When I first met Milford Graves for a private tutorial he asked me to play something for him and almost immediately stopped me. “Why are you playing a ride pattern on the ride, man? Play something else.” I started again, “Stop. Stop, man.” Big pause. “Something else.” I had already played what to that point in my life were the two rhythms I felt I had the most dexterity and style in. I begin again. He stops me three notes in. “Who are you trying to communicate with, man?” Pause. “What are you trying to communicate?”

The question of communication was paramount to Graves, and in the myriad interviews he gave he authored a prismatic methodology of communicating energy, frequency, vibration, analysis, gravity and experiential learning, using his body as the membrane to both receive and transmit frequencies and energy. Ralph Ellison wrote, "Who knows but that, on the lower frequencies, I speak for you?” and Graves was intimately attuned to all of the lower frequencies as well as the who, the I, and the you, that make up the three and what that communicative ratio, three, is. The three in response to everything else.

He was obsessed with the three as deeply as James Brown or George Clinton were obsessed with the one. But the three of course is a triangle, the strongest shape, and it can’t be reduced further but also has the generative possibilities that nature has and that square, even things don’t. Put against a 2 and it’s a polyrhythm in and of itself. 
“Listen to your heart,” he said. “It’s all there. Have you ever closed your eyes and listened to all the rhythms in your body? All the patterns are already there, man.”

This conceptional/conceptual gambit was presented to me in perhaps the first 20 minutes of instruction. As a pedagogical framework it is a push to not have the student be beholden to the teacher, the expert, the power relationship, the lectern, the tenure, and student debt. A student is at once beholden to themself. Graves’ pedagogy encourages the student to immediately move away from the institutional framework, the same way he moved the trap set away from the grid, clock hashes and calendar squares.

He asked you not to respond to the mandates of a scene or “a set” but to look at nature. If you can’t find nature then just go ahead and look inside yourself because you are nature too. And so the pedagogy was of the heart, the garden, the air, and of course, the mantis. When he describes the mantis he says, “I’m going to have to evaluate the whole situation.” Not reevaluate, evaluate – that is to build the analysis up from earth, seed, photosynthesis, to the mouth, transubstantiation, the body. Argo, as the writer Maggie Nelson would have it.

Graves, who was called, “Prof” even in his neighbourhood of Jamaica, Queens, arrived at Bennington College at the invitation of composer and organiser Bill Dixon in 1973. Prof recounted the story at the Rotterdam Film Festival in 2018. “Bill calls me up, I said, 'Bill, I don’t wanna teach on no college campus right now, I don’t think I want to get into academia.'” And he said one thing to me, he said” – and he does a pretty great impersonation of Dixon here – “‘Graves, you will be getting a paycheck.’” Graves took the job.

When I was at Bennington as a student with Prof, and going to Bill’s house on the weekend, other musicians found it an odd pairing, as though I had split myself between two competing ethoses. But one only has to hear the monumental 1984 recording of a Dixon/Graves duo that’s been circulating for years as a cassette bootleg to understand that the possibilities of listening and real-time decision making were paramount to each artist. In the course description for Prof’s ensemble class it said we would be studying “pre-cognition” as in “the future”. Dixon and Graves both explained to me the importance of a pension. Dixon said that when he got to Vermont, “They didn’t even have Black shoes.” Different futures to accommodate.

Many descriptions of Prof refer to him as a shaman. This description belies an ignorance of the shaman’s role in traditional cultures, because while shamans are of the community in their culture, they typically exist as separate from that community. This is reductive. Prof was a kaleidoscopic, emergent, generative possibility of a human but he was of and in several communities, actively. He taught one day a week at Bennington and at his home in Jamaica, he ran, hosted and organised – first in his basement and then his garage – a collective called the Closed Door Yara Temple. Closed Door as in, “you can’t look it up in the phonebook,” says Jake Messina Meginsky, director of the feature documentary Milford Graves Full Mantis.

The 19th century abolitionist Sojourner Truth sold cards bearing her photo to raise money for the myriad causes she was invested in. The text reads, “I Sell the Shadow to Support the Substance.” While Professor Graves affected dozens if not hundreds of students at Bennington, that was the shadow. The substance was Yara, the system he invented, in the community, in Queens. Yara began in 1969, four years before his tenure at Bennington. Many people gloss over the meaning or importance of Yara in his musical biography – a hyphen maybe, a neat thing he also does like gardening, focusing instead on the fact he had a gig in academia. A flyer from a shared bill with the Last Poets in 1969 shows a drawing of Graves extending a fist in a strike with the words, “Ya'ra-The Black Way of Self Protection.” Prof was at Bennington one day a week at the Black Music division (it was dissembled by the college in the mid-90s) and Yara two days a week, 4–10 hour sessions with no breaks. One very white, one very Black. Bennington students attended classes with Professor, one day a week, for four years, tops. With Yara it was decades of experiential learning with some students working out at the temple from 1970 until the present, no summer vacations, no spring break.

I asked long time participant at the temple Wendell Orr, seen in Full Mantis, who began at the temple in 1988, about the connection between Prof’s label Self-Reliance Productions, that naming, and Yara. In a roving conversation about time, futurity, the difference between possibility and impossibility, he turned it back on me, “As African-Americans when have we ever been safe? Comfortable? Secure?” It was like being hit by my own hand, over the phone. When I described to Orr the first meeting with Graves in private tutorial his question was: “When he asked you who you are trying to communicate with, what did you do in that pause? Not what did you think about or how did you answer. What did you do?” The multiplicity of intervals seems to exist in Yara also, even over the phone, in language.

I sought out Graves for pre-cognition, to recognise futures, but rarely if ever shared that goal with others. Orr said without prompt, “The man speaks to the future and what you are trying to language out in this writing is an experience. To see, interpret, feel, be in those moments – it isn’t anything that hasn’t been here already, but when it comes from an African-American experience and expression, America has proved that it isn’t ready.”

Read Alan Licht's cover interview with Milford Graves in The Wire 409 from March 2018. Wire subscribers can access the piece via the digital archive.