Becoming An Art: Friend, journalist, bandmate remembers Isamu ‘Som’ Jordan through Terrain art show

The voice of Our Generation, the poet, the critic, the documentarian, the historian, the spokesman, the promotor, the emcee, the writer who kept music alive in this city more than any other person in our time – the artist.

I came to The Spokesman-Review in the opening days of 2008 excited to finally be a member of the staff, but also to meet him. By October we’d still be at the beginning of our friendship, living through the largest recession of our working lives, and out of a job. A job we’d both wanted for as long as we could remember.

What followed was a hard year at the start of a difficult decade, but let’s start with the nine months that would shape the rest of my life.

When I started at The Review it was just the usual photo assignments coming across my desk – the retirement of a long-time physician or a high school football game shot on Friday-night deadline. I loved the rhythm of the newsroom, the daily miracle of publishing an entire book’s worth of photos and stories every day, the constant flow of people and ideas being discussed, learning about the city one person at a time.

Then one day while I was editing a photoshoot, Isamu Jordan wandered into the photo department and sat down at my desk, probably in his signature Flash hoodie over a biz-casual button up and slacks. That could be a memory lapse by how often I’d see him in that exact outfit, but he definitely made me feel cooler just sitting there at my desk. Then Som, as most everyone knew him, told me what he was dreaming about for the next issue of Spokane7 magazine.

For those who don’t know, “7” was The Review’s music and arts section that was included as a pull-out weekly in the newspaper and available on newsstands every Friday alongside the Inlander. Som had spent his career building space for the arts in the paper, and was a fierce promoter of local talent while also a part of the scene himself.

His career was already a storied one. He’d arrived at The Review in the ’90s. He was among the inaugural class of high school reporters hired to write and publish a weekly section of the newspaper called Our Generation. Som was just a teen, but a quick study, a diligent reporter, and a fast friend to almost everyone at the paper. I mean, he taught Shawn Vestal about how to enter the WuTang, so you know he was a special dude.

Me and Thuy still do this for living

With or without the 4th Floor yo we still gettin’…

Cash, check, American Express

Visa, debit, food stamps, credit

truth, lies, media, spies, bribes

Blackmail my soul won’t sell cuz I’m a

Black male my soul won’t sell

Som would say he was “born and raised on the fourth floor” – a reference to the editorial family of writers and photographers, designers and editors on the fourth story of The Spokesman-Review’s downtown building. It still is where the newspaper is produced, though with significantly less people now.

This became a regular occurrence, me and him meeting up in the middle of the newsroom, talking out his vision for that week’s magazine, and brainstorming like a cypher over his cubicle wall.

If there was a desk at the newsroom that summed up a journalist’s, it was Som’s. Every flat surface was piled with reporter notebooks and stacks of plastic CD cases of local musicians across genres. Show posters covered almost every inch of the fabric walls.

It was a promising time for music and the arts in Spokane. Terrain had their first art event that year, the city was alive with local venues and bars with regular live music, and national acts put Spokane on their tour schedule for the first time. Som was seeing it all, and preaching it to whoever would listen.

We knew we couldn’t do it alone, so Som brought in Thuy-Dzuong Nguyen, the soft-spoken and quick-to-see-joy writer who he would come to call “The Queen Bee Black Widow Silent Assassin.” Creating the magazine together is where she proved what that title meant as she produced all of Som’s content and videos and broadcast him into the pre-social-media internet. Together the three of us were doing it, day in and day out, writing stories, creating photo concepts and cutting videos. Nothing seemed impossible as long as Som was running it.

I was always creating the visuals for the next issue in my mind and looking forward to hanging out in dank basements and hot garages with bands all over the city. We set up portrait sessions and cracked PBRs with musicians while listening to early mixes of their new songs. Som also encouraged me to work on my own music and was there standing against the back wall at my first show. He was a friend to anyone in the pursuit of art.

I’d never been a part of anything like it or learned from anyone like him. A community leader who could write and walk his talk, who could find commonality with anyone, who understood what it meant to pursue a passion, and who saw the musicians in this city as equally talented and as worthy as anyone famous. It was more than a job, and I was happy to spend my Friday nights at work with the most creative folks in the city. More than anything, it reminded me of my college newspaper days in Pullman.

The Daily Evergreen is the student-run newspaper where I’d just missed Som a decade earlier. He graduated the year before I started as a photographer there, but the memory of him remained large in the legacy of stories he’d left. As the Editor-in-Chief he had led a newsroom protest against the newspaper’s general manager for going back on a promise to stay out of the editorial decisions – something similar to the traditional separation of editor and publisher. Som published an issue of protest to call out this overstep of boundaries – an entire paper without any stories, just ads. It made national news.

There’s a spirit in those student newsrooms, the mix of the awakening of creativity and community that feels more like participation in culture than mere reporting. I’d only rarely felt it since, but working with Som at The Review, telling the story of the city where he was born and the city I came to call home, we both were in it again.

Every week we were creating together – digging into the art of the city, telling the stories behind the music – the people who were giving Spokane its persona. The arts are after all what shows us who we are, individually, but also together as a community. I didn’t know that then, but Som did.

The night lights when I strike like Shazam

I got laid off but I’m still the best Spokesman

A positive emcee that’s worth quotin’

My kinetic energy will getcha neck movin’

Those months ended unexpectedly Oct. 1, 2008, when all three of us were called into an emergency newsroomwide meeting and had our names called out as we were laid off with nearly 30 others. I got my nine months in, Thuy her two years, and Som his two decades. A historic run and the end of an era.

The recession had already crippled the news business and many other industries. “Nothing unusual” and “brutal,” were the quotes from the paper’s publisher and an editorial spokesperson, respectively, in a story about the layoffs. I wanted to be angry about that, but really I understood what they meant. It hurt to be rejected by a family when you only yearned to be a part of it. I also knew that it was nothing unusual to see all the other journalism families torn apart while our parents pointed to the earnings statements.

What followed was a time of retraining, new careers and doubling down. I started a photography business and picked up regular work doing corporate and wedding photography and photojournalism on the side. Thuy picked up a new job in the tech sector and later became a Vietnamese translator.

Som and Thuy worked together at that company, but Som also saw a different opportunity, a chance to build onto what he had spent the last two decades working on. He double downed on himself. Som covered the arts more intimately, from within the scene through his blog at TheSomShow.com. He filmed concerts, interviewed bands and hosted an awards show where the musicians in the city won Sommy Awards for best new artist and band and album and community leader. Som was building it all over again, and trying to figure out how to monetize it without the newspaper’s backing. This was before “YouTuber” was a career option and there wasn’t well-worn practices in building a social media brand, but that didn’t seem to bother him.

Som would pitch stories to whoever would take them, mostly the former competitor, the Inlander. He picked up a few side jobs to help provide for the family, including flipping paninis at the gas station (Rocket Market). He taught journalism classes at Whitworth University as an adjunct professor and spun records as a DJ at KYRS. He was hustling day and night, long before it was a hashtag. Between it all, he called up two of his old newspaper friends and asked if we wanted to start a band.

Thuy and I were original members of that group, Flying Spiders. Neither of us had much idea why we were there, or how it would change our lives, but it was Som’s idea and so we were all in.

Both of us had grown up on classical instruments, me on the violin and Thuy on the piano. We weren’t necessarily the first or obvious choices to launch a multi-instrumental hip-hop spaceship, but with Som at the helm, it just worked.

I imagine Som sketched that band on paper for years as he met and wrote about hundreds of musicians throughout town. The musicians who formed the core of the group, and the satellites who performed when they were in town or featured on recordings – we were all part of his vision. Until recently I’d wondered why I’d been there as one of the first, but I’ve come to understand it wasn’t for the reason I’d imagined.

Som is gettin’ sick and tired of the drama

Tryin’ to get right with my karma

Suckas wanna bite like piranhas and fools wanna fight over honor

Or go to war for the profit/prophet

Callin’ up Raj when it’s real life

If you want beef, we’ll bring it to you carne asada

On 10/10/10, two years after we’d been ghosted by The Spokesman-Review, we had our first show at the A Club in downtown Spokane to a handful of friends. Every show after that, we played to packed venues from stages that were filled with our eleven piece hip-hop orchestra. This happened across the Pacific Northwest, but most regularly right here in Spokane. The audience would crowd the front and dance through the encore, often until the flicker of the closing lights.

In the following three years we released three albums under Som’s direction; three EPs that showcased the talents of more than a dozen musicians and elevated Som’s stories beyond his words. To tell you there was nothing else like it would seem self-serving, so just ask someone who was there. But I can tell you it felt like nothing I’d experienced in music before; a cacophony of energy between the stage and the audience, a musical reinvention for what I’d imagined hip-hop could be, a creative community in formation, and the beginnings of a belief in my own artistry.

There were moments on stage when in the middle of a solo, shredding the horsehair off my bow, when it felt as if I was outside of myself. I was creating something new and incredible from an instrument that always had made me feel weak. I don’t think I really understood it at the time, because I still had a stifling self doubt around my creativity, but I did sense that everything I’d been told about music was now up for debate.

As this show came into focus over the last year, I listened to Flying Spiders for hours at a time on every speaker I own. I’d played these same tracks for friends many times over the last decade, but never just sat and listened alone. Almost immediately those words began to echo in my head as his observations became more clear to me. That’s when the door began to open.

I felt the need to create new work, derived from what I was now hearing, evolved from those words. I cut some old footage I’d recorded of Som into a new music video for an unreleased track he had recorded on a voicemail. Then, like a good reporter, I went digging through the archive.

I unearthed thousands of images and dozens of videos that had been mostly forgotten on my castle of old hard drives. Seeing them through the lens of time had changed them and changed me. As I listened, I came to see what I had missed. Though I’d been there as we wrote and recorded those tracks, it felt as if I was looking inside the songs for the first time.

Through this process I’m getting to know him again, this time from a new place in myself. I’m more vulnerable but also with a conviction I’ve never had. It feels as if the creative process has brought me back to where he was then.

It is what inspired Thuy and I to reach out to the Spider-verse, call on the writers and musicians and poets and rappers and breakdancers to come together to remember, together. We’ve created an art show in Som’s memory, built from the words he left us in his music.

The show made of those works and memories is for all those who didn’t see it coming, who felt the confusion and anger over an incalculable loss. It is for those who have struggled to understand what we have felt individually and collectively. It is a celebration of a life and the art that remained when it all came to an abrupt end.

I like how Thuy explains it. “Som left for the Moon on Sept 5th, 2013.” As if it was planned, as if we would be seeing him one day again, after his mission.

Until now I hadn’t imagined I was also out in orbit, just trailing Jupiter on its path of 11 years. Today I’m back in the classroom again as an adjunct professor, finally recording my album and reconnecting to the community that Som built. It feels like time travel.

I pick up the mic where I left off last

Nearly at ground zero of the H-bomb blast

But I stayed on track

So many of my days gone past

Feeling always out of place on that

Wish I could take something back

See, I turned off The Som Show after he left. I couldn’t watch it anymore, didn’t want to think about it. I put my violin away and essayed my way through an entire three-year degree in writing without even acknowledging it had happened. Either it hurt too much or it didn’t matter, it’s hard to say how I felt then.

In some ways, I’m still a blind pilot. I can’t remember much of those years creating with Som, playing those stages with the band of friends who have forged through this experience together. The mind is an unreliable narrator, and mine doesn’t remember it happening or how I felt about most of it.

Through creating this show I was able to hear it again. If I was willing to sit with his words, recognition came, ideas came. The creation of these ideas brought with it new emotions and realizations – something of an epiphany. Is this Som speaking to me, or through me?

Be An Art is borrowed from a slam poem Som wrote and performed in 2009. It introduced me to an idea that I believe resonated at the center of his creative being – everything can be an art.

Be An Art is an idea free of ownership or limits or rules. It is both a call and a response. It is a means of empowerment for you and what you are trying to say, or show, or see. It is your permission to look.

This photograph I made of Som is both a portrait of my friend and the poster for an idea. Turning someone who you respect and love into an idea is both limiting and infinite to the memory of a person. How do we decide who someone was? When do we?

This is the conclusion I’ve come to after these years away. My invitation into the Flying Spiders wasn’t a validation for what I could do then, but what I might do – what someone else could already see in me.

This show is a document of a time and of the people that one life can change. This show is not a life story, only a memory, just one version of a multitude of ways we can be seen.

I find life mind boggling.

Here we are together

But going through it separately

I wrote this in the key of connectivity

So every time you see me you see you in me

Without U-N-I there’s no unity

A place is nothing more than its people. Without a means to connect us, it is difficult to find what it is we share. Som didn’t hide where he came from, he highlighted it. He raised up Spokane, told her history, told his story. A place can only be a place if it knows itself; that questions itself, that considers every member of its community. That is how we understand what makes us a city.

This city, this community, this brother and sisterhood we share. I believe he knew we could decide the kind of place we want to be. His words have become a roadmap for me and I hope they are for others. An illumination of the path we are on together and separately, on our way to becoming.

When Som was silenced by those in power, he wrote. When they took away his pen, he grabbed the mic. Som may have left us before we had a chance to appreciate what he was doing, but his art still speaks.

Style is uncommon

Voice is rare.

Flow is water and fire

But my sign is air

Try to stay grounded

Might float away

And come back as a lion

They took my pride away

But my spirit’s defiant

My space is a moment and time is rushing by like a tidal wave

Dustcloud now spinnin’ out of orbit

Wash away and cover up

So they can’t absorb it and board it

Put my mind to it and blew it

When I couldn’t write it I drew it

And when I couldn’t draw it was music

I think I see a light coming through it

I speak truth even when muted

Deep rooted castaway and rescued it

Isolated when I should have recruited

Relate to it?

Fascinated by the way that I do it

It’s a powerful gift I don’t abuse it I’m truant

Brush your teeth

Comb your hair and go to work

After that we gone party like your last night on Earth

Reporter’s note: All italics are lyrics by Isamu Jordan, except for “I pick up the mic where I left off last,” which is by Andrew Hauan (aka Nobe) on the Flying Spiders’ album after Som’s passing.