Always There: A Conversation with George Burton

Far too often, people tend to compartmentalize and localize matters of concern. However, such an approach minimizes the true scale of what is before us. Only in perceiving the big picture of an issue can truly substantive and meaningful reform occur. As one example, slavery in America and its vestiges are frequently removed from the struggles for racial justice in other countries, like apartheid in South Africa. But, they ultimately both grow from the same roots: a shared anti-Black hatred in a white majority society. While Black American music is replete with artists yearning for equality and equity-  from Louis Armstrong’s “Black and Blue” to Kendrick Lamar’s “Alright” – what sets George Burton’s White Noise (Porge, 2024) apart is its overtly broad scope. 

In incorporating cues from jazz, electronic music, Xhosa music, hip hop, and more, Burton abandons perceived rigors of styles – assuming they ever matter. It also underscores the connectivity of Black struggles that transcend nation or regime. A song like ”Back Home” overtly ties blips and whirs of electronic music – let’s not forget how many of its pioneers were Black – to African music. The piece also showcases a recurrent motif of White Noise: the use of synthesizer. In using his electronic instruments in largely acoustic settings, Burton draws parallels to the otherness and social ostracization thrust upon Black communities by a majority white status quo. However, he also shows the diversity and richness of that marginalized voice by using the instrument in a wide variety of contexts. Surrounded by oppression, the synthesizer must change and adapt to survive without its flame diminishing. Burton also underscores the connectivity of fights for justice by incorporating samples by forebears like Sun Ra, who fought the same battles decades earlier. As a member of the Arkestra for ten years, Burton knows well how Ra’s voyage continues to resonate. 

White Noise is a powerful, poignant, and necessary indictment of the status quo. For those lucky to attend the 2025 Winter Jazzfest, they can see the pianist-justice crusader perform at The Bitter End on January 9.

PostGenre: You started putting together White Noise in 2021. 

George Burton:  Yeah, I did. First, I had to figure out what the hell I was doing. 2020 was all messed up because of the pandemic. But, around that time, I bought a bunch of modular synthesizers. I had never worked with anything of this nature on a synthesizer before and for a while, I had to figure out how it worked. I quickly realized that when you turn l the Moog modular [synthesizer] off, you lose whatever you are working on.

I started getting into the habit of just leaving the instrument on. I would leave it on for days. I would turn it down very low and leave it alone for a few days while I figured out how to hear certain things. It was difficult because modular synths are not digital, you can’t just line it up on a grid on the computer. It took me a while to figure out how to make it all work and how I was going to write the music over it or determine whether I even wanted to do that. I just tried to do something else, and little by little, ideas started to come into place. I started to discover patterns and once I did, I recorded them right away, or else I would lose that pattern. 

Also, coming off of the pandemic, people weren’t around to record in the way that we needed. Everybody was still being cautious. You couldn’t bring over a whole bunch of people to a studio and record. Actually, I think a lot of crappy music came out during that time because of those limitations. So, I just took my time with this project.

PG: Do you feel that having it come out on your own label also gave you more time and freedom in putting this record out? 

GB: It gives me all the freedom I wanted. There’s nobody to say things like that the record is not marketable enough. Or too political. Or to make a part more danceable. Working on my own does give me a freedom I enjoy having. Putting it out on my own label also meant I wasn’t in any particular rush. I could do whatever I wanted when I wanted. 

PG: Do you think you’re going to continue using these synths going forward or is this album a one-off thing? 

GB: Oh, no, no. I’m using these going forward. I would have sold them a long time ago if I wasn’t planning to use them because they are expensive. I’m not taking them to a gig or anything. But using the synths does open up a lot of ideas of where to explore going forward. However, I seriously doubt my next projects will be synth-based. I kind of keep moving musically. 

PG: You are also not using the synths in the same way each time on White Noise. Sometimes, the instrument is very prominent. At other times, it is more subtly in the background. Is that diversity of usage something you consciously had in mind when creating the pieces? 

GB: Well, that reflects the actual album itself and how it is titled White Noise. I’m sure you’ve heard some of the commentary on some of these tracks. The synth represents a certain thing that’s part of the machine that’s always happening behind you, reflecting how the world works. The noise is always there, something that we can’t get rid of. Sometimes it’s right in front of us, right in our faces. Other times, it’s hiding in the background. Either way, it’s always there. 

PG: As far as the compositions themselves, did you approach writing them similarly to how you have done on other projects?

GB:  l usually write out charts and organize them. Then I put it into a Finale and take it to the band. I had to approach the songs on this album a little differently. Each track came together slightly differently as well. 

If you start with the second track, “Back Home,” James “Biscuit” Rouse – the drummer, who also produced the album – and I came up with the idea of the song first. Then I talked to [vocalist] Siya Makuzeni, who is from South Africa, about apartheid and I drew connections from that to the Jim Crow South and other things that are similar. Siya is into Xhosa music which uses a lot of call and response. It has lots of rhythms and percussion but it’s all about the ritual, identity, and storytelling of the people themselves. It reminded me a lot of the Black American church.

PG: The church you grew up in.

GB: That’s right. And from that musical connection between Xhosa music and the church, I started to think about what it means to be Black anywhere in the world. And how we’re still surviving over top of that. We still apply the generational things we learned from our ancestors even while doing our own thing. And that’s how I got the idea for the album. I worked my way from there. 

PG: As far as your use of samples on the record, what was your process for selecting them and figuring out where they should go? 

GB: One sample came from a speech by Jane Elliott. I was searching around on the computer and reading a lot of stuff at the time about apartheid. Many videos came up, and one was with Jane Elliott. I think I’m pretty caught up with all this stuff, and she’s very well-known in my world. This particular video was interesting to me because it was part of an interview where she talked about a very particular book that she had written about thirty-five years ago. She went back more recently and read it again, with different eyes. Her rereading is where the sample came from.

I hit Jane up and asked to use these particular quotes. And when I did, she told me exactly where it came from. The quotes were from a misguided Jewish man named Ben Wattenberg. They tell the story of how we are led to think issues are about one thing, but they are really about something else. Immigration is not really about immigration, for one. 

Wattenberg said that he thought what we need most in the world is more white babies. But if the government paid white people to have babies, they would also have to pay the Blacks and everyone else to have kids. I use those particular parts from that interview to get to that last part where it says, “What we do in the present tells us what we’re going to do in the future.” To me, that’s a very solid statement about how what we do right now will affect what happens in the future. History seems to keep repeating itself over and over again, and that’s keeping us from getting as far as we should be, as fast as we should be. But we can change that. What we do now is going to affect everything else for our kids and our grandkids.



PG: And the other sample was of Sun Ra?

GB: Yeah, I  heard that clip when I was putting the piece together, and it just fit the piece. I ran into Sunny’s stuff a lot from being in the Arkestra. I would sometimes check out some of his talk. Actually, I check out his speeches more than his music these days. I got drawn into what he was saying in the recording about the need to think about who you associate with. It stood out to me. With that particular sample, I took it and played it forward, then played it backward and just played around with it a little to give a distorted idea about who you respond to or align yourself with. I wanted you, in listening to it, to take a second to think about how confusion comes in who you align yourself with. It’s a very basic idea of someone being your friend but over time that friendship changes. The other person isn’t the same person you thought it was. That type of idea applies to so many different situations. Some musicians try to become aligned with certain other musicians and find out the other musicians aren’t as they seem. Some artists try to be in with a certain art studio or certain gallery, and once there, find it is not what they thought it would be. And that was my idea for using that particular sample. 

PG: As far as looking specifically at Sun Ra’s words, do you feel a particular connection to the concepts he espoused of Afro-Futurism and the alienation he expressed by presenting himself as being from another planet?

GB: It’s funny because I played with the Arkestra for some years. I was in the band before Danny [Ray Thompson] passed away. And from that, I talked to Danny a lot. I don’t try to pretend I know all the things about Sunny or any person from that band. I’m not writing books about Sun Ra’s works. There are a lot of things I feel like I’m still missing about him. But Danny knew a lot because he was Sunny’s right-hand man for a long time. And then he became Marshall [Allen]’s right-hand man for a long time. Danny had a bigger explanation about what was actually happening with Sunny’s music and what Sunny was talking about. Sunny talked a lot about race, religion, and freedom. But he had a different way of presenting those things. Most people presented those issues while focused on the present moment during which they made their music. Have you seen any of the movies yet? 

PG: Like Space is the Place (1974) or [Robert] Mugge’s A Joyful Noise (1980)?

GB: Yeah. If you watch them, you see all of the themes that are happening and everything else. More important, is what he’s saying about these particular themes and what they represent. It’s not just going to space it’s something on a deeper level. I do connect with a lot of those things that he talks about just being an African-American male living in this world. 

PG: In his review of White Noise, Jim Hynes – a friend of this site – drew references to other artists like D’Angelo, Kendrick [Lamar], and Fantastic Negrito. Did you have their music in mind when you were making the record, or do the connections also just come by virtue of similar experiences as African-American men?

GB: The latter. When I write, I don’t think about anyone else’s music. Everything that I do is pretty much my own ideas and own thought process. I didn’t get much inspiration from those cats. I was not thinking about them all, though I know their work very well. But it’s nice to be linked to those guys and the idea that my work is mentioned in reference to theirs. 

PG: Musically, the album pulls in many different stylistic ideas – jazz, electronic music, hip-hop, African music, and more. Do you see those as different things, or are they all facets of a unified force of Black musical excellence? 

GB: I’m not a [Black American Music] guy, but I see it as all one Black music or music that has originated from African Americans or Blacks in general. To me, it all goes together. 

PG: You mentioned how you are not a BAM guy like Nicholas Payton. Do you see a problem with the use of labels that we use to describe Black music? For instance, how many people, including Payton, do not use the word “jazz.”

GB: Nick is going to be Nick. But I’m not a labels type of person. I don’t like to label things because I always think that as soon as you put a label on something, it brings the value of it down a little. That’s my perception of that particular type of situation. Some people believe you need to put a label on something for it to stand out. But ultimately, I think a lot of Black music is very interconnected. For me, it’s very easy for me to mix and match styles because I hear it all as one. It’s one simple and cool idea on top of another idea on top of another.

George Burton will be performing at The Bitter End on January 9, 2025 as part of Winter Jazzfest. More information is available here. ‘White Noise’ can be purchased on Bandcamp. You can read more about on his website.