Building a Musical Home: Sonya Belaya Speaks
Photo courtesy of the artist
by Sarah Thomas
Pianist, vocalist, and composer Sonya Belaya explores a wide range of styles in her music, including jazz, contemporary classical, and Russian folk influences. This week, she makes her leader debut at The Jazz Gallery, culling a set from a variety of recent projects including Cognitive Distortions, Ancestral Patterns. We at Jazz Speaks caught up with her to talk about the show’s themes, what it’s like revisiting music over the course of many years, and striving for openness as a collaborator.
The Jazz Gallery: Can you start by giving me the rundown on your show coming up?
Sonya Belaya: I've been making the joke that this show is my greatest hits. I’ve been pulling together music I've written in the last four years for different projects and bands. I tried to fit things together that work well as a set, but also specifically for the players on this show.
The consistent factor in my music is that it's always written for these colossally giant bands. I love the collective aspect of a giant band and the sound and energy of that. Some of this music is from my long-standing project called Dacha, which is a large ensemble of music I've written that uses Russian folk and bard music as well as jazz and contemporary music. It’s about trying to find my own musical home in the in-between spaces, which is often how I feel.
The word “dacha” also means “summer home” in Russian. So it's musically, spiritually, and metaphorically about me trying to find and create a sense of place for myself. I’m a first generation Russian-American with a lot of nostalgia for the culture, but also with a lot of growing resentment and frustration with what's happening politically and being physically separated from my family in Moscow during a time like this. So I’ve been reconciling a lot of that in the music.
The other half of the music, which you [Sarah] have played, is from the Cognitive Distortions, Ancestral Patterns show. That’s a big multidisciplinary piece I created in collaboration with Laura Pérez, who is an incredible video artist and filmmaker. At The Jazz Gallery, we're just doing the music from that show without the multimedia. But the music is about interviewing and collecting stories of immigrant women who are artists in the city. The interviews include topics of assimilation, communal care, miscommunication across language, and mental health care for immigrants.
I’ve researched a lot about social work practices with immigrants in the US, which is really fascinating. It's a topic I'm deeply invested in because of my own personal history, with my mother and the lack of care she received as an immigrant woman.
It's really cool to do the music without the other elements of the piece, because it reaffirms for me that the music can also speak to the topic. All the multidisciplinary elements really elevate and are crucial to the storytelling, but I'm excited to get back to just the musical communication. I won’t have to worry about ten thousand elements of the show, which is what I'm used to having to navigate.
TJG: We played “Cognitive Distortions, Ancestral Patterns” together in 2021. What is it like revisiting that music two years later?
SB: I've done that music twice now—once at Roulette Intermedium, then at a residency at University of Michigan where we also did the piece. I feel the muscle I'm flexing as a composer is becoming a lot more conscious, less rigid, and more open to the idea of meeting the people and music in the very moment that you're doing it.
In the past, including the first iteration when we played it, I felt a really deep imposter syndrome. I'm not a “trained composer,” whatever that means. It was my first time writing for string quartet, and I was really anxious about my scores and my notation. Was I doing it the right way? Was I legitimate enough? If I made a mistake, I was really beating myself up about the fact that it wasn't up to some supposed standard.
Grey McMurray, my friend and fellow bandmate, said something to me about this after the dress rehearsal at Roulette. I was talking about how I feel the weight of so much responsibility—that if I do something wrong then I'm wasting people's time or hurting someone in the band. He said to meet the music in the present moment exactly where it's at, and not to project expectations onto the music. So if something isn’t working, that is something to notice. It's not that you did something wrong or the players did something wrong. If it isn't working, there's room to change it.
It's probably going to take me five or six times playing this music to figure it out. There's really no way other than trying. I know there will be things that are better this time, but also still things that won't work. And that's okay. That's part of the process, and you have to just meet it in the moment. This idea of trying things out and failing and not having everything perfectly figured out is such a beautiful part of the process of revisiting music.
Also, it's not about you writing the music. It's about the people that bring their own voices to the music. Often, when I'm rethinking things for different instrumentations, I'm trying to think about what I've heard a certain musician do, what their voice is like, and how I can include that in the revisiting of the work. I try to be conscious that it’s not just like, “Oh, there’s a guitarist, there’s a string quartet, and there’s a bassist.” It’s actually this human that I have a lot of love for. So how can I express that love through making space for them to be themselves?
It’s still something I’m learning to do, but that’s the energy and the ethos I’m trying to bring moving forward in writing music for such giant bands. It’s really hard to do, because it’s the balance of specificity and openness—knowing what to make space for, and what to make sure is clear in the form. But I’m super excited to continue having the opportunity to revisit things, and to have an open space to figure things out. That’s something we should all be allowed to do. Growth is the goal. This is just another moment of that.
TJG: I love the idea of revisiting mindset and process as well as the actual musical content.
SB: There are so many factors that go into how we approach a piece in a given moment and in a given period of time. There are life stressors, there’s financial instability, there are health issues, there’s whether your needs are being met.
There might be a point in time where you can take a gig for $100 and you have space for that. Then sometimes you take a gig for that amount of money and you're so bombarded with other things in your life that it's really hard to have the capacity for being the most patient and open collaborator. That's something we don't really talk about often. Especially in the music scene, there's this mentality that if you make one interpersonal error, you're out. My personal ethos is that I really want to be playing with people twenty years from now, and building these longform relationships means a lot to me.
For example, Ledah [Finck] has been the most consistent person in my bands. Ledah is the only person on this gig that has played all the music—the MVP. I love that that’s been the case. I trust her to be honest and I trust her to communicate if a need is not being met. That kind of trust and open communication and honesty—that is love.
You might come into a rehearsal or show one day, and there may be a family crisis—there's grief, there's sorrow. If someone comes to tell me that's what's going on, I'm going to have a very different understanding of why their head is somewhere else. I, as a band leader, want to and should be that kind of person. This is a very humanity-based craft that we are all in. I try never to separate those things.
TJG: Who else is in your band for this show?
SB: I'm really excited, because there's a combination of people that I've played with for a long time and people that I'm playing with for the first time ever. For me, the person that you are comes before the sound or musician that you are.
I met Aakash Mittal, who's going to be playing alto sax and bass clarinet, about two years ago. We've both worked as educators and have talked a lot about the intersection of balancing music life and life as a teaching artist. Every time we talk, I'm like, “Wow, you really get me.” We're on some similar wavelengths about life. But it was about two years of that before we ever played together.
Another person in the band is Ben Willis, who I've known for ten or eleven years. His sound and the way he approaches music has always been in the back of my mind. He’s a very deep musician and occupies a lot of different sound worlds. He doesn't live in New York, and this opportunity came up for him to play Cognitive Distortions when I did my artist residency at the University of Michigan.
When that happened, I realized that I wrote this music for him. It was such a cool moment, because I was just like, “Oh, you're supposed to play this music. You're who I was thinking about and I didn't even realize it.” That was such a fun moment of realizing how much his sound has influenced me over the years. So I'm super stoked that it worked out for him to come play this show at the Gallery.
I already talked about Grey, but I've played in a few different iterations with him. We have this improvising band called Alaara with me, Grey, and Nicole Patrick on drums. That band is really about meeting the music in the present moment and cultivating a lot of patience. To be honest, I really couldn't see another person playing the music on this show other than Grey. His musicality really resonates with me and deeply inspires me.
This is the first time I’m going to play with Jason [Nazary]. But he and Grey have known each other for a long time, and the person I mixed my upcoming record with has known him for a long time as well. I was emailing Jason, and he was like, “Oh yeah, Seth just sent me a bassinet for my new baby. That's how far we go back.”
But I really care about that template of communal love. I'm trying to be way more conscious of that going forward into developing relationships with people musically and thinking about who I ask to play with me. I'm trying to be slower and more patient with that.
And then there’s y'all, of course. I think what's so great about Bergamot Quartet is that there’s this really immediate malleability that is so inviting to work with. It also really helps to have such a beautifully unified sound rather than calling separate string players. I feel more like I was writing for you guys than just writing for string quartet.
Also, Ledah has been my introduction to you all, and she is this omnivorous translator of how to occupy many different musical worlds. But she does it in a way that’s not pandering to either side. That’s what I really appreciate about her. If she’s the access point to people who are improvisers to write, it’s never like, “No, let me show you how to write. This is not how you write for string quartet.” And if there’s improvisation built into the music for y’all, I’ve never sensed in the rehearsals that it’s like, “No, this is how it’s supposed to go.” She really meets each musical moment where it’s at and is such a thoughtful and conscious diplomat of how to make it all work. So, shoutout to Ledah.
TJG: Do you have any other projects going on you’d like folks to know about?
SB: I'm in this space of incubation in some ways, of recalibrating how I feel about music making and art making. I’m trying to find a balance of what works for me and my health. Part of that incubation has been dreaming a lot about what could be, which is really exciting.
Also, I'm sitting on two albums of music right now. Some of it is going to be mixed very soon, and then for some of it I’m in the process of trying to figure out a label and that sort of thing. I'm really excited for that to be my offering to the world soon. It’s coming. My album of music has taken a lot of work and patience, and I'm so proud of it. But it’s taking time, as it should.
I’m also thinking ahead to developing something that's more on the solo end of things. I think that's going to be my next big baby. I have another project, too, but I'm more in the research phase of that. I got a grant to do it and there's a lot of information and material that I want to absorb before I go about creating the music. So that's where I’m at right now.
Sonya Belaya plays The Jazz Gallery on Wednesday, May 31 with her band. The group features Sonya Belaya on piano & voice; Aakash Mittal on alto sax & bass clarinet; Grey McMurray on guitar; Ben Willis on bass; Jason Nazary on drums; and the Bergamot Quartet (Ledah Finck & Sarah Thomas, violins; Amy Tan, viola; Irene Han, cello). Sets are at 7:30 and 9:30 p.m. ET. $20 general admission (FREE for members), $30 cabaret seating ($20 for members), $20 Livestream (FREE for members). Purchase tickets here.