Drummer, Coleman Bryant ‘17, graduated from UCLA in 2021 where he studied political science and music industry and worked as an executive and musician for the artists collective, CMMND. Since then, he’s worked for the Arts for Healing Justice Network, an interdisciplinary collaborative that provides arts programming in order to transform the juvenile justice system. He continues to DJ and write his own music.

This interview was conducted on 7/10/24 and has been edited for length and clarity.

What have you been up to since your time at PCM?
I graduated in 2017 and went to UCLA and got a bachelor’s in political science and a minor in music industry. I did do some music performances. I was in the marching band and did drumline because at PCM I played trumpet and drums but it was a difficult environment to navigate, and I wasn’t really feeling the music department. The competition was a huge turnoff which is why I explored different things.

However, I was learning how to produce music on my laptop while also playing drums and writing. I was going to open mics around LA and campus and people were like you’re a dope writer, you should start recording some of this stuff. Then my friend was like, yo, we’re trying to start a collective called CMMND, and we want a musician. They had a designer and photographer but then I got on board in Spring of 2019.

We immediately became friends and started making music. We created an EP to advertise basketball shorts we made and held an event on campus. After that, we started seeing people tagging CMMND around Westwood. We got in trouble at one point even though we weren’t even the ones doing it. Working for CMMND definitely got my feet wet in terms of learning how to operate creatively in multiple different disciplines. We all had different majors like I was pre-law, my designer friend was pre-med and we’re all combining different knowledge and art forms that we were each so good at. So we did that for a little bit and even got an official collaboration with UCLA. That helped us all realize our potential then individually, we each started discovering our talents and wanted to hone in on our individual craft so we haven’t been as active. That’s when I really started writing my own music.

What was your motivation for writing and producing your own music?
My motivation for writing music was a couple of friends talking me into it. I, like a lot of other people, had been making beats but I was this kid from Pasadena, and my dad is a jazz head, and I had this jazz foundation from PCM which gave me a different set of influences so my beats sounded a little different. Then I felt like I was the only person who could get on my beats because people weren’t understanding what I was doing. They were just rapping, but I wanted a mixture of everything.

What music do you like to create, why do you like to create music, and who are your musical influences?
I like to create a fusion between hip hop and R&B, Neosoul, or dance or house music. I call my sound like rapping beat, it’s like a mixture of R&B, but also rapping. I also like to produce because I have more leeway than I do as a writer. And around the time I started producing, I also started DJing.

In terms of influences, it’s difficult for most people to notice, but jazz is a humongous influence in my music. It’s an if you know, you know thing. There’ll be a certain musical choice I make production-wise, or even with my lyrics or my rapping that follow the same cadence as I would if I were drumming. I definitely learned how to write from playing drums.

Do you have specific artists that you’re into right now or were in the past?
Someone who inspires me now is Anderson .Paak because he’s a drummer as well as an artist-producer so he has a similar sound as me. I also love Kendrick Lamar, I feel like he’s one of the best artists of all time. Conceptually, he’s really brilliant. Miles Davis also inspires me. I try to emulate a trumpet with the melodies I sing.

Can you talk about your experience as an administrative associate for the Arts and Healing Justice Organization?
I’ve been working with them since I was in high school and through college. I’ve always been interested in social justice work and in college, I studied the intersection of politics and music. This got me interested in how I can do what I’ve always been trying to do but with art.

The Arts for Healing Justice Network is a bunch of organizations that go into different juvenile detention centers. I don’t lead the workshops, but I do mostly coordination like helping people get cleared to go into the centers and I help with programming. I just created a program called Transformative Junk, where we’re going to take a bunch of youth, go to a junkyard, flip junk into art, and then auction it. So it gives me a lot of freedom to still be creative and do something cool.

We also have a policy team, and their whole belief is how inhumane youth prison is, which I could go on about, and how it should be eliminated. In addition to that, we focus on reintegration. Because the students who are 15 and have been in the facility for two years are disconnected so we try to help reconnect them into society through whatever art form they prefer.

And then what are your plans for the future?
I’m about to close out working with Arts for Healing and Justice this month. And on one end, I’ve been DJing more as a career at events and I want to keep growing that. And I also want to keep being a performing artist. I’ve been meeting a lot of great people and performing a lot more. I did a show a month ago in LA that had an amazing turnout. But I would love to get a deal going soon.