So how do you see, you know, coming out of this pause slash lockdown pandemic period,

how do you see these issues? I mean, obviously people,

I don't know about obviously, but it feels like there's an openness to, you know, audiences

and musicians to really realigning and, you know, possibly even really understand and look

at through a different lens, the idea of

bam and black American music and like where this music can go.

But how do you see that actually happening like with venues and clubs?

Because everyone's talking about this is like, I mean, there's the whole issue of like,

are people going to want to go into the vanguard where there's no windows and there's no,

there's bad ventilation and there was already disease being spread before COVID,

probably, you know, but I mean, even beyond that, like where do you see things going? Are you optimistic? Are you optimistic about the scene in the coming years? I am. Well, one thing I would say

with specific regard to BAM is I've seen a tide changing, really over the whole 10 years, but almost accelerated in this COVID era. I think last summer with that sequence of murders of Ahmed Aubrey and

Diana Taylor and George Floyd, that really gave the nation a pause that we really have a lot

of work to do in terms of race relations in this country.

And with each successive thing like this, and it's such an unfortunate price and a sacrifice that lives have to be lost.

Black lives have to be lost for America, develop a consciousness about themselves.

Like, at a certain point, it's just a price too high to pay.

But if anything can be brought about as a result of it, is that we become more serious,

and that the need to change becomes hopefully more dire. And I don't feel it's happened yet. It hasn't

gotten dire enough. We're still having these same conversations. But what I noticed with BAM,

now when I started BAM in 2011, we're like in the height of the Obama years. So most folks,

black folk, black folks included, thought we were already in a promise land.

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