Milford Graves Live at Jamaica Arts Center

Weaving blistering performance footage from Europe, Japan, and the U.S. with a sublimely restrained, intimate glimpse into a world-renowned jazz percussionist’s singular voice and complex cosmology.

In the months before he passed away, Milford Graves created the paintings that were displayed at the Fridman Gallery and Artists Space by vibrating the paint to the frequencies of old reel-to-reel practice tapes and the sound of his own heart.

Using a device known as an electronic stethoscope, musician Milford Graves is able to hear and record the different patterns produced by each heartbeat.

On August 23, 2011, three days after Milford Graves’s seventieth birthday, a magnitude 5.8 earthquake cracked the soil near Mineral, Virginia. That day, the energy traveled all the way to New York City, where Jake Meginsky was filming Graves in his basement in South Jamaica, Queens.

In the heat of the summer, in his backyard garden in Jamaica, Queens, Milford Graves sings to Ọsanyin, the one-eyed, one-armed, one-legged orisha of healing herbs.