix of the October 8, 2022 performance is currently in post-production to be edited as a multi-channel video and sound installation that captures the spatial musical aspects of the performance.
As with Nevarez and Tevere’s other projects which are often process-centered, site-contextual, and collaborative—The Slow Drop has multiple ontologies: which include the live performance in Musicians’ Village, a multi-channel video and sound installation, and a series of photographic portraits of collaborating musicians to be presented in exhibition.
Image courtesy of Edge Effect
OUR STUDIES SHOW ($100 for Truth, 2020). Sculpture/process and photo by Esther Neff
