Joy Guidry is living her full circle moment

Thirty years later, in another broadcast dialogue well worth watching in full, the great Toni Morrison offered her own seductive thoughts on survival. Asked by an audience member how to survive whole in a world where we are all victims of something, she clears her throat, adjusts her pearl necklace, and drops a philosopher’s truth bomb. “Sometimes you don’t… survive whole, you just survive in part,” she says. “But the grandeur of life is [in the] attempt.”

Life, she goes on to say, is about “being as fearless as one can, and behaving as beautifully as one can, under completely impossible circumstances.” It will wear away small pieces of you, yes, leaving dents and chips and scratches that may scar. But that adversity, that non-terminal damage, is in itself a source of power; a power that can be traced back generations, back to marginalised Black communities – especially women – who, as the poet Audre Lorde wrote, “were never meant to survive.”

For bassoonist Joy Guidry, all this ancestral wisdom is not just something that comforts and grounds her. In certain not-small ways, it has kept her from tumbling clean over the edge. Since emerging on the noise scene five years ago, she’s been a pretty open book about her mental health struggles, whether composing around the trauma of a forced stay on a psych ward (“72 Hours”) or broaching the physical anguish of bipolar II and complex PTSD in the searing short film 2:19am.

Her first two releases – the EP Darkness is a Myth (2020) and debut full-length Radical Acceptance (2022) – were documents of Guidry’s early to mid-20s, a “horrible” time of her life that might have buried her completely if it weren’t for music as a medium through which she could find peace. Transitioning was an important step in learning to love herself unconditionally. So too was backing away from the noise scene, where performances would often call for reliving some of her heaviest trauma. What emerged in its place was last year’s Amen, a spiritual odyssey into communal mending that grew out of her academic thesis on healing Black music from the time of enslavement through to now.

Drawing on her roots in the American South, Guidry tapped into a common source from which, she believes, all Black musical artforms pour from. Whether it’s blues, zydeco, gospel, or the healing frequencies of Alice Coltrane’s spiritual jazz, there’s a river of mood and sensation that flows through them all. Created over two and a half years and featuring a generous cast of friends and contemporaries, Amen pulled from that flow to shape a unique new bayou of sound, where ancestral currents mixed with bassoon-led ambient and electronic ripples. Still experimental, but in a way that served the greater good of enlightenment and wholeness.

It’s a towering work, and one that she remains rightly proud of, but in consciously stepping back from centering her identity and struggles, it felt in a way like unfinished business. “The beauty of Radical Acceptance is that I had no fucking idea what I was doing and I wasn’t afraid to say what I wanted to say,” she says, laughing. “With Amen, I played it safe. I don’t think I’ve ever said this publicly before, but I played it so safe in that project. It’s still honest music, it still came from me, but I think I lost a bit of me in the process. There was still so much I wanted to say within that enlightenment universe.”

Initially conceived as a handful of bonus tracks for a deluxe edition of Amen, Guidry’s latest album Five Prayers can be seen both as a companion and as a reaction to its predecessor. Where Nykelle DeVivo’s artwork for Amen pictured Guidry wearing a giant braided hairpiece, on Five Prayers we see only the costume, held up to the camera by two pairs of arms. It’s tempting to interpret the record as a manifestation of Amen’s negative space but, as Guidry came to realise, it “actually follows Radical Acceptance in a really strong and beautiful way.”

“With Five Prayers, I feel like I found the best of both worlds, in getting back to the roots and rawness of Radical Acceptance but with the beauty of Amen,” she explains. “I wanted this music to really represent where I am right now, but also how I’m moving through life. The whole thing is coming from a more honest, deeper place. A place of not being afraid to talk about the roots of everything.”

The truth is, in writing and meticulously working on Amen for so long, Guidry emptied herself out. For a long time she was too distracted to even notice that her sense of self was ebbing away. Part of that was to do with uprooting herself from New York to study for a doctorate in San Diego, which naturally slowed her life down a bit. Part of it was family issues. But largely it was to do with having suppressed a lot of fears and pain that she hadn’t been ready to deal with.

“It got to a point where I felt like I didn’t even know who I was anymore,” she says. “Things that had brought me enjoyment fully did not any longer. I realised I’m not as much of an extrovert as I thought I was. I also realised that I’d lost a chunk of my individuality, which is something I’d always loved about myself and how I move through the world. I was isolating myself from my friends and my loved ones. It felt like I had nothing. Amen really woke me up and showed me that I needed to start choosing myself again and try to get back to being a human. So that’s what I did, and it was not a good time.”

Having moved back to Brooklyn in the spring of 2024, though she couldn’t really afford to at the time, she planned to reconnect with friends and with the old Joy, the one who wasn’t so quiet. What happened instead was that her sense of self continued to crumble, day by day, little by little. Guidry found herself feeling angry and frustrated, constantly tired. To calm herself down she would go to the bathroom and lie on the cold floor, sometimes for hours, but the maelstrom in her mind refused to abate.

“Joy,” said her friend Niecy Blues one night over the phone. “Do you ever think you’re just overstimulated?” “That was huge for me,” says Guidry, laughing. “Once Niecy said that, I realised I’d been wrapping everything into everything. And I think that idea of wrapping everything into everything also applies to Five Prayers. It’s honestly hard to pick apart what inspired this or that moment. It’s the product of a multitude of emotions – every emotion – all happening at once.’”

Desperate to distract herself, Guidry began work on Five Prayers in July 2024, sitting in her room for days on end, “spending so much time on Ableton.” Quickly abandoning the Amen deluxe idea, she found herself drawn to a new form of experimentation, bundled in lush and comforting sounds. Music that felt like home, not just emotionally but physically too. “I wanted to make music that’s peaceful, that calms me down and helps me to leave whatever situation I’m in mentally,” she says. “Five Prayers is really a direct line into my soul, into my brain, and into my thought processes.”

Guidry is very frank about the first two songs on the album being responses to her lifelong struggle with intrusive suicidal thoughts. It’s an overwhelmingly common story among people living with bipolar, which has one of the highest suicide risks of any mental health disorder. Add in structural racism and the unhelpfully masking Angry Black Woman stereotype, and – as is far too often the case – the care of Black women in crisis leaves a lot to be desired. Culturally, too, the pressure to be unflappably resilient leaves many Black women in limbo, forced to cosplay surviving whole even when the wheels are coming off completely.

Things didn’t go all the way to the cliff-edge for Guidry while making Five Prayers, but almost. “I think the deepest part of myself that I've been afraid to admit is just how bad things got mental health-wise, and how much I almost just gave up,” she confides. “I was talking to one of my closest friends and he was like, ‘What is the theme of this music? Because you don’t release things like this.’ I was like, ‘Honestly, what if this was my final playlist?’ and he was like, ‘First of all, never say that again, but I know what you mean.’”

Of the two dovetailing songs, “Convince Me to Stay” broadcasts a quivering vulnerability, a fragile hope that lives in the space between breaths and the long, singing notes of her bassoon, while “You’ve Done What You Can” has the reassuring feel of a spiritual visitation with Guidry’s distant, wordless singing morphed into an ambient wash.

If “You’ve Done What You Can” is a call to rest, then album centrepiece “Hold and Be Held” is a call back to the light. Composed as a harmonic response to the Nikki Giovanni poem "This World is Not a Pleasant Place to Be” – the first line of which is completed by the words “to be without someone to hold and be held by” – here, Guidry is reflecting on a relationship she had before leaving San Diego, that she ultimately had to let go of. “It didn’t work out but they made me feel so loved and cared for in a way that I’d never really experienced before,” she explains, rejecting any idea of it being a breakup song. “It’s more remembering the good times. I wanted to capture the love and beauty of the poem together with the love and beauty and comfort I had with that man.”

Blessed with the sweetness of Elizabeth Steiner’s harp, “Hold and Be Held” vibrates with a meditative tenderness that continues into the first half of “Myles”, before Guidry guides her fourth prayer confidently, and unexpectedly, to the sidelines of the dancefloor. A beat emerges out of nowhere, combining with a beautiful synth melody courtesy of pianist/composer Diego Gaeta, who co-produced the track along with Guidry and the vibrant talent of JWords.

The source of this mid-song burst into joy? Guidry’s teenage brother, who she wrote the song for and named it after. “I wanted to make something beautiful and strong but in a way that was chill and that you could bop your head to, and, to me, that’s the epitome of who Myles is,” she says. “He makes me feel so happy and free. He’s like my mini-me, before I transitioned, and I find so much peace when I’m around him.”

Although electronic music is deeply rooted in Black history, Guidry says it largely passed her by until recently. Her first encounter of “pure, real club culture” came last summer when she was invited to play at Dripping Festival on the beachfront of Sparta, New Jersey. Soaking in the diversity of electronic music, she says the experience opened her mind in a way she’d never felt before. “It felt like I was meditating, it was crazy,” she explains. “It was such a freeing experience and honestly felt almost identical to a praise and worship service at church. I felt like I was so connected to myself, and so many creative ideas were coming. It just feels really beautiful, coming into electronic music later in life and discovering the spirituality of the dancefloor.”

Basking in the tranquility of the song, it’s hard to imagine the battles Guidry fought with herself in trying to finish it off. With the drones and Gaeta’s synth lines in place, only the bassoon remained, but nothing seemed to fit. “I really needed to get it done and move on with my life so I was like, ‘Okay, girl, the album’s called Five Prayers so, like, you probably should just pray,” she says, laughing. “So I let the spirit move through me, asking it to let me say what I needed to say. I don’t even know what took over me, but I figured out what the melodies had to be. I was like, ‘Oh yeah, another bassoon has to come in here.'”

Layering the bassoons in the song’s final two minutes – putting them in conversation with each other, just as Guidry was in conversation with herself – turned out to be the miracle she needed. “I cried so much listening back to the raw version of it before I went home from the studio that day,” she says. “There’s something really honest about those bassoon lines at the end, something I don’t think I could ever recreate again. It was such a special moment.”

Perhaps Guidry’s favourite thing about Five Prayers is that, in the end, all the electronics fall away and it’s just her and her bassoon, telling a story like the old days, as if the instrument were an extension of her body and soul. It’s the culmination of a very intentional practice to recover a connection she felt she’d lost. Though bassoon has always been her primary instrument – other than a short stint playing saxophone in middle school, which she hated – Guidry’s relationship with bassoon has not been entirely smooth.

Having worked hard to transfer from a music school in Texas to the prestigious Peabody Conservatory in Maryland in her early 20s, she was blindsided by the onset of intense anxiety that would freeze her up so badly that she’d “sometimes really botch it in rehearsal,” even though she practiced as hard as anyone else. Later, during an orchestra concert at the Spoleto festival in 2019, she “completely disassociated” during a performance, to the point where it felt that she couldn’t even breathe.

“We were playing ‘Romeo & Juliet’ by Profokiev and I suddenly felt like I was going to pass out, like if I moved even an inch I was going to just topple over right there on the stage,” she recalls. “This was a full-ass orchestra show as part of a summer fellowship that I’d worked so hard to get into, and I was so scared. I’d dealt with disassociation as part of my bipolar disorder before, but never like that. I felt like I was going to die.”

Although it never happened quite like that again, the ever-present fear that it could took a huge toll. As much as she loved playing orchestra shows, she gradually retired from that world to protect her mental health. But, as she soon realised, the orchestra wasn’t the problem. “I still had so much anxiety in playing my bassoon, and I feel like that showed in my playing,” she says. “As my mental health got worse, my relationship with the bassoon got worse too. It felt like I was doing everything through a straw, like, in a really throwaway manner. It didn’t feel like I was playing this extremely beautiful, almost 100-year-old instrument.”

These days, thanks to modern medicine and therapy, Guidry says she has the kind of life and friendships she’d always dreamed of. Her discipline and playing are better than ever, and those moments of dissociation are a thing of the past. “I can love music again, not just in my head but in reality,” she says, happily. Recently she moved to Chicago, living in an artist’s studio in the same building as one of her closest friends, and so far she’s enjoying the slightly slower pace of life than in New York.

This autumn she turned 30 and put out a sixth prayer, “Here We Are”, to mark how far she’s come. It’s a short piece, entirely improvised and unfiltered, and humming with the background noise of Brooklyn Navy Yard where it was recorded back in 2021. For Guidry, the track’s emergence is a full circle moment that she always knew was coming. Listening back, she’s reminded of the confusing time after leaving classical music when she was trying to find ways to show the bassoon in a very different light.

Resentful of the fact that the bassoon is often seen as “some kind of honkytonk instrument” in the orchestra world, her practice focused on finding the lyricism and beauty that she knew was within her reach. That initially came out as noise, but eventually something softer began to emerge, and that’s what “Here We Are” represents. “It was honestly the first sort of out-of-body experiences I’ve had while improvising,” she recalls. “I don’t remember playing it, just listening back when I got home and being, like, ‘Whoa! This is really pretty. Where did this melody come from?’”

Tapping into the idea of ambient music as a form of spirituality, or what she calls “praying through my instrument,” proved to be a huge turning point in her improvisational practice, and one that directly inspired both Five Prayers and Amen. Where the fear of dissociation had once stifled her art, “Here We Are” showed her that it was not only safe to give up some of her control, it could also lead to something incredibly rewarding. That she recorded the track pre-transition only adds to the sense of closing a loop. “It really feels like a blast from the past as well as a peek into the future, but also very much where I am today,” she says. “It’s like an ancestral message, not even that things are going to be okay but that things will really start to figure themselves out.”

At a time when malevolent forces in the US are rumoured to be pushing for trans people to be labelled as violent extremists while racist ICE thugs are free to terrorise liberal cities, it’s worth remembering the rest of Toni Morrison’s response to the question she was asked in 2001. “Evil is silly,” she continued. “It’s predictable. It needs a tuxedo, it needs a headline, it needs blood, it needs fingernails. It needs all that costume in order to get anyone’s attention. But the opposite, which is survival, blossoming, endurance – those things are just more compelling.”

Guidry seems to agree, refusing to live any other way than unapologetically and with unfiltered honesty. Like many Americans, across the gender spectrum but especially trans people, she fears that things will get much, much worse before they get better. But she refuses to lose faith and overlook the power that we all have within us to bring about change. In a poem written for the Five Prayers liner notes by her friend Kehinde Alonge, I’m struck by the line “if prayer could be anything let it be me,” which Guidry interprets as validation of knowing how to answer your own prayers and guide your own life. Or, paraphrasing Giovanni, to find a way to be who you are and survive.

“I feel like I have the wisdom to do that now,” says Guidry. “And I don’t mean praying to myself like I’m a deity, but just being able to pour into myself in a way that is nurturing, in a way that’s uplifting. We all have the universe within us.”