The connection between my work on paper “Apart Together” and the music of the Jimmy Woods Sextet is both literal and profound—Apart Together is precisely the title of a track on the album Conflict (1963), that masterpiece of advanced hard bop recorded in Los Angeles.

The painting is a collage of rectangular planes of distinct colors, similar to the arrangement of Woods' sextet, where each musician maintains their own sonic identity while participating in a collective whole.

A large portion of the sheet remains white, empty. In Woods' music, these are the silences, the breaths between phrases, the spaces that Andrew Hill creates in his voicings. The white is not an absence—it is structuring, holding the colors together as silence holds the notes together.