We’re excited to introduce you to the always interesting and insightful Kevin Harris. We hope you’ll enjoy our conversation with Kevin below.
Hi Kevin , appreciate you sitting with us today to share your wisdom with our readers. So, let’s start with resilience – where do you get your resilience from?
The great Maya Angelou would often remind her audiences that “we have already been paid for”
I find continued resilience in knowing that my ancestors have sacrificed much so that I may have the privilege to live the life that I do.
I am also beyond grateful to my parents, mentors, and wife for the immense inspiration they continue to be.
Great, so let’s take a few minutes and cover your story. What should folks know about you and what you do?
As a national and international pianist, composer, and educator, I feel that these occupations allow me to inspire others (and myself) to become more creative versions of ourselves.
As a creator, a typical album, chamber work, or large orchestra work embody but are not limited to the likes of Nina Simone, James Brown, Tchaikovsky, Los Muñequitos de Matanzas, Miles Davis and Thelonious Monk.
At the beginning of December I will be releasing a new album titled “Embers”
With this new project, I seek to bring light to the hidden embers that continue to quietly burn throughout the curious history of our societies and the ongoing repercussions they hold. When these hidden embers catch fire, communities of all races, ethnicities, genders, and social status on local and global scales are affected. There are embers of courage, empathy, respect and embers of racism, classism, sexism and the like. The profound potential for positive action is limitless but it begins with an acknowledgment of patterns that keep us from becoming better versions of ourselves.
There is so much advice out there about all the different skills and qualities folks need to develop in order to succeed in today’s highly competitive environment and often it can feel overwhelming. So, if we had to break it down to just the three that matter most, which three skills or qualities would you focus on?
Looking back, the three areas of knowledge that were most impactful for my journey were perpetually told to me by members of my family and mentors, and colleagues that I’ve met along the way.
My mother, father, and close family members taught me that as a result of how blacks are often represented in a negative or less meaningful light in the media and society, you’re going to have to work 10 times harder than most people around you. With no excuses.
My martial arts instructors Jack Walker and William Green would often say to us “Mind over matter, What you think you become.” This and other early forms of meditation, my brother, Steven Biko and I ardently practiced along the way (with many failures and setbacks) slowly arriving at habits of determination and rigor that later allowed me to better understand more broad and complex philosophies of action and non-action by Lao Tzu, stoics like Marcus Aurelius, African Griots, American philosophers like Henry David Thoreau and Ralph Waldo Emerson, and perhaps the culmination of all of these philosophies in the likes of James Baldwin and Maya Angelou. (I’m still a student of course)
I also had wonderful mentors in music like Charles Little, Jay Flippin, Cecil McBee, Danilo Perez, Fred Hersch, and Terri Lyne Carrington. By their actions, they taught me to paint and carve of life what I know it could be instead of excepting it for what it is.
The advice that I would have for folks earlier in their journey is that they do their best to surround themselves with individuals who creatively, positively, and curiously inspire themselves to “stretch.” By the actions, of these individuals, they will hopefully be inspired to do the same.
Just like myself, it may take a while for you to find the rhythm and habits that warrant the manifestation of dreams, but ever upwards and onwards, and in time, you’ll arrive at where you’d like to be.
What do you do when you feel overwhelmed? Any advice or strategies?
When I feel overwhelmed it’s usually because there’s a lot on my plate and the culmination of limited sleep hits me at the same time.
As a frequent remedy, I try to take a few minutes to sit and close my eyes and actually talk out loud asking myself questions like: “What’s real Kevin?” And then I must respond this deadline, or that grant, or this phone conversation, or this commissioned work due date. By asking this question it often times helps me to allow feelings and opinions that I may have of myself or feelings and opinions that I think others may have of me to fall to the wayside so that I can see with better clarity the tasks at hand.
This is still a work in progress of course.
Ha!
I can ask myself questions that keep me in the here and now like “how is gravity acting on your body right now?
” What are my other senses picking up in this moment right now?”
These are all questions that bring me back to the moment and this is a good thing because the moment is the only thing I can do something about.
But as I said earlier, this practice is still a work in progress.
Contact Info:
- Website: https://www.kevinharrisproject.com
- Instagram: @kevinharrisproject
- Facebook: Kevin Harris Project
- Youtube: Kevin Harris Project
Image Credits
Yamaha photographer credit: Robert Torres
Previous page photo of Kevin Performing photographer credit: Luisa Harris
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