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On Friday night, legends came together at 2220 Arts to celebrate “Milton + esperanza,” nominated tonight for a Grammy in the Best Jazz Vocal album category. Milton Nascimento flew from Brazil; Herbie Hancock and Thundercat were there and made cameos on stage. “This is not a show,” Esperanza Spalding said emphatically. It was a jam, a gathering, a joyous and much-needed reset.
Image contributing writer Harmony Holiday, who co-runs the space, shares the making of this event. Interspersed throughout are photos from the evening, captured by Tyler Matthew Oyer.
As if the year of the dragon wasn’t finished with us, January 2025 in Los Angeles brought the kind of sudden devastation that could force a postapocalyptic metropolis such as this to reacquaint itself with God, only to declare God dead again as existential crisis demands. The fire and ash and destruction, the lingering gunk in the air and water, the many who escaped their homes with the clothes on their backs as the roads behind them burned, are a collective and ongoing trauma that no amount of yoga, cold-pressed juice, class denial, glamour spells and quiet-on-the-set energy can diminish. L.A.’s brand, which is Hollywood, is being asked to expand its consciousness or suffer, to either let its ego die or watch it flail as it’s snatched by the force of this catastrophe. The city is in the level of disrepair that forces us to normalize disrepair.
While the fires were only moderately contained, many waited to see if the landscape of the coming awards season would shift, if films would pause, if the show must not go on. Instead, as sets burned to the ground, new locations were scouted the next day, the Oscars delayed the announcement of nominations, the Grammys decided to carry on as planned but transitioned the tenor of the evening to that of a fundraiser for musicians who lost everything in the fires. Is it possible to rebuild morale and creative spark in the city without turning empathy and suffering into spectacle? We may never know. We have been interrupted, and moments of rupture create lost souls as well as they do community. We are being asked to say something, tell our story fast, as Stevie Wonder puts it in his address in “Jesus Children of America,” as if speaking to us now. I’ve never seen this city more on edge, more at risk of totalizing decay, more goaded by hubris and quiet despair, not even when I was kid and the L.A. riots erupted here.
Late last year, Esperanza Spalding had reached out to me about hosting a celebration for Brazilian singer and collaborator Milton Nascimento, at 2220 Arts in L.A, a venue where I program shows and events and curate an archival practice that way. In the past, we’ve had small gatherings of musicians after shows or to improvise for fun; this would be a larger-scale version on the occasion of him coming to town from Brazil to hopefully win a Grammy with Esperanza for their album “Milton and Esperanza.” I saw him live downtown a couple of years ago on what was meant to be his final U.S. tour. This was one of those delightful flukes; the answer was an unequivocal yes.
Intergenerational friendships are rare and threatened by the potential for technical difficulties now that the digital and analog worlds run coterminal; theirs is beautiful in song and in life. It thrives because Spalding does not objectify or extract from Nascimento or call him “mentor” as if he’s providing a service. They are peers, they play together. When the city went up in flames, we shifted the event and invited jazz multi-reedist Bennie Maupin, who lost his home and instruments in Altadena’s Eaton fire, to be part of the ensemble. We moved to donate the proceeds to others who experienced similar loss.
Intergenerational friendships are rare and threatened by the potential for technical difficulties now that the digital and analog worlds run coterminal; theirs is beautiful in song and in life.
Planning this event became a form of recovering our collective faith in the beauty of Black improvised music and in its power to heal and compel us to want better for ourselves and one another. There’s no bow around this disaster; a neighborhood full of Black musicians burned to the ground. We gathered to remember what was and what we’ll rebuild. And because celebrating and grieving are unified modes in the Black tradition, wherein we offer the spirits joy as they leave or rearrange their energies, this was our jazz funeral for the parts of Los Angeles we will never retrieve except through coming together.
Harmony Holiday greets the guests, including Herbie Hancock.
