He's surrounded on all sides by an arsenal of machines for creating music: a MIDI controller keyboard, four keyboards stacked in racks of two, and an organ, while a bass cabinet, guitar amp, drum kit, and percussion section fill out the rest of the cramped basement. All of these run through five interfaces which route 40 signals-eight apiece-into the 21-year-old jazz musician's computer. It sits at the helm of this tightly organized chaos.
While chatting on a video call, Whitaker flits around a sea of dials, sliders, LED displays, and keys, like a pilot in the cockpit of a jumbo jet. A turn of a knob here, a click there, then his fingers turn to their true love: the piano keys. He grins while they dash across the keyboard, producing a raucous, cheeky major-key run. The piano is an extension of Whitaker: When he's particularly excited, or laughs, his hands dart across the keys, creating short melodic trills and riffs.
This basement is where Whitaker records and produces his music. But he doesn't use home production software or mixing boards the same way that sighted musicians do. He's blind, and has been since he was an infant-a result of complications from being born prematurely at 24 weeks.
Now at 21 and entering his fourth year at New York City's esteemed Juilliard School, he's an established recording and performing artist, a Gen Z jazz wunderkind with three full-length records under his belt and collaborations with jazz veterans like Christian McBride, Rhoda Scott, and the late Dr. Lonnie Smith. He's driven and he values control over his creative process, but for most people, recording music in the digital age is as much a visual process as a musical one. Playing, recording, mixing-all of these are carried out on visual cues, especially on a computer screen.
So how does Whitaker do it without sight? With a nod to Sinatra, Whitaker does it his way.
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