Magic, Science, and Body Rolls

I. Away

Kinetic was a long time in the making. A neo-soul duo, BOOMscat combines Asha Santee’s percussion (BOOM) with Jennifer Patience Rowe’s vocals (scat). BOOMscat’s first release, 2013’s The Trilogy Mixtape, was recorded on the spot in a friend’s living room, capturing the BOOMscat magic. Asha started to play, it sounded good, Patience started to sing, and there it was: “Prototype,” their cover of the Andre 3000 song.

In 2015, they wrote, recorded, and produced No Life Jacket in just four days. They’d won a House Artist’s grant which gave them a week, gratis, to work with House Studio DC.

But Kinetic was something different, something that took years to gradually accumulate. Certain tracks on the album were recorded years before the release. Woven among the music are three clips from an interview recorded shortly after the band first formed. These samples shape the album’s flow from the teasing seductive poppy neosoul opener (“A Sure Love”) to “Now and Forever,” layering a narrative arc of personal achievement that spans BOOMscat’s first-ever recording all the way to their first full-length album.

As a result, Kinetic feels more fully realized and whole. The songs are polished, yes—but the album’s movement and shape also feel musically unified in a way that’s new. Still, two major themes that surfaced in that first interview continue to guide BOOMscat’s artistry: the importance of improvisatory creation and the value of openness.

Because what might be most important about Asha and Patience is their capacity to create magic when they perform together, a magic which is vulnerable and real and creates a sort of community with the listener by being so. It is Asha who describes the magic moment, an improvisatory or collaborative happening when she and Patience play together, when suddenly she is playing better than she has ever played in her life.

 “That’s magic,” she suggests. And in the interview sample, plucked from the end of THEANSWER on The Trilogy Mixtape, you can hear the interviewer add their opinion too: “That’s God.”

—

At some point, somebody suggested the flight suits. They went with it. As luck or fate turned out, three of the four band members had flight suits already, independent of each other; just had them. Patience helped Asha search for one; someone had promised Patience a dress and by coincidence, the dress had wings.

That this all fit together so well goes along with BOOMscat’s openness to the unplanned and their understanding that sometimes bringing two things together creates a third thing that transcends the sum of its parts. This, they call magic—an unexplainable phenomenon—or God, as if maybe the truly resonant moment exists beyond space and time, past explaining.

But the imagery the flight suits invoke goes beyond aesthetics. While studying at Columbia College in Chicago, Patience first encountered afrofuturism, fell in love with Sun Ra and Betty Davis. Afrofuturism rewrites the overbearing whiteness of science fiction, which inherently implies the extinction of blackness. The flight suits are a uniform of exploration and survival that spans universes of possibility.

They also fit right into Patience’s personal style. “I dress weird,” she says bluntly. Always has liked to use that weirdness, that space oddity, to embrace her own state of otherness.

“As a black queer woman, how can I use my body to be other, outside of how it already is?” Patience asks herself, before performing. “I really just want to incorporate that into my music, my voice, my instrument.”

Inspired, Patience let afrofuturism permeate her singing, too. “I want it to sound weird,” she explains, “I want to make my voice do things that are not normal.”

After the album release show, people wanted a little piece of that weirdness, too. They kept asking if the flight suits were for sale and where they could buy one.

II. Chemistry

BOOMscat barely rehearses. They estimate maybe 20 rehearsals in the six years they’ve been performing together. Perhaps this helps to cultivate the “let’s vibe” approach to their playing, helps to usher in magic moments. Because of this, when they play it is rehearsal and show all in one and so “you hold onto each other every single show,” Asha says.

It took decades for the two to wade through time and space, eventually finding one another and discovering the magic together. Born in San Francisco, raised in Houston, Asha first came to DC on a basketball scholarship to Howard, where she was no. 32 for the Bison. It isn’t hard to find stats from long-ago games where Asha was Howard’s high scorer. One play-by-play readout sings her praises in enthusiastic all-caps: “GOOD! 3 PTR by SANTEE, Asha.”

Asha’s dad was a drummer and she started drumming young, three or four, but it wasn’t until she was sidelined by a broken leg that, as she says, God intervened: “Okay, will you stop messing around and let me put you on the path I meant for you?”

She laid in bed with a broken leg and her keyboard, making beats for hours. Then, a month or two later, she was listening to those idle beats and realized: they were good. She had never performed her own music before. She kept her musical side close. People who knew her at Howard would have only known her as an athlete unless they had been to her room. Not long after this revelation, she started playing drums in DC, which led to her connecting with her first band, the CooLots.

Today, she still plays with CooLots. The night of Kinetic’s launch, Asha was behind the drum kit during CooLots’ set. Then she readied the stage and appeared again, this time in her BOOMscat flight suit. “That was an easy night,” she said when asked about the energy that takes. “Some nights I play five shows. If I have thirty minutes to get there, I’m making the show.”

Meanwhile, Patience was here in D.C. all along. A “born and raised” native of NE D.C. who went to Wilson and Blair high schools. She’s worked for the DC Housing Authority and DC Brau, run a salon in Silver Spring, and now works with Black Mamas Bailout, a collective of black organizers determined to abolish mass incarceration.

Like Asha, music has been a part of Patience’s life since she was very young. The first time she performed in public was at St. Judah Baptist Church in NE when she was four. With her typically impressive ability to recall details, she recalls the moment she sang “His Eye on the Sparrow”:

Why should I feel discouraged, why should the shadows come,
Why should my heart be lonely, and long for heaven and home

Her whole family sings, they’re all musical, especially her mom and aunts, whom she remembers singing gospel music.

At Columbia College, she wanted to be a radio DJ—specifically inspired by Rane of “Flexx and Rane from PGC.” So she majored in radio production, though no one knew it because she was never in the radio department. Instead, she spent her time elsewhere: “Singing and doing poetry and building up my craft as a vocalist,” she says. Plus, doing “weird ass performance art stuff, hanging from ceilings and doing different characters.”

Patience loves seeing the way art changes people. When we spoke, she had just seen a performance by The Returning Citizen. The show was written by a cohort of men in prison and performed by non-actors who’d only seen the script 45 minutes before showtime—among them, a man who had just been released after 28 years. “If I couldn’t sing,” she says, “I don’t know what I’d do.”

Asha shares this restless need to create. Her room—the pseudo-studio in the lower level of her house—is almost absent any blank space, evidence of her endless ability to make things. Paintings large and small fill the walls. Asha’s prolific creativity allows her to give freely. If someone asks for something and she has the means, she will give it.

Asha and Patience finally met in 2012, at the B Side or maybe Big Bear Café, the exact details are hazy at this point. What they do know is that Asha and Huggie, the guitarist of the CooLots, were the backing band for a poetry reading. After Patience read her poems, Asha offered to play with her anytime she was performing. Patience had another show coming up, a brunch, and so it began.

There was something about performing together that was different from their other musical identities.

Patience talks about this as a level of comfort beyond anything she has experienced with other bands. Asha says, “Patience’s ability to just like, freely express a feeling or a moment as if it were already a song is just incredible,” as is her own ability “to just read and connect in those feelings and also create off the fly.”

Asha can not only recognize and respond to Patience but will create the magic space by declaring, onstage, that they will make up a song on the spot. Proust once imagined this moment as an “immeasurable keyboard [on which]…some few among the millions of keys of tenderness, of passion, of courage, of serenity…have been discovered by a few great artists who…[show] us what richness, what variety lies hidden, unknown to us, in that vast, unfathomed and forbidding night of our soul.” Achieving such a thing does seem worth the risk inherent in getting up in front of an audience and winging it. 

“It has to be a beautiful moment,” Asha says, and most often it happens in someone’s living room, although the magic might also find them onstage at the Kennedy Center. Asha is willing to push them out into the unknown, a voyager seeking the real rather than a performer singing the same song the same way every night. “With Patience,” Asha says, “you never know how she’s going to sing it.”

Patience says she’s willing to take these leaps of faith because “there is a lot of comfort in performing with Asha. There’s something that’s very familiar and always has been.”

—

On Kinetic, it is Patience who describes her desire for the audience to feel touched, open, vulnerable—and also comfortable, since vulnerability can be painful.

There comes a moment, midway through their set at Union Stage, when Patience tells the story of BOOMscat’s 2017 performance at SXSW. They’d been selected to represent DC out of hundreds of submissions. About to perform for Erykah Badu and the Wu Tang Clan—soaring on an artistic high—she got the news that her mom had passed away, and crashed back to earth.

We had a week of shows when we got to Texas. This was our first show at the WeDC house at SXSW. Asha’s mom was there, inside, talking. I was drinking a beer, sitting outside, and somebody actually sent me a message on Facebook giving me their condolences and I didn’t know what the fuck they were talking about. And then this person’s sibling wrote on my Facebook wall, “I’m so sorry for your loss,” and I was like, “What the fuck is anybody talking about.”

My mom had been sick…she had breast cancer, and she had been sick before we left, and so I was doing a lot of caretaking for my mom during that process and that time. But she had just gotten a mastectomy. She was doing well when I left; her cancer cells had gone down. She had gone to the hospital for oxygen because her oxygen was low…the last time I saw my mom, she was in the hospital and [she sent me out. I said] “I’m leaving” and she was like, “Go home,” so I went home, I packed, I got my stuff together, and by the time I got to Texas my mom was back home and so…I think the night after I got in I talked to her. And Asha’s mom was like, “Hey, tell your mom we praying for her.” And everything seemed normal.

And then we went to the show. I had a beer, got these messages on Facebook, and I called my aunt and she didn’t answer the phone so I called my mom’s phone and my eldest aunt answered and she was like, “You have to come home,” and I started wailing in the middle of this courtyard of people and all I heard was Asha saying, “Get her.”

And [fellow DC musician] Kokayi was there, Kokayi grabbed me and walked me inside and Asha’s mom sat on the floor with me while I cried and people came in and out. And the WeDC folks were really amazing, and they walked us to a hotel room where we like, got ourselves together, and we were all in the room freaking out. Like, how we going to get a flight, how we going to get a flight?

And…and there was a moment where I was like, I think I want to stay here and perform because my mom is not there. My mom’s not at home. So I sat and I talked to Asha. And Asha was like, “I don’t know what I would do.” So I talked to Asha’s mom and she was like, “You know, whatever you choose it’s okay. Whatever you want to do is okay.” She said, “I’ve seen people perform after their parents or brothers have passed and they’ve been amazing, and I’ve seen people go home. There’s no wrong answer.” And so I talked to my family and they were like, that‘s fine.

And I stayed.

And we performed and it was really hard, it was a hard three days to not be near my family. But Asha and my mom were close so she was super supportive. And I had people there that were really supportive, and Asha’s family was really supportive. 

It was hard.

My partner at the time, who’s my ex now, but they came [from DC]. Somebody called them…My family wanted them to come and tell me that my mom had passed. They didn’t want to tell me; that’s why I didn’t know. That’s why people on Facebook freaked me out, ‘cause nobody wanted to tell me.

So, it was a lot. And just the decision to stay was hard, but it was [also] an easy one because I was like, “My mom would be really proud of me for staying” …She was really proud of us. And I was like, ”All right, I have to do this, I have to stay and perform and be a part of this.” And I took my mom onstage with me. I named my mom. And that showed up in Billboard, which was crazy, that moment showed up in Billboard.

There are things that I would do differently, but staying is definitely one of the things that I would have done. You know, like I was already there and there was a part of me that didn’t want to go—there was a lot of me that didn’t want to go [to Texas]. And I was like okay, talked to Asha about it, we figured it out, and that’s where I was supposed to be.

Because my mom waited. She waited for me to not be home.

The music is playing behind her, still going, the song now expanding into the space between her and us and Patience invites us all to name everyone loved and lost: her mom, a close friend, and we all call out names of those we carry with us, inside, we bring them forth, together, and their names. Our calling out is now part of the song, and Patience onstage is crying, and in this moment she has created we are all, each of us, in a personal and emotional space but also a shared space: we are all here together, each with our personal loss and love and feeling and hurt yet part of a community.

Our connection, that she is rendering out of nothing, this change of state from group of strangers standing near each other in the dark to something else, something more, a body of people now open and hurting, vulnerable to all the feelings we walk around suppressing, and sharing these both privately—because no one can hear you scream the name that comes to your lips—and publicly. This is transformative, this is transcendent. It’s magic, and it’s God.

Asha puts it more simply. She says, “All we can sing about is what happens to us.”

III. Necessary 

In biology, kinesis refers to how an organism changes in response to stimuli. But what has changed after the release of Kinetic? What now?

BOOMscat has plans for a music video, some shows lined up, a process for tracking downloads and reaching out to the cities where the data shows an audience. “We have stuff that we have worked on,” Asha says, “recordings that we [will] go back and listen to and start creating stuff.”

Asha is working on a solo album, and Patience is working her own projects, too. They’re not being as productive together as Asha would like, struggling to capitalize on the time and the momentum they’ve got. “We go through these waves,” she says, “[that] I want to be able to work through because I think that’s also what’s hindered BOOMscat in a way: we always have these big moments of momentum and we don’t have the endurance to take advantage of that momentum and turn it into something else.”

That boundless energy Asha uses to groove through five shows a night? Turns out it’s got limits, after all. By 2018, she admitted feeling kind of burnt out, emotionally and physically.

“Sometimes I don’t have the space, not for BOOMscat but like, for me,” Asha says. “I do so much for everybody else, I’m in a place where I’m just like—I don’t even know who the fuck I am right now.…like when I come home or when I wake up in the morning the only thing I’m thinking about is: me. Being in that space is a place I’ve never been, so a lot of the time I’m just in [my room] watching Hey Arnold! and trying to put myself in a space to love myself a little bit more.”

And Patience, too, she says is going through “some serious shit.”

On the interview clip that resurfaces throughout Kinetic, Patience says that she wants to create vulnerability that has enough good in it to redeem some of the inherent pain. Healing, for example, like what the music does. Good, bad, ugly, beautiful, life will turn into good music, as it always does.

In “Affirmation,” the final poem from her book Electric Arches, Eve L. Ewing writes,

Put a finger to my wrist or my temple
And feel it: I am magic. Life

and all its good and bad and ugly things,

scary things which I would like to forget,

beautiful things which I would like to remember

— the whole messy lovey true story of myself

pulses within me.

In that moment of openness during the interview, of Patience’s vulnerability at Union Stage, in all these moments BOOMscat spontaneously creates, we feel it: magic, life, all of it. We feel the mess and the love pulsing within our veins, love like water on Mars, love that is atemporal, now and forever.

—

In the full interview included on The Trilogy, Asha and Patience are asked to each choose a single word to describe BOOMscat.

But three words emerge: Asha says “away,” Patience says “chemistry.” And since there are three of them talking on a mixtape called Trilogy, the interviewer offers “necessary.” Away, chemistry, necessary. The words echo Asha’s earlier reflection  about the fact that every time BOOMscat performs the songs are different. “It’s raw,” she explains, “it’s necessary, it’s supposed to be.”

The exchange comes after Patience has already expanded Asha’s explanation of the magic of BOOMscat. “That moment,” she says, “can never be recreated. But. What we do, no matter how many times we do it, will always have that same chemistry, that same magic.”

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