This Is Not a Land of Kings

Or maybe it is… but it doesn't have to be.

Four years ago, I wrote a piece for VAN on musicians who were following the deceptive cadence of the US election in the days between Election Day and when the vote was finally called. It was a balm to spend the first 36 hours after that Tuesday having so many conversations that touched on a range of emotions and reactions, with people like David Harrington, Reginald Mobley, and Raquel Acevedo Klein. Everyone I spoke with was aligned politically in the broad sense, but since there’s no such thing as a monolith, there were as many threads to tug on as people after the initial response of nervous laughing and guttural sighs. In this sense, the experience reinforced one of Harrington’s observations, made in reference to Pete Seeger (whose music the Kronos Quartet had recorded in anticipation of this same election): “When I think about his life’s work and the way he brought his audience into making a community, to me that likely is part of the answer now.” 

That notion of community resonate…