Gwen Laster, who lives in Beacon, is a violinist and artist-in-residence at Bard College. In April, she was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship.
How does it feel to be a Guggenheim fellow?
It feels like an affirmation for believing in what I want to do, how I want to expand as an artist and how I want to grow. That was a big thumbs-up for me — for people [on the selection committee] to read about what I’m dreaming of and affirm it.
How do you plan to use the grant?
I want to create a multidisciplinary work loosely rooted in the memoir I had to write for the application, which was called “Is My Black Still Beautiful?” I wrote about growing up as a dark-skinned girl in Detroit. There’s a lot of discrimination within the African American community based on skin shade. I’m going to include music, script/spoken word, choreography, possibly a vocalist! I was thinking of having a pod of seven or eight musicians. It will be presented in late 2026.
When you were growing up, what support system did you have for your music?
My mother loved music. She wasn’t a musician, but she was such a music lover. We would often have lots of people visiting because my mother liked to have folks over to entertain. There were a lot of great parties at my house. I started playing violin at school in the fourth and fifth grade. The instrument looked so mysterious and beautiful, the alignment of a bow pulling and pushing across the strings. The visuals of it were very attractive to me. In middle school, I had a jazz trumpet teacher who didn’t know how to teach strings, although he was upfront about it. He had just finished touring with an R&B band and took this teaching gig.
At Northwestern High School, my music teacher, Anderson White, was a violinist — he was the one to introduce me to improvisation. That spoke to me in the sense of my environment and the culture of the city. My teachers gave me difficult work to do on my violin and pushed me creatively. I was doing gigs around Detroit with my friends. I also was influenced by artists from my area like Nathan Watts [Stevie Wonder’s bass player] and Ray Parker Jr.
Now you’re teaching at Bard. What is that like?
I’m an artist-in-residence, or an adjunct. Even though I teach in the jazz department, some students don’t come with that background. Most are not music majors, which I find refreshing. I meet them where they are. We’ve been doing country, folk-rock, R&B and so on. If someone has been only educated with Western classical sensibilities, techniques and approach, when it comes time to take away the piece of paper and step away from executing what you’re reading, you can step into yourself and your imagination. When people aren’t music majors, they come with a broader artistic palette. I teach them the traditional jazz approach as a springboard to any genre of improvised music.
You have an appreciation for African American musical history. Do you use that in your work?
The music of the African diaspora inspires me and gives me ideas. That and how I grew up merges and finds its way into rhythms, melodies, tonalities, colors and textures.
