The power & prowess of SheKhan.

Art without the hustle. Creation sans the pressure. The musicians behind the duo SheKhan have found their own Shangi-La that exists almost as a parallel universe alongside day jobs and moonlighting that would daunt any moderately sane worker bee -- but these girls are anything but your average multi-hypenate jugglers. Kelly Coats and Kathleen Kim kill it on the daily on the Los Angeles art scene, political arena,  music world and celebrity industrial complex.

Kathleen was recently appointed Los Angeles Police Commissioner when Mayor Eric Garcetti took the reigns last January. His decision to appoint her, an immigration reform activist, civil rights lawyer and law professor, came as a surprise, most of all to her. But she took on her civil duty gracefully and has woven it into her day-to-day, reviewing cases, attending meetings, and essentially, policing the police.

A fine artist and musician, Kelly moonlights for a Hollywood tabloid agency as an editor and motion graphics maîtresse. Behind enemy lines, she hones her craft and sharpens the talons of her wit.

Both hailing from Detroit, Michigan and its surrounds, they met out West through a series of crossed paths, friends in common, but most of all, a shared passion for avant-garde jazz, or better said, improvisational music.

SZOLDIE
This is just text.

KATHLEEN
Just a conversation.

SZOLDIE
I’m sure you’re a pro.

KATHLEEN
Not with this kind of stuff. Immigration...

SZOLDIE
Do you have talking points by now?

KATHLEEN
I’m still not media savvy at all, but at least at this point I know to focus on my message and always try to get back to that.

SZOLDIE
And what’s your message?

KATHLEEN
All the issues are different, and I do try to respond with substance. But most of the time it’s just immigrants’ rights. Less enforcement. Open border. That’s the broad message.
But here I have no idea what our message is, so this is fun.

SZOLDIE
Well, the first thing I wanted to ask is about the name of the duo- SheKhan.

KELLY
I’ve always been into the Jungle Book. It’s basically derived from Shere Khan. But I’m also a fan of Chaka Khan. So it’s a bit of a variation of those two things. And it does sound like “She Can,” which I like.

SZOLDIE
Did the idea for the name of the band came before the band?

KELLY
Oh yes. Kathleen and I were already in two bands together. We’re sort of kindred spirits, so finally we decided, let’s do a duo.

KATHLEEN
It was completely liberating. Kelly’s design and idea of SheKhan - have you seen her design?

SZOLDIE
Yeah...

KATHLEEN
It’s perfect. And, there was another “SheKhan” with a C. Do you remember?

KELLY
Right. “Checan,” of course. I have to show you this...
(takes out a big hardcover book) Peruvian pottery.

KATHLEEN
It’s indigenous-

KELLY
It’s erotic-

KATHLEEN
From a male perspective.

KELLY
It’s some of the first pottery, I think, where there are hermaphrodites.

SZOLDIE
It’s ancient.

KATHLEEN
And it’s “SheKhan” with a C. So, we like that, too.

SZOLDIE
The first thing I saw in your design was that this tiger is a hermaphrodite.

KELLY
Yeah, you have the microphone coming out of the tail. It’s kind of a phallic thing.

SZOLDIE
(flipping through the pages)
Where did you find this book?

KELLY
An artist. He went to art school, but he was very much an outsider artist. I was visiting him with my boyfriend at the time, in the late nineties. He was like, “You guys are very romantic, I wanna give you this Checan book.”

He made me this postcard, too.

KATHLEEN
Wow. That is... That’s a really cool postcard.

KELLY
His name is Dale Teachout.

KATHLEEN
That is something else. He didn’t mail it though.

KELLY
He did mail it.

KATHLEEN
He mailed that?!

KELLY
Yeah.

KATHLEEN
Like that? Or, was it packaged?

KELLY
It was like that. There’s a note that reads, “The letter is inside the arm.” So I had to kind of cut it open to get it out.

KATHLEEN
Do you still have the letter?

KELLY
I don’t know.

KATHLEEN
Where does he live?

KELLY
Detroit. Oak Park, Michigan. He was one of the early people who were going inside all these abandoned buildings and creating these massive faces out of all this junk.

KATHLEEN
Is he still alive?

KELLY
I hope so. I should look him up...
Tequila is poured, all around.

KATHLEEN
My love of tequila came from playing with L.A. Fog.

SZOLDIE
Explain the name.

KELLY
There are songs where we have actual lyrics. But it’s not so much about storytelling. There’s something liberating about just making vocal noises. There’s something deeper anyone could understand. I like that openness of feeling an emotion without having to define it.

KATHLEEN
And they’re hot women-

KELLY
Yeah, they wore-

KATHLEEN
-like nothing underneath; sexy style, wearing trench coats...
And Giles loved- I mean he loved the name and just, what it invokes-

SZOLDIE
L.A. doesn’t have too much fog.

KATHLEEN
Right, I mean, it was ironic, but also-

KELLY
It does at five in the morning.

KATHLEEN
Sometimes.

SZOLDIE
So the other members of L.A. Fog-

KATHLEEN
It’s a full quartet.

KELLY
Giles Miller and Jonathan Silberman are the other two. Jonathan was in a band called Raz and then an old school L.A. band, Godzik Pink.

KATHLEEN
They’re kind of legendary. I think they’re one of the first - they’re Avant-Jazz, but pop, you know? They were one of the first bands to cross over.

SZOLDIE
Are they both artists as well?

KATHLEEN
No. Giles is a private investigator. He worked for a corporate investigation firm for his entire career and then he just started his own. And Jonathan is a real estate agent. But, I mean, that seems like a loaded... you know, he’s so creative.

SZOLDIE
I’m sure.
Do you feel you ever use inspiration from your day job and translate it into your art?

KELLY
Oh. Yeah. Definitely. There’s - I’m kind of embarrassed to say - I edit paparazzi footage for a celebrity gossip agency.

KATHLEEN
It’s a great job. I don’t know why-

KELLY
X17. They’re the ones who caught Britney shaving her head and going after the paparazzi with an umbrella... Anyway, I’ve made work that’s derived from looking at so many of the same sort of situations. I work on East Coast time out here in L.A. And there are days when I go home and my head is just - kind of flat - but filled with all these images. I remember trying to take a nap one day but all I could see when I closed my eyes were these faces. So I started doing a series where I would search in our database for a couple of words, for example, “stripes” and “peace signs.” Then with what I found, I made a sculpture composited from all these celebrities layered and woven together.
Another thing I’m interested in is using these audio clips. There are a lot of mistakes because the paparazzi never know when something’s gonna happen. It’s not like a shot that gets set-up, like a normal film production and so, there are a lot of starts and stops. The audio might be a clip of someone yelling at the paps or a cell phone dial, or they’re just talking, doing nothing, just waiting. It’s only clips of their conversation but it’s just such a fragment that it’s kind of interesting. I’ve saved a lot of those clips and some day we might do something with it.

KATHLEEN
That’s awesome.

KELLY
I don’t know-

KATHLEEN
Well, Kelly’s got a really fine sense of humor. So I bet all those sound bites that you captured, there’s something funny about them. It doesn’t matter if - I mean if we use it, then maybe the audience isn’t going to hear the humor - but that’s what will inspire the spirit of whatever we create, and that will make it so much more energized and so much more engaging, because humor brings in everyone. Yeah, I think it’s funny.

KELLY
We have a lot of room for improvisation - and I just love that we have that in our music, because sometimes our day jobs... It’s definitely a release for us and it’s very, I don’t know what the word is, I don’t wanna say therapeutic... 

KATHLEEN
It is.

KELLY
It is. Yeah.

KATHLEEN
Absolutely. It’s the best, because we don’t need to rely on it to make our livings and that’s kind of what makes me respect my band mates even more, because they can just treat it for what it is. There’s no anxiety around it. There’s no desperation around it. We have so many friends who are artists and that becomes almost a symptom. I mean, I understand, it’s... It’s too bad.

SZOLDIE
I interviewed this poet- Kenny Goldsmith. Before, he was a sculptor and he was in the art game and he was doing okay. He was doing well. But, he then became disillusioned with visual art and became more and more interested in words as the medium. So he moved to poetry. As a poet, there’s no way you can make money. But for him, that was incredibly liberating because, “Okay, there’s no way this could be in the marketplace in a commercial sense and so my day job is going to be as a professor and I’m not gonna be in that kind of hustle anymore.” It made me think of Doctor Zhivago. When Yuri graduates top honors from medical school he is also, of course, writing poetry. Someone asks him, “Aren’t you going to become a poet?” He says, “No, poetry is a vocation. Medicine is a profession.” That delineation between vocation and profession. He would never stop writing poetry, because that’s his vocation; that’s his love, but it’s not a profession. 

KATHLEEN
Oh, that’s interesting. But I’d never put that meaning into vocation. I would say my day job is my vocation.

KELLY
You’re lucky. Not a lot of people have that.

KATHLEEN
I’ve found that a lot of law professors have a different mission as well. You really identify with your profession, but if you want to enact some kind of social change, it’s necessary to be creative. Law, for me, is like music because there’s so much theory. But the theory is just boundaries for a lot of  uncertainty. It’s like the music we play because we are always very thoughtful in our approach, so there’s always some compositional foundation. But we leave so much room to explore the possibilities. Every time we play live, it’s gonna be different, even though we compose the songs. And it’s the same with the law. I always tell my students, “You don’t realize it yet, but in order to be an effective lawyer, if you want to enact change, you have to be creative.” You have to see the possibilities beyond the text in front of you. I was a civil rights lawyer first and then I became an academic. And what reassured me was when I met my colleagues and so many of them were artists and musicians, either in a previous career or they kept it on, and not in a hokey sense. I mean, they’re fucking good.

KELLY
You have one colleague who’s a dancer.

KATHLEEN
They’re serious. Another has been most successful as a fiction author. We can find her books. They’ve received awards. But she also writes law review articles and she puts just as much passion into them. Sometimes they gain a lot of recognition, they’re in Harvard Law Review, and other times they completely fall flat because she’s so eccentric. She thinks outside the box.

SZOLDIE
So there is something... because, what I was asking first is if your day jobs influenced your art, but what you’re saying is that it also goes the other way around; the creative impulse that makes you an artist goes into your day job or, in your case, your vocation.

KATHLEEN
Yeah, that’s right. But the substance of the work I do at my day job - social justice - I never think, “Oh, I’m gonna compose a song about Cesar Chavez.” That’s not interesting to me at all, because it’s so hokey.

SZOLDIE
What were some perceptions you had of L.A. before you moved here that either were debunked or proved to be true?

KATHLEEN
Well, my first time in L.A. was when I was 19 years old. My parents pretty much forced my brother and I to take this road trip across the US.  So, we embarked on this trip with a third person, my boyfriend at the time.

KELLY
Third Person.
Laughter.

KATHLEEN
Our only friends in L.A. were these two brothers. They grew up and lived in Echo Park with their dad but spent Summers with their mom in Michigan, so they could get out of the barrio, basically. They were really nice kids and they’d always talk about, “Oh, you know, it’s rough back in L.A.... gangs.” So, you know, these were a couple of Latino boys and maybe “La Vida Loca” had just come out around the same time. Epic road trip... So we get to L.A. and  hook up with our two friends, and they’re real excited to show us everything. We arrive in Echo Park, and on that strip of Sunset Blvd. we see people trying to sell green cards on the street-- it’s not drugs, it’s green cards! We get to their house and it’s really beautiful... it doesn’t look like...

KELLY
-the ghetto.

KATHLEEN
It doesn’t look like the ghetto at all. Then all their friends come over. They’re all Latino except for one Chinese girl - they call her “Chinkie.” You’ve heard this story-

KELLY
Oh, no. I don’t think I’ve heard this story.

KATHLEEN
They call her “Chinkie” and so every time they say “Chinkie,” my brother and I are like, “What?” Because we’re from Detroit and there’s so much overt racism in Detroit... But then we realized, “Okay, it’s harmless.”

So we go to this house party with them, and it’s pretty much the raddest house party I’ve ever been to. We walk in and... booming music, they’re freestyling in Spanish, they have the best hip-hop beats. Everyone is dancing. Shortly after we get there, all of a sudden, everyone moves to the sides and these dudes, maybe ten of them, come in with assault rifles and they’re wearing the pressed white T-shirts and pressed Dickies, and my brother and I are like, “What the fuck?”

Laughter.

KELLY
Crazy.

KATHLEEN
They cruise in, but after five minutes they’re gone.

SZOLDIE
Who were they?

KATHLEEN
Yeah, so we asked, “What just happened?” They said, “Oh, they were a gang, they were looking for this other guy, ‘cause they wanna fuck him up...” He wasn’t there, so they left. Then everyone just started dancing again with the 14 year old kid... freestyling on the mic. It basically fulfilled every stereotype.

SZOLDIE
And how soon after did you move here?

KATHLEEN
Many years later.

SZOLDIE
Mhm.

KATHLEEN
But, you know, this is my home. I’m never gonna leave L.A. It’s a good place.

SZOLDIE
What about you, Kelly?

KELLY
I came to Los Angeles, for the first time, when I was seven years old and, really, all I remember was the basic tourist things, like going... Well, I actually remember where I was when Marvin Gaye died because we were waiting in a long line to get into Universal Studios. That’s one of those vivid memories from my childhood. I couldn’t believe his own dad killed him. We stayed on the floor of my great aunt Ernestina’s house, and it was the first time in my life I’d ever had fresh squeezed orange juice. We went to Tijuana for a day, down the coast. I remember getting a red sombrero and then my dad wanting to leave because he couldn’t understand what some people were saying about us in Spanish.

It wasn’t til much later when I was actually living in Mexico City that I came to LA again. It was during Thanksgiving and a few of us were invited to do a show at Fritz Haeg’s geodesic dome.

KATHLEEN
I played there my first New Years in L.A.

SZOLDIE
And this is still before you met.

KATHLEEN
Yes, lots of coincidences.

SZOLDIE
So, what would you say are your musical influences?

KATHLEEN
Well, Yusef Lateef. He died recently, but he was one of my professors at Hampshire College. He was one of the famous Avant-Jazz musicians. He always insisted on not calling jazz music “jazz” because that was a term that white people gave to it. He would always say, “It’s improvisational.”
But improv can’t just be noise. It’s very thoughtful and it comes from a place of, I don’t wanna say scientific, but it comes from a foundation and it comes from spirit with foundation. Technique with freedom. It’s really the best place to be. Improv music is very theoretical. It’s abstract.

SZOLDIE
Are you ever surprised at what happens?

KELLY
I think it’s interesting the surprise that other people have. When we were recording with Michael Rosen, there was a thing Kathleen did on her violin. I don’t know if it was so much a surprise, but he said, “The violin was having a nervous breakdown.”

KATHLEEN
Yeah, right. In that moment, he didn’t get it.

KELLY
Yeah. But it’s kind of a great description, too.

KATHLEEN
I listen to a lot of jazz, I mean improv... “improvisational music.” There’s this whole soul-jazz period that I like a lot.

SZOLDIE
That’s from?

KATHLEEN
It’s from everywhere, but probably from late-Sixties through the Seventies and it’s kind of the last era of great jazz. It’s really funky. You dance along. It’s soulful but also so free. The improvisation is amazing. The scales are so free. It’s all modal. Miles Davis is modal. He’s really emotive. There are only three chord changes in his compositions and then he had this whole thing with Coltrane. John Coltrane is brilliant but he’s really technical. There are like twenty chord changes in his compositions, and so Miles Davis sent John Coltrane “So What?” and he showed him, “I can be modal and better than you.” Because I’m not technically gifted like John Coltrane, but I’m emotive, and I prefer the soulful-

SZOLDIE
What about the Albert Ayler?

KATHLEEN
I love Albert. I love that shit. That’s exactly along the same lines. I love that stuff. The only thing that I don’t like is when free jazz gets to the point of being total music masturbation, they’re just playing for themselves and it becomes noise. I can respect it, but I don’t particularly seek it out.

KELLY
I grew up listening to hip-hop, and Kathleen grew up in Detroit listening to ghetto tech. So, with SheKhan, there’s definitely a beat driven element, along with other influences. We’re really interested in Cabaret Voltaire and that early sampling. I’m in another band called Embarrassing Powers with James Hamblin from “HowardAmb.” That’s where I first started sampling and looping. He was very influential in starting to explore that sort of stuff.

KATHLEEN
That’s right. I feel like with SheKhan, there’s a whole story behind it. For me it’s the best project because it’s truly free and different, but also accessible. It is beat driven.

SZOLDIE
So, who’s the one whispering in “Brown Rice”?

KATHLEEN
That’s Kelly.

KELLY
There are songs where we have actual lyrics. But it’s not so much about storytelling. There’s something liberating about just making vocal noises. There’s something deeper anyone could understand. I like that openness of feeling an emotion without having to define it.

SZOLDIE
It’s an instrument that instantly connects to you. It doesn’t matter if it’s saying anything at all. The human voice has an emotion to it that’s inherent.

KATHLEEN
You know, it’s funny - and this is just an off-the-cuff thought - because I love vocals. I mean, vocals that are selective, you know?

SZOLDIE
The repetition of something very simple.

KATHLEEN
Yeah, just using the voice as another instrument. But within that improv community -Albert Ayler,  Ornette Coleman, Yusef Lateef - they don’t like vocals.

SZOLDIE
No.

KATHLEEN
Some of the students who auditioned for Yusuf’s performance class, he was so biased against the vocalists, like openly mean. It’s funny because I actually don’t know where it came from.

KELLY
Right.

KATHLEEN
I never figured it out.

KELLY
Well, it’s always interesting, thinking of the voice as an instrument. I mean, I’ve played with people who didn’t like certain instruments.

I played the flute as a kid growing up. Elementary school band and then private lessons but I got kind of bored with it ‘cause I think that I wasn’t that interested in playing the classic flute pieces. But later, in college, I picked it up again and I started playing psychedelic flute in a garage rock band. But then, there was so much resistance against that, too, from some of the rockers.

SZOLDIE
Same with the violin?

KATHLEEN
Pretty much everyone, for the whole time that I’ve played experimental music with violin, has been like, “I’ve never heard the violin sound like that!” Everything has been pretty reinforcing. I’m trying to think if there’s ever been a time someone’s like, “Oh, I hate experimental violin. Why don’t you go play Mozart.”

KELLY
The thing about - not to take it back to the flute - but the thing about the flute that’s so annoying, and it doesn’t matter what you do with it; if you’re on the stage in a bar or whatever, there’s always the Jethro Tull thing.

But if people can see beyond that, it’s cool. I was playing the flute with a friend who does death metal, and another friend came to see the show and said, “Wow, the flute was amazing. It sounded like a Kurosawa film.”

KATHLEEN
Yeah. Yeah. Well, SheKhan is great because it has vocals, and because the violin sounds like a human voice sometimes. So, when Kelly uses her voice, it stimulates a lot of ideas.

KELLY
And likewise with the violin. I feel like there are times when we kind of go back and forth. I’m trying to create a sound with my voice - and I’m not a traditionally trained vocalist - so if I hear something I think I could respond to-

KATHLEEN
-we’re really... It’s very special to play with Kelly because we do have this back and forth.

SZOLDIE
Like a conversation. Sometimes interrupting. Sometimes repeating. Always riffing.

We left Kelly’s studio and headed for a goodbye party at Footsie’s that the Mas Exitos crew was throwing for one of their members' emigration to New York. First we stopped at a corner for tacos al pastor. In between bites I asked Kathleen what was going down at city hall, as far as responding to the national unrest of late. Coming back from the holidays, lawmakers were met by scores of angry civilians jumping on the bandwagon of police reform. Coming out of the woodwork, protestors shouted obscenities, calling them house niggers and Uncle Toms, demanding justice, even if exactly what that justice would look like evaded them as well. At the end of the meeting, one man spoke up defending the commissioners and community organizers, and asked the most vocal of the group, where exactly did they come from? Where were they during all the reform, community building, and organizing that had been taking place over the past decade? Who exactly were these concerned citizens? Did they even know the score? Or were they just there to take their woes out on the civil servants, appointed to help create peace and mediate between the powers that be and the people. While police reform remains a national necessity, for people to effectively enact change they must know the particulars of their own city, understand its history, and participate in its politics. Know thine enemy. Only then is it possible that barriers may be chipped away and true communication can begin. 

Listen to the other instrument. Because there really are no notes on the page.