A LETTER FROM THE EDITOR

Though the last day of summer is technically September 22, (and we have a lot of unbearable heat yet to come) when Labor Day rolls around, it always feels like the close of something sweet. It is for this reason that Sonic Summer ‘26 is in your hands today— urging us to celebrate and bask in music, words about music, images that crystallize moments of live music such that we can savor them for a long time.

Julius B. Fleming, Jr. published a stunning piece on Lorraine Hansberry and Nina Simone titled “Anticipating Blackness” in South Atlantic Quarterly in 2022. In it, Fleming closely reads Simone’s performance of “I Wish I Knew How It Would Feel to Be Free” at the 1976 Montreux Jazz Festival—specifically her right arm moving through the air as she sang. I have watched the video on loop since reading Fleming’s piece. I’ve come to the conclusion that however much footage we have, Simone’s performance is not frozen but fleeting. The lyrics, which as Fleming offers “lead [Simone] to speak with a different grammar (moving from the conditional to the declarative), to alter the temporality of black freedom…” (138) make material Simone’s wish. And the fleeting nature of this moment in 1976 makes it all the more salient, more beautiful: fundamentally shifts the way we enact time. Through this performance, utterance becomes freedom.

All in all, it feels right to think of sound as liberating—right that we enter this mixtape through Ahalia Persaud’s perception of what that liberation might mean to the ear. It feels right that today, wherever you are, however you are considering the ways we toil daily (and the desperate need to make those ways more equitable for our collective survival) you can have a soundtrack to savor the tail end of summer.

With love,

Kameryn Alexa Carter