Ionne Finds A Way Forward

“Rocket,” from New Havener Ionne’s For Those Who Remain, begins with a plaintive triad from a piano. A woman’s voice, clear, calm, and resolute, asks questions. ​“Why are we expecting someone else to save us? Why do we think that there’s someone else coming to save us?” she says. Other voices chime in, about social justice, racial equity, environmental repair. The beat accelerates; the music hurtles forward. Ionne floats over the top: ​“They all said we’d heal / On a rocket to paradise / I can’t help but feel / Like we’re running away,” he sings.

As the music intensifies, so does Ionne’s vocal, tilting toward hip hop:

He found a gun when he was looking for an easier way
He packed a Glock when what he needed was a bulletproof vest
To guard his honor and his story and the life in his chest
Against the people trained to see him as the problems he caused
Instead of looking at the system as the source of the fraud
Inside a planet that produces freely more than we need
They told him settle for a dollar and a handful of seed
That afternoon we saw him laying with a slug in his back
And while the cops said he’d been running there were phones that had tracked
The truth

The song ​“was inspired by a lot of events that have been ongoing, specifically police brutality in communities of color,” said Ionne, a.k.a Dr. Maurice L. Harris. Like many, he followed the news, and the steady drumbeat of Black deaths at the hands of police officers in the past several years that gave rise to the Black Lives Matter movement.

But as a student and teacher of racial justice and reconciliation — he holds a Ph.D. in ethical and creative leadership with a specialization in Martin Luther King, Jr. studies from Union Institute and University — Harris noticed that ​“media attention tends to be on the specific incidents,” while he hoped to shift the focus to the ​“systemic issues that give rise to the specific incidents.” Not for the first time, his academic and professional work informed his music, about ​“getting to the idea of really interrogating systems that create these self-fulfilling prophecies … and looking at what role we all might play in changing the system.”

For Harris, this requires ​“being introspective” in ​“identifying and dismantling our own power in these systems,” he said. As a society, ​“we are enamored of the idea of a mission to Mars or living somewhere else, when there are so many problems here.” Without that introspection, Harris worries that even if we succeed in developed manned interplanetary travel, we’ll just take our problems with us.

This set of ideas feeds not just ​“Rocket,” but all of For Those Who Remain, a scintillating album that encompasses synth pop, hip hop, dance music, and just a bit of jazz, yielding music that first catches the ear and the feet, but finds its way to the heart and the mind.

Harris, who serves as director of marketing and communications for the Schwarzman Center at Yale. He moved here in January 2020 from Vermont, where he was diocesan communications minister for the Episcopal Church in Vermont. But his career began in the music industry — artist management, music production, and music licensing — and music has been a ​“running thread” throughout his life, he said. He has written music for Guiding Light, Another World, As the World Turns, and Making the Video on MTV. In the music world, he has worked with Grace Jones, Pocket Size, Blessid Union of Souls, LaKiesha Berri, Jennifer Fouché, and guitarist Rod Harris, Jr.

Harris was born in Riverside, California, but as part of an Air Force family, he grew up in ​“a little bit of everywhere,” he said, from England to Florida and Georgia to Germany. ​“Air Force was all I knew from the age of four to adulthood.” His time in Germany turned out to be formative. ​“Musically that was a very important period,” he said, as it was the beginning of his deep dive into the possibilities of electronic music and electronic instruments, which could create textures and timbres acoustic and electric instruments could not. With electronic instruments, Harris could ​“manipulate waveforms until they sound the way I want them to sound, feel the way I want them to feel.” He hears the fruition of that time in his music now. ​“Soul II Soul, Erasure, Pet Shop Boys, James Cleveland, Walter Hawkins,” he said — ​“all of those influences really converge” on For Those Who Remain.

At the time, he said, ​“the high school had procured a CZ-5000,” a now classic Casio synthesizer. ​“I begged my instructor to borrow it over the summer.” The instructor agreed, and Harris began recording music, and acquiring synthesizers. His first purchase was a Yamaha DX-27, and his collection just ​“grew from there,” to 11 or 12 synthesizers. Starting about a decade ago, with further developments in electronic music, ​“I’ve scaled back to a more minimalist approach, and making the software itself the instrument,” Harris said.

Harris began writing the songs of For Those Who Remain in June 2020, but the inspiration for it came two years before that, when Harris was working on another project called The Garden, dealing with racial healing and reconciliation. He wanted to ​“dive into the intersection between environmental and racial justice,” he said, knowing that ​“I’m not the first artist to deal with these issues.” Among the trailblazers in this regard, for him, was acclaimed science-fiction novelist Octavia Butler, who died in 2006 but whose influence now looms large over the current literary and musical landscape. Her novels themselves are landmarks of Afrofuturism, which Harris described as ​“an important element of my own creative aesthetic.”

“It wasn’t something I consciously used to describe myself,” Harris said of the Afrofuturist label. But it was ​“how I found that listeners were describing my work. I appreciated that. I embraced that.” Upon further reflection, ​“it occurred to me that I hadn’t consciously embraced it because it’s my day-to-day reality,” of being a Black man living in American and an artist looking to create work that partakes of but isn’t hemmed in by genre. Some of the core tenets of Afrofuturism — about using creativity to embrace change, foment transformation, and transcend boundaries, in both artistic and broader social work, making them one and the same — also converge with Harris’s academic work.

“My doctorate is in ethical and creative leadership,” Harris said, but he is quick to see that ​“it has so much to do with music production.” He has drawn particular inspiration from a mode of thinking called Theory U, a set of ideas about learning and management that helps innovators from the arts to business to social movements break out of old, ineffective patterns of thinking and establish new ones. For Harris, the ideas of Theory U help him to ​“be intentional” about his music making, beginning with understanding what he is drawing on — from the news to larger historical moves to his own lived experience.

“You have to go inside yourself and digest and synthesize,” Harris said. But it’s also about figuring out exactly who he imagines the audience for his music to be. ​“This was part of the reflection process,” he said. He taped some early conversations he had about the music with colleagues, and some of those appear in songs on the album. In a sense, those talks helped complete the project. ​“In the conversations, there was an arc and underlying thread that I thought was articulated beautifully,” he said.

But in another sense, Harris never imagines that the music is ever totally finished; the possibilities for growth and change continue even after release. ​“I’ve heard it said that perfection is an illusion,” he said. ​“I put an asterisk by ​‘album,’ recognizing that one can go back and revisit this work and rework it in other ways, or that other artists may want to rework it.” He wants ​“to never think of it as etched in stone,” but more ​“as a prototype,” engendering ​“ways of seeing that will continue to evolve snd change.” Through that approach, he said, ​“the work avoids becoming didactic — it doesn’t preach to the listener about how they should think and feel, but rather inspires further conversations about racial and environmental justice.”

In that sense, the music can serve as a kind of map, a model of a process, for how to find your place in the work of social change needed to address the problems of our time. ​“By virtue of stepping on a stage, the artist becomes a leader,” Harris said, humbly. ​“I accept that.”

Ionne’s For Those Who Remain is available on Bandcamp, Spotify, iTunes, Amazon, and other platforms.