/ mō-ˈtēf /·noun.
A short idea that keeps returning — in a piece of music, on a canvas, in a life. The faint field of dots behind
every page here is one. It has been called the motif in this site’s code since the day it was built.
Frank Levy, piano · public domain via Musopen
Music has never been a hobby I keep at the edges — it’s how I rest, how I feel most
human, and, on the best days, something I’m lucky enough to make. That’s me below, junior year of high
school, at a recital I’d spent months preparing for. The piano is where I first learned that discipline and joy
aren’t opposites.
Junior YearHigh school · 2004
I’ve had the privilege of performing alongside a few of the artists I grew up
admiring; mostly, though, I’m just a devoted listener. Here’s some of what I keep coming back to.
There is no more honest music than jazz. It’s a conversation — players listening,
answering, taking risks in real time — and it taught me a lesson I have carried far beyond the
bandstand. Give me Art Tatum’s impossible hands, Duke Ellington’s
elegance, and Herbie Hancock and Chick Corea forever chasing the next idea. I even had the rare gift of
learning some of it up close: Charles Covington, a masterful pianist and organist, was my
professor at Howard. He found jazz through a high school principal who played Erroll Garner over the
intercom, which is why Garner is up there too.
Someday My Prince Will ComeHank Jones, Chick Corea, Hiromi and Austin Peralta. Tokyo Jazz Festival, 2006.
Classical
Classical is where I go for scale and stillness — music built to outlast the people who wrote it.
I’m a lifelong Chopin devotee, and I keep close company with Mozart, Beethoven, Bach, and
Rachmaninoff. It reminds me to think in centuries, not quarters, and that some things are worth doing for
no reason other than that they are beautiful.
Gospel
Gospel is where the music and the faith become one and the same. It’s the sound I was raised on
and still return to — James Cleveland, the Clark Sisters, Richard Smallwood, Smokie Norful, Shirley Caesar,
and the incomparable Mahalia Jackson. There is a joy in it that doesn’t deny the hardship; it rises
straight through it. When I need to remember what I believe, I don’t read — I listen.
Hip-Hop & Rap
Hip-hop is the sound of making something from nothing — a corner, a hard season, and a secondhand
turntable turned into an art form that conquered the world. It’s the closest thing I know to my own
story: where you start does not decide where you end. Jay-Z is my north star here — more than any
businessman I could name, I’ve modeled my own steps as a builder on his, from the corner to the
catalog to the boardroom. Alongside him: Biggie, Tupac, Young Jeezy, Lil Wayne, Rick Ross, and J. Cole
— poetry
with a pulse, truth delivered where softer forms get ignored.
Beyond category
Some of what I love refuses to sit in a single box, and I love it all the more for that. The Beatles and
the Bee Gees. Michael Jackson. Luther Vandross. And Motown — all of it, always. If it
carries that much soul, I have never needed a genre for it.
“The best things happen when you leave room for someone else to speak.”
— what jazz taught me first, and life kept confirming
