Electrical Field of Love: A Conversation with Harriet Tubman (Brandon Ross, Melvin Gibbs, J.T. Lewis) and Georgia Anne Muldrow (Part Two)

Below, we continue our conversation with the band Harriet Tubman and Georgia Anne Muldrow by talking about freedom, love, lifetime learning, and creation and how they all come together in Electrical Field of Love (Pi, 2026). You can read part one here.

Melvin Gibbs: I wanted to share something that riffs on what Georgia Anne said earlier about hypervigilance. Back in the days of kufi wearing, my crew used to fast a lot. It was one of the things we did. And one thing that happens when you fast for a few days is that your senses get deeply heightened. You can hear stuff from far away. You can smell things very particularly. That’s all because your hunting instincts kick in.

Brandon Ross: Right.

Melvin Gibbs: And what happens in our society, with people going to work and eating three times a day, is that part of them gets deadened. They’re too comfortable. They don’t realize that the deadening is circumstantial. I once interviewed the great drummer, Milford Graves, and he said that Black Americans are naturals and masters because we have to stay vigilant for survival.

The point I’m making is that the goal of this is to transmute that. You use that thing that’s put on us as a entrance point to go back to how we’re supposed to be.

Georgia Anne Muldrow:  That’s right.

Melvin Gibbs: You take off the toxic aspect and create a space for this vigilance. This vigilance is actually the same as that of a bird flying through the sky.

Georgia Anne Muldrow: Wow, that was so deep. Everybody in this band is so deep, man. I love this band so much.

J.T. Lewis: I do want to say that you brought up the term of race. Race is external. We’re not coming from that. But what we do is also racial because our music reflects history. A lot of the things we incorporate in our music that sound chaotic to many are more like jubilation. We use those terms to justify making it through slavery. And all of that is incorporated in our music. Some of it might sound angry, but it’s not. It’s a cleansing. It’s a jubilation of how everybody gets through things. And that’s not exclusive to Black people. That’s inclusive of everybody. That there are spaces where we understand the jubilation of life and survival is important. But there’s a language that is exclusive to us as Black people. That might be racial. It may not be. But it’s exclusive to us. For a long time, I didn’t even know I had that in me. But it’s in my genes about how we do things.

A story might help. My grandmother, my dad’s mom, used to take me to church as a kid. The people at church were all yelling, screaming, and jumping around. I didn’t understand what it was. I didn’t like it when I was seven years old. I wanted to get out of there. But ultimately, I understood that it’s all about letting stuff go so the people could keep going. The yelling, screaming, and hollering are part of our survival and our music. It’s that sound. It’s that scream. It’s that screech. It’s that yell. We’re not yelling at anybody. We’re just letting it go. People take that as racism. But it’s just us, letting stuff go so we can keep going.

Brandon Ross:  So I have a question for you, around that J.T. Or, really, for all of us. Is there intimidation in that?

J.T. Lewis: Well, it can be scary.

Brandon Ross: It’s scary. Why might that be?

Melvin Gibbs: Well, what do you mean by intimidation?

Brandon Ross: Well, J.T. said that the process is not adversarial.

J.T. Lewis: It’s not. But it’s taken as adversarial.

Brandon Ross: So, that’s what I’m asking about.

Melvin Gibbs: Well, that’s the big context question, right? The conditions that create the need for that particular form of healing are part of your creation. If the situation that holds you up and keeps you safe is creating a situation for us, you’re going to see what comes from it as adversarial.

Georgia Anne Muldrow: Yeah. It has a lot to do with what you’re looking at, what you’re hearing, and where you’re coming from. If you’re intimidated by something because you seek to control it, it can be intimidating when you can’t control it because it is already being divinely guided. You can’t colonize a land that’s shifting with every moment.

J.T. Lewis: It also comes from the fact that our music is a statement that we’re not broken. No one will ever break us. We’re not broken. And that’s the scary part.

Georgia Anne Muldrow: Yeah, it is. I think it is also tied to who is listening. One person could love something while another person is freaked out by it. It depends on where people are coming from. It’s almost like what your mama tells you before you go to school. You can’t worry about what people say. You have to live from the inside out.  And in that way, you’ll magnetize to the people who are like-minded and will expand you and push you forward.

One of my favorite things about this band is that it’s expanding past this treatment. The name, in two words, is Harriet Tubman. We know that’s an experience, but this is the music that happens outside of that. It’s the music that happens when we’re free to live. And the word is free. But it comes from the inside, not because nothing externally has changed, but because, internally, a decision has been made to let the chains bounce off of you.

PostGenre: Much of the conversation thus far ties nicely into something that really makes Electrical Field of Love stand out. The record is wholly unique and does not really sound like anything else out there. But once you start deeply listening to it, you also hear layers of great music of the past, from both people you have each worked with and those you have not. The music on the album is all about freedom, but it does not come from nothing. What came before is built into it, too.

J.T. Lewis: Wow. Thank you. Absolutely. The album is also about love. It’s about love of self. It’s about the love of people. And it’s about faith. It’s about giving people the information to be free. To be free of others’ opinions and not be locked into certain genres or whatever. And that’s been a challenge for us for decades now. We’re not trying to force-feed anybody. We challenge people to let go of things and have an open mind.

Melvin Gibbs: Yeah, I was talking about that in another context recently. For a long time, this band was out in the wilderness in a certain way because when people think of free jazz or whatever, they have a stereotypical idea of what those words mean. And that idea is related to a particular set of formal elements.  But the four of us have been exposed to different people who created free jazz. And, from that, we know what they were thinking about creating music. And even though our music doesn’t sound like theirs, we’re thinking about the same things. We always have. It took until recently for most people to start to realize that we are thinking about the same things, we just sound different.  

But there was a whole period where people just didn’t get what we do or why we do it. I’ll always remember a time we played at, Brandon will correct me if I’m wrong, I think it was the Pori Jazz Festival. Some people were leaving the concert, and when asked why, their response was, “All those guys are students.” Oh, boy.

Brandon Ross: That was actually. The North Sea Jazz Festival in The Hague.

Melvin Gibbs: See? And my response was “Yes, we are students.” I don’t see being a student as a bad thing. If we’re doing this right, we will always be students.

Brandon Ross: Yeah, we’re students for life. And I think that also relates to the earlier question on the racist paradigm and the perception of words.

It also reminds me of another situation. I think I told you guys this story before, but I may not have. We were in Portugal for the Jazz em Agosto with our double trio project [of Harriet Tubman with Ron Miles, DJ Logic, and DJ Singe]. I talked to a journalist there who was from the States. We were talking about the band, and he said to me, “So, the name Harriet Tubman is hard for people. They will get your record, and they will start asking what it is about Harriet Tubman.” I responded, “What did we miss? We have to find out.” And I laughed a little because I thought that was so crazy.

Then he said, “Well, why does J.T. look so angry when he plays the drums?” I didn’t know what to say, and the conversation ended shortly after that. I think I said that it’s just his game face, and everybody does that. But also that it’s probably because he’s a Black man and because the interviewer was not, that he read it in a particular way. But J.T., my brother and friend, is just digging into the earth. He’s mining. He’s panning for that which shines.

J.T. Lewis: Yes, you know, but the other thing is, too, that our music is challenging. I have to admit, we are challenging to the listener. But our music also brings the consciousness of the listener.

Georgia Anne Muldrow: Right.

Melvin Gibbs: I’m gonna push back a little on the idea of our music as a challenge. And this is how the band works. Everybody’s right. It’s all within the context of a larger conversation.

By far my favorite gig of this band was when we played at the Brooklyn Museum for the opening of Kehinde Wiley’s first show. The museum was open for free after hours. And the place was packed. Random people who knew nothing about what we do or how we do it were coming in off the street to hear us. It  was the best response we’ve got.

J.T. Lewis: That’s true.

Melvin Gibbs: Our music is not really a challenge to listen to, but it is one when you put the context of a challenge on it. When we play for little kids, and they’re not told they’re not supposed to like our music, they love it. I think it’s a question of, again, like George Ann said, being in a different context about the external thing. The music itself is a reflection of moving through the world, so people can vibrate to it if they’re not told they’re not supposed to.

J.T. Lewis: Absolutely.

Brandon Ross: To go back to the idea some hold that creative music should sound a certain way, I was talking to my older brother one day. He is a bassist, and I come to a lot of this music through him because he used to sneak into his room and play his records when I was young. Anyway, he said to me, “You know, Brandon, when Ornette came out with the record Free Jazz (Atlantic, 1961), I don’t think he meant that term as a noun. I think he meant it as a verb. Free jazz all the way.” That’s my brother. He’s very deep. Also, my father was a musician. He’s a trombonist and singer.

J.T. Lewis: Didn’t your dad play with Duke Ellington or Count Basie or something like that?

Brandon Ross: Yeah, he played with Ellington’s orchestra when Mercer [Ellington] led it. He also played with Sy Oliver. And with Benny Carter’s big band.

Georgia Anne Muldrow: Wow, that’s crazy.

Brandon Ross: Yeah. He also always had the radio on in the background. And he smoked Lucky Strikes, through a filter, with a cigarette holder. Anyway, he called me one night. It was late, maybe 2:30 in the morning. He asked if I was sleeping and told me to wake up. And he said to me that the idea of a Blues scale is a systemic misnomer. The term is relative to who was looking at the music and trying to evaluate it. And then I found a newspaper article on that from when I was four years old and realized reading that article and my dad’s comments both sounded like something I could have said last week.

That’s both the beauty and the tragedy of it. It is the nature of, as [Amiri] Baraka called it, the ever-changing same. Or the same old. We’re inextricably locked into this thing. And whether that initial engagement was hostile or otherwise, it’s a lock. And I actually think it’s time-coded. I think we’re approaching a place where we can begin to see that it’s time-coded, where we can actually create something else. We can escape this thing or resolve this thing. But it’s going to happen to individuals one at a time.

PostGenre: Is that where the emphasis on love in Electrical Field of Love comes from?

Brandon Ross: I first heard the title of this record when I heard Georgia Anne sing that line on the song “Hands” on the record. And I said, “Man, I think we should call the album that.” I was thinking about the vibration. It ties to “I Sing the Body Electric” and how we are electric beings, all of us. The Electrical Field of Love is about that whole energetic, not just emotional romance or sentimentality, which plugs into that, but this frequency question of reality or function. To me, this electrical field of love is where we have an opportunity to resolve this thing. This wicked conjoinment that we find ourselves in, with all of those people and things going on, is a space where we can release into this thing. That, to me, echoes back to what J.T. talked about being in church, and the process of release, clearing, healing, and balancing. In lots of ways,this music has been like that.

I woke up the other morning to the radio playing music. It was Bird. A song on Charlie Parker with Strings (Clef, 1954). I forget exactly what song it was, but it was incredible to listen to. I think what happens is that some people will hear something like that and get caught up in the form they hear. And they start to venerate the form, which is not necessarily incorrect. But it’s not the way forward. When you do that, it begins to create a calcified language. As great as what came before was, and still is, just using that language is not living in the time we’re in. We’ve always been moving forward as people. I personally believe that nature is not big on redundancy and doesn’t thrive in a closed system.

All of us right on this call, everybody, have an imperative to bring through, as fully and completely as we can, that which we’ve been placed here to manifest or to reflect or to exemplify in some way. That is the thing actually up for us to do at this time. And it’s like Melvin said, it needs everybody to be who they are in a way that they can. So nobody’s wrong. It’s like there’s no such thing as being wrong. But will you adapt? Can you adapt? What does that look like? And what does this sound like? And that’s all, actually, very high-level beingness, not a small thing.

J.T. Lewis: I also wanted to say that we’ve had musicians come to the Tubman circle over the years. The other musicians would come and sit in our environment. They would look at us and say, “Well, what do you want me to do here?” We would tell them to just be free. The environment that Melvin, Brandon, and I have created comes from the masters, Ornette, Threadgill, Don Pullen, and others. The environment that we have created, that we got from those masters is fertile soil. As my grandmother used to say, you’ve got to be in fertile soil.

But musicians who come from other environments often don’t even know that they’re free. When we tell them, “Okay, just be you,” they can’t even get there because they haven’t practiced it. It’s almost like when you have a dog on a three-foot-long leash, then you cut the leash. When the dog goes past three feet, it doesn’t know what to do. He’s totally disoriented.

Georgia Anne is one of the special ones. From the time she first joined us, she has fit in perfectly. We didn’t even have to adjust. She just knew what to do. She felt and understood. Actually, she was like a missing piece that’s now connected. Another part of the puzzle of what we do. That’s such a beautiful thing.

Georgia Anne Muldrow: Thank you, J.T.

PostGenre: So, going forward, do you think that beyond the upcoming performances you have coming up, that Harriet Tubman and Georgia Anne will be an ongoing thing?

Brandon Ross: I want to go on. I think something new has been born here. All we have to do is interfere with it.

J.T. Lewis: The music itself will tell us what to do.

Melvin Gibbs: Yeah, it will.

I also wanted to add on what J.T. said earlier. Ornette’s name has come up a few times in our conversation. I think everything goes back to the whole thing of improvisation and what it is. It is a way of seeing the world. When Brandon was talking earlier about his pops, the insight from that conversation and all the insight that you’ve gleaned over the course of your life that relates to this idea of this external thing. And I am going to make it racial because that’s the way it’s framed in this society. It’s all about this external idea of what’s put on black people, on what we’re supposed to be, and how it’s supposed to be all irrelevant at the end of the day.

Georgia Anne Muldrow: It’s true.

Melvin Gibbs: It’s all really about how you express yourself and how you do it yourself in a way that both makes the point and brings people. I think that, at the end of the day, that’s what matters.

Several years ago, as Harriet Tubman, we did a version of Ornette’s Free Jazz. It was my idea, so I was stuck doing the transcriptions for it. When I sat down to do the transcriptions, at a certain point, I realized that Ornette was just trying to express something that he heard and was trying to get other people to understand what he was hearing. It wasn’t this huge thing like the record became. He was just trying to put out what he heard so people would get it. It was really all about how he saw the world.

One thing I think would be interesting to add here, even though we touched on it, is that  all four of us were mentored by strong people from the previous generation. We’re all carrying forward a thing that is like a thread through history. And that’s a really important thing. We’re not making music the way it sounded in 1958, because it ain’t 1958. But if we sat down and talked with those guys about what they were doing and why, they were ultimately all focused on the same thing as we are.

Brandon Ross: You know, that reminds me of something. A long time ago, Melvin and I both worked at Tower Records for a period of time. A lot of musicians worked there then because working there, even only part-time, was a way to get quick medical and dental insurance. If you had a gig, others would cover your shift, and you could do the same for them. But one day, Melvin and I were talking and he said that one of the differences between jazz and other music is that with jazz, if the music doesn’t sound like it did in 1958, most record buyers are critical or disappointed. But those kinds of expectations aren’t present with the person who comes in to buy a pop or a rock record. There’s always this pushback specifically against what I prefer to call creative music, like what the AACM guys brought forward for me. Or someone like Butch Morris, who innovated through conduction, which is completely post-genre.

J.T. Lewis: Yeah, totally. I mean, you’re talking about my heroes now.

Brandon Ross: And it exemplifies so many of the things we are talking about. The art of that day has changed, I’m happy to say, because conduction is now appearing in so many different spaces. I did some conductions last fall out in Seattle, which was fantastic. I was in conduction number one, which was documented back then on Sound Aspects Records. And I’ve been conducted many times since, always with Butch. But one day, I got on the other side of the podium to conduct. And that’s when I understood how brilliant conduction truly is. The language, the lexicon, that Butch developed to communicate ideas and where he wanted to take things. And it needs people who can, in a way, submit to the structure of what that process involves. And the conductor does that, so to speak, too.

To conduct reminded me of the Sorcerer’s Apprentice in Fantasia (Disney, 1940). All these forces are suddenly at your command, and if you can’t manage them, they will overwhelm you. The musicians must bring everything they can –  their notions, their limitations, and the things that go beyond that – so they become a part of the process and the action. And that the ability to participate with all of that is true power, if power is an expression of value. To me, that’s where everything is an opportunity these days. What’s the opportunity? What’s the possibility? What can I open myself to that maybe I didn’t see or that I’m not seeing? And that opportunity can move, or expand.

Georgia Anne Muldrow:  That’s a beautiful way to think, man. And to add to what Melvin and Brandon both said, as far as just energy versus trends in time. I think, for me, it also has something to do with when you have people who are compositional greats pouring into you, you don’t want to waste their time. You don’t want to repeat what they did because that means that you didn’t hear anything that they told you. It means that you didn’t care about what they told you. It means that you were just waiting to talk. It means that you’re not building upon them. You’re not really standing on their shoulders. You just never climb. You’re not pushing for nothing. You’re only standing, staring them in the face and saying, “I want to replicate you.” And that solves nothing. That evolves nothing. And so, while it’s a definite honor and privilege to be around elders who see possibility in you, you also get charged with something. You better not be wasting their time.

J.T. Lewis: No, you have to bring yourself with it all

Georgia Anne Muldrow: Even culturally, it is important to deep thinkers that you don’t do entirely and exactly what they say. No, think deeper.

Melvin Gibbs: Exactly. That’s exactly it. If you’re replicating what they did, they would say, “Well, I already did that. What are you doing here?”

Georgia Anne Muldrow: Exactly. For me, the biggest honor is when I can talk to someone like Mr. Threadgill, and he’s joyous because he didn’t waste his time on me. That’s the biggest compliment I can get. And I feel something similar by working with Harriet Tubman while doing my own thing, too; incredibly honored by what we can do together.

‘Electrical Field of Love’ will be released on Pi Recordings on March 27, 2026. It can be purchased on Bandcamp. More information on Harriet Tubman and Georgia Anne Muldrowcan be found on their respective websites. The combined group will be performing at the Big Ears Festival in Knoxville, Tennessee on March 28, 2026. More information can be found on the festival’s website.