Composer Hannibal Lokumbe on the Illusions of Time and John Coltrane’s Visionary Sheets of Sound

Photograph by Heather Khalifa for the Philadelphia Inquirer, 2019.

Lauren Coyle Rosen: What time is it?

Hannibal Lokumbe: This thing called time. It is such an illusion. People haven’t always had these clocks and watches like we have now. It’s easy to think they have, but it’s not the case.

Lauren: Do you mean that people had different ways of marking changes, or phases, or periods of things before?

Hannibal: Right. Nature is a clock, and it has always been there, available to everyone. People knew and moved by the position of the stars and the moon. You don’t feel the weight in the same way if you move with these arrangements, these ensembles that are all around us and are part of us, that we are part of.

Lauren: Do you mean that the wisdom of nature has its own rhythms and temporalities, and we remain most aligned or vital if we honor the movements of nature?

Hannibal: Absolutely. Even down to forms such as our bodies, our bones. We are born, and like the nature, we go through these different dimensions. If you think, for example, of people who never saw a clock – thereby not being, to my mind, belabored by a clock – they just lived. They lived according to what their spirits and bodies required. It can be difficult to remember that there were millions of people who lived without a clock and without the properties of a clock. We think that just because we have one, everyone had one.

Lauren: These measurements kept or marked by these so-called modern clocks, do you feel that they feed concepts of time in ways that hold us back as human spirits?

Hannibal: Yes, and how necessary is it to have this thing that we call time, which is really an illusion? Before our very eyes, we have all this change – within the seasons, for example. And even in things that we can’t see, on a molecular level, change is always happening. We do see it everywhere around us. The trees have to lose their leaves. These transformations are going on in everything, everywhere, all the time.

For me, the encapsulation of all that is music. This music thing, when we play, it’s always moving. That’s what Trane [John Coltrane] was trying to get a lot of people to see when they came upon it. No one questioned E = mc2 [Albert Einstein’s famous equation in his theory of special relativity]. When Trane said sheets of sound, that was his E = mc2. People couldn’t say, ‘By virtue of what I feel this man playing, I’ve got to believe in sheets of sound.’

The wind doesn’t just have one tempo. It has many degrees of tempo, f1, f2, f3, f4 – f5 means, ‘See ya later.’

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Leading composer and musician Hannibal Lokumbe and the cultural anthropologist Lauren Coyle Rosen recently have joined forces in coauthoring a new book on Lokumbe’s remarkable life and journeys in music, spirit, and liberation, coming out with Columbia University Press in October 2024.

Hannibal Lokumbe: Spiritual Soundscapes of Music, Life, and Liberation

by Lauren Coyle Rosen and Hannibal Lokumbe

The above exchange is not included in the book, but it gives a small glimpse of the spirit of the work.