Milena Casado’s Jazz Is A Mirror For Reflections

Milena Casado’s debut album Reflections of Another Self is an album that doesn’t rush to prove anything, yet still manages to hold everything. Throughout the album, themes involve the weight of memory and the freedom that comes with knowing yourself deeper. As a Spanish-born Afro-Latina jazz artist and trumpeter, Milena’s work is both experiential and spiritual. She plays to feel, to process, and to name the things she couldn’t before.

Milena Casado

When we talk over Zoom, she’s just returned from Accra, Ghana, her first trip to the continent. She went early, a week before performing, so she could really be there. “It was amazing. Really fulfilling,” she says, beaming. “I wanted to learn about the people, the culture, the history and to share, too.” A story about being between worlds, looking inward, and reaching outward at the same time.

Milena references albums like Miles Smiles and Thelonious Alone in San Francisco as key influences, and you can hear those textures throughout Reflections of Another Self. There’s a stripped-down, acoustic quintet energy to it but also a kind of meditative and still at parts. For Milena, jazz is a ritual. It’s also a reclamation.

AFROPUNK spoke with Milena to discuss growing up in Spain as an Afro-Latina, falling in love with Jazz, and working with Meshell Ndegeocello and Esperanza Spalding for her debut album. 

AFROPUNK: What is Spain in your eyes? Is it a home? Just the start? Something else?

Milena Casado: My mother is from Spain. My father is from the Dominican Republic. I did grow up in Spain, so I feel like I spent most of my life there. I’m from a really small village in the middle of Spain. I feel like I developed a little bit of where I am right now and what music means to me, why I play the trumpet [there]. It’s a little bit like therapy too because I grew up in predominantly white spaces. As a Black woman, I feel music was like home too.

AP: What was that like? Growing up in those predominantly white spaces, being a Black girl, and trying something new? Even here in America, a lot of Black girls don’t always get access to: instruments, lessons, real space to expand musically. What was that mentally and emotionally like for you?

MC: It was hard. It is really hard. In my case, I was pretty much the only Black person in my village. My mom and my mom’s family is white. I feel like I still carry a lot of trauma from just growing up there and not having references close to me or around me. I feel like I’ve been really trying to work towards understanding my experience and accepting that. This experience also made me who I am today, uh, but also learned how to overcome or deal with all of the trauma that I carry from that. I was traveling a little bit around Spain because my mom is a teacher. So there was one village that had a music school and some of my friends were playing trumpet and drums. I tried it and I was like, “Oh my goodness, this is amazing. Like, I can fully be myself with my trumpet. I can fully express myself.” 

AP: What is it about the trumpet specifically? Outside of just picking it up and it feeling like home sonically, what was it for you?

MC: Initially I did want to play drums. I wanted to be a drummer, but, at the school that I started to learn music at, the drummer section was full already. So I had a friend that was playing trumpet and I was like, “You know what? Let me, let me try the trumpet. Let me see.” And then the moment I started to play, [it] took a little time until I really got deep into it, but I really felt that I was able to speak through my trumpet. The rhythms, the tone of the way I talk…I can also do it with my trumpet.

Which I feel like you can kind of apply to any instrument. When I play, I feel like I’m just talking. I’m just talking sometimes about things that I could also speak about with words, but other times it really takes me to a deeper place in a way that I can talk or play things that I don’t really know how to express with words somehow. 

AP: So the name of this album is Reflections of Another Self. Can you explain what that title means to you in your own words?

MC: I guess I’ve been thinking about this title for a while. And then when I was creating the album, I was like, “Whoa, this is perfect. It actually really compliments everything that I want to express with this album.” I like the word reflection a lot. Because it has this double meaning. Where you are reflecting about something, but also a reflection of yourself in the mirror.

Sometimes we think we are a version of ourselves but this version might not represent who we really are because it’s influenced by insecurities, by fears, by expectations. I feel that’s what happened to me, that I just realized that the version that I was, was impersonating who I am right now. It wasn’t really me and I really wanted, or I really wanted to figure out who I am. It might be a process that takes me a long time, but I feel this is a little bit of the start to that. Just accepting it, understanding it, and overcoming it and finding myself.

AP: When did that moment kind of click for you? Or was there a moment where it was like, “Oh, this ain’t even really me”?

MC: It was a couple years ago. I also feel like pandemic time and everything that was happening around that time. I was going through a really hard time and I felt kind of lost, finding meaning in what I was doing. I reached that point, I was like, I’m not letting these traumas get over on me. 

AP: So what made you choose jazz instead of going down another musical path?

MC: My mom actually, she loves music. And she would just randomly pick albums at the record store. I remember just going through her collection and finding records like Sarah Vaughn, Miles Davis, Dizzy Gillespie, Thelonious Monk and I was just listening to this music. There’s something there that I really love. I was really connecting with Miles and Dizzy and trying to learn about them, looking them up. Who are these people? I was like, “I am like them, like I look like them.” I feel that was the first time I was like, wow, I look like them and I feel really connected to this music. 

AP: As a jazz musician, do you view your horn as a form of resistance or protest? Or is it more spiritual, more protective, more internal?

MC: I feel it’s a little bit of everything, honestly. Because of how I connected with the music and what it meant for me and what it means now to me, I feel it’s a little bit of everything. It goes together from it being my therapy, but also for me as a way of protesting. Sharing as a way of inspiring.

AP: So how do all these inspirations, your upbringing, your identity, the healing process, come together in this project, Reflections of Another Self? Walk me through it. How it was made and what brought you here?

MC: I feel like the fact of creating an album, it’s already a whole journey. Crafting all the ideas and the music for it, composing it, but also releasing it to the world and actually putting aside all your fears and insecurities. The idea, the initial idea of it, is me going through my traumas. The album is divided into three different sections.

The first one is accepting, the second one is understanding, and the third is overcoming. When I was composing these songs, I was reflecting about how I can express all these experiences in just a couple of songs. So I started with an introduction that is called, “This is My Hair.” Hair has been a really big theme in my life.

I have a lot of trauma with my hair and I’ve been doing the work towards embracing it and towards loving it because growing up in Spain, I never really saw anybody with an afro. I received a lot of looks, a lot of laughs, and a lot of comments. I had a lot of trauma with my hair. Now, I love my hair. It’s beautiful and I love Afro hair. I started with that statement because it’s personal, but it’s also universal. After that we get deep into topics like imposter syndrome, the adversity in the world right now, and the craziness that is going on “OCT (Oda to the Crazy Times).”

Then we go through the second section of the album, which is understanding, and I have compositions like “Lidia y los Libros” which is in honor of my mother and grandmother. About the structure of family, friends and people that love you and support you and how important that is.

We have a song “Unconditional Love” as well. Then we go through the third section, which is overcoming. There’s songs like “Resilience” or “Courage” and then a composition called “Self-love,” which I feel loving yourself might be one of the hardest things to do. I’m still struggling with it. I’m trying to do it. I am going to do it. It might take me a second, but I’m in that direction and I felt that was a really important theme to end the album with.

AP: Do you see music visually when you’re creating it? Or do you see music as cinematic scenes in your mind?

MC: Yes. And this is so great that you mentioned the word cinematic because that was something really important for me. I really, I feel like every song by itself, is a little movie. I do hear the music, but I see it as well. I imagine myself going through it and it’s so great to hear that people are feeling that, and especially mentioning the word cinematic because that’s something that I was really trying to achieve.

AP: How big is being intentional in your work for you?

MC: It’s one of the most important things, if not the most important thing because for me, music is like home somehow. I feel like maybe consciously or unconsciously. 

AP: You have women like Meshell Ndegeocello and Esperanza Spalding on the album. What was it like working with them creatively or even spiritually?

MC: Working with Meshell was so inspiring. She’s such a special person and an artist, so it was really an honor to just have her blessing the album then with Esperanza as well. She appears in the first song, “This is My Hair”, which is actually kinda like a sample of an interview that I had with her a couple of years ago. Everybody on the album, like all the special guests, are family to me. People that I know and that they’re happy to help and support and always inspire me and, and guide me through, through this world.

AP: For any young Afro-Latina girl out there, what do you hope she feels when she listens to this project?

MC: Well, I hope that, when they listen to this project, it helps them to believe in themselves to know that anything they want to do, they can do it. I will tell them, don’t let anybody stop you.