Pew Fellows Sumi Tonooka, a composer and musician, and Phillip B. Williams, a poet and author, work in different mediums. Yet, through their one-on-one conversation, they discovered commonalities in the ways they “channel” their compositions and how they’ve experienced shifts in their artistic identities. 

The conversation that follows was recorded and edited for length and clarity. 

Tonooka (she/her) is a composer and jazz pianist who has released twelve albums, composed four symphonies for orchestras, and scored numerous films and dance performances. She has performed at venues including the Kennedy Center, Lincoln Center, and the Monterey Jazz Festival.  

Williams’ (he/him) poems explore Black surrealism, folklore, and spirituality. His publications include two books of poetry, Mutiny (an American Book Award winner) and Thief in the Interior, and his debut novel, Ours. 

Phillip Williams  
I’m curious about how composing feels in your body versus how playing feels in your body. Does the physical sensation of one type of creation inspire the way that you navigate the other? 

Sumi Tonooka 
That's such a great question. First, because it considers the body and how you feel in it. I think 
sometimes creative people, even if your art is physical, can get away from the fact that you're creating from a physical body. 

I would say the act of composing feeds the act of playing, and vice versa. As a jazz musician, you're working in improvisation, and that requires you to embrace the moment. As you become more mature, you're able to get out of your own way and not allow your ego to dictate as much. I would say that thinking improvisationally helps me in the compositional process because, as you can imagine, it’s much more slowed down. You're looking at a larger field of endeavor in terms of how you approach time. Even if you're working on something fast, the act of composing is slow. 

I feel more alive when I'm in the act of improvisation, and sometimes I don't feel as embodied when I'm composing. A lot of the time what I'll do is take breaks and improvise, maybe record something, and then listen back because I want the music to feel organic and to make sense in terms of how it flows.  

I feel like both processes inform one another, and being able to go back and forth a little bit is very helpful. 

Tonooka 
How did you come to be a poet? What’s your origin story? 

Williams 
For undergrad, I got into the business school at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. I was going to “do writing on the side,” is what I told myself. 

But for as long as I can remember, I always wrote. I started writing in first grade. We kept journals. It was part of our everyday experience that became a habit, but it’s something that I learned to enjoy for the rest of my life thanks to Mrs. Bellamy, my first-grade teacher.  

So, my story isn’t as dynamic as that of some people who start in one thing and then transition, but writing is foundational to who I am. I wrote through high school. I wrote through undergrad. I was thinking that I would start off in fiction, but I did not want to read other people's short stories in workshops. So I said, “Oh, let me try to do poetry instead because it'll be quicker.”

Tonooka 
<laughter>

Williams 
I thought that I was going to do business school, make money that way, and then have whatever time to write. But I took the unsafe route and went for my English degree in undergrad and my MFA in poetry later on. 

Tonooka 
Do you think of yourself as a word person? 

Williams 
I do. Learning how to read didn't take long. My mom had gotten me Hooked on Phonics, and I naturally understood if you put a “p” and the “h” together that makes the “ph” sound. Being named Phillip helped, but it’s just something that visually made sense. The “f” makes sense to sound that way. The “c” makes sense to sound that way.  

The way that I look at language or see words or think of sentences, it feels like a different relationship compared with what other people might be experiencing.  

I can look at the word “cerulean,” and it brings a feeling in me. And then when I read the definition, it's like, “Oh, yeah, that makes sense. This is a particular kind of blue that feels that way.” I don't know what that is. It's not quite synesthesia. But there is a way that I’ve always gravitated toward language and words and the sound of words.

Tonooka 
That's beautiful. 

Williams 
What, if any, is the conversation between your African American heritage and Japanese American heritage when it comes to composition and how you view yourself as an artist? 

Tonooka 
Oh, that's complex. Both my parents were radicals and revolutionaries. I grew up as a child of the ‘60s, so the whole idea of civil rights and addressing my Blackness and what it meant to be Black, but also Japanese, was something that started pretty early. 

My mother was interned during World War II. She was one of the first families to be taken off Bainbridge Island, Washington, where she was born, and put behind barbed wire as an American citizen at the age of 16. Though she didn’t really start talking about that experience until later in life, she ran towards radical politics to address a lot of her anger about what had happened to her.  

My father was African American with a lot of mix and was a Marxist. Both my parents are really unusual people. They met during the McCarthy era, writing an anti-McCarthy leaflet. My mom says it was love at first sight, and the rest is history, right? Four kids later.

Tonooka cont.
I used to say that I'm half Japanese and half African American, and then I thought to myself half of what? Like how can your blood be half and half, you know what I mean? Growing up in West Philadelphia, my context was more from an African American perspective because I didn't have a lot of Japanese people around me, except for my mother and my grandmother and grandfather, who actually lived with us for a while. 

Pretty early on when I started doing music, I received a grant from the Japanese American Citizen’s League to compose a work that would address the internment. It was called “Out From the Silence.” So, then I was exploring Japanese poetry that was written about the internment from different generations of people. I brought in Japanese instruments like the koto and the shakuhachi for that piece. For the first time, I was really exploring Japanese culture and music in my own music in a very conscious way. I had to confront certain things about myself like, “How authentic is this to me?” and “Where am I in this?”  I ended up using poetry that was composed by people with firsthand experience. My mom had prose that she had written about it, so I brought her into the piece and she read her prose. I based a lot of the music on that particular thing that my mother had written. 

Williams 
When you mentioned the ancestors, it made me think of the process of writing and how often I would look back and say, “I don't know who wrote this. I don't know who's behind this voice.” Or I started noticing it in the poems when I revised and I would be stuck, and then a word would come, and it would just be like a flash of inspiration. I would change one word, and it would unlock the entire poem. Intellectually, I think that is most often something that happens when the intellect and the spirit are somehow finding resonance with one another.  

When I started writing the novel, it didn't necessarily happen in that way. I most recognized it when characters would do things or want to do things, and I would have to write it, and I didn't know exactly how I would move through the plot with those decisions that they made. Some of the language I could hear, not necessarily being spoken to me, but just like some kind of music. It’s a very musically written book. The language has been described as poetic, but for me, it's just because it's really embodied. There's this spiritual element. I would look back at entire chapters and say, “I don't know where the skill came from to do this. I don't know where the knowledge came from.” I feel like that every time I write. I'm in conversation with those who have been here before me and are still watching. 

Tonooka 
That's really powerful. The artistic process and how it's a channeling of sorts is pretty fascinating, right? Because a lot of the time, it's way beyond you. You're the vessel. I think sometimes it's all about getting out of your own way and just following the thread. It can be scary, because it can feel over your head, just like, “Where is this coming from?” And then you have to not worry about it and just go with it. 

Williams 
And to feel deserving of that. Because sometimes I didn't know if I could say it was mine, you know? Because it's so collaborative. Like, is this my writing? Well, I'm the only one here, so I don't know how else to describe it. <laughter> 

Tonooka 
Has your concept of Blackness and identity shifted or changed from ten years ago? And how does it come through in your work?

Williams 
I think it's broadened. It's become more expansive because it's become more diasporic. It's not just Black American. I think there's a huge misconception that there's one way, or even a few ways, to be Black. America is the result of the melting pot, but it is also a composition of many people who come from the diaspora for whatever reasons, be it refuge or jobs or to be with family. There are Jamaicans here. There are Trinis here. There are Nigerians here.  

Previously, my idea of what it meant to be Black was based on those whose ancestors experienced slavery here on this soil or who had been here even before there was slavery. Those who were here free, who were indigenous. That's one part of the history. But there are also folks who came after the Haitian revolution, who came in the ‘20s, ‘30s, ‘50s, ‘60s, and they too contribute to the way Blackness is understood. It is through that integration of cultures that I come to better understand myself spiritually. Because all I had before that was Christianity, and I'm not a Christian. That never resonated with me. But in having conversations with people I went to high school with—I had friends who were Ghanaian, Eritrean, Nigerian—and then I went to college, and that [sphere of influence] just got bigger and bigger.  

I've become someone who when I think about “What does it mean to be Black?” I'm fully aware that I am having multiple conversations at once, and the primary conversation that I want to have is with myself, with this knowledge that I am part of the capital-D “Diaspora,” a group of people who have maybe phenotypical similarities but also cultural similarities that allow for our differences to be more easily bridged. That might not be true for everyone. I love to see some of the dances that are created by Black Americans, but then see there's a dance in Senegal called the sabar, and it's very fast-paced: the arms are swinging, the feet are up, it’s grounded, the knees are bent, and I'm like, oh, this is like footwork in Chicago. Seeing those connections is not a coincidence. This is history. This is lineage. This is blood memory. So that's what has grown for me. 

Williams  
How has your creative process evolved in surprising ways, in maybe the last five or ten years? 

Tonooka 
Well, one of the things that's happened in the last ten years is I've gone into orchestral writing. That happened without me really being prepared for where it was going to take me. I applied for this program called the Jazz Composers Orchestra Intensive, specifically for jazz composers to compose for orchestra. I was picked along with 37 other jazz composers and then went off to UCLA for this weeklong intensive. The program was so exciting, exposing us to all things orchestral, including pairing us with mentor composers. My mentor was the amazing composer Paul Chihara. The program was in two stages, and for the second part, if you wanted the opportunity to receive a live reading by an actual orchestra, you had to submit a one-minute sample and proposal. I ended up moving forward and getting chosen to compose a new work to be read live by the American Composers Orchestra in New York City, and that one piece opened doors for a bunch of other things to happen. I didn’t see that coming. Orchestra writing comes with a huge learning curve. It's too much information to wrap your arms around in one go. But with each effort, you learn, and then you keep going and you keep learning. I've been very fortunate as I've started to have some sense of continuity because I've been getting my work performed, mostly through competitions. I was just recently offered my first actual commission. I didn't see that coming. It’s been very surprising, because it's taken me into another world, working with conductors and lots of big groups of players.  

You have to take such a deep dive that you feel like you're re-emerging when the piece is over. So, it's been a new development. I've been struggling a little bit because the worlds are so different. I’m still figuring out what my truth is as far as who I am musically. I feel like I'm still in the question of it. Like, “What am I doing here?” 

Williams 
Maybe that keeps things exciting. 

Tonooka 
I guess so. I mean, I'm learning a lot. That's exciting. And I'm smitten by the sound of the orchestra, but I don't want it to happen that I stop playing altogether or stop doing the music I did before. I'm at a very interesting place with it all. But I feel like there's a lot more work for me to do in this area, especially around bringing the jazz sensibility into the orchestra. I'm trying a lot of things.  

Tonooka 
Could you speak to what is driving you to create at this moment, and can you please share a little bit about what you're working on right now? 

Williams 
I am not doing anything right now, which is okay. Well, that's partially untrue. I would like to buckle down and get to writing what I've been calling a love story, a love novel. It's not necessarily a romance novel, but surely those elements will be in there. I am at a point in my life now where romantic partnership is important to me, and it's not something that I'm experiencing. I've never experienced it before. I want to write this book and just see what my values are and how they transcribe over to characters, and how my characters can also challenge me and push back against some of the things that I think are my beliefs or my green flags and red flags.  

Ours, my first novel, takes place in the Antebellum period, but I want this novel to be a contemporary story of two people just relating to one another. They're not worrying about racism, or the police, or poverty, or whatever. They're just trying to figure out, “How does one complex human connect with another complex human?” They both have experienced a kind of loss, and it is their grief that is the magnet. I'm excited about exploring that. But also, you know, making sure that I leave room for a real romantic life.  

Tonooka 
Yes, you do absolutely need to also be engaged in real life. Maybe that's what you should do now, go out and fall in love. <laughter> Right? 

Williams 
Exactly. I’m looking forward.