Kevin Sur and Tory J photo courtesy of KEXP
BY DEVON LÉGER
Early Monday morning in Seattle, long before the sun comes up, the airwaves at KEXP open up to accept nearly every genre of music at once. Going beyond eclectic, KEXP’s new radio show airing 3 to 5am, Sounds of Survivance, unites a world of music under an Indigenous banner. Through jazz, metal, hip-hop, folk, country, ambient, indie rock, punk, and every other kind of music, each artist played on Sounds of Survivance has Indigenous roots somewhere in the world. It’s part of KEXP’s new suite of programming, and the brainchild of co-hosts Kevin Sur (Kanaka Maoli), who runs Artist Home, a local event production company known for the Timber! Outdoor Music Festival, and Tory J (Quinault), a self-taught guitarist, music scholar, and PhD student with a love for jazz and tricky time signatures. The goal is to show not only that Native musicians today can be found in any genre, but also that Native artists have been at the heart of many movements of music from the beginning. And though the show’s great fun to listen to and an excellent way to discover new artists, both Kevin and Tory have a much more powerful vision in mind for what they want to do at KEXP.
The spark for Sounds of Survivance came from former KEXP DJ Gabriel Teodros. Though KEXP had celebrated Indigenous Peoples’ Day in the past, Teodros pushed hard to step up KEXP’s focus, programming only Indigenous artists on his show that day, and working hard to get other DJs to do the same. Gabriel’s advocacy showed that KEXP could support fully Indigenous programming, though at the time there were no Indigenous DJs. “I’ve never seen somebody advocate as an ally and felt so seen by somebody in a place where I felt incredibly uninvited and unseen, you know, as a Native person,” Kevin says. “When I applied for this job, I made a point to say I’ve heard one Hawaiian voice [on air]. At 5pm in 2019, DJ Riz played [Hawaiian band] Kapena; it’s the only time in six years.” Tory came up with the name for the show, drawing on the academic work of Gerald Vizenor, who coined the term “survivance.” A portmanteau of “survival” and “resistance,” Tory says that survivance “was a repudiation of tragedy and victim narratives for Native people.”
Kevin and Tory both hold special space for jazz on Sounds of Survivance, driven by their own backgrounds, but also by a desire to reclaim Indigenous history in jazz. “If you look at the native roots of jazz,” Kevin says, “and you look at the long list, you might think ‘I’m looking at the list of the greatest most influential jazz musicians of all time.’” Names like Dave Brubeck (Modoc), Miles Davis (Cherokee), Duke Ellington (Cherokee), Charlie Parker (Choctaw), Don Cherry (Choctaw), and more attest to this. Many greats of the genre felt forced to hide their Indigenous roots. Both Kevin and Tory mention Mildred Bailey in particular, who was Indigenous from the Coeur d’Alene Reservation in Idaho, but had to hide her Native identity. Tory points out that Bailey had Seattle ties too, moving here in her early life to live with her aunt, later taking advantage of a functional West Coast touring plan between Seattle and San Francisco. For Tory, the Indigenous struggle for identity is the same as jazz’s struggle for acceptance in the Western mainstream. He sees jazz developing as a form of activism similar to the activism that was needed by Native Americans in the 60s and 70s to fight back against the institutional policies of the time. “We’re doing the same things that jazz artists did,” he says. “We’re continuing a tradition of reclaiming a sonic space through accompaniment and empathy for each other… I think that those sorts of processes, the ways that we accompany each other, the ways that we improvise and bring new worlds into being, those are animated through Indigenous activism and through, intertribal, interracial activisms. That’s one thing that’s really inspiring to me, vis-à-vis that connection between jazz histories, like the proliferation of jazz as an activist genre or an activist sounded act.”
Both of the Survivance DJs are looking at a bigger idea of Indigenous music than just North America. Kevin’s trying to focus on a definition of Indigenous that brings in more global struggles against colonialism. “To me,” he says “it’s learning how to center it on a shared struggle. Not your Webster Dictionary that just says ‘the original habitants of any place.’ I can do an Indigenous show on English people if that were the case. It’s really based on trying to understand the current predicaments and the current status of people around the world that are colonized.” He’s been playing Palestinian artists on the show, and has had to reject some Native communities that were not colonized. It’s hard, he says, because he’s constantly researching trauma. “Every once in a while, I just need to do a show that’s fun!” he says. For Tory, it boils down to the simple fact that “our ancestors didn’t call themselves Indigenous, right? Indigeneity itself necessitates an Indigenous-settler relationship. It might seem kind of restricting, but it opens things up a lot too, because it allows for us to analyze that relationship.”
For now, both Kevin and Tory have their heads down researching new Indigenous artists to feature on the program, and both have been looking at premiering new songs via the show as well. Kevin just wrapped the show’s first KEXP in-studio with fellow Kanaka Maoli artist Isabeau Waia’u Walker, and both are struggling a bit with the early timeslot and workload. “I’m spending so much time practicing words and making sure I get words right” says Kevin, “because that means so much to my people, and I want to hold the reverence for others that I would want people to have for mine.” They’re happy about the successes that have come out of the show, like other DJs at KEXP discovering artists from Sounds of Survivance and moving them into the station’s mainstream. They’ve come a long way in just under a year. Kevin chuckles looking back at his first interview with KEXP to host the show. KEXP asked him “What makes you an expert in this genre?” He replied “One, this isn’t a genre. And two, anyone who claims they’re an expert’s fucking lying. It’s really just someone who’s willing to do the research and willing to not stop, because the amount of work is gonna go beyond my lifetime.”
