Marshall Trammell is drawing shapes in space. He glances at an enlarged photograph of overlapping triangles seared on a wooden square, and with a fluid gesture lifts a long cooking chopstick above his head. When he starts to drum, it’s almost imperceptible; his foot trembling on a pedal gains just enough pressure to stroke his loosely-tuned bass drum membrane, like a feather. Soon, adjusting his shoulders, Trammell interprets the triangular points on his snare drum and cowbell, and from these few resonant objects elicits the slow-tumbling percussion motif designated “Posture #1.”

Eleven Postures, recorded with Jacob Felix-Heule in a downtown Oakland office tower last year, demonstrates Trammell’s lithe and bristly techniques to voice metal, wood, and skin: feathering and scraping, pushing with palms and fingers, clutching a fine-tipped chopstick like a pen or else between his teeth,  manipulating with one hand the snare’s surface tension. In the performance film Eleven Postures (burn the temples, break up the bells), directed by Matt Volla, Trammell characteristically uncovers the social and historical currents beneath his seemingly-solitary improvisations: the wooden squares feature recontextualized quilt code-patterns associated with the Underground Railroad.

Eleven Postures’ visual score came from an “insurgent learning workshop” that Trammell ran in Albuquerque, New Mexico at a residency curated by Candice Hopkins and Raven Chacon in 2019. “Insurgent learning,” in Trammell’s practice, references the Chiapas, Mexico-based, anticapitalist Zapatistas, who promote a participatory, democratic approach to education, as well as the similarly-inspired Center for Convivial Research and Autonomy based in the Bay Area.

Video still from "Marshall Trammell: Eleven Postures" (2021), directed and edited by Matt Volla.

Participants in Trammell’s workshop invoked the quilt codes as symbols of chattel slavery-era intercultural solidarity to imagine equivalent contemporary practices, and to highlight “Black amnesia to current indigenous struggles in the Americas and beyond.” The Underground Railroad, to Trammell, is a collective traversing of bondage via “tactical media,” a term he uses to denote appropriated and politicized cultural forms. The vision of emancipatory struggle resonates with his investigative, nonhierarchical approach to collaboration and improvisation.

The principles reflect decades of shuttling between—and attempting to integrate—political activism and participation in underground music scenes. Trammell, since leaving free-improvisation duo Black Spirituals in 2018, has simplified his drumset and turned his focus to workshops implementing feminist scholar Chela Sandoval’s “methodologies of the oppressed.” As a self-described “music research strategist,” Trammell imparts a political education that’s alert to possibility as much as it is to violent reaction.

“People like diamonds but don’t want to know where they come from,” Trammell said in a post-performance discussion at the Exploratorium in San Francisco last year. “Pressure makes diamonds.”

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Trammell says he plays “ancestral music,” and he elaborates on this in historical and musicological terms. The components of his current, reduced kit—metal, wood and skin, with no cymbals—reference Afrodiasporic group percussion. He traces his stick-in-hand technique from the West African kingdom of Dahomey to the syncretic music of enslaved Africans in colonial Haiti and Cuba. “So what are they telling us to do? To play the music? What’s being communicated?” Trammell wonders. “That their music is related to their textile technologies, homemaking, family making.”

Ancestral music also references his nearer lineage and personal experience. To Trammell, the drumset is not a rock ‘n roll machine, or a jazz machine. It’s a tool not for accessing a particular genre, he says, echoing his non-idiomatic conception of improvisation, but instead for manners of speech. Trammell describes his playing as a “style of stuttering,” and attributes his stutter to interpersonal violence within his family. “Its resonance is apparent in the way I speak on these drums,” he says, describing this mode of investigation as an “autoethnography.”

Trammell’s two-piece kit also has a material basis in downtown Oakland. A few years ago, without money for a rehearsal space, let alone a vehicle to transport gear, Trammell grabbed what percussion he could carry and walked the few blocks from his apartment to Lake Merritt. Seated beside the tidal lagoon, he honed his feathering and stick-in-hand techniques in response to the mildly chaotic park. Passing by, I remember his pattering, resonant kick meshing with the sound of a car-bumper scraping pavement, and glass and shells crunching underfoot.

So when the pandemic shuttered the clubs, and then the George Floyd Uprising emboldened people to seize the already-permissive streets of Oakland, Trammell was prepared to continue his practice outdoors. I saw him play outside Pro Arts Gallery in collaboration with the dancer Antoine Hunter, who appeared remotely from his studio nearby, projected on a sheet taped to the wall. Hunter, who is deaf, seemed to be staring at the camera; he was watching a live video of Trammell as Trammell and those of us clustered around him looked back, slowly comprehending that we weren’t a passive audience.

In October, Trammell and I talked by the lake, distracted by the dirtbikes, the recyclers, and the man in a red fez blasting throwback R&B. With a friend, he’d been preparing materials for his current residency at the Borealis festival in Norway. Trammell mentions the group improvisation systems of John Zorn, Butch Morris, and J.A. Deane admiringly. But, calling himself a “reluctant conductor,” he intends for his Borealis workshop to be even more egalitarian. “I really want the public to make the score,” he says. “So it’s just me as a facilitator.”

Trammell, leaving for Norway a few days later, had sent festival staff to to local libraries, to research themes such as “welcoming.”. He wanted the public to provide imagery for transforming it, through discussion and analysis, into tactical media. The plan was to have local musicians interpret the imagery as a score to perform at the festival this March. “It’s a critical pedagogy sourced through the community,” Trammell explained. “So the community makes a score and the musicians remap their instruments with meaning—not A or B or C or pitch but with meaning.”

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Trammell, 49, moved to the Mission district of San Francisco in 1993. Promptly evicted, he started squatting, and fell into punk and anarchist circles around now-defunct record store Epicenter Zone and mutual-aid projects such as Food Not Bombs. He opened for Los Crudos, and ran a free store out of his roommate’s van. Trammell was influenced by former Black nationalists active in the then-resurgent anarchist movement, such as Ashanti Alston, and by the mid-2000s he traveled to Chiapas to support the Zapatistas.

At the same time, in creative music combos, Trammell found a similarly-spirited emphasis on collectivity. One important influence in the 1990s was Lisle Ellis. The bassist hosted weekly workshops, conveying lessons from free jazz figures such as Cecil Taylor and Don Cherry. Ellis blindfolded his pupils and led them into Golden Gate Park, where they laid down and felt each other breathe or, holding hands, ambled across the grass. Back at his apartment, Ellis told them to play what they’d heard. The supple feathering technique highlighted in Eleven Postures stems from this time, Trammell recalls. “It brought things out of me I didn’t know were there.”

Though he no longer calls himself an anarchist, Trammell remains optimistic about the capacity of creative underground scenes to prefigure social transformation and build inclusive, resistant bases of what he calls “dual power” (following Murray Bookchin).

Yet he’s also been frustrated with the depoliticized or conservative character of free improvisation. “Sometimes I would just disappear and do organizing work,” he says. In the 2000s, after moving to Oakland, Trammell worked with restorative justice (Generation Five) and prison abolitionist (Critical Resistance) organizations, experiences that shaped the coalition-building themes of his workshops.

In 2012, Trammell joined with Zachary James Watkins as Black Spirituals. They arose from an Oakland experimental music scene interrelated with the composition and electronics programs at Mills College. Watkins applied no-input mixing techniques from noise to his original guitar tunings and electronics, exploring harmonic intervals often without strumming. Trammell, inspired by 20th-century avant-garde jazz, similarly aimed to reconceive his instrument, viewing the trap kit as a product of the colonial repression of Black sociality. “I got away from being a drummer,” Trammell told me in 2015. “And I was allowed to be a percussionist.”

Video still from "Marshall Trammell: Eleven Postures" (2021), directed and edited by Matt Volla.

Black Spirituals released tapes through Ratskin Records, label home to Oakland peers such as Las Sucias and Beast Nest. SIGE Records, which Trammell continues to work with, released Of Deconstruction (2014) and Black Access / Black Axes (2018). The Wire magazine hailed their droning and radiating dual-solo style—spontaneous, simultaneous composition—as an “emergent form of improvisation.” Ben Ratliff, writing for The New York Times, detected not merely the influence of, say, free jazz drumming or post-rock riffage (Black Spirituals toured with Earth), but the strategies and ambitions animating these forebears.

The duo induced sometimes-contrite discussions of race in experimental music; the same Wire feature, headlined “Racial Overtones,” quoted a letter to the magazine from scholar Morgan Craft lamenting the magazine’s lack of young, African-American experimental artists. But Black Spirituals distinguished representation from liberation, connecting with other artists developing decolonial practices, including collaborations with indigenous artists collective Postcommodity and Sharmi Basu of Beast Nest. Watkins, closing the Wire article, voiced the question continuing to preoccupy Trammell: “How do we make this work emancipatory?”

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I recently was thinking about artist organizing, in the sense of artists organizing to effect social change, in contrast to artist organizing that lapses into demands for individual career advancement. I remembered a talk given by Fred Moten, theorist of the Black radical tradition, following a solo set by Trammell on March 4, 2020. It was days before pandemic restrictions indefinitely ended public gatherings, and hundreds of people sat upstairs at the African-American Museum & Library in Oakland, a neoclassical structure built with the wealth of violently anti-labor industrialist Andrew Carnegie.

Moten, weaving an argument into a story of his trip to the Colombian seaport of Buenaventura, proposed that Blackness, like jazz (which Miles Davis called “social music”), requires two or more people, and that the sociality of Black music harbors the power of Black resistance. Hence the Reconstruction-era laws that restricted percussion and gatherings of two or more Black people in public. “It makes sense,” Moten said. “If two black people were gathered in the public square, they were probably trying to figure out how to steal themselves—how to get out.”

An Afro-Colombian percussionist Moten met emphasized “our approach,” he recalled. “He was talking about a path, a way of living, not so much about producing the music as a commodity, not so much about using the music as some kind of modality for self-aggrandizement.” Moten related this approach to a capacity for militant struggle: The people of Buenaventura, long subjected to government austerity policies, realized they were at a chokepoint for global capital, and that by blockading a critical bridge in the city they could leverage the neocolonial capitalist class.

Moten likened independence of limbs, which allows drummers to play different patterns simultaneously, to the cotton gin turning people into parts of their bodies. “It was so beautiful to watch you play,” he said of Trammell. “At a certain point the instruments you were playing started playing you.” Though the beauty bore the “tragedy of enforced individuation,” he continued, polyrhythms enable the drummer to self-disintegrate and reconstitute an ensemble. It reminded me of Trammell’s approach, his refusal to pretend he acts alone in his work. “That’s the social force of this music.”

At the time of the lecture, University of California graduate students were on strike. They were pressuring the administration for higher wages. And as a wildcat strike, undertaken without the approval of union leadership—at one point blocking traffic to the Santa Cruz campus—they were fomenting militancy within the precarious rank-and-file. Moten described this action as continuous with the blockade in Buenaventura, likening them to an international percussion ensemble. “The way to support them is to join them,” he said. “So we strike.”

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At the Borealis Festival residency in Norway, Trammell’s plans changed. He told me he encountered an ahistorical insistence that Norway played no role in the slave trade, and after a one-off gig with local musicians, someone from the experimental scene spoke appreciatively of slavery’s contribution to jazz. For the performance in March, he decided he didn’t want to work with musicians. Instead, Trammell met with groups of largely nonwhite immigrants, learning about their experiences confronting color and class and the built environment of Bergen.

Trammell initiated several projects. With the founder of Dar, an Arab-Norwegian magazine, and the radio artist and sociologist Karen Werner, he’s exploring the possibility of broadcasting to people on buses. A writing-based workshop involving women of color, which Trammell is facilitating from Oakland, centers on autoethnography instead of interpreting codes, and it more directly sources the public. They’re developing a collective text to read live with Trammell accompanying on drums at the festival in March. Their voices will be recorded and played back live, producing an echo.

Trammell described the live echo, inspired by the recently-deceased sound artist Alvin Lucier, as “utilitarian.” It creates an ephemeral archive of women’s experiences in the surrounding city, and Trammell hopes it attracts audiences unfamiliar with Borealis. Moreover, Trammell wants to take his workshops beyond the arts, in partnership with social-justice organizations. If the drumset is a reconstituted ensemble, Trammell’s instrument is the ensemble. And, echoing Moten, the bandstand is a limitation on the ensemble’s power, Trammell said. “Improvisation doesn’t only live in the consciousness of musicians.” ♦