Every February for the last few decades, the present author has spent most of the month, aka Black History Month, focusing on music made by Black musicians. Sometimes that’s exploratory — extended visits with record store clerks or music bloggers, which is how I first heard Fela Kuti and Fishbone. Sometimes it’s a deep dive into the catalog of artists I already enjoy. For instance, like most white dudes I really enjoy the music of Miles Davis, so February is usually a good time to get into the six hours of outtakes that comprise those “Complete [Name of Album] Sessions” boxed sets Columbia puts out. Other times it’s just a good time to enjoy familiar favorites, stuff I grew up with like Parliament and Stevie Wonder. This year it’s all about John Coltrane. And so on.

Please note that the point here isn’t “look how cool I am” but “this is a lot of fun and you should do it, too.” You can do this with anything, obviously: Swedish melodic death metal, 16th-century Flemish choral music, Riot Grrrl bands, Italian prog, West Coast ‘50s swing, cumbia, the road goes ever on and on, back to the door where it began.

Predictably, then, today we’d like to discuss Black music in Oregon. (It’s a minor miracle that a state infamous for originally prohibiting Black people altogether has any people of color at all living in it, but such is the enduring resilience of the human spirit.) This isn’t exactly a history lesson (read Lynn Darroch’s excellent profile on the Albina Music Trust to get started with that). Nor is this an authoritative “Best Black Music in Oregon” column (check in with Mac Smiff for that). Nor do we wish to get particularly political (read about Cappella Romana’s recent struggles for that).

As always, this is just the perspective of one biased music journalist with a love for Oregon music and a love for Black music. It is, by necessity and design, incomplete (esperanza spalding is in, Aminé is out). And, in keeping with our “this is not a damn events column” New Year’s Resolution, we’re not going to discuss very many live events, although there are a few choice concerts and one major jazz festival we’d like to bring your attention to.

We’ll start with one of those choice concerts: Singer-composer Jimmie Herrod’s album release party February 24 at The Old Church.

Today is tomorrow

Go back twelve years – past all the America’s Got Talent appearances and the Rent gig and the stint with Pink Martini and all the acclaim – and listen to Herrod’s first EP, Subtleties, recorded in 2013 when the singer-songwriter was fresh out of Cornish and ready to take the world by storm. Here it is on Bandcamp:

Cut to 2018-19 and Herrod is tearing it up, releasing his album of originals Falling in Love and Learning to Love Myself in 2018 and his EP with Pink Martini, Tomorrow, in 2019. Here’s both of those:

The intervening years have been a lot of “singing other people’s music” — not that anybody could complain about Herrod’s performances of standards like “On A Clear Day” and “What a Wonderful World”:

And then there’s this little collaboration with Oregon “art music and art pop” composer Damen Easton, 2023’s The Stars:

But to get a real sense of what Herrod does, get a load of this show from 2023 in San Diego, with a combo of Herrod originals and covers, including (yowza!) a Björk song:

An exchange in the comments on this one is hilarious:

Jimmie Herrod’s “Color and Light” is part of the Biamp PDX Jazz Festival 2025, and happens February 24 at The Old Church. Tickets and more information are available here.

Mr. Grant

And now it’s time to talk about Darrell Grant, who is also performing at this year’s PDX Jazz Festival (with Portland Jazz Composers Ensemble at their Rise In Love concert February 24 at PSU).

Grant is a monumental figure in Oregon music, almost more than you can really take in at first glance; in 2019 Brett Campbell called him “Portland’s most significant man of music.” The thing is, at first it’s easy enough to just think of Grant as “jazz pianist, kinda in that contemporary Blanchard-Marsalis camp.” And he is that, and damn good at it, as you can hear right away on his first album as a Portlander, 1997’s Smokin’ Java (which is, by the way, an incredible name for a jazz album):

Listen to Grant’s discography and the “regular jazz” keeps going, all the up through last year’s – sorry, 2023’s – Our Mr. Jackson, dedicated to drummer and radio host Carlton Jackson (and still available on vinyl):

But there’s a lot more to Grant than “jazz pianist,” and not for nothing did we namecheck Terence Blanchard and Wynton Marsalis a few paragraphs ago: Like those two giants, Grant is very much a serious classical composer. Consider 2015’s The Territory and 2019’s Edna Vazquez collaboration 21 Cartas:

Better still, check out Grant’s choral composition From the Book of Sankofa, created in collaboration with poet/activist A. Mimi Sei and Resonance Ensemble in 2024:

Or his “jazz chamber opera” Sanctuaries, created in 2021 in collaboration with Third Angle New Music and Oregon Poet Laureate Anis Mojgani: 

You can read more about these last two in a trio of ArtsWatch stories: From the Book of Sankofa in Daryl Browne’s review, Sanctuaries in Campbell’s preview and Charles Rose’s review.

We leave Grant with a selection of his fine prose, discussing Julius Eastman’s Femenine:

It’s not jazz. At least not as I would usually define it. It’s all in one key. There are no chord changes, no sliding away into dissonance and distraction. It is improvised, but the composer’s original theme, his “prime” motive, is ever-present. It reminds me of the way I experience Mount Hood as a Portlander. Coming in and out of view, sometimes distant, sometimes close enough to touch. But even when obscured, its presence grounds me in the territory that I occupy.

There is a published score for Julius Eastman’s 1974 work Femenine. I’ve been using it to learn the piece. There is also his original manuscript, of which I have a photocopy — four pages of barely legible scrawl containing scraps of notation and hand-written instructions for how the musicians are to navigate the next 70 minutes of communal music-making.

Read the rest, and explore Grant’s extensive catalog of work and works, over at his website.

Besides Grant, PJCE’s all-star “Rise In Love” concert on Feb. 24 at PSU also features Todd Marston, Steven Golliday, S. Renee Mitchell, James Powers, Kirsten Volness, Ezra Weiss, and Marilyn Keller. Learn more about this free concert (and RSVP) right here.

When does this man sleep?

Take a good look at Machado Mijiga’s catalog, all of it on his Bandcamp page. Count up those releases: 24 albums, 17 singles, 17 EPs, all within a dozen years. He recorded his first album, Just Standards, at Washington State University in Pullman, Wash., in 2013:

The loveliest thing about this debut is that Mijiga plays tenor sax on the whole thing. He’s mostly known as a drummer now, and he kicks ass at that, but we always find ourselves wishing he’d get back to his sax roots someday. Here’s his classical-meets-jazz sax album from 2016, Mirror Images:

Mijiga first really hits his stride as a composer, bandleader, and multi-instrumentalist on 2014’s Taken for Grant(ed), which is also notable for the first appearance of “Heimdall’s Creek,” a tune which will appear again on later Mijiga albums.

Cut to 2019, after several Dilla-inspired EPs and a move to Portland, and Mijiga is playing with PDX Jazz folks like bassist Damien Erskine, guitarist Mike Gamble, keyboardist Todd Marston, and trumpeter Noah Simpson:

Cut to 2025 and the hits keep coming. He’s been releasing an EP every month with his Neighbors (aka Gamble and bassist Garrett Baxter), the most recent of which also featured alto sax and drum duo Grammies:

Last month, Mijiga released a collection of 24 short tunes, aptly titled Sketch Book, which he describes as “an assortment of sketches I collected from the last 10 years of composing that had not been fully developed for some reason or another.”

When Mijiga’s not doing this home-recording stuff, he’s out on the Portland scene being one of Oregon’s most exciting jazz drummers (not easy in a town that’s still home to both Mel Brown and his son Chris). He’s played roughly 10,000 shows at The 1905, in a variety of configurations:

Mijiga’s new quartet (with trumpeter Pablo Rivarola, guitarist Jack Radsliff, and bassist Jon Shaw) will perform a 10 pm show on February 28, once again at The 1905. Information and more tickets are available right here.

Little spells

Now, here is where we could take a deep dive into Portland jazz. Famed jazz trumpeter Noah Simpson plays The 1905 earlier the same night as Mijiga, which means all these jazz cats will be hanging out there together, and that means you could spend your whole evening there eating pizza and drinking beer and generally having yourself a fine Black History Month Finale. Chris Brown and his band are there too, for two sets every Wednesday night.

Or we could plunge into the world of Oregon hip hop, a subset of the Pacific Northwest Sound every bit as distinctive and wonderful as the better-known East Coast, West Coast, and Dirty South scenes. We could trace a history from ’90s Cool Nutz and that glorious Lifesavas Gutterfly soundtrack all the way up to Mic Capes and Mat Randol and Rasheed Jamal and the continued evolution of Cool Nutz.

But we did say this wouldn’t be a history lesson, besides which you can do all that yourself right here:

Or we could talk about musicians who’ve left Oregon (Aminé, Damien Geter) or who have relatively recently come here from elsewhere (Black Shelton, Sidney Guillaume). You can listen to all of them yourself too:

But we’ve given you enough to ponder today, so we’d like to leave you with one of our favorite albums by a Black Oregon musician, perhaps the most famous of all, and someone who completed the Hero’s Quest by going away and coming back: We’re talking about esperanza spalding (aka irma nejando). This season, the bassist-singer-composer is the inaugural artist-in-residence at The Patricia Valian Reser Center for the Creative Arts (PRAx) in Corvallis. You can read about Prismid, the artist sanctuary she helped found in North Portland, right here. Oregonians are, quite justly, very proud of her.

Like Grant, spalding’s work is vast and complex; as with Grant and the piano, it’s easy enough to first think “jazz bassist,” from early albums like Junjo and Esperanza to her recent albums with Fred Hersch and Milton Nascimento.

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But then you get into the intense plurality of an indefinable artist for whom nothing is off the table. Her current bio reads like this:

esperanza continues to collaborate and perform in new productions of “…(Iphigenia)”, an opera written by Wayne Shorter, for whom she wrote the libretto and co-produced its 2021/2022 premieres // is currently developing a mockumentary in collaboration with brontë velez and San Francisco Symphony // researching and developing liberation rituals in jazz and black dance // and through the Songwrights Apothecary Lab continuing a lifelong collaboration with practitioners in various fields relating to sound, healing, and cognition to develop music with enhanced therapeutic potential.

With her dance company Off Brand gOdds (co-founded with Antonio Brown) and the Songwrights Apothecary Lab she leads multi-week performance, teaching, workshop, and therapeutic-arts research residencies in collaboration with colleges and arts venues across the Americas, and throughout the world.

Her forthcoming installation “I love being Black/Quit saying I’m Black” opens in a near future, commissioned and produced by institutions who do the work themselves of learning about, reaching out to, and offering comprehensive support to eaabibacliitoti (and other ancestored) artists rather than demanding we take on the burden of proving our competency and worthiness to receive the resources required to deliver our medicine – uncontorted & well-rested – to our communities/the world.

All of which brings us to her Grammy-winning 2018 album 12 Little Spells. Is it jazz? Beats the hell out of me, man. Sure. Why not? But it’s weird, and I mean weird. It’s a concept album; it’s densely composed, with angular melodies and rich harmonies and a production that sounds intensely layered whether the texture is orchestral or just vocals and one or two instruments; it’s heavy, both thematically and in the way it sometimes almost hits like heavy metal.

It sounds like the best, weirdest stuff on records by Stevie Wonder, Prince, Zappa, Thundercat; at times it sounds a little like Miles Davis’ surreal late ‘80s modernist classical album Aura. But it also sounds determinedly fresh, futuristic, and female; in this sense it almost feels like the weirdest of Kate Bush’s stuff (say, The Dreaming) or the more classical side of Björk (say, Medúlla) or especially–perhaps obviously–early Janelle Monáe.

Meaning that, for all the weirdness, it never stops being catchy and groovy. And that’s exactly why we love it.