432Hz

or Big Ears: Low pass and the alignment of frequency

Open your mind and reeeelax, I’m gonna take you to another dimension - ATBANN KLANN

I’ve been sitting with this one for a week, trying to find the right words to express my gratitude for my first Big Ears Festival (March 26–30, 2025). Not just as a band member, but as a bandleader, too — “Look, Ma! I got a two-fer.”

This year, I had the honor of performing Honey From a Winter’s Stone with Ambrose Akinmusire at the Bijou on Friday night — and then hitting again with my band of miscreants and vibe conjurers: DrewKid on keys, Kris Funn on bass, and Sheldon Thwaites on drums, Saturday noon at The Standard. — a whole entire wave!

I’m no sice box, but all flowers due where they belong. Ambrose is, hands down, one of the dopest and most important composers of our time. Sure, he plays trumpet, but reducing him to that would miss the point entirely. As a writer and lyricist, because his compositions are lyrical, slim’s pen game is top tier. Since our first collaboration on Origami Harvest, it’s been both an honor and a gift to build with him, song by song, missive by missive.

The brilliance of the Mivos Quartet, Chiquita Magic, Sam Harris, and Justin Brown deserves a whole paragraph of superlatives. But rather than pull up with that full-on Cory Booker filibuster energy, I’ll just say: I’m a fan. In real life.

I’ve been hearing about Big Ears for years — just never made it. I was supposed to hit with Nate Smith + Kinfolk one year, another time with Terri Lyne Carrington and Social Science, maybe even Steve Coleman and Five Elements. I think this Ambrose joint was a rescheduled gig. Don’t quote me. Marcus J. Moore’s been telling me for three years that Big Ears was different. He was right. I haven’t felt this open to hearing new, eclectic work in a long time. And that’s the beauty of this festival — it lives up to its name.

One of the key skills needed to do what I do as a vocalist — taking stories, ideas, and cues from the music and spinning them into narrative — is listening. Not just with your ears, but you know what I mean… with the aether. You gotta remove ego from the center and be open to the energy being presented so you can channel that energy back into the conversation. All the dope musicians do this. It’s the same thing I’ve seen with my favorite DJs — Rich Medina, DJ Stylus, Les Talusan, Natasha Diggs — they keep the party moving by listening to the crowd, without feeling the need to flex for it, channeling the energy — serving as guide.

It’s one of the first things I tell music students. Some of them — given their skill and ego — will play like they’re on American Soloist Idol off the Rashaan Roland Kirk box set, chopping up Poulenc, Dilla, and Monk in every other bar. But in jam sessions, I can always tell the “players” from the “listeners.” The listeners introduce themselves. The players just plug in and start yelling out standards. Listening is why I rock with Marcus’ “Active Listening” on his Substack — they ask the reader to give agency to artists beyond the instrument, to activate that inner ear, the one past the cochlea.

Listening, to me, is the other half of practice. The best players will tell you about rigor — the scales, the breathwork, the muscle memory that kicks in when your mind blanks mid-set. But practice isn’t just repetition — it’s also reception. Filling yourself with other people’s data: emotions, stories, ideas, and dreamscapes. Not your own. Other people’s. That’s how you build empathy. Real empathy. Not the buzzword. The verb. — I’m talmbout empathy.

Empathy is what’s needed if you want to develop some ears. If you want to hear the conversation and feel the feels, you gotta set your ego down and lean into empathy as a verb. That means actively allowing yourself, as a verb, to shut the fuck up and listen — to the end. You want to grow? Listen more. And do so outside your silo.

Because the truth is, while technology, culture, and society keep shifting — while we bear witness to global atrocities from Gaza to the Sahel states to the DRC, suffering is being livestreamed while we swipe past it like it's optional content… like between 2k and in-app purchases, “oh shit the world’s on fire…hmm?!” We are moving dangerously close to a point of no return: a homogenous singularity where all we have is cultural uniformity and social cohesion, where innovation is stifled, where inclusive ideas are discarded, and where we lose the very diversity that propels us forward, we lose those alluded to by Emma Lazarus in the New Colossus.

…“Give me your tired, your poor,
Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,
The wretched refuse of your teeming shore.
Send these, the homeless, tempest-tost to me,
I lift my lamp beside the golden door!”

That’s the rub, though, ain’t no lamps outchea, and they’re redirecting the tempest-tost to El Salvadorian internment camps on the first thing smoking. We’ve moved too far from those words etched at the base of a once revered monument to the purported freedoms awaiting those seeking shelter.

We’ve leaned too far into our silos, echo chambers so loud we can’t hear anything else. We’re so afraid to be wrong that we stick our fingers in our ears and yell na-na-na like toddlers. We’ve replaced civil discourse with clapbacks, disregarding the nuance and curiosity that make us whole. Instead of listening, we lean into performative understanding — pursed “puppy face” lips and hallmark nods looking down our noses in condescension — feeding our egos and clinging to our need to be right — as if not being a “lemming” or “sheep” makes us any less lost.

This is the zeitgeist. In the absence of fairness doctrines, punditry wins the profit wars. The more extreme the ideology, the more viral the content — trauma always goes viral, followed closely by drum majors in a parade of think pieces. Our feeds stay on these trauma loops, a rack of centered therapy-speak without context and a whole lot of loud opinions teetering on medically sound posits, all lacking the proper pedagogy behind them. Facts have been replaced by “because I said so.” Knowing the ledge used to mean something. Now, it just means knowing the algorithm.

This is why Big Ears is a wave.

Because having big ears — truly listening — isn’t just about music. It’s a metaphor, a practice, a mindset. Especially now, when the U.S. is full-on Mike Jack… Motown 25 moonwalking back from diversity, equity, inclusion — isolating itself from the world instead of engaging with it — having big ears becomes a radical act of liberation.

Participating in using these ears means you’re listening for the unfamiliar, you’re open to being changed, and you care enough to sit with discomfort, hearing the voices on the margins, to stretch your perceptions. This is the only way we grow. This is the only way we evolve. And this is the only way we move forward — not as silos, but as a collective, and no this ain’t no hands across ‘murica, because as part of my mental health practice, I’m still minding my black ass business. I’m just asking that as part of your mental health practice, you may want to move accordingly.

Salute to Big Ears Festival — not only for the opportunity but reminding me that having big ears can lead to big hearts, and right now, we jive need both more than ever.

easy

k