Meet Camille Kerani | Genre-Bending Saxophonist and UCLA Student

We had the good fortune of connecting with Camille Kerani and we’ve shared our conversation below.

Hi Camille, how has your work-life balance changed over time?
To me there is no balance. When you do something like play an instrument professionally, it’s something that becomes a part of you. For me, whenever I’m out, I constantly have the same thing on my mind. When you have a job that’s 9-5, you have hours where you’re at work, and hours where you’re done working. But music is 24/7.

I do think it’s important to have a balance in how you live your life, because all of those things are ultimately going to come out in the way you express yourself musically. To be honest I used to not believe in that when I was younger, because I was so focused on practicing all day and wanting to get better, but I think when you play music that’s so highly improvised you have to be really mindful of how you’re spending your time and the type of person you are/how you act because that’s what you’re going to sound like. So if you’re only spending your time in a practice room, your music is going to reflect that. It’s hard for me to let go of that, because it’s important to be sharp to be able to express yourself to the fullest, but I try to balance myself when I can by spending time in nature, reading, drawing, and being with people that ground me. I also started training capoeira during my time in Brazil, which I would say has been the most helpful to balance my mind, body, and spirit, especially with its deep connection to music and the type of music that I play since it comes from the African diaspora as well.

At this point, my main motivation for practicing is just to get to a point where I’m sharp enough to express everything I’ve experienced in real time when I’m improvising or creating. At this point, I just see my instrument as an extension of who I am. Improvisation is just a filter that I express my experiences and who I am through. So in that way, music is 24/7 for me because everything that I’m doing is going to build on who I am and ultimately what I make.

Since I’m a student, my version of work-life balance has always been very tied to school. I made the decision to study at UCLA instead of going to a conservatory, so a lot of what finding balance looks like for me right now has to do with my studies there. I got into the school for music, in their Global Jazz Studies program, but I recently added a minor in African American Studies as well. Going to a school like that while pursuing a career in music as well can be difficult at times because there’s so much to learn and you can just lose yourself in your studies. I think that’s a thing that a lot of people with creative minds have – the ability to go so deep in something that you lose sight of everything else. It’s definitely been something that’s tested me, and I’m still learning what my limits are and when to pull back from my hyper-focused state to give attention to the other things I need to do. I think that’s true outside of music and education too, and I’m grateful I’m learning those lessons when I’m still a student. But going to a school like that especially always makes me wish that there was more time in the day.

It’s always been a conversation with my parents as well – they were both elementary school teachers so they were always strict about school. I knew what I wanted to do from a very young age, I started working professionally playing sax when I was 11 or 12 years old, so there was already a lot I had to sacrifice in terms of how I lived my life and what my priorities were, but school was never something that fell by the wayside. They were always supportive and believed in me since it was something that I took very seriously, even at that age, but they always made sure I did my homework before I practiced or went to the gig. Now, I’m at an age where I have more freedom in the way that I structure my time, but those lessons never departed from me. Especially recently after spending time with Dr. Makhathini, I’m constantly thinking about how to bridge the things I’m learning in school or otherwise with the music I play. It’s all very connected.

Alright, so let’s move onto what keeps you busy professionally?
I’m someone with big goals and a large vision. Playing the instrument that I play, it’s easy to get pigeonholed into a box of either just being a jazz musician, which is a term I don’t like to identify with. I think as a culture we’re too obsessed with genres, and putting things in boxes. Part of that is human nature, I think, but I’m here to challenge that.

The type of person I am is someone who’s always listening. I was drawn to the saxophone when I was young in a way that I can’t exactly explain, my family would play a lot of different music in the house growing up so it was a familiar sound to me. I loved John Coltrane and Sonny Rollins, even more when I started studying the history of the music I play and seeing how large an impact they made on the music and on my instrument. But I was also hearing a lot of saxophonists like Fela Kuti and Manu Dibango, who became an even bigger influence for me once my uncle moved to Cameroon and I started to have connections with some of the musicians out there. I’ve been committed to learning as much as I can about the saxophone and prolific artists on that instrument since I started playing – I’m self taught originally so a lot of my study has just been through listening and playing things by ear, which has been something that has helped me a lot in playing improvised music. But I’ve never been strictly just into jazz.

The first music I would say I was deeply connected to on my own is actually punk, specifically hardcore and skate punk music from the 80s. My dad was among the wave of the first skaters in the East Bay in the early 80s, so that music has always felt very nostalgic to me since my introduction to it was through a family member. My mom has a very diverse music taste too. She loves classic rock actually, but growing up she would always play artists like Erykah Badu and Jill Scott for us around the house. When I started developing my own musical taste as a young teenager, that stuff was always very heavy in the rotation too. So I guess I’ve always been used to balancing a lot of contrasting things in terms of what I like and what I’m inspired by, because as a kid I was listening to neo-soul and R&B, while simultaneously going to a lot of punk shows and also learning about and listening to a ton of jazz music because of the instrument I play.

I actually really don’t like the term jazz and try to avoid using it when I can – a lot of musicians in the jazz world feel strongly about this as well because of the origin of where that word comes from. But I think the departure from this term, for us, represents the fact that the music we make expands beyond the limitations that boxes such as genres impose. Once you start breaking down these walls in your mind, you discover that a lot of music is connected because it shares a similar root. I always had known about this intuitively just because of all the different music I was hearing growing up, but it really became solidified in my mind after spending the time I spent living in Brazil, the trips I’ve taken to Cameroon to see my family out there, and recently, when I was in South Africa with Dr. Makhathini. A lot of people at this point will use the term “Black American Music” as an alternative to jazz, because it not only represents the music we call jazz but also its continuation into soul, rock, techno, hip-hop, and pretty much any other prolific music genre in the US and beyond. But my attention has really been on Africa lately. To me, that’s the common thread connecting not only all of our music in the US but in music from other diasporas such as Brazil and Cuba. It goes extremely deep, and once you know what to listen for, you really see that connection everywhere.

I think that’s why I feel so comfortable departing from people’s idea of what jazz music can sound like in the music I create. I’ve pretty much done everything with the saxophone, from spiritual jazz to hip hop to dub reggae to house music. I just put out a drum and bass record as well, which a lot of people weren’t expecting from me. But I do it because I don’t see those limitations. I really just feel like me and my saxophone are a filter for all of the things I listen to and enjoy, and expressing it in the way I do is a part of my artistry.

I’ve been playing for a little over a decade now, but most of that time feels like it was just training for me. Study and tradition are huge aspects of the music I play, so most of my time and energy was focused towards learning as much as I could about everything and being as proficient on my instrument as I could be. Even though I’ve been playing sax professionally for a while, I feel like I’m at the very beginning of my journey in terms of what it means to be an artist, especially now that I live in LA. There was a period of time, in my senior year of high school, where I was really grappling with the idea of what that meant for me. I had wanted to go to Juilliard for music since I was a little girl, and that year I ended up being one of less than 10 students that were accepted to their jazz program. For me to turn that offer down to go to Los Angeles instead was a very pivotal moment for me, and I think was the first instance of me believing in myself as an artist with my own specific vision and just trusting that. It was a difficult decision for me, and one that I think about a lot, but I never think it was the wrong decision for me. LA has a really unique musical climate because it’s the center of the recording industry, so you’re exposed to pretty much everything at a very high level.

I’ve worked with a few artists at this point that have really inspired me outside of the jazz world, which is something that has informed the sounds I put into my own music as well. This past Spring, I was brought out as a guest artist at Rolling Loud with Larry June, an artist who I’d wanted to work with for a long time. He had found me from a video of mine that blew up on social media where I was playing one of his songs, and his manager David Ali reached out to me asking if I wanted to play on the show. Which was so crazy to me because I feel like that’s something I manifested… When I heard Larry’s music for the first time I kept thinking about how awesome it would be if I could be a part of it somehow because I loved his sound so much and it contained so many of the things I love in other music as well. I’ve been playing with the band Thee Sacred Souls lately as well, with a horn section I formed together with my two friends, Julian Johnson and Steven Schloschberg on trumpet and trombone. We’re about to tour with them in the fall for sixish weeks across North America, which is my first time doing anything like that. There are a few other soul artists I’ve worked with who I’ve really enjoyed: I started playing with Aaron Childs, Billy Childs’ son, when I first got back from Brazil and that opened up my sound a lot too. I remember we did a show at Gold Diggers right after his dad won a Grammy and he ended up coming up to the stage and playing on one of his songs right alongside us, which was so cool to witness. In a lot of ways, that moment represents the connecting threads that run through all of this music. I’m doing a lot of different things that might seem like they don’t relate to one another, but the truth is they’re all connected, in the same way that everything I’m doing is connected.

If you had a friend visiting you, what are some of the local spots you’d want to take them around to?
School takes up a lot of my time currently so I can’t say that I go out a ton, but I would tell anyone to go to Gold Diggers on a Monday night to check out their jam session. It’s been my favorite thing lately to bring non-musicians into those types of spaces… it’s definitely a deep hang in terms of who is there and the type of music that is being played but that venue is always a fun vibe and the music and energy at those sessions is infectious. Sam First by LAX has another session on Tuesdays that is cool too, I don’t go all the time but I love going there as well. The ambiance of that spot is super nice too, I always love going on nights that they just have live performances just to be in the space. Other places I love are Tea at Shiloh, and BCD Tofu house and Wi Spa in Koreatown.

Shoutout is all about shouting out others who you feel deserve additional recognition and exposure. Who would you like to shoutout?
There are so many people I could shout out, but someone who has inspired and guided me a lot on my journey recently is South African pianist Dr. Nduduzo Makhathini.

Nduduzo is someone who I’ve been following for a minute, and I’ve always been very in awe of how he conducts himself as a musician and a thinker. It was a dream of mine to connect with him ever since I first heard his music in 2022 through a playlist Blue Note made. His album “In The Spirit of Ntu” had just dropped, and I only heard one track on that playlist, I think it was “Mama”. I immediately ran to the album to listen to the whole thing. I was so blown away, I remember listening to the record over and over again. I must have listened to it every day for at least a few weeks, often multiple times. When I started going deeper on his discography and learning more about him through some interviews and seeing the range of people he’s worked with, I just became more and more amazed.

Right around the time that I was really deeply checking out his music and work, I got an email from UCLA about a scholarship for music students in their jazz department to go to South Africa. It was the Hugh Masekela Centennial scholarship, they award it to one student every two years and sponsor their travel to South Africa with an open-ended itinerary of connecting with students and musicians. I applied for the scholarship in the Spring of 2023, right before the school year ended. By the time I heard back from them, I was already away in Brazil studying at a university there. Me and Nduduzo had connected right before I left; it just so happened that he was playing a show near my house so I got to talk to him for a long time. We had been in touch loosely ever since, just checking in on social media every now and then. It was unclear whether or not our time in South Africa would align because of his tour schedule, but I booked my ticket to his city just in case. I really feel like the universe was on my side with that one – he ended up being there the exact same time that I was.

It’s hard for me to even put into words the type of person that Nduduzo is or the things that I learned from being by his side in South Africa. The culture of the music that I play is really heavily based on mentorship and learning from your elders, who in turn learned from theirs, so I’ve been in a lot of situations like these where I’m with someone who I really respect and just trying to take in all of the lessons that come with that. But out of everyone that I’ve met and drawn inspiration from, Nduduzo has had the biggest impact on me. He’s such an incredibly deep thinker and musician; it’s like everything that is doing comes from the highest level of intentionality. I always look for that in the people I look up to, and the people whose music I enjoy, and I feel like it’s always there. But especially for Nduduzo, he is drawing from these very deep places that are so fundamental to who he is and his upbringing but is simultaneously reaching forward and drawing connections between the things he learns and knows because he’s a scholar too. That’s something that I admire a lot, and what I hope to do with my work as well.

Instagram: @camillekerani

Image Credits
Jeremiah Borbe (entercreativity.squarespace.com, @enter.creativity)