Oluyemi Thomas is all about balance on the edge. When he danced onstage at the Vision Festival at Roulette in June, he was sprightly on his feet, cradling his beloved bass clarinet. He was in town to play with the storied Spiritworld ensemble, featuring creative music giants like William Parker, Michael Wimberly, J.D. Parran and Lisa Sokolov.
Dressed in a resplendent orange Nigerian buba (shirt and pants) and crowned by a Ghanaian headpiece made in the Kente style, steampunk-style goggles and prominent rings on his fingers, Thomas stood out onstage. His external persona wasn’t the only reason.
Radiating out of him was a spiritual force, focused into a wide stream of joyous outpouring. He had the air of a creator doing something very deep but wearing it lightly. His playing wasn’t rooted in ego. This invited the audience into his realm, with that great motivator, natural curiosity. Once in his world, his sonorous and imaginative play was revealed, allowing a most penetrating level of learning to take place.
Thomas’s instrument of choice, bass clarinet, has its own storied history, never more than in the hands of the gone-too-soon genius, Eric Dolphy. With a rich, full-bodied sound and range, it is a vastly versatile instrument that can enthrall when played by a musician that has mastered its tough technical demands. Just like Thomas, it is an instrument that can look deceptively simple, until you start peeling away the layers.
Thomas hails from Detroit, where he grew up, but has spent the largest chunk of his life in the Bay Area in California. An exponent of spiritual jazz, he is yogi-like, his ardent practice of the Baha’i faith fueling his inner worlds.
His longest collaboration (three decades running) has been with his partner and wife, the poet and musician Ijeoma Thomas, under the auspices of their band Positive Knowledge, which has expanded and contracted like a living organism, allowing others into their wildly creative world. Along the way, Thomas has played with a string of legendary improvisers like Cecil Taylor, Kidd Jordan, Roscoe Mitchell, Henry Kaiser, Wadada Leo Smith and Gino Robair, all over the globe.
Trained as an engineer, Thomas has the unique vision that allows him to see the intersection of science and the free spirit of creation. This is most evident in his graphic scored compositions — artworks, essentially, that map out his progressions and ideas using abstract visual symbols, conjured from his idiosyncratic vocabulary and language.
His latest album, Point, recorded with Positive Knowledge and percussionist Robert Wallace in Flagstaff, Arizona, has just dropped. It features a host of thoughtful and spiritually intellectual music for which the Thomases are known — aural landscapes and poignant spoken word for open ears and minds.
Some tracks are like philosophical treatises, others are sonic explorations/experiments like “Bass-Wideband Tones,” or deep dives into the invisible sounds of nature with “Ocean Motioning.” All through the voice and poetry of Ijeoma Thomas acts like a north star for the cosmic musical explorations. It was recorded by engineer David James of Mudshark Studios in April 2024 with cover art by Oluyemi himself.
We had a satsang (a sacred gathering) with the wise and effervescent Thomas over Zoom from his home in California, about his worldview and approach to creative improvised music. The following interview has been edited for clarity.
You started off playing the clarinet. What pulled you toward the bass clarinet, a unique instrument that you’ve made your own?
My love for the bass clarinet came from Eric Dolphy. I knew I loved the clarinet because I started with soprano clarinet and then the alto, which I still blow. Then I moved on to saxophones. Lots of musicians start with alto and then move to tenor. So basically that’s what I did. Eric showed me what the instrument could do. He pointed me to my own voice. I love him. He’s still my teacher, you know, even though I do my own thing with it.
My bass [clarinet] sound was influenced by the bass singer of The Temptations from Motown, Melvin Franklin. When they had the Motown Revue in midtown Detroit back in the late ’60s, it was at a big theater called The Fox in Midtown. Oh, it was something! Everybody came up: Stevie Wonder, The Miracles, The Contours, The Supremes. But when The Temptations came, they were so clean physically and had impeccable routines. When they did “Old Man River,” Melvin Franklin would come to the mic and say, “Good evening, ladies and gentlemen,” in his deep tone. He hadn’t even started singing yet. I said, wait a minute.
I thought that Eric [Dolphy] was the cat. After years passed, I realized that I really have a love for the bass tone. And I love bass players like Henry Graham, William Parker and Alan Silva. I’ve done duets with many of them. What they do down in that register is just phenomenal.
The saxophonists helped me tremendously because they blew faster. I got a combination of slow, medium and fast. But that soprano sax just goes! That’s the fastest horn. But I can get it done going really slow. You guys are speeding, jetting through these things, which is fine. Because of the acrobatics of life, you have to tell stories fast. But the bass can come in and say, well, watch me hit one note and wipe out your whole phrase!
Did your love from music come from your upbringing?
My father loved jazz. He had these big 78 records, Duke Ellington, Count Basie. He loved Dinah Washington, Gene Krupa. My mother loved creative music too. And I have a younger brother who’s a phenomenal pianist, Kenn Thomas.
My older brother would turn us on for hours with Coltrane, Archie Shepp, Cecil Taylor. He helped me understand the significance of these people. We always made a point to talk to them when they performed in Michigan. You might sometimes see people as larger than life, but when you have a conversation things become a little bit clearer, and you feel like you can attain that or get to that place.
[My older brother] is also a member of the Baha’i faith. So he introduced that to me and helped me connect with the Baha’i faith and the worldview of Baháʼu’lláh. In other words, how to think beyond what you think you know. Baháʼu’lláh asks us to investigate and connect with that within yourself and all of the people, but also flowers or ocean and the other planets and the sea because they are creation. And it’s such a beautiful thing.
How do you distill the spirit into your playing and composing? How does that translation happen between those two worlds?
You trust. My parents helped me understand that there’s a spirit inside the hymns in Christianity. We went to church, so there’s a spirit in it. If you kind of relax and allow the music to permeate in you.
Ravi Shankar was a deep brother. The Indians take a certain tone and work on that one tone for many minutes until the vibration of it starts to happen. If I stay with this long enough, something can happen. I’m a throat singer on my horns because I get to a point. I sing through the horn and use the notes to cluster but I have to open and close them. If I sing through the horn and vibrate the reed with the clustering of fingering, now they become notes in themselves and pitches in themselves. It’s part of my vocabulary now.
The throat singers of all cultures, they’re on a different level because they’re … blending them together and doing harmonic structures and single notes and silence. They have another vocabulary that they have developed to do this.
I came upon this myself. Cecil Taylor and Coltrane, they got those moves so fast and would start expanding or contracting. Cecil Taylor would go into a trance with the music. I know because I’ve been inside his system and when I blew something, he’d give me three full interpretations for what I just blew. He’s doing his thing. And then he opens you to what you’ve done and gives you four or five variations of that. He’s taking quotes from everybody, reinterpreting them and still holding his interpretation. It’s almost like if this is a quintet, he’s a five-headed person. When we get into the world of prayer meditation, it’s beyond the word.
Do you feel like the bass clarinet gets its due in the world of improvised music and jazz?
The bass clarinet has more musicians, in whatever area of music, working that instrument than ever before. If I went back 50 years, it was just symphonic cats playing bass clarinet. But now, you even have rock cats blowing the bass.
This brings me to your connection to science and your background in mechanical engineering. This interconnection really speaks to the Baha’i faith as well, where there’s an equal respect for both science and faith.
Studying engineering, you get exposed to the relationship of the keys. The higher register, midrange and the lower register, along with velocity. That’s a science. Because first of all, just to move my finger, that’s a science. Because now I got motion or heat. I can stop it, flip it or clap it. But I didn’t think of it that way until I got into engineering study, working on a project with a vector engineer.
Were you playing music back then as well? Were they parallel?
Music was always number one. Even though I did engineering, I didn’t connect it to music. But then I said to myself, you are the same individual. So you need to look at it like that. I would go into the office and we worked on these huge power plants like the Montana power plant. I was doing this in San Francisco and they had gigantic generators and turbines, particularly the coal fuel plant. Then they also had nuclear fuel plants. These plants were supplying this particular Montana power plant project, which would supply electricity for the whole state.
I would come home, open the door and turn on the light. Then it cut to me. Man, what you were working on at work is what you just did. Then I started using engineering symbols like valves and piping for these blueprints and designs. That was fascinating. It was abstract stuff. But they had a codification in your ledger to define all of these things. So I wondered, what if I took these symbols and made them be what I want them to be?
So, you’re creating your own vocabulary?
That’s it! I even made a ledger. I said this symbol means something, and I blew that. You got a whole community and infrastructure of engineering that makes the whole plant operable. And when things come up we gotta troubleshoot. It’s the same with (musical) composition.
I’m glad I studied engineering because it helped me see the community of possibility with exactitude. And approximately exact. Because you don’t be too rigid, right? We’re human and we’re spirit together, both invisible and visible.
What has it been like to collaborate with your partner and wife, Ijeoma Thomas, for so many years? And could you tell me about your new album, Point, released with the band that you co-lead, Positive Knowledge? How did it all come together with your other collaborator, percussionist Robert Wallace?
Ijeoma is just a phenomenal poet and a phenomenal woman and I have the honor to work with her systems. It’s a marvelous gift. It works great because it keeps us fresh. Rob is a professor at Northern Arizona University and he loves creative music. He has an interesting vocabulary of how he visits the realm of sonics and how he reinterprets other collaborations into his system. We all got our systems and we tried to make them work together or invite them in and mash them up. And in other cases, we don’t mash them up, and let them mash themselves. So it’s a combination of both. I call it “comtuition,” composition and intuition — I put those two words together. JT