Julian Joseph is acclaimed as one of the finest jazz musicians to emerge this side of the Atlantic and his career has been characterised by many ground-breaking advances: he was the first Black British jazz musician to host a series of concerts at London’s Wigmore Hall and the first to headline a late-night televised performance at the BBC Proms. We explore how jazz and life are both animated by the art of improvisation, the methodology that undergirds the educative offering of the Julian Joseph Jazz Academy, the instruments and symphonies that enchant him, the artists and composers he recommends to inspire us to adventure, and his message to those who feel like they have music within them, but aren’t quite sure how to get it out. Julian plays Gershwin with London Philharmonic Orchestra on 22 November – and subscribers to Field Notes have an exclusive discount on tickets. About Busy Being Black Busy Being Black with Josh Rivers is the award-winning podcast that centres and celebrates queer Black liveliness. Help these enlivening conversations reach more people, by leaving a rating and review. Thank you to our funding partner, myGwork – the business community for LGBT+ professionals, students, inclusive employers and anyone who believes in workplace equality. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Questioning and then breaching our limits is a salient and consequential concern — and a quest Elijah McKinnon undertakes as founder and executive diva of Open Television (OTV), a platform and media incubator for intersectional storytelling. Elijah’s insights into how their imagination is supported and encouraged by their pragmatism made me think and reflect on how I engage with my own; and we wax lyrical on a shared desire to become undone. We explore the difference between surrender and intentional release, the differing demands of and confusion between transparency and vulnerability, and refusing to be bound by other people’s ideas and labels. Elijah reflects on their stewardship of OTV, the care required to sustain artistic vitality, and how an entitlement to softness has transformed their sense of duty to themselves and the communities they love. About Elijah McKinnon Elijah McKinnon (they/them) is an award-winning entrepreneur, strategist and visionary from the future currently residing on planet earth. They are the founder of Chicago-based consultancy and creative studio People Who Care, which specialises in campaign development and management, brand strategy and identity and cultural productions exclusively for non-profits and grassroots initiatives. Elijah is the Co-founder and Executive Director of Open Television, an Emmy-nominated non-profit and web TV platform for intersectional artistry. About Busy Being Black Busy Being Black with Josh Rivers is the award-winning podcast that centres and celebrates queer Black liveliness. Help these enlivening conversations reach more people, by leaving a rating and review. Sign up for Field Notes – Busy Being Black's newsletter offering to encourage your wonderlust. Thank you to our funding partner, myGwork – the business community for LGBT+ professionals, students, inclusive employers and anyone who believes in workplace equality. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Help me shape the future of Busy Being Black by filling out this short listener survey: https://forms.gle/y7y3iQ7RPievyGFP8 Kokomo City takes up a seemingly simple mantle — to present the stories of four Black transgender sex workers: Daniella Carter, Liyah Mitchell, Dominique Silver and the late Koko Da Doll, who share their reflections on desire, confronting taboos, gender’s many meanings and the ways Black trans women are harmed by both structural and cultural impositions that render their lives less valuable than any other. The film is the directorial debut of D Smith, a veteran of the music industry who was shunned when she came out as trans. In creating Kokomo City, D Smith has captured an unapologetic and cutting analysis of Black culture and society at large from a vantage point that is vibrating with energy, sex and hard-earned wisdom – and tenderness, intimacy and humour. We explore how the artistic process that made Kokomo City possible reflects what D’s learned through her own survival, thriving and liveliness; the role of forgiveness in clearing room for creative expression; and creating art about Black LGBTQ lives that intentionally extends beyond the confining limits of mainstream LGBTQ media narratives. D says she was inspired to create a work of art that not only calls us to imagine and produce more and better options for Black trans women in the world, but also one that cis Black women, her brothers, uncles and father would encounter and which might provoke necessary and life-sustaining conversations about the world we want to inhabit together. About D Smith and Kokomo City D. Smith is a Grammy-nominated producer, singer and songwriter. She is the director of Kokomo City, which was executive produced by Lena Waithe, and the film won the Sundance Film Festival’s NEXT Innovator Award and NEXT Audience Award, as well as the Berlinale’s Audience Award in the Panorama Documentary section. Kokomo City is released in the UK and Irish cinemas on 4 August, 2023. A special thank you to Campbell X for always advocating for Busy Being Black and thus making this conversation possible. About Busy Being Black Busy Being Black is an exploration and expression of quare liveliness and my guests are those who have learned to live, love and thrive at the intersection of their identities. Please leave a rating and a review and share these conversations far and wide. As we continue to work towards futures worthy of us all, my hope is that as many of you as possible understand Busy Being Black as a soft, tender and intellectually rigorous place for you to land.  Thank you to our funding partner, myGwork – the business community for LGBT+ professionals, students, inclusive employers and anyone who believes in workplace equality. Thank you to my friend Lazarus Lynch for creating the ancestral and enlivening Busy Being Black theme music. Thank you to Lucian Koncz and Stevie Gatez for helping create the Busy Being Black artwork. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

At just 23 years old, Leon Benson was sentenced to 61 years in prison for a murder he did not commit. At 47 years old, Leon is a free man after his case was taken up by lawyers at the University of San Francisco Law School’s Racial Justice Clinic. Over 25 years, Leon consumed as much knowledge as he could get access to, which helped him explain the complex dynamics of not only his physical form in relation to confined space, but also of how his mind made sense of the injustice of his experience and the experiences of those like him. We explore the parallel experiences of those confined within and beyond the walls of prison, the awakenings and reckonings that helped him build emotional and psychic resilience and the near impossible task of embodiment in a place that traffics in sensory deprivation. We discuss the moments and people in 2020 that would be instrumental in his release and how people born guilty in America maintain faith in the idea of justice, which he believes is a natural human impulse and, like hope, is also a spiritual practice. About Leon Benson Leon's case was championed by The Racial Justice Clinic at the University of San Francisco’s School of Law and led by all-star attorney and author Lara Bazelon. The particulars of his case are the focus of season three of investigative podcast series Suspect. Leon performs as EL BENTLY 448 and shares his survivor's journey on Innocent Born Guilty, an explosive hip hip record full of poetry, philosophy and world history, inspired by Black-led social justice movements. Innocent Born Guilty is available now from Die Jim Crow Records. Throughout his incarceration, Leon was supported by family, friends and strangers on the internet, like Shannon Coleman and Steve Willet. For those interested in supporting charities in the UK addressing miscarriages of justice and prison reform, please consider supporting the work of Appeal and the Prison Reform Trust. About Busy Being Black Help me shape the future of Busy Being Black by filling out this short listener survey: https://forms.gle/y7y3iQ7RPievyGFP8 Busy Being Black is an exploration and expression of quare liveliness and my guests are those who have learned to live, love and thrive at the intersection of their identities. Please leave a rating and a review and share these conversations far and wide. As we continue to work towards futures worthy of us all, my hope is that as many of you as possible understand Busy Being Black as a soft, tender and intellectually rigorous place for you to land.  Thank you to our funding partner, myGwork – the business community for LGBT+ professionals, students, inclusive employers and anyone who believes in workplace equality. Thank you to my friend Lazarus Lynch for creating the ancestral and enlivening Busy Being Black theme music. Thank you to Lucian Koncz and Stevie Gatez for helping create the Busy Being Black artwork Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Writer and organiser Kenyon Farrow is fighting for better infrastructures of support for queer Black people vulnerable to and living with HIV. He trained as an actor before he pivoting to activism in response to the fault lines he saw emerging as gentrification, criminalisation and healthcare inequalities began to rock his personal and extended networks. He has since coordinated campaigns large and small, local, national and global at the intersection of public policy, public health and social justice. Today, we explore his upbringing in Cleveland, Ohio – including watershed encounters with gay Black film and literature – and the events that led to a hard pivot from acting to activism. He shares how his work at the policy level is work that centres queer Black liveliness, and speaks lovingly about house music and house music spaces as evidence of the ways queer Black communities create for themselves that which is often structurally denied: spaces of love, care, spiritual renewal and healing. About Kenyon Farrow Kenyon Farrow is a writer, editor and strategist working at the intersection of public health and social justice. Kenyon has a long and distinguished track record working in communities impacted by HIV. BET named Kenyon a "Modern Black History Hero". About Busy Being Black Help me shape the future of Busy Being Black by filling out this short listener survey: https://forms.gle/y7y3iQ7RPievyGFP8 Busy Being Black is an exploration and expression of quare liveliness and my guests are those who have learned to live, love and thrive at the intersection of their identities. Please leave a rating and a review and share these conversations far and wide. As we continue to work towards futures worthy of us all, my hope is that as many of you as possible understand Busy Being Black as a soft, tender and intellectually rigorous place for you to land.  Thank you to our funding partner, myGwork – the business community for LGBT+ professionals, students, inclusive employers and anyone who believes in workplace equality. Thank you to my friend Lazarus Lynch for creating the ancestral and enlivening Busy Being Black theme music. Thank you to Lucian Koncz and Stevie Gatez for helping create the Busy Being Black artwork. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Earlier this year, writer, actor and director Rikki Beadle-Blair gave an electrifying and affirming keynote speech at Let’s Debate, a conversation about creativity and culture in the UK, produced by arts commissioner Mediale with the support of Arts Council England. As Rikki does, his speech centred his insistence that marginalised communities create art unashamedly; and at a time of increased cultural and political disregard for queer life around the world, Rikki reminds us all that art-making is life-giving. So it feels like the right time to resurface our 2018 conversation, in which he asks us to pay closer attention to the beauty that abounds around us and within us, and to our role as creators of the worlds we want to inhabit. Watch: Let's Debate Keynote for Inclusivity and Relevance About Rikki Beadle-Blair Rikki Beadle-Blair MBE is a British actor, director, screenwriter, playwright, singer, designer, choreographer, dancer and songwriter of British/West Indian origin. He is the artistic director of multi-media production company Team Angelica. About Busy Being Black Help me shape the future of Busy Being Black by filling out this short listener survey: https://forms.gle/y7y3iQ7RPievyGFP8 Busy Being Black is an exploration and expression of quare liveliness and my guests are those who have learned to live, love and thrive at the intersection of their identities. Please leave a rating and a review and share these conversations far and wide. As we continue to work towards futures worthy of us all, my hope is that as many of you as possible understand Busy Being Black as a soft, tender and intellectually rigorous place for you to land.  Thank you to our funding partner, myGwork – the business community for LGBT+ professionals, students, inclusive employers and anyone who believes in workplace equality. Thank you to my friend Lazarus Lynch for creating the ancestral and enlivening Busy Being Black theme music. Thank you to Lucian Koncz and Stevie Gatez for helping create the Busy Being Black artwork. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Farzana Khan is the tender titan leading the transformative work of Healing Justice London, which works to dignify lives made vulnerable and to cultivate public health provisions for collective liberation. She's a writer, cultural producer and award-winning arts educator, and her work centres community health, repair and self-transformation, rooted in disability justice, survivor work and trauma-informed practice. We share a love for the poetic wisdom of Kevin Quashie and language and practices that engender tenderness. And our conversation today explores how Farzana and the team at Healing Justice London are thinking through and building new infrastructures that respond to the ongoing needs of vulnerable communities. Undergirding this work is Farzana’s commitment to holding and facilitating spaces that invite change through a deeper engagement with the world of feeling and wisdom in our bodies. We discuss the importance of attending to our grief, mobilising with an improved class consciousness and the long work of un-internalising hundreds of years of colonial thinking. Farzana calls on us to refuse the individualising thrust of the colonial regime, so we can then free ourselves for the transformative work of extending ourselves to each other’s aliveness. References in this conversation include: "Unworlding: an aesthetics of collapse", "the endless possibilities of open-source design" and Rehearsing Freedoms. About Healing Justice London Healing Justice London builds community-led health and healing that creates capacity for transformation. Working for and with communities surviving state and systemic oppression, Healing Justice London build towards futures rooted in dignity, safety and belonging and free from intimate, interpersonal and structural violence. Their practice nurtures the work of radical and holistic medicine to support our personal, collective and structural transformation. About Busy Being Black Help me shape the future of Busy Being Black by filling out this short listener survey: https://forms.gle/y7y3iQ7RPievyGFP8 Busy Being Black is an exploration and expression of quare liveliness and my guests are those who have learned to live, love and thrive at the intersection of their identities. Please leave a rating and a review and share these conversations far and wide. As we continue to work towards futures worthy of us all, my hope is that as many of you as possible understand Busy Being Black as a soft, tender and intellectually rigorous place for you to land.  Thank you to our funding partner, myGwork – the business community for LGBT+ professionals, students, inclusive employers and anyone who believes in workplace equality. Thank you to my friend Lazarus Lynch for creating the ancestral and enlivening Busy Being Black theme music. Thank you to Lucian Koncz and Stevie Gatez for helping create the Busy Being Black artwork. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

There is a divine vision for all of us and Mikael Owunna hopes his work can be a vessel for the transformation of our consciousness. Trained in the mechanics of bioengineering and empowered by the imaginative possibilities of photography, his artistic practice conjures queer Black people as embodied reflections of the black and brilliant cosmos. He does this work because he believes we, as queer Black people, are heirs to African cosmological traditions, which place us as the stewards of spiritual experience and as gatekeepers between the realms of the physical and the numinous. Our conversation explores how Mikael utilises technology to help us reencounter ourselves as divine beings, what 50 different expressions of queer Black liveliness taught him about his own capacity for self-actualisation and how art helps us push back against distorted images of ourselves. About Mikael Owunna Mikael Owunna is a Nigerian American multimedia artist, filmmaker and engineer. He is the Director of Mikael Owunna Studios, LLC., a full-service art production company, and the co-founder of Rainbow Serpent, Inc., a Black LGBTQ art nonprofit. His art emerges from the generative intersection of technology, art and African cosmologies, with the aim of reanimating our imaginative possibilities. About Busy Being Black Help me shape the future of Busy Being Black by filling out this short listener survey: https://forms.gle/y7y3iQ7RPievyGFP8 Busy Being Black is an exploration and expression of quare liveliness and my guests are those who have learned to live, love and thrive at the intersection of their identities. Please leave a rating and a review and share these conversations far and wide. As we continue to work towards futures worthy of us all, my hope is that as many of you as possible understand Busy Being Black as a soft, tender and intellectually rigorous place for you to land.  Thank you to our funding partner, myGwork – the business community for LGBT+ professionals, students, inclusive employers and anyone who believes in workplace equality. Thank you to my friend Lazarus Lynch for creating the ancestral and enlivening Busy Being Black theme music. Thank you to Lucian Koncz and Stevie Gatez for helping create the Busy Being Black artwork. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Many of us have an intimate and ongoing relationship to shame and shame forms part of a very public conversation about what it means to be queer in the world. And until my conversation today, which is with social worker and psychotherapist Rahim Thawer, I thought I had a pretty good grasp of what shame is. I was wrong. I wasn’t aware, for example, of how shame really operates, nor how it prevents the radical intimacy necessary for our collective liberation. Our conversation today explores how shame thrives on white supremacist ideas of desirability, how we learn to live with shame’s imprint and residue and the four defensive behaviours we exhibit to separate us from our shame. Rahim also shares why attempts to love ourselves before we can love anyone else will always leave us wanting; and says that contrary to the dominant culture’s insistence that shame is a problem for the individual to address in isolation, we must learn that love for yourself only develops in positive relationships with other people. For those who’d like to dive deeper, Rahim has a number of articles available on Medium. About Rahim Thawer Rahim Thawer works as a psychotherapist, clinical supervisor, facilitator and public speaker, sessional lecturer, writer and community organiser. Rahim is particularly interested in examining innovation in queer relationships. He has dedicated almost ten years to community organising with Salaam Canada, a national volunteer-run LGBTQ Muslim organisation. He was also a co-editor and essay contributor in a local history anthology entitled Any Other Way: How Toronto Got Queer. About Busy Being Black Help me shape the future of Busy Being Black by filling out this short listener survey: https://forms.gle/y7y3iQ7RPievyGFP8 Busy Being Black is an exploration and expression of quare liveliness and my guests are those who have learned to live, love and thrive at the intersection of their identities. Your support of the show means the world. Please leave a rating and a review and share these conversations far and wide. As we continue to work towards futures worthy of us all, my hope is that as many of you as possible understand Busy Being Black as a soft, tender and intellectually rigorous place for you to land.  Thank you to our funding partner, myGwork – the business community for LGBT+ professionals, students, inclusive employers and anyone who believes in workplace equality. Thank you to my friend Lazarus Lynch for creating the ancestral and enlivening Busy Being Black theme music. Thank you to Lucian Koncz and Stevie Gatez for helping bring new Busy Being Black artwork into the world. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Emily Aboud believes that art needs to be political. Whether in its critique of power or its provocation of joy and laughter, art must help move us towards freedom. Her cabaret-play, Splintered, gathers the first person experiences of 12 queer women in Trinidad and Tobago and weaves together these experiences to show how queer women living under threat of homophobic violence manage to cultivate and nurture intimacy, joy and resistance together. Emily says she made an explicit and intentional decision to avoid centring the trauma queer women know so well, deciding instead to let laughter, irreverence and satire act as the vehicle for a necessary critique of what post-colonial countries and cultures decide to hold onto. We explore Emily’s complicated feelings about carnival, her adoration of the mythic shapeshifter Lagahoo, and her challenge to what she calls the false binary between art and science. Emily says art and science are asking the same question in two distinct but connected ways and we discuss how Splintered is evidence of her scientific approach to theatre-making. About Emily Aboud Emily Aboud is a theatre director, a film director and a writer of mixed heritage, born and raised in Trinidad and Tobago, based in London. She won the Evening Standard Future Theatre Award in 2021. She is an associate artist at the Bush Theatre and Artistic Director of Lagahoo Productions. About Busy Being Black Help me shape the future of Busy Being Black by filling out this short listener survey: https://forms.gle/y7y3iQ7RPievyGFP8 Busy Being Black is an exploration and expression of quare liveliness and my guests are those who have learned to live, love and thrive at the intersection of their identities. Your support of the show means the world. Please leave a rating and a review and share these conversations far and wide. As we continue to work towards futures worthy of us all, my hope is that as many of you as possible understand Busy Being Black as a soft, tender and intellectually rigorous place for you to land.  Thank you to our funding partner, myGwork – the business community for LGBT+ professionals, students, inclusive employers and anyone who believes in workplace equality. Thank you to my friend Lazarus Lynch for creating the ancestral and enlivening Busy Being Black theme music. Thank you to Lucian Koncz and Stevie Gatez for helping bring new Busy Being Black artwork into the world. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices