“An angel isn’t necessarily a mythical being: it’s someone who’s bringing a message, and that’s a big part of my artistry,” Angel Bat Dawid explains in our recent interview. As a multifaceted artist, she believes her message can center and address Black people while helping unify audiences to better understand society. “That’s really where I’m at right now with my artform and the way I play. Whatever I express, it is specifically for Black people, but anyone can join in.”
Dawid is a Black American composer, improviser, clarinetist, pianist, vocalist, educator, and DJ who performs with Angel Bat Dawid & THA BROTHAHOOD and Damon Locks’ Black Monument Ensemble and leads the all-woman ensemble Sistazz of the Nitty Gritty. She also teaches children from infants to teens, mentors young adults, and hosts a monthly show on music on NTS Radio.
Her enthusiasm is evident as she details just a few of her recent projects to me. On a recent February tour she taught and performed in cities in France, Italy, and Spain, and last month, she was named a 2025 United States Artists Fellow, an award she calls “life-changing.” The grant provides $50,000 in unrestricted funding to American artists in 10 disciplines who “push boundaries across disciplines, identities, and definitions.”
Dawid considers her artistic practice to be part of the lineage of Great Black Music established by the AACM, which allows her to delve into multiple forms of musical expression. “I call it Great Black Music, meaning I’m a Black person, so whatever music comes out of me is great, okay? That music is genre-less. I can write for a 100-piece orchestra, and I can also direct a crowd of people who are not musicians at all and get y’all sounding like an oratorio chorus because I know spontaneous composition and improvisation.”
Her interest in music and becoming a multi-instrumentalist began early. A family trip to the movie theater to see Amadeus provided the spark. “There’s a scene in there where little young Mozart is playing the piano. I thought wow, I want to play piano one day. Then he gets up and he starts playing the violin. I was like ‘Oh my gosh, that’s what I want, to play more than one instrument.’”
Dawid’s family moved to Kenya when she was 7-years-old, and music education offerings were limited there. But when they returned to the U.S. four years later, she started piano lessons. In sixth grade, she aimed to join the school orchestra, but when she learned that the violin section was filled, she was sent to the band room. “Mr. Jarrett, the band director, handed me a clarinet, and I was disappointed,” she recalls. “The whole reason why I was drawn to music is I wanted to shred, right?”
Angel Bat Dawid — Photo by Joachim Bertand
Growing up in the era before YouTube, she visited the library looking for clarinet music, but nothing spoke to her young sensibilities. “The only music I saw is from this corny, white, dude [Benny Goodman], and I’m like 12, I’m trying to be cool,” she remembers. However, she found inspiration yet again in the music of Mozart. “I saw, oh, Mozart, clarinet concerto – I know Mozart be shredding. That’s the first time that I heard the clarinet shred, and it was so cold that I got obsessed. I was listening to it when I went to bed; I was listening to it in the morning.”
In her classical piano and clarinet studies, she was often the only musician of color. Naturally she struggled with the isolation and lack of support. “The more I kept going, the less I saw people that look like me, and the more I was the only Black girl in the symphonic band, and they’re putting me in lower chairs. Whether they’re doing it consciously, subconsciously, or not doing it at all, I feel that. It was always a thing being in classical music, being a clarinetist, being a Black woman clarinetist. It was just shrinking my visibility and how I felt as a musician. In my early twenties, it was a struggle to figure out. I majored in clarinet performance, and I was just not getting any support because it was a mostly white school, and I was just battling all of these things.”
Stereotypes she faced naturally took a toll over the years, and she recognizes the weight of what it took to get to where she is today. “When most people meet me, the first thing they say is ‘Oh, do you sing?’ This is very sexist, and it’s racist. I can sing. But even on this [recent tour], I went on the clarinet, I got on the keys, I’m on electronics, and the first thing that somebody comes up to me to say is, ‘Can I touch [your hair]?’ Battling all of that as a musician, it takes a toll on you.”
Based in Chicago, Dawid says the city encourages the creativity, collaboration, and experimentation she seeks, with fewer arbitrary barriers between artists at different stages of their career. “I would have been snuffed out anywhere else. Chicago is a very collaborative town. You could go see your hero perform somewhere, and then right afterwards, have a whole hour/two hour conversation with them, and they’ll even be like, ‘What are you doing? Oh, you wanna come on my set?’”
Dawid says this sense of community is unique to Chicago, and musicians of color have a strong network of mutual support. “There are problems in the music industry. I keep talking about racism. I keep talking about misogyny. It’s problematic. You’re gonna need your team, you’re gonna need your tribe. You’re gonna need those people who support you, no matter what. And definitely [in Chicago] you have that. We all help each other. And doing it ourselves is the best way to do it.”
Structural racism is ever-present, and she makes no apologies if some people are uncomfortable with her naming it. All the more reason to create safe and inclusive spaces for Black musicians. “I will play with any race. We can all play music together, glory be to God, hallelujah, we are the world! But when it comes to my work right now as an artist, I’m very interested in investigating what would it look like for Black artists to be able to perform without having all of these [systemic] issues – creating spaces for Black artists to create, because if you gonna play my music, you definitely gonna be protected by me.”
Angel Bat Dawid — Photo by Pascal Gambarte
Dawid is working on a forthcoming residency specifically for Black women at The Black Room, a collaborative creative space and studio for BIPOC artists located in Chicago’s West Garfield Park neighborhood. The intuitive experiences that Black women culturally share are crucial for their safety and support. “Some of it is not stuff that we can even define, but we feel. If it’s not misogyny, it’s telling us that we’re too aggressive, or labels that are put on Black women when we speak up for ourselves.”
Being true to her principles has propelled Dawid’s success over the last 10 years. She acknowledges that others may not have this privilege, but for her, speaking honestly is how she maintains her creative truth. “I don’t care about being that person; some people may have more at stake, so I’m gonna say the elephant in the room. It has worked right for me being vocal and saying the uncomfortable thing, whether musically or artistically.”
More than ever, Dawid believes artists can bridge the gap in an increasingly polarized world. “When artists rise up, we’re the ones who connect communities. I think we can live in a world one day where there’s no racism or any of that shit. Absolutely. I do. That’s why I’m doing what I do. I gotta show people that we can do this – that you’re gonna have to be in a relationship with each other. You’re going to have to have faith in one another. We have to do it because the children won’t know how to do it if we don’t show them. We all have an obligation to show the youth what it means to be a human being.”
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