Joy Harjo
speaker
82 appearances
1 recordings
1 series
first heard Apr 2025
last heard Apr 2025
Joy Harjo’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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Appearances
But I think it's not just for me the poet, but I think that's something useful for anyone that you can sit and, you know, you might do it through painting or the song or writing because we all have things we say we regret or people who go we can't talk to. And you can do it. You can sit and write it and talk to them. Thank you for that. The book is beautiful. Do we have more cards? Yes, Joy!
Do we have more cards? More cards.
Three. We'll do three.
What's the biggest risk you've ever taken? Recently... I sat in. To me, this is the biggest risk. I sat in at the Blue Note in New York.
I played a song. I played a song. So we need the context of this.
I did. I'm friends with Esperanza Spalding, and she was doing a two-week run at the Blue Note. She sold out, I think, every show. Yeah, she's incredible. She's incredible, and she's real. I mean, that's the thing about it. I think what maybe is that she's absolutely who she is. She's very generous and very humble. And as a mute, she's in that space. And I'd played with her.
We just, you know, improv. We're friends. Yeah. But this is different. Yeah. I mean, she said, oh, why don't you sit and do a song, you know, do a piece with, you know, with a guitar player who, you know, and the drummer. And so I couldn't say no. I mean, I thought about it. Of course not. No, I thought about it. I mean, I thought about saying no. Well, what would I feel like if I said no?
Well, I would feel... I would feel very disappointed. Yeah. Like I should have done it, and I don't want any should-haves.
But I'm sitting down there in one of the seats with my horn on my lap waiting to be called up, and I'm thinking, what if my horn messes up? So then you have to have – It's just the Bluto.
I know. It's just that. I know. I love that club. I often go there. If I go to New York, that's where – maybe that's where I should go tonight.
Yeah. I sat there with my whore. And I got up there. But then the thing I've learned, because I used to have a horrible stage fright. It was bad enough when I was just doing poetry, and then I picked up horn when I was almost 40 and learned to play mostly on stage.
But the thing I learned was that if I just listen to the music, and that's even if I'm just reading or even doing a wild card, that if I just listen to the music, I'm okay. Yeah. But I did it. You did it, Joy! No, to me, that was like bungee jumping from the bridge at the Royal Gorge.
Well, yeah. I mean, they're just wonderful musicians. And the thing I was taught early on is to play with people better than you.
That's how you grow. Yeah. Okay. Three more.
I'm like, well, like, okay, there's two, there's several parts of me. I'm like, my mother used to write music, and she would write these really kind of sad ballads. However, she wrote a song that my sister just gave it to me, and it was, she typed it out. She didn't capitalize everything, and I love the way she wrote jazz, J-A-S-S. This was in the early 50s. It's called My Guy.
We just recorded that song with Esperanza. We just recorded it for my next album from Folkways. And it's so cool. It's my mother's song. So that's an up one. And I like that because it's so up. And most of her songs were these really heartbreak ballads, sort of like Patsy Cline and Crazy. And I love those scraping the bottom of your heart ballads. You know, Nat King Cole.
Yeah, Nat King Cole. And then I like funk. My most played artist is James Brown. I mean, can't go wrong.
Well, it is pointed. I keep thinking a lot of the problems we have going on right now are because of belief systems. You know, how powerful. I keep thinking about how powerful and potent beliefs are.
The middle. The middle. Number two. Okay, number two.
Tremendously. If I think about God before they were words, it has to do with the sunlight or the rainbows and sunlight or that kind of joy. A kind of resonance that goes through everything. And I think kids have that. And then I remember going to church and God being very much like an image of Jesus or an illustration of an elderly white man. And that was the next implanted image of God.
Showing 41–60 of 82 · page 3 of 5
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