Migrations

Artist
Cliff Korman
Released
2014
Genre
Audio

… the immigrant is even more alien and strange than the migrant outside his door because he exposes as banal what the native considers sacred…
Vilèm Flusser, The Freedom of the Migrant

Consider… that an element you hear once will return in some form…

When I encountered Sebastião Salgado’s photo exposition “Migrations”,  its theme resonated and impelled me to respond with my means of expression: music. It tapped into underlying currents of my forcibly displaced immigrant family: uprooting, survival, and transformation, on one side, ambiguity, double identity, and the power of untold stories on the other. It illuminated aspects of my identity as a jazz player and the ways in which it manifests through Brazilian music.

It also struck me that on a linguistic level, the creative or associative use of citations prompts the migrations of meaning through the narrative structure: a trait that I recognized as essential not only to jazz, but to the very fabric of our times.

As I continued exploring this dynamic notion, I began to formulate a project made of simultaneously occurring elements: compositions, improvisations, and commentaries on returning citations.