Soaring Glory
Happy Birthday to our dearly departed Anthony Ant, the best bandleader I ever met
This image, and all others in this post, were pulled directly from social media (mostly Anthony’s). If you know the photographers of any of these images and want to make sure they get credit, please let me know.
I’d like to start by telling a story once told to me by trumpeter, band leader, promoter and event organizer Anthony Anderson, better known as Anthony Ant. Wednesday, May 13th, 2026 would have been Anthony’s 41st birthday if he hadn’t been shot and killed by Alameda County Sheriffs back in February of this year.
Like many conversations I had with Anthony, this particular story was told to me during sound check. I was scurrying around the tiny stage in the upstairs bar of The Legionnaire Saloon on Telegraph Ave. in Oakland, plugging in DI boxes, trying to move cables out of the way so a mic stand couldn’t knock them over.
Anthony hosted weekly jam sessions (or “Glory Jams” as he called them) at The Legionnaire, The Starry Plough in Berkeley, The Layover in Oakland (when it still existed), and countless other spots all over the Bay. You could sometimes find him at The Ivy Room in Albany, at The Boom Boom Room in SF, or if you were really tapped in, at ultra late night afterparties at some random mansion tucked away deep in the hills of San Rafael or another city absolutely not known for its nightlife. If there was any funk/soul jam session happening anywhere in the Bay Area, it was very likely that Ant would be there.
At the time I was doing sound for the Legionnaire Glory Jams each Tuesday, and was used to seeing him every time. He had been conspicuously absent the week prior. As I was plugging in his mic and preparing to check his levels, I asked him where he had been.
“Dude it was focking crazy,” he said, grinning. This was how he pronounced the word ‘fuck’, as if he had read it somewhere and never learned that this spelling was incorrect.
He proceeded to tell me about how someone had texted him out of the blue offering him a gig to play with Solange in LA. For many years, Anthony conducted most (if not all) of his business via an old flip phone. I remember when he got an iPhone and I had to explain to him how to screen record something so that he could reshare it on social media. If you saw the scale of the network that he built up over the years, the size and energy of parties he organized and the caliber of artists he regularly recruited for his Glory Jams, you would understand that him doing all this via a busted Motorola was the music industry equivalent of building a nuclear bomb with a box of Legos.
According to Anthony, he drove all the way down to SoCal for a rehearsal with Ms. Knowles’ band a day or so before their set at a music festival. He followed the directions and showed up at the rehearsal space where he walked into a room filled with some of the industry’s finest instrumentalists. As soon as he entered the space however, things went silent. A man came up and introduced himself and asked what Anthony was doing there.
“I’m Anthony,” he said. “You reached out to me about this gig.”
“Oh,” the guy said. “Uh... We thought you were Black.”
Between Ant’s stellar reputation as a badazz (his preferred spelling) trumpet player and his lack of social media presence, the bandleader had simply assumed Anthony was Black, and never even bothered to follow up to ask what his ethnicity was. His clout was so ironclad that someone very reputable had simply referred him to Solange’s people, and no one bothered to do a background check. That is how well respected the man was.
So Anthony was compensated for his time and gas money, and given a VIP pass to the festival, got to hang out with Solange and everyone else, but he was not invited to play in the band. A few years later I saw Solange play at a festival in Helsinki, and her band was very noticeably all Black. I sent Ant a video (he had a smartphone by this point), and asked “Is that you on trumpet up there?”
He responded within a few minutes saying something along the lines of “LOL dewd that’s focking epic!!!”
It was focking epic indeed.
Anthony wasn’t the first person I knew who has died this year, and he wasn’t the last. I recently sat down and had a drink with my old high school english teacher and he said something along the lines of “I’ve been to more funerals than I can count recently. They’re dropping like flies.” I came very close to saying “same,” before realizing that he was talking about parents of friends and people older than him, while I was talking about people much closer to my age.
Although several people I know have passed away this year, Anthony was the first person I have known in my life whose death I actually saw in a video. I will not link to the video here, but when I was first trying to get information about what had happened I stumbled upon an article from a local news station which contained video from a Ring camera on someone’s porch. Before I even really knew what I was watching, I had seen footage of two law enforcement officers shooting and killing my friend and colleague.
Very quickly, rumors and theories began to spread online. The official narrative was that Anthony was experiencing some kind of mental health episode, had called 911 and threatened to commit violent acts to himself and/or other people, and the sheriffs who were dispatched mistook an object in his hand for a gun, at which point they proceeded to shoot and kill him.
I saw some people online claim they thought it was a set up. One guitarist who used to perform with him quite a bit told me in a message that he thought it could be a potential “suicide by cop”. Another bass player (a very successful and well known musician I might add) actually posted a screenshot of a conversation he had had with Ant a few weeks prior where Anthony was detailing some sort of psychosis he had experienced whilst seemingly going through drug withdrawal. I found myself shocked that someone so close to him would share something so deeply personal, and as much as I appreciated the potential insight it gave into the situation, it made me genuinely sick not just to read that but to know that someone was posting that while the blood was still drying.
I promptly unfollowed this bass player on Instagram and have not really had the stomach to follow him back or get in touch with him.
I was heartbroken to miss the tribute that the Starry Plough hosted shortly after his death (I was still in Europe at the time), but I was very heartened to see not only a massive outpouring of support but also a concerted effort by Anthony’s girlfriend and others to ask people to tamp down the discourse online and also decline to share any information with members of the media, should they come asking.
To me, Anthony’s death is not some mystery that needs solving. “Suicide by cop” is a uniquely American phenomenon, and whether or not that is what happened I have found myself barely being able to keep it together when explaining to non-American friends that someone I know was recently shot and killed by the police.
For all I know maybe the cops made the same mistake that Solange’s band did. Maybe they thought he was Black.
Image via Allison Irvine on Instagram.
I had never really had any serious conversations with Anthony about drugs or mental health, with the exception of fleeting mentions of music industry burnout, something he took quite seriously. I had seen him drink quite a bit before (mostly PBR), but as far as I know he didn’t smoke, always turning down a hit of a joint while others were smoking outside the Plough or whatever venue we were at on any given night. I had also never talked to him much about politics or police violence, but from what I could understand he was firmly left-leaning and firmly anti-police.
I can understand why there were conspiracy theories afoot, although I am sadly inclined to believe that the official narrative is more or less correct. In the video I saw - a video I will never watch again - he did appear to have something in his hand (apparently it was a pipe), and did appear to raise it in a threatening manner at the police. Whether or not he was deliberately challenging the police to a violent showdown is something we will never know, but it is clear that Anthony was struggling. It is also incredibly clear that things did not have to end this way.
The reason Anthony’s death was so shocking to so many people is not simply because he never seemed particularly unstable, but because he seemed like someone who simply could not stop living. Whether it was an hour-plus conversation about one particular practice technique or a 15-minute rendition of Outkast’s “SpottieOttieDopaliscious”, there are exceptionally few people I have met in the music industry, or any industry for that matter, who had as much energy as he did. He spoke in his own language, he did things his own way, he would get on stage and howl like a cartoon dog and rant about “Soaring Focking Glory” and other nonsense, and everyone just went with it. His energy was so infectious that it was practically impossible not to.
Everyone was always happy to see him, and he was always happy to see everyone. I’m not sure I ever heard him say a bad word about anyone, and if he had anything to complain about, it was generally a well-deserved rant about a disrespectful club owner or a musician who had wasted his time by flaking out of a professional commitment.
The last time I saw Anthony was at the Starry Plough a few years ago when I flew out from Europe to visit California for a few weeks. He was chilling in the back of the room and taking a break while letting some other musicians run the stage. This was the usual format: Anthony and crew would play a series of covers for an hour or so, then they would bring up a featured vocalist to play some of their original music for an hour or so, and then musicians would hop on stage for a jam that would run until the venue closed. Nothing was rehearsed in advance, and Anthony would always let anyone jump on stage for the jam regardless of skill level.
“Dude!” he said to me when I crossed paths with him at the back of the room during the jam portion. In my head I heard it the way he would spell it, something like “deeewwd”.
He proceeded to ask me about the music scene in Berlin and Europe in general. We chatted for a few minutes above the din before he became distracted by the guitar player, some young kid he had never seen before.
“Sorry,” he said, turning to me wide-eyed. “This dude is fucking CRUSHING it!! I gotta go check this out. Let’s catch up outside in a little bit.”
I smiled and watched him work his way through the crowd back towards the stage, fist-bumping people and grinning as he went. We never got to finish our conversation.
That is how I would like to remember Anthony Ant, making his way through a crowd of people who were there to see him, and sending that love right back to everyone.
I have been to the Starry Plough a few times in recent weeks and I am happy to report that the Glory Jams are alive and well, still starting off slow before building to a raucous crowd and packed dancefloor by the time of last call. But there is an unmistakable hole in the energy, a sense that nothing will ever quite be the same again.
It is not an exaggeration to say that there are quite a few people in the Bay Area and beyond who would not have a career as a musician if not for the community that Anthony lovingly and meticulously cultivated. He platformed queer and trans artists, he decried any sort of racism or discrimination, he encouraged people (myself included) to jump on stage for a song or two even if he knew they were well below his skill level. When he wasn’t gigging in nightclubs, he was playing weddings and private events and teaching lessons. There were people with Grammys who could have been anywhere in the Bay on any given night and they would come out to play with Anthony for a meagre sum of cash (or nothing at all) just because they knew he threw the sickest parties in town.
I have done sound for Charlie Hunter, I have worked security for Green Day, I have shaken hands with Brian Eno on the floor of a major record label office. In Helsinki, just after messaging Anthony, I witnessed Erykah Badu join Solange onstage, and then I turned to my side and saw Earl Sweatshirt standing next to me in the crowd, grinning ear to ear. I would give all those things up in a second to run sound for one of his Glory Jams again. I’m not sure I have ever felt quite as flattered as when Anthony texted me asking me to send him the link to the playlist I made to play in between acts during the jams. It was quite possibly the single most profound validation of my musical taste that any fellow musician has ever given me.
Anthony wasn’t just a great musician, he was an unbelievably skilled organizer and networker who squeezed more use out of a flip phone than any loser tech bro or the data centers they evangelize could ever dream of. But he didn’t do it for money or fame. In his words, he did it for the focking glory.
Rest easy Ant.