When trumpeter and singer-songwriter Imani Duhe joins my personal Zoom room from her Youth Orchestra Los Angeles classroom in Inglewood, she’s in the middle of crocheting an emerald green blanket. She’d been teaching herself over the past few days.
“My best friend told me I need to start doing something for myself,” Duhe says.
Lifelong fascinations for 24-year-old Duhe, such as the sweeping possibilities of composing music, singing and songwriting, make it difficult for her to stray, even if she tries. Her friend’s sentiment echoed the milieu of “Whiplash,” a film about a jazz drummer’s obsession to better his abusive professor, achieve greatness, and a flying chair.
“So, I’ve never had a teacher throw a chair at me,” Duhe says, laughing. “But I have had a teacher tell me that I should quit the trumpet.”
Surprisingly, she did quit at one point for an entire year. Everything had come down to one question: Am I happy not doing music? she asked herself. The answer was in how she had lived her life up to that point.
Duhe’s sound is a harmony of the many places she’s lived, such as her hometown of Atlanta, plus the influence of her parents’ Black Southern origins in Louisiana — conjuring an ardor and a deep conviction that give her trumpet playing a singularity. On her Instagram, you’ll find a clip of her blowing an undulated and playful swell while singer-songwriter Ani DiFranco serenades the Hollywood Bowl for the Los Angeles Philharmonic’s free online concert series, Sound/Stage, earlier this year. As the only musician sharing the stage, Duhe’s individuality as a trumpeter was the sound heard around the world for a moment, distinguishing that performance as the highlight of her career thus far, she says.
“I tell my students trumpet is 85% mental and 15% physical,” Duhe decisively shares.
But while she plays, the 85% is loaded with questions: “Am I doing a service to the music? Am I doing a service to whoever wrote this music? Am I doing a service to myself? Am I portraying this musical vision as well as it can be portrayed to the audience?”
If you look at her music sheets, they are adorned with little notes, like “a lot of soul” or “don’t be a bitch.” Not to be misconstrued for obsessive, impractical strides toward excellence measured by those who came before her, Duhe sets her own bar in that regard.
When we compare notes on heroes, we agree we need them, people who tell us what can be possible on this creative odyssey of coming into our own—whenever that begins and ends. The glaring difference between us, perhaps, is that Duhe has actually performed with one of her heroes — Lauryn Hill — with 85,000 in attendance at the Lovers and Friends Festival 2022 in Las Vegas.
“That’s also one of my earliest memories of music, watching ‘Sister Act II’ and just being in awe of [Hill’s] voice,” Duhe says. “That movie is not sad like that, [but] I’d cry like a little baby.”
Duhe recalls her first memories of music through a parental dichotomy — her father’s love for Black singer-songwriters who dominated the ‘70s and ‘80s, and her mother’s gospel roots.
But Duhe especially underscores the absolute necessity in separating inspiration and influence —inspiration being the drive and influence being the motive.
“There’s just a moment where you realize that you can’t spend your whole life chasing what someone else sounds like, and what someone else plays like,” Duhe adds. “You have to chase the best version of yourself.”
Her father was ultimately responsible for putting the trumpet in her hands, and then putting her in front of small crowds — dressed like “a little man” in a vest and fedora getup — to play the trumpet around Atlanta as half of “Sax Man and Jazz” with her saxophonist brother. An amusing distant memory, sure, but in that moment, audiences responded to her playing. She was only seven-years-old when she taught herself how to play the horn.
Trombonist Errol Rhoden and Duhe have been friends for roughly 11 years now. They first crossed paths in grade school through the Atlanta Symphony Orchestra Talent Development Program — made up of 25 Black and Latinx musicians at the time, according to Rhoden. He also admits that his mother, Duhe’s first District Honor Band conductor, will often recount — to whoever will listen — watching young Duhe play as a prodigy at work.
“Everyone’s just like, ‘Who’s this little Black girl? Who the hell is this? She sounds amazing!’” Rhoden recalled. “It’s always been kind of like a natural thing for Imani.”
Duhe was accepted as a graduate student at USC’s Thornton School of Music to study classical music in 2020, but put off moving from North Carolina for a year because of the pandemic. It was the same year she quit playing — the doing of her teacher I assumed — until our conversation turned to how she’d been reflecting on the modern record label’s soulless pursuit of monetary gain, and the lost fervor for physical media.
“We don’t own anything anymore, we own a subscription to a service that allows us to listen to music sometimes,” Duhe says. “I think that that’s not good because music and movies and all of that stuff can be a form of protest, it can be a form of love, and as soon as someone wants to censor what we’re able to listen to and have some of the things that we really like, it might not be available anymore.”
Perhaps the most tragic reason for her decision to quit was the incessant deconstruction of music and emotions in an academic setting until it was seemingly stripped of all of its wonder by the end of her undergraduate years.
“A lot of being a musician is your music — making being so tied to how you feel on the day to day,” she says. “That’s a huge thing that people struggle with, when they’re having a bad playing day and think that’s automatically a reflection of their character, which is just absolutely not true.”
But her love affair with music, the most tangible form of spiritual expression, was too deep to abandon. Instead, Duhe left a bartending gig in North Carolina in her rearview mirror as she drove to California to make a career out of music, whether it was playing gigs or the gratification of teaching kids of YOLA at Inglewood to play the trumpet.
Duhe is visiting the studio on her own accord these days, too. She’s writing the latest song for her debut R&B record under the banner, “Mani and the Wildflowers.” The song is supposed to be a deep contrast to the yearning tone of the rest of the album, a record she plainly describes as “fast” and “happy.”
Whether or not Duhe takes a break doesn’t concern Rhoden, a gracious nod to her talent, and his love of Miles Davis.
“[Davis] put down the horn for five years, and then brought it back, and the cool was still there,” Rhoden said. “Imani is the same. Regardless, she’s still cool.”
Listen to the only Mani and the Wildflowers song on Spotify here.