Austin Williamson and Brent Hayes Edwards

The performance will feature a call and response between musician and composer Austin Williamson of the Onyx Collective and Brent Hayes Edwards, professor of English and Comparative Literature at Columbia University. Williamson’s tonal exploration through percussion—both drum and sequenced—and Edwards’s reading of his work will build a textual and sonic landscape that engages with the artworks by Melvin Edwards, Sam Gilliam, and William T. Williams within the exhibition.

Epistrophy takes its title from a 1941 jazz standard by Thelonious Monk and Kenny Clarke, which riffs on the Greek word epistrophe, a formal structure in poetry that involves a repeated phrase or turn at the end of a line or stanza. The show also alludes to literary scholarship by Edwards, who has used the concept of epistrophe as a metaphor for the cross-pollination between music and poetry in Black cultural production.

The call and response format of For Voice and Drum reflects the experimental ethos of free jazz, celebrating the history of the genre. The performance will highlight jazz music’s powerful presence in the work of the artists in Epistrophy.