Pan Amsterdam – the shapeshifting inter-disciplinary artist from New York also known as Leron Thomas – continues to map out his highly-anticipated new album with the release of self-produced single, ‘Day Out’. It’s the second primer following last year’s ‘White Ninja’, which the musician dissected in an interview last year. In a similar fashion, the experimental rapper and trumpeter doesn’t shy away from foregrounding race-related issues, laid out plainly in the song’s opening line: “living more vicariously than a white girl through her mixed baby.”

Speaking on the song’s biting exploration of interracial identity, Thomas tells CLASH: “When I originally wrote ‘Day Out’ I had been scrolling on social media and saw this story of a white mother making her interracial daughter do a bunch of tricks for the camera to keep her mum posting viral content, much of it against the daughter’s will. My own daughter is interracial, and although as parents we would never do something like this to our child, it made me wonder how often this sort of thing happens behind closed doors.”

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He continues: “When you grow older, you don’t think you’re gonna be the angry black man. You look at people who are older than you and think ‘ah man you’re from that time period so I can understand your frustration’, but you don’t wanna be labelled as that. It’s very dismissive and it kind of puts a target on your back. But if I’m honest with myself, at this point in my career, there are definitely things that I’ve seen that are pretty damn racially biased.”

While acknowledging these recurring themes in his work, the current musical director of Iggy Pop’s band reveals that making a politically-charged project was not something that he had in mind when he began sessions for the album. “I remember talking to Danny [Mitchell] and Daisy [Goodwin] at Heavenly and telling them that this is not a political album, and they both looked at each other like ‘Does he really think that?’ I had to embrace all of this truth,” he says. “I try not to be too political or too preachy, but at the same time if that’s how I feel on that day when I’m writing those lyrics, then that’s what’s gonna come out. I try to write something that dances out of that feeling and moves towards a more universal outlook.”

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As Thomas navigates the complex landscape of race and identity in his music, it becomes evident why he regularly cites funk pioneer George Clinton as one of his foremost influences. Much like Clinton’s ability to blend humour with incisive social commentary, ‘Day Out’ exemplifies a continuation of this ethos – of using music as a vehicle for entertainment and enlightenment.

“[Clinton] was way out there! He was even doing things with bagpipes!” Thomas says in awe. “He said something in an interview one time about how he was ‘too black for the white folks, and too white for the black folks’ and I understand where he’s coming from with that. I think sometimes we don’t think about George Clinton as one of the godfathers of hip-hop, but he is. West Coast hip-hop would not exist without him. Snoop and those guys were sampling the hell out of Funkadelic. That can only come from someone being such a free spirit in their art.”

Thomas eradicates any doubt about the free-spirited approach he’s taken in crafting the new Pan Amsterdam LP. “It looks like it’s gonna be all over the place. I think what I’m trying to do is really free up and not feel like I’m pigeonholed into one thing. At the same time I wanna keep it Pan Am, you know? It’s a difficult thing to do but I find that if you just watch whatever project you’re doing, it tends to do its own thing. It becomes a whole journey within itself and I think that’s perfect. I like to do whatever’s on my mind at the time, and document it kind of as a time capsule which you then have to be able to let go of,” he explains.

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Pan Amsterdam is in a constant state of creative flux, which explains his frustration with the concept of style. He quotes a line from the 1996 film Surviving Picasso – “style only comes after you die” – while also citing Bruce Lee and his allusions to mimicry. “You want to be more fluid and organic,” says Thomas. “There are times where I might not like the direction that a project is moving in but it’s still an honest documentation. And usually, a bit later on, I do find myself liking it more because of its honesty.”

Thomas attended the high school for the Performing And Visual Arts in Houston, a state school that boasts an impressive alumni, including Queen Bey herself. “I went to highschool with Beyoncé!” Thomas reveals. “We were in a talent show called the Sammy Davis Jr Expo, and it was all about cultivating young talent around the city. One year, Destiny’s Child won best female group and I won best instrumentalist. By that point, she was already pretty successful. She was showing up in a limousine after classes, just to see her friends, really.”

Pan Amsterdam’s musical education can also be attributed to his late father, a tenor in a Motown-inspired quartet who once opened for Ike and Tina Turner at a show in Port Arthur, Texas. His lessons and pearls of wisdom proved invaluable. “My dad taught me how to perform. He told me that if I was nervous, I should concentrate on one member of the audience until they were almost uncomfortable, then move onto another person and so on and so forth until eventually you’re comfortable,” Thomas recalls.

Much of his zest for multi-genre experimentation came from his father’s expansive and highly-eclectic music library. “He’d listen to The Grateful Dead, Great Funk Railroad, Isaac Hayes, Beethoven…” Thomas reveals. “You’d look through his collection and you’d see something like an obscure Freddie Hubbard album. When he saw I was trying to play jazz, he would show some of his records which nowadays would be considered some serious collectors items. That vinyl collection got me through puberty, man! I ain’t lying, you would see some of these covers with all these women on them, some of them topless. If you were to see some of the Ohio Players covers, man. Goodness gracious!”

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At the start of his career as a trumpeter, Thomas was known primarily for his work as a jazz musician, so when his unapologetic and unconventional self-released debut album ‘Dirty Draws Vol. 1’ landed in 2005, it raised a few eyebrows, even from those closest to him. “My dad was shocked! I innocently didn’t understand why at the time because I grew up listening to him listen to all kinds of music!” He remembers the moment clearly. “After I played him the album he just said ‘well, you got that out of your system!’” As it turns out, this was simply the beginning. “It went on and on and on, and somewhere along the road I ended up creating this character Pan Amsterdam!”

Twenty years on from that moment, Pan Amsterdam is ready to honour his familial history on a record that celebrates the circularity of life. “This new album is a homage to my dad. I kind of went full-circle and took more of a Dirty Draws approach to making it, with a lot of genre-crossing and whatnot.”

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Words: Finlay Harrison
Photo Credit: Louise Mason

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