Jlin: Vulnerability is my superpower

In the process of writing introductory profiles over the last five or six years for artists coming to both the Big Ears Festival and Oak Ridge’s Summer Sessions outdoor Americana concerts, I’ve had a string of conversations with some truly remarkable musicians, composers, conductors, and inventors. Ricky Skaggs. Bill Frisell. Shara Nova. Reggie Workman. Rodney Crowell. Nikki Giovanni. Wyatt Ellis. Greg Tardy. Elliott Sharpe. Rachel Grimes. Morton Subotnick. Aram Demirjian.

But none of these conversations prepared me for the one I had earlier this week.

I spoke for less than half an hour Tuesday morning with Jerrilynn Patton, aka Jlin, a native of Gary, Indiana now in her mid-30s who, since she was 20, has reshaped the topography of electronic music. Her impact on the art has been seismic, and in 20 minutes she filled my brain with so much to think about, I thought my head might explode.

Jlin’s collaborative album “Perspective” with Third Coast Percussion earned her a nomination for the 2023 Pulitzer Prize for Music. And if you are lucky enough to experience Jlin’s and Third Coast’s separate live performances at Big Ears (plus a rumored joint appearance) at The Point on March 21 and 22, your head might explode too.

Jlin never went to music school. She plays no conventional instruments. She dropped out of Purdue University and held onto a job at US Steel for four years. She experimented with electronic composition for three years before she was sure about diving in, but as soon as she did, she was on a path that led directly to collaborations with Philip Glass and Bjork and a masterpiece score for British choreographer Wayne MacGregor.

Jlin, a math brainiac who crushed Advanced Placement calculus in high school, is the living embodiment of a curious observation by the great John Coltrane: she’s “starting in the middle of a musical sentence and moving in both directions at once.”

I told Jlin that, after listening over and over to “Perspective” and after interviewing Rob Dillon of the Third Coast ensemble, I simply could not figure out how they made the record.

She said she just started from scratch. She visited Third Coast’s Chicago studio for a couple of days and made “field recording” samples of the countless instruments she found there. Third Coast owns a priceless collection of instruments, from around the world and from weird places like Office Depot and Hobby Lobby.

Following her standard methodology, she went home to Gary with her computer bursting at the seams, and she wrote a series of 60-second demos from her bank of sound samples. She sent them back to Third Coast, and then she fleshed out the demos they found interesting. Then they recorded acoustic performances of her electronic compositions. And I think she is now working in the opposite direction, remixing electronic treatments of the Third Coast acoustic realizations. It’s like a musical Möbius strip.

I don’t know that anyone has ever produced an album with this sort of process before, but the result was brilliant. She said “I want you to feel like you’re right there when I made the music.” It earned Jlin the Pulitzer nomination, and I’ll tell you why.

The Pulitzer Prize for Music has been awarded annually since 1943 “for a distinguished composition of significant dimension that has had its first performance or recording in the United States during the year.” And “Perspective” surpassed the “significant dimension” criterium. In some respects, it redefined the criterium. It also reinforced a metric that’s indefinable. Jlin sort of whispered it to me. “I like nothing more than when I can surprise myself.” And that’s the moment I fell in love with her world.

The Pulitzer Prize in Music has gone to Caroline Shaw, Oak Ridger Ellen Reid, Aaron Copeland, Samuel Barber, Gian Carlo Menotti, Elliott Carter, Gunther Schuller, Wynton Marsalis, Steve Reich, Henry Threadgill, and Walter Piston, to name just a few. The 2023 Pulitzer was shared by Michael Abels and Rhiannon Giddens, who will also return to Big Ears in March.

Rob Dillon (Third Coast Percussion founding member, director of development, and dashing performer) told me to ask Jlin about the three-word motto that describes her creative environment.

CPU. No, not Central Processing Unit. It stands for Clean, Precise, and Unpredictable.

CPU is not so much what Jlin aspires to as it is a set of boundaries. At least, that’s how I interpret it. Clean and Precise are really the same thing, and her compositions, in their electronic genesis, are inherently so. And because the unbounded breadth of her creative horizon is so encompassing, Unpredictable is also a given.

The motto, she told me, “pushes me.” When she adheres to it in her process of making new music, which she does at a dizzying pace, she said, “It’s the most transparent and honest I can be. There’s something priceless about these moments. It pushes me. It’s like going through a hurricane. You know, the only peaceful part of that is the eye, but getting to it and coming out of it, you get beat up a lot. To me, it’s kind of a beautiful vulnerability. A lot of people would say vulnerability is a weakness, but it’s my superpower.”

When was the last time you surprised yourself?

Jlin does it every day,

If you want to enjoy the intellectual depth and creative peaks of this beautiful person, listen to Jlin’s episode of the Kronos Quartet’s “50 for the Future” Composer Interviews on YouTube. You can also go for a ride through the hurricane with Jlin by watching her performance called “Sonic Cloisters,” also on YouTube.

And by all means, see Jlin at Big Ears if you can. She will most likely be featuring works from her latest album “Akoma,” which I’ll review after the Festival. It’s far-reaching in a totally new dimension.

The Kronos Quartet will also return to Big Ears in March. I wonder if they’ll perform any of their collaboration with Jlin in her tribute to Sun Ra, or the new string quartet she’s written for them.

It’s a beautiful world. Connect with it. Because like I said in my Third Coast preview, there is so much to learn at Big Ears.

John Job is a longtime Oak Ridge resident and frequent contributor to The Oak Ridger.

This article originally appeared on Oakridger: Jlin: Vulnerability is my superpower