Billy Higgins in the Zone: Brushwork, Breath, and Imagination

This Chapter presents an analysis of the late drummer and community leader Billy Higgins’s improvised brushwork and breathing strategies in his performance on Hoagy Carmichael’s “Georgia on My Mind” on his frequent collaborator’s Charles Lloyd’s recording The Water Is Wide (2000). Connecting with the book’s theme of political and cultural considerations of what it means to create Black musical space, Ashon Crawley’s “black pneuma” interpretive frame is used to help understand Higgins’s breathing strategies relative to his drumming as an orchestration of individual and community sound. Higgins’s breathing strategies during improvisation are theorized as a way to cross bar lines, accessing all colors of the human condition while creating a Black sense of musical place. Higgins’s values of musical place-making thrive through his ego-denying philosophy for the benefit of group sound throughout his career and within the social movement of Leimert Park.

Neighborhood Planning of Technology: Physical Meets Digital City from the Bottom-Up with Aging Payphones

What does it mean to “plan” a technology? Designs with a footprint in public space are important hybrids, including wired bus stops and rebuilt payphones. Our goal is to shift from designing technology for a neighborhood by planning technology as part of the neighborhood. Aging phone booths were purchased in LA’s historic Leimert Park. For six months, residents joined with technologists to tackle a planning issue (gentrification). We developed a method of “deep engagement” to sustain grassroots planning in socio-technical systems, especially around the digital divide. The method resists “solving” the payphone problem, and instead theorizes engagement as four social scaffolds to bring technology literacy into the planning process.