AMERICAN COMPOSERS FORUM: JFund Awardee Joseph C. Phillips and Genre Fluidity
AMERICAN COMPOSERS FORUM: JFund Awardee Joseph C. Phillips and Genre Fluidity
BY MICHAEL J. CYRS
"'America is a great place. But it’s also not so great. You can have those two happen at the same time, and that’s a beautiful thing,' says 2016 JFund awardee Joseph C. Phillips as he walks his Alaskan Malamute through Brooklyn’s Prospect Park. He doesn’t compose for his Numinous project here, but admires how he can be in the middle of the city and still find solitude in nature. He’s describing his upcoming project, a Jerome Fund commissioned piece entitled The Grey Land. Following from his band’s 2017 record Changing Same, The Grey Land will seek to be a musical representation of a more ideal America – one where we don’t have to define music as solely black or solely white. We can appreciate the work of the artist, keeping their identity in mind but not uppermost in our reactions or classifications.