Looking Ahead to ‘Earth Tones’ — An Interview with Etienne Charles

By Anastasia Tsioulcas

Composer, trumpeter, bandleader, and storyteller Etienne Charles brings his new multimedia work, Earth Tones, to the Lydia Mendelssohn Theatre on January 17-18, 2025. In advance of these performances, Etienne was interviewed by Anastasia Tsioulcas, the University of Michigan Knight-Wallace 24/25 Arts Journalism Fellow.

AT: It is such a joy to talk to you! It’s been a while since we’ve had a chance to chat about your work. You’re bringing Earth Tones to the University of Michigan next month. Tell me a little bit about the genesis of this project — where it got started, what your inspiration was, and why you want to do it now.

EC: I’ve been learning about climate change since I was very small. I’m from a small island state, Trinidad and Tobago, and my mother is a retired urban planner. So I always knew, but back then, they used to call it “global warming” and “sea level rising.”

A few years ago, when I lived in [Lansing] Michigan, I was kind of in a bubble, and I didn’t really see much of the effects. And then I started going back to Trinidad, and every time I would see the water higher. So I started thinking about a project that can kind of highlight the places and people who have been and will be affected by climate change, specifically from the standpoint of coastal erosion and sea rising, from the standpoint of landslides, from the standpoint of forest fires, and from the standpoint of food production, which is one of the main challenges that we see from climate change.

And you know it was a fascinating journey…I’m still on it. It took me to the Maldives, which is the fastest-sinking country in the world. It took me to Homer, Louisiana, the bayou, where they lose about a football field worth of land per minute. So yeah, you know, very sobering places, but very lovely people. And so it’s really about centering the people and these issues, but also just about letting people know that there are solutions to these challenges.

AT: You and I have spoken in the past about storytelling through multimedia work, and it feels like Earth Tones is another multimedia project. Tell me a little bit about what the audience is going to see.

EC: They’re going to kind of get transported to these different places to see what I saw. Also. they’re going to hear from the actual people there. It’s a big part of my work to center the voices of the actual people affected by the changes that happen.

So you’ll hear from a fisherman and photographer in Rasdhoo, Maldives who also has a coffee shop. He’s a very fledgling entrepreneur. You’re going to hear from people in Louisiana who have watched their land disappear. They’ve watched their fisheries drop. They’ve watched the produce that they make dwindle when they went from a thousand pounds of crab and shrimp per day to a thousand pounds of crab or shrimp per week.

You meet these people, you hear their stories. And that’s what it’s about.

AT: So the audience is really going to have the opportunity to step in and experience what they’re experiencing.

EC: Yeah. And I mean for me, I always care about immersion. I mean, the same thing happened with San Juan Hill. I wanted people to see what was there before and what is there now. And it’s kind of a similar approach with this, but simply because what happened in San Juan Hill is kind of gradually happening with Earth Tones.

As a musician, I’m lucky to get to see all kinds of places on this planet. And as a result, I just kind of want to bring what I saw on stage with me, so people could learn about not just the places, but the peoples.

AT: And music is your channel and your passport. Since you referenced San Juan Hill: A New York Story, we should just say what it was. This was a piece that premiered at Lincoln Center in 2022, again in a multimedia format. It chronicled the displacement of black and brown communities out of the San Juan Hill neighborhood that became Lincoln Center, and I thought that was a very powerful piece of storytelling with beautiful music.

I’m hoping you can talk a little bit about music as that sort of storytelling vehicle, because it is so crucial to what you do.

EC: You know for me, music is a way to highlight uncomfortable scenarios while making people feel less uncomfortable. There’s this topic, right? But then there’s this distraction while you listen to it. But the information is still there, and so you know, San Juan Hill was pretty overt because it’s literally something that had happened. There were styles of music that came out of this place, so there was a lot of content to kind of pull from to then extract, synthesize, and then compose.

But with Earth Tones, these are dynamic places that are constantly changing, and these dynamic people that are having to adjust. I call parts of it a “prequiem,” because it’s like not a requiem yet, but it’s the precursor to a requiem. Some of these places are literally going to be gone.

When you find out about a sandbank in Rasdhoo that literally in the last 4 years has shrunk 90% of its size, and you will see the video of me walking where there once was sand. And now there is water, and it was a huge beach that hundreds of people can go to. So that is a part of the storytelling, and then the music is a kind of coloring.

But at the end of the day, it’s all about hope. What I love about the blues is that “the blues is eternal optimism in the face of adversity,” as the great Wynton Marsalis says. It’s a great definition for the blues. And that’s what this is as well. It’s optimism. The music is very hopeful. It bounces. It’s very energetic. Everybody’s having a good time. It’s a great band, and all the musicians get lots of time to shine.

There’s mandolin and cuatro, because I wanted to make sure and show all of the different sounds of wood. I have marimba and piano played by Warren Wolf. Of course there’s drums. I play percussion. Marcus Strickland plays bass clarinet on a lot of it, and then and then we have a DJ Val Jeanty who does a lot of electronic stuff. And then, of course, there’s the bass player, Jonathon Muir-Cotton, who’s from Ann Arbor. And so it was about all of these different ways that you could use the sound of wood and natural instruments. So it’s a fun project so far.

AT: I hear you saying that the audiences are sort of going to be walking through your point of view, walking through these other people’s points of view, right? Because you’re centering their voices and their stories. Do you hope that this is a work of advocacy or awareness for the audience? What do you hope that they’ll take away from this?

EC: My work, my practice, my music — I don’t see it as advocacy. I just see it as highlighting places of people, and from that people might see a particular dimension of it that they may not have seen or known about before. And it might cause them to change something in their life. It might not. But through interaction with what we’ve done with this piece they might know a little more.

The last movement is called “Coming Together.” And it’s really because of the fact that this challenge of climate change won’t really go away. It won’t get better unless we come together like big countries and small companies, big corporations and small corporations, big people and little people. The message is really about the scenarios that we’re in all over the country and different parts of the world, and it’s a new way for us to have a common denominator that connects us. At the end of the day, the more people who know that that’s the challenge, the better off we are.

AT: Art, as you well know, is an incredible vehicle for creating empathy, and being able to step into other people’s perspectives. Good storytelling in general, is that you create these channels for empathy and sort of shared experience or recognition of shared experience.

EC: I totally agree. It’s opening the door and giving people insight into what’s going on. And then the human tradition is that of seeing and then deciphering. You know we don’t know how tall something is until we measure it, but we see it before we decide that we want to know how tall it is.

AT: The storytelling that you do through your work has garnered a ton of support for some very big people and organizations. And now, government, right? You got a Guggenheim fellowship, a Creative Capital award specifically for Earth Tones. And then the French Government, the Ministry of Culture, just named you a “Chevalier,” which is a huge honor! Do you find that recognition bolstering, validating, exciting?

EC: I don’t do mainstream work, right? Like, I’m not on a major label. I don’t have major representation. I book myself.

A lot of jazz musicians do stuff for the approval of their peers, the engaging of their peers. And I feel like, yeah, music is supposed to engage your peers. But that’s like surgeons only talking with surgeons about surgery. They’re not out there like using it to make humanity better.

Through these stories, it’s always about finding these pockets of people that you won’t see on a big screen. You won’t read about them in Time Magazine or in Rolling Stone, but they deserve a stage. They deserve a platform.

And so, recognition like being named “Chevalier” was validating. So it’s a form of recognition that I’m grateful for, because it just reminds me that we do the work with blinders on. We do the work a lot of times in the dark. We don’t come up for air. We don’t look up, and we don’t really look around.

And so when somebody pats you on the shoulder, and is like, “I see what you’re doing. and you know we see it as valid. We see it as important. and we salute you for it,” it’s a great feeling. It pushes me to go further. It pushes me to want to engage more every time I might get discouraged. People are caring about it, and so it kind of pushes me forward, and you know that’s you know we’re here to do. We’re here to work.

We hope you can join us January 17-18 for performances of Earth Tones at the Lydia Mendelssohn Theatre. You can also join a free discussion with Etienne Charles at the U-M Ford School on January 17, in-person or online.

Buy Performance Tickets

Buy Student Tickets