At a time when there are vast differences in peoples’ beliefs and perspectives—in their sounds and their art—it feels more important than ever for artist and former Pioneer Works music resident, Amirtha Kidambi, to pick up her tools and get to work.

I met the vocalist, improviser, composer, organizer, and educator while I was myself a music resident at Pioneer Works, and I felt an immediate kinship with her remarkable output. We’re both third culture musicians living in New York City, and our creative practices emphasize the important role artists play in encouraging catharsis and release in a period of unprecedented global solidarity movements. To achieve this goal herself, Kidambi needed to break down the structures controlling her own self expression. Revolution of the self is necessary before taking on the institutions that profit from hate—or, more commonly today, that virtue-signal their support for what’s good while obfuscating how much they benefit from maintaining an oppressive status quo.

After I was a guest on her podcast Outernational, we decided to flip the script; it was my turn to ask questions. During our wide-ranging conversation, we discussed improvisation, dancing through societal collapse, how to stand firm for what’s right—and how to become the kind of people we need to be during these trying political times.

Who is Amirtha Kidambi right now? I know from some of my reading and listening that you're a jazz, avant-garde, improvisational, and devotional vocalist. You’re a part of many projects pulling from an Indian musical background, blended with a lot more traditional Western, experimental jazz leanings. You touch upon topics of decolonialization, socioeconomic disparity, and struggles within society at large. You strike so many deeply emotional chords in a way that feels really visceral—listening to you, it’s almost like I'm in the room with you. So I would love to hear from you directly: Who are you? Where are you right now?

Right now, Amirtha is tired. She is very tired. The world feels so relentless. I guess music has always been the way I process everything that’s going on. That’s what I hope my music can do for other people: help them process through catharsis. I am a vocalist. I play synthesizer, I play harmonium in my band, Elder Ones. My practice has incorporated devotional music not just from India, but Pakistan and Bangladesh and a lot of South Asian countries. I was a South Indian traditional dancer in Bharatanatyam, so it's almost like I learned it in my body instead of my voice. But I'm also a punk and DIY kid, and that’s where my formal musical training came from; so there’s a hard edge that’s noise and electronic. My music is also, like you said, jazz.

But if somebody asks me what kind of music I make, the answer is creative music. I like that term because it doesn't tell you anything about genre. It tells you more about philosophy and approach. It was coined by the AACM, the Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians, which was a collective of composers, performers, and improvisers on the South Side of Chicago—so people like Anthony Braxton and Roscoe Mitchell—who were asking questions and being critical; it has that Black Panther attitude of self-determination.

Creative music is a way for me to actually describe what my practice is, which at its root is about liberation.

I think that's why I gravitated toward free jazz and improvisation, as a way of decolonizing myself after all this Western classical music education that I, by default, stumbled into. Improvisation was such a big part of Indian music, but it's almost like I was programmed to forget about it.

Totally. It feels the closest to authenticity in motion, in the sense that it’s less about music sounding like a final product, but more the thought of, "Hey, this is what it is. It's gonna be imperfect." Even though your music still sounds pretty close to perfect.

Perfect is relative in this scenario.

It’s perfect in the sense that it feels connected to real feelings, not perfect in the sense that it was EQ'd to meet a certain LUFS threshold [equalized to meet a certain frequency balance] for mastering. But speaking of improvisation, so much of your music, especially the more long-form pieces, feel like it comes in parts or in stages. I was listening to Dance of the Subaltern on the way over here, which feels like a triptych. It’s really, really gorgeous. With improvisation, it's hard to know when something is done. Maybe I'm projecting here, but I know I struggle when I do one take and wanna start making changes. How do you keep the improvisation front and center, and not let that initial feeling of yours get lost?

I was attracted to improvisation because I have a neurotic, kind of intense control freak energy. It broke me out of that. Before improvisation, I was just performing a lot of other people's music, because I was never satisfied with anything I’d written or done. I wouldn't release anything, I would just pore over it forever. In 2013, I was in a piece by one of the composers of the AACM, Muhal Richard Abrams, called "Dialogue Social." It was all improvisatory. It was also the first time I sang in Tamil, my mother tongue, because he suggested it. He was like, "Oh, if you speak any other languages, feel free to sing in them." Which nobody had ever asked me to do. He also asked me what my music was like. I hadn't made anything under my name yet. When I said I didn’t know, he told me, "Okay, well, why don't you make it and then let me know what it is."

That spirit of letting go of control and improvising as a social process was how I formed my band Elder Ones, at a Musicians Against Police Brutality event that Matana Roberts had organized in 2015 for Mike Brown's family. It ended up being a trio with various people in the New York scene. It was a way to become part of a community and develop relationships through playing. You didn't have to have a million rehearsals as a band. You just had to get together and play. I realized then that I wanted to write compositions to not only release control but to have the voices of other creative people involved. It became less about the product, and more about the process. Improvisation also blurs that separation between artist and audience. It makes them real participants, and it becomes less hierarchical, which is anti-capitalist and anti-colonial. It goes back to more indigenous practices. As an organizer, I feel like improvising is a tool to deal with a crisis that’s unfolding before your eyes. We're being surveilled all the time. How are we gonna adjust our tactics? You have to improvise. You're doing it in collaboration with other people. You're doing it in communities, in real spaces. It’s a constant process of learning—not just in relation to music, but other things as well.

During the pandemic I lived in Sunset Park. Do you know the Metropolitan Detention Center there?

I work two blocks from it, so I'm around there all the time.

It's a federal prison, and Jamel Floyd was killed there in 2020. He had asthma and he was pepper sprayed to death. They knew he couldn't breathe. So this Sunset Park advocacy group, MDC Solidarity, held a rally and vigil there every Friday, which I was going to. I started to be like, "What if we had music at these things?" If you know those buildings, there's a big space between them and there's crazy acoustics. I started to play alto saxophone—this was the beginning of the pandemic, when I had no connection to my voice anymore—and I started organizing a band for protests. We played free jazz or protest music. The incarcerated folks inside were tapping on their glass and shining their room lamps in the windows. We even organized a string quartet that played Nina Simone. I think you asked me before what my ideal venue would be. That’s an ideal venue.

You were doing what needed to be done.

I want my music to do something. I made a commitment a long time ago to advocate on stage. Sometimes that feels symbolic and sometimes it feels real. It used to be that I would talk about racism on stage. Everyone could agree and feel good about that. “Yeah, racism is bad." But Black Lives Matter was a different feeling in Europe. I thought I was preaching to the choir, but now that I think about it, I don't think that was true. And when I talk now about colonialism and imperialism and Palestine, and implicating not only the audience but myself as an American, I think it has a different feeling. I’ve been trying to work with various organizations to commit to PACBI, which is the Palestinian Academic and Cultural Boycott of Israel. And I couldn't get even one large or mid-sized organization to do it, not one in our community that espouses all these progressive, radical values around social justice.

Which they profit off of.

1000%.

...through their marketing and everything else too.

They’re like, "We're a community space," blah, blah, blah. But as soon as you have a material demand from them, which is that they should endorse PACBI's call, which might anger some funders or audience members, they’re all, "Oh, we're just a space, we're not political.” It was very disappointing to me, because Palestine is representative of so much beyond just Palestine: It’s all the intersecting horrors that we're dealing with. If the art world cannot disentangle itself from genocide and horrific systems of imperialism and surveillance, the same surveillance that's used in Palestine and here in New York on our own immigrants, why should I care if it continues to exist or not?

Wouldn't the thing then be to create something that doesn't rely on those injustices?

That’s what I'm struggling to imagine right now. How do we get ourselves out of where we're at? So now I’m trying to book shows based on where their solidarity is.

It's very hard to know what building will rise in place of something that hasn't been torn down yet, so I think that there's some grace that we all need to give ourselves; it's very, very difficult to see past smoke. And right now, things are only just starting to sizzle and burn. And a lot of people are saying, "Oh my God, things are worse than they've ever been." And I'm like…

It can get worse. [laughter]

The mindfuck—for lack of a better philosophical term—is the hard thing to deal with. Hopefully, as we approach the next higher elevated form of consciousness, we'll start to be able to sift through and build something new. It might be helpful first to just do the healing before the building. You seem like such a builder, and I'm also a builder, so it's very easy for us to envision it.

Often people will call me an activist, and I used to feel really weird about that. I'd be like, "No, there are real activists doing the real work." But now I'm starting to integrate that idea, and take seriously that it’s part of the work that I do. It's interesting going back to the spiritual idea of the Kali Yuga versus the Satya Yuga. The goddess Kali is named for the goddess of destruction. She's one of the most important goddesses because you have to destroy to build up again. You have to go to the most morally depraved point for people to actually see how everything works.

This is slightly optimistic of me—I was talking to someone from Writers Against the War on Gaza [WAWOG] about this yesterday—but Zohran Mamdani winning the primary here in New York and then the mayorship has shown that this third rail of being openly pro-Palestinian, calling out genocide, didn't destroy his political career. I have my critiques of Zohran…

Sure.

…but he's pro-Palestinian. Period, you know? I do feel like people's consciousness is rising.

I came across a quote by Huey P. Newton recently—who was one of the founders of the Black Panther Party—about talking to someone who you don't think is on the same side as you. It has become something of a mantra for me. He said, “I dissuade Party members from putting down people who do not understand…I try to be cordial, because that way you win people over. You cannot win them over by drawing the line of demarcation, saying you are on this side and I am on the other; that shows a lack of consciousness.”

He said the actual work of revolutionaries is to help people's consciousness expand. It stuck with me, because revolutionaries are viewed as militant, but their real mission has always been raising the consciousness of regular working people. And I feel like, as artists, art is one of those ways you can raise consciousness.

If there's anything I’m trying to do right now, and recommit myself to, it's that we, as artists, can raise consciousness. So even if we can't necessarily be out in the streets every day, getting arrested or whatnot, that's a role that we have to play as musicians, you know? We can raise consciousness. ♦

Amirtha Kidambi's 2025 Pioneer Works residency was supported by the Rockefeller Foundation’s inaugural Working Artists Fellowship program, a part of the Foundation’s The Artist Impact Initiative.