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OAKLAND, Calif. \u2014 Near the end of a sold-out show earlier this month, celebrating the release of his visionary second album, \u201cGrief,\u201d the vocalist, pianist, composer and activist Samora Pinderhughes asked the audience to sing with him. He was about to hit the coda to \u201cProcess\u201d<\/a> \u2014 a heart-baring anthem of solitude and self-forgiveness, which he uses to close all his concerts \u2014 and he wanted some familiar voices to join the wordless melody.<\/p>\n For every new fan who\u2019d showed up that night at the downtown headquarters of the online music store Bandcamp, a member of Pinderhughes\u2019s close-knit community seemed to be there too. Standing in the back was his friend Adamu Chan<\/a>, a filmmaker and organizer, who had been incarcerated early in the pandemic and is now working on a documentary about Covid-19\u2019s spread in the prison system. In the front row, an arm\u2019s length from the grand piano, sat one of his mentors, the historian Robin D.G. Kelley<\/a>. A few seats down were Pinderhughes\u2019s parents, scholars and activists themselves.<\/p>\n In the past few years Pinderhughes, 30, has been breaking out well beyond the Bay Area, and with the release of \u201cGrief,\u201d he\u2019s emerged as one of the most affecting singer-songwriters today, in any genre. His trebly, confessional voice steps deliberately on its own cracks, and he treats his gut-level lyrics with care. His piano playing, rich with layered harmony and rhythmic undertow, holds together his arrangements, which mix the influences of Radiohead, chamber classical, Afro-Cuban rhythms and underground hip-hop. Not unlike Kendrick Lamar, Pinderhughes has become a virtuoso at turning the experience of living in community inside-out, revealing all its personal detail and tension, and giving voice to registers of pain that are commonly shared but not often articulated.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n The \u201cGrief\u201d LP is one of three components in the Healing Project, a yearslong undertaking based around roughly 100 interviews Pinderhughes conducted with people of color who had been incarcerated or had experienced some form of \u201cstructural violence,\u201d he said. The first part of the project was a visual-art exhibition that opened at the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts in San Francisco in March, and will be on view through September. Then came \u201cGrief\u201d last month. And on Tuesday, he unveiled an online archive of the interviews and an accompanying interactive online experience<\/a>, which he hopes will help to bring listeners from all over the country \u2014 and beyond \u2014 into contact with the stories of his interviewees and their arguments for prison abolition.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n Pinderhughes created the Healing Project in pursuit of answers to two lines of inquiry, both about mass incarceration in the United States. \u201cHow is this operating, and what is the machinery that\u2019s going on systemically that\u2019s doing this to us, and how can we fight back? That\u2019s one set of questions,\u201d he said over coffee in Harlem, where he now lives. \u201cAnd then the other one, on the personal tip, is: How am I a part of that? How am I implicated and how am I doing something against it? What does that make me feel like? How am I dealing?\u201d<\/p>\n Pinderhughes is currently on his way to a Ph.D. in creative practice and critical inquiry from Harvard, where he studies under the pianist and scholar Vijay Iyer, who called him an \u201cunstoppable creative force.\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cHe\u2019s just constantly making new things: new music, new writing. Imagining past the standard contours of the music business, even,\u201d Iyer said. \u201cThat\u2019s been the most exciting thing to witness \u2014 that, through a lot of study and surveying the landscape, and doing a lot of community work and just being in the trenches, he\u2019s sort of imagining another way to be a musician.\u201d<\/p>\n A SLIGHT MAN<\/strong> with a flop of brown hair dumped over alert eyes, Pinderhughes is fashion-forward but understated, favoring denim gear and streetwear. When we walked the San Francisco exhibition earlier this month, he was dressed in a burnt-orange jean jacket and a faded tee from Daily Paper<\/a>, a Black-owned brand based in Amsterdam. In conversation he\u2019s quick to laugh, and always on the lookout for points of common ground.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n \u201cHe is cool, because he\u2019s in the jazz world, but he\u2019s not cool in that way of cutting himself off from feeling,\u201d said the actress and playwright Anna Deavere Smith, who is one of Pinderhughes\u2019s mentors and a producer of the Healing Project. (Iyer and the artist Glenn Ligon are the others.)<\/p>\n Pinderhughes, who is of Black and mixed-race ancestry, was raised in Berkeley, Calif., by professor parents who work in urban and environmental planning (his mother, Raquel Rivera-Pinderhughes), and at the intersection of race, behavioral science and violence prevention (his father, Howard Pinderhughes). Both are active community organizers, and their connection to incarcerated populations around the country helped Pinderhughes get the Healing Project off the ground.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n Music was constantly around the house, which was littered with hand drums and other small instruments, though only the children played. Both Samora and his sister, Elena, a flutist who has become a major player in jazz, showed promise early. He began playing percussion almost as soon as he could land his hand on the drum, and his parents started taking him to La Pe\u00f1a Cultural Center<\/a> in Berkeley, where he was immersed in Cuban and Venezuelan music from age 3. When he was 10, his parents went to Cuba on sabbatical, and instead of enrolling in school he spent his time becoming ordained in the spiritual (and musical) tradition of Santer\u00eda.<\/p>\n As a teenager, Pinderhughes attended the Young Musicians Program (now the Young Musicians Choral Orchestra<\/a>) in Berkeley, which caters to low-income students and has produced many of the current jazz generation\u2019s brightest stars. \u201cThe spaces where I learned growing up, and where my sister learned, they were community spaces that combined the musical with the communal,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n When he got to Juilliard, although he loved his piano teachers, Kendall Briggs and Kenny Barron, alienation set in fast. \u201cAs an institution, it totally felt like a factory,\u201d Pinderhughes said. \u201cWe\u2019re here to get as good as we can at playing the music, but we don\u2019t talk about why<\/em> we\u2019re doing what we\u2019re doing. I don\u2019t know if I had three conversations about that.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n He pushed through, graduating in 2013 and settling in to create a major work of protest, \u201cThe Transformations Suite.\u201d<\/a> Close to an hour of semi-orchestral jazz, laced with poetic broadsides against the establishment, the 2016 album was proof-positive of Pinderhughes\u2019s vision and his rigor. It caught the attention of Common, Karriem Riggins and Robert Glasper, who invited him to tour and record with their August Greene project<\/a>.<\/p>\n Keith LaMar<\/a>, an author and activist on death row in Ohio, was also impressed by \u201cThe Transformations Suite,\u201d and through friends he got in touch with Pinderhughes. The musician joined a group of artists working to raise awareness about LaMar\u2019s case, and LaMar became part of the Healing Project. \u201cHe\u2019s talking about speaking truth to power, he\u2019s talking about your agency, putting it in perspective, the unequal distribution of wealth and how it\u2019s basically the foundation of all the inequalities that exist in this country,\u201d LaMar said in an interview.<\/p>\n \u201cThe Transformations Suite\u201d had been forceful as a manifesto of rightful outrage, but it wasn\u2019t really a document of intimacy. For his next project, Pinderhughes started to interview men and women impacted by the criminal justice system, hearing their stories up close.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n ON \u2018GRIEF,\u2019 PINDERHUGHES<\/strong> focuses on an emotion that we all intimately know and fear, but that comes in particularly high frequency close to prisons and incarceration. He said that Nina Simone and Curtis Mayfield had been his lodestars: \u201cTo me, those are both artists that are working out ideas about how to contextualize not just their life, but their own entire communities\u2019 lived situation.\u201d<\/p>\n Pinderhughes recorded the album \u2014 which was co-produced by his longtime collaborator Jack DeBoe \u2014 in pieces during the pandemic, overdubbing one instrumental section at a time to help maintain social distancing in the studio. Some tracks have only a string quartet, playing slowly dragged harmonies that sometimes pinch into fine-grain dissonance. Others have a full band, with Pinderhughes often playing the Rhodes, sputtering beats underneath and gossamer strings above.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n On \u201cHolding Cell,\u201d a highlight, voices harmonize over swarming violins, cello and electric bass; the harmony shifts tensely around them as they sing: \u201cHolding cell\/I can\u2019t get well while you hold me.\u201d For the title track, one of the most patiently beautiful songs \u2014 co-written with the bassist Burniss Earl Travis, known as Boom Bishop \u2014 two chords are all Pinderhughes and the band need to build a sonic whirlpool, conjuring the disorientation of loss.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n A standout of the Healing Project exhibition at the Yerba Buena center is the one piece without any visuals: a small, darkened room with a bench surrounded by speakers. They play an hour-and-a-half-long audio piece on loop, lining up clips from Pinderhughes\u2019s interviews over ambient, sometimes ominous backing tracks that he recorded. The way they\u2019re edited, these voices present critiques and reflections from within the system, not simple narratives of personal trauma or triumph over the odds.<\/p>\n \u201cWith the sound room, you\u2019re in the middle of the sound, and there\u2019s nothing but you and the voices,\u201d Pinderhughes said. \u201cWhat I wanted to create is: \u2018This is your brain.\u2019 There is no us-and-them.\u201d Everything is first person, he explained, \u201cSo unless you\u2019re doing the work of separating yourself from the experiences, you\u2019re in it.\u201d (In this way, he acknowledged, he had been inspired by a conversation he\u2019d seen<\/a> on YouTube between the author bell hooks and the artist Arthur Jafa. In it, Jafa says that any camera can effectively function as a tool of the white gaze.)<\/p>\n The people whose voices Pinderhughes uses in the sound room share publishing rights to the tracks that feature them, something that Pinderhughes saw as nonoptional. Some also have bio pages on the Yerba Buena center\u2019s Healing Project website<\/a>.<\/p>\n In one clip, Keith LaMar speaks about feeling victorious simply for having maintained his \u201csweetness\u201d \u2014 a personal quality that\u2019s obvious in his voice \u2014 despite the inhumanities of living in solitary confinement for decades. He calls the prison system a \u201cdigestive tract,\u201d not a space of rehabilitation.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n Not long after comes the voice of Roosevelt Arrington, an educator and peer mentor who spent years in the system. He says that socially accepted language can be dehumanizing: \u201c\u2018Inmate,\u2019 \u2018convict,\u2019 \u2018ex-felon,\u2019 they\u2019re demeaning titles: They\u2019re put in place to diminish self-respect and dignity, and to demean you and to break your spirit.\u201d He adds, \u201cWhen a person feels like they have no self-value and no self-worth, that mind-set tends to take them back to a criminal element.\u201d<\/p>\n The exhibition also includes visual artworks by Pinderhughes himself; the artist Titus Kaphar<\/a>, who also designed the \u201cGrief\u201d LP cover; Nnaemeka Ekwelum<\/a>, whose works in the gallery are a variation on Nigerian funeral cloths; and Peter Mukuria<\/a>, known as Pitt Panther, who\u2019s currently incarcerated in Virginia and serves as the minister of labor for the Revolutionary Intercommunal Black Panther Party.<\/p>\n Since connecting for the Healing Project, Mukuria and Pinderhughes have become close, and now talk by phone multiple times a week. In the gallery hang a number of works Mukuria drew on prison bedsheets, including a portrait of George Floyd, a piece to accompany the song \u201cProcess,\u201d and a strikingly intimate scene with Mukuria seated in his cell. The show also has an altar, drawing from Afro-Latino traditions and New York City street culture, with a faceless portrait at its center, inviting visitors to honor anyone they\u2019ve lost.<\/p>\n Pinderhughes plans to take the Healing Project around the country, ideally reaching all the 15 states where he did interviews. He hopes it can ultimately become a permanent installation somewhere, someday. \u201cI want to build a space that actually engages, and is able to offer the healing practices that I\u2019ve learned through the interviews,\u201d he said. \u201cIn an everyday context, offer those things.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\nCoping With Grief and Loss<\/h2>\n
Living through the loss of a loved one is a universal experience. But the ways in which we experience and deal with the pain can largely differ.<\/h3>\n<\/section>\n<\/div>\n