Because it’s Women’s History Month, many music writers have been documenting Black jazz vocal icons who have joined the ancestors; Ella Fitzgerald, Billie Holiday, Nina Simone, and so many more (who I’ve also featured here). May their names and musical legacy be blessed.
For today’s Black Music Sunday, I thought I would share music from some sisters who are carrying on that legacy, and not just as vocalists, both outside of the U.S. and here at home. Music, after all, knows no borders, though jazz as a genre has been and continues to be undeniably dominated by men.
Thanks to the wonders of global social media, it is much easier these days to find living jazz to explore—we’re no longer completely dependent on radio programmers and the whims of record company executives; artists can begin to build audiences and develop fan followings outside the boxes that once contained them.
Some readers may already be familiar with the women I’m writing about today, while for others, this will be an introduction. Enjoy and let me know what you think!
From Trinidad and Tobago, meet Vaughnette Bigford, who has been singing jazz for nearly 20 years, though I admit that I had not heard of her until recently. It was while doing research for my Caribbean Matters series that I ran across news of her having contracted COVID-19, which was reported in Trinidad &Tobago Newsday.
Songbird Vaughnette Bigford is hoping that her covid19 positive status will convince anti-vaxxers to get vaccinated.
However, she is not totally optimistic.
“If an average of 25 deaths a day has not brought the message home that there is something going on and we absolutely need to give ourselves a fighting chance, then I am not even going to expend my energy to say anything more. “Nothing is more real than seeing 25 people dead every day,” she said in a phone interview with the Newsday from her La Brea home.
Bigford who is fully vaccinated and awaiting her booster shot, tested positive last Thursday, forcing her to postpone her concert, An Evening with VB, which was set to take place at the Naparima Bowl on Saturday, among other carded events for the rest of the month.
Curiosity about her led me to the Safe & Sound at-home concert series from Trinidad, where artists have been sharing music from the safety of their homes, including Bigford. Here’s Bigford’s version of Al Jarreau’s 1981 hit,"We're in This Love Together," her first song in the 45-minute concert.
I was instantly captivated by Bigford’s voice and style. I had to hear more.
Bigford’s website includes this fascinating interview with her, on Trinidad’s The Morning Show, with host Michelle Borel.
Per the YouTube video’s notes:
It isn't hard to believe how quickly audiences sit up and take notice whenever Vaughnette takes centre stage and starts to sing. Her rich, warm, earthy tones caressingly draw you in, as she delivers effortlessly on some of the most timeless standards and ballads. Hailing from La Brea in the south of Trinidad, Vaughnette debuted on the jazz circuit at the Steelpan & Jazz Festival (2004), performing as a guest vocalist with virtuoso pannist Len 'Boogsie' Sharpe. She next graced the stage later that same year, at the San Fernando Jazz Festival, appearing with visionary Carlton Alexander and the Coalpot Band. Vaughnette's focus and hard work paid "dividends" in 2008 when she became one of few Caribbean nationals ever, to be awarded a scholarship to attend the prestigious Berklee College of Music Summer Performance Program. She returned to the Berklee College of Music in 2010 and enrolled as a student of Berklee’s Twelve Week Program where she honed her craft under esteemed tutors like Donna Mc Elroy, Armsted Christian, Gabrielle Goodman, Janice Pendarvis.
I can’t resist—here’s one more clip.
Traveling farther afield, I headed across the pond to Great Britain. My husband introduced me to tenor saxophone player Nubya Garcia a while ago, though I wasn’t aware of her work with other women as part of Nérija.
Per the YouTube video’s notes, Nérija is determined to showcase the power of women working together to create music.
Nérija (pronounced ‘Ne-ree-ya’) began from a Tomorrow’s Warriors initiative which premised that many girls often start playing jazz at the same time as their male counterparts, but often do not develop at the same rate. The Warriors have therefore begun separate development sessions for young women with the aim of creating a space for them in which they do not feel intimidated by counterproductive competitiveness, or feel discouraged by perceiving jazz as a uniquely masculine art form. Nérija embodies this initiative.
Nérija was featured in this 2019 review in The Guardian, which in turn includes an earlier interview with guitarist Shirley Tettah.
While jazz undergoes a facelift thanks to a new generation of London-based musicians who are shunning the genre’s elitist stereotypes and opening it up to more diverse audiences, there is still a notable gender gap among its performers. In an interview with the Guardian in December, guitarist Shirley Tetteh said that, in jazz, “you had to play 10 times harder if you were a woman and wanted to be taken seriously”.
I really enjoy seeing and hearing women jamming on instruments we expect to see men playing—especially horns, even as Shirley Tetteh finds a major groove on guitar about two minutes in.
Back to Nubya Garcia, who was profiled on the blog “Guyanese Girls Rock.”
London-based saxophonist and composer, Nubya Garcia, is one of the leading forces behind the resurgence of jazz-influenced sounds in the UK. Raised in a creative environment built by a set of Caribbean parents, her brand of afro-tinged Jazz has made her a key component in a string of new and established groups: from work with MOBO Award-winning drummer, Moses Boyd, legendary Jungle producer and toaster, Congo Natty, through to her own works as part of six-piece, Maisha, and the Nérija septet.
Nubya was born in 1991 in the Camden district of northwest London a Guyanese mother, Loraine Jansen (Bishops High School alumni). She is the niece of Guyanese-born Stanford University Professor, Dr. John Rickford. Given a violin aged 5, Nubya followed her three older siblings to the local Camden Saturday Music Centre. Nubya also played the viola with the London Schools Symphony Orchestra (LSSO).
Nubya started playing the Saxophone when she was 10. Joining the Camden Jazz Band, later moving to the Junior Jazz at the Royal Academy of Music. She attended Tomorrow’s Warriors workshops led by Gary Crosby, formerly of Jazz Warriors, alongside music workshops at the Roundhouse in Camden. With a distinction in G8 Saxophone and still in High School, Nubya received a scholarship enabling her to attend the summer five-week programme at the prestigious Berklee College of Music in Boston. Returning to London she attended Trinity Laban Conservatoire of Music and Dance London, graduating with a BMus (Hons) in Jazz Performance.
Record company founder and broadcaster Gilles Peterson hosts The Worldwide Awards, an annual celebration of new music in London; watch Garcia’s stunning performance there in 2018.
Like Bigford, Garcia’s tour schedule was interrupted by COVID-19; even still, the world got a chance to hear her during an NPR Tiny Desk concert from a very unique location.
As the YouTube video’s notes note:
September 16, 2020 | Suraya Mohamed -- Look to the left of Nubya Garcia's Tiny Desk (home) concert and you'll see a hanging plant swaying right above the keys. It never stops moving during the next 23 minutes, and it's for a bizarre reason. Garcia's (home) concert took place on a boat — a first in Tiny Desk history — because she was in between homes. Before the pandemic hit, the London-born jazz saxophonist and composer was booked for an extensive global tour that started in February 2020, and it was expected to continue through the end of the year. Because she was only going to be in London for a very short time, she gave up her flat, planning to stay with family and friends for short breaks. It seemed like a good idea until March, when COVID-19 shut down most of the world and the tour, too.
Garcia and her band are at Soup Studio, a recording facility built on a decommissioned floating lighthouse moored on the River Thames. It's also where Garcia recorded her excellent new album, SOURCE. This set features three songs from the record; the title track starts it off with a reggae, dub vibe. Garcia skillfully uses the entire range of her tenor saxophone, hitting convincing low and high notes with ease and resolve. Throughout the set, her tone is gorgeous, her musical intuition perfect. She projects rich and full melodic lines with refined solos that leave just enough space to take in the expressive sincerity of the music. There are no lyrics but her music conveys a message of staying grounded, being present in the moment and appreciating the comforts and feelings of what it means to be home.
Coming home to the States, we meet Cécile McLorin Salvant, born in Miami in August 1989—with a Caribbean connection, according to her website.
Cécile McLorin Salvant, is a composer, singer, and visual artist. The late Jessye Norman described Salvant as“a unique voice supported by an intelligence and full-fledged musicality, which light up every note she sings”. Salvant has developed a passion for storytelling and finding the connections between vaudeville, blues, folk traditions from around the world, theater, jazz, and baroque music. Salvant is an eclectic curator, unearthing rarely recorded, forgotten songs with strong narratives, interesting power dynamics, unexpected twists, and humor. Salvant won the Thelonious Monk competition in 2010. She has received Grammy Awards for Best Jazz Vocal Album for her 3 latest albums, “The Window”, “Dreams and Daggers”, and “For One To Love”, and was nominated for the award in 2014 for her album “WomanChild”.
Born and raised in Miami, Florida, of a French mother and Haitian father, she started classical piano studies at 5, sang in a children’s choir at 8, and started classical voice lessons as a teenager.
Salvant received a bachelor’s in French law from the Université Pierre-Mendes France in Grenoble while also studying baroque music and jazz at the Darius Milhaud Music Conservatory in Aix-en-Provence, France.
Salvant has also had to cope with COVID-19.
With people across the globe urged to stay home as much as possible and avoid mass gatherings, the Grammy-winning jazz vocalist announced a series of concerts to be live-streamed on Facebook and Instagram in order to give fans the opportunity to enjoy the concert experience from the safety of their homes. Salvant scheduled the first one with piano accompanist Sullivan Fortner for Wednesday, March 18 at 8 p.m. EST on a pay-what-you-can basis, with donations accepted through Venmo to be used for people in need. Prior to that, Salvant had made the best of her cancelled performance at SFJazz by regrouping at the Oakland home of activist Angela Davis for an exclusive, intimate concert — only 11 people were in the audience.
Salvant’s new album Ghost Song was released March 4, and has received quite a bit of media attention.
Arts writer and critic Kadish Morris reviewed it for The Guardian.
Her music is beloved for rejecting traditional jazz standards, embracing theatre and subverting classics with playful renditions. At 21, Salvant won the Thelonious Monk International Jazz Competition. Her 2013 album WomanChild spanned three centuries of American music and introduced her charismatic voice and spirited energy to the world. She won a Grammy award for best jazz vocal album for her 2015 album, For One to Love, which delved into the history of sexual politics and a more intimate history of unrequited love. From 2018, The Window is more stripped back, with Salvant accompanied only by pianist and organist Sullivan Fortner.
Her new album, Ghost Song, combines the sounds she is known for – jazz, folk melodies, blues – and weaves in brand new textures that are less clean. (Her sensibility is reminiscent of Fiona Apple’s on Fetch the Bolt Cutters – both jazz-honed vocalists with an unorthodox approach to their influences.) “Bringing in recorded sources that are not as high fidelity and pristine … moving forward, I want to do that a lot,” says Salvant. “I have always loved field recordings. I’ve been thinking a lot about not trying to drown out the life around us and actually integrating that into the album. We start and end the album with these recordings that are a cappella in a church. You can hear the air.”
Here’s the titular song.
Jazz writer Giovanni Russonello also reviewed the album and dove into her history for The New York Times.
On “Ghost Song,” she’s also on a mission to punch up the jazz ballad for the 21st century, and she does two covers that could well become new standards: Sting’s plangent “Until,” and Gregory Porter’s triumphant “No Love Dying” (which she and Fortner deftly combine, on Track 2, with “Optimistic Voices,” a chipper tune from “The Wizard of Oz”).
“It lifts everything up to have standards that we all play that are written by our peers, and I just feel like that’s missing a little bit,” Salvant said of the contemporary jazz scene. “I’m not saying that it’ll be ‘No Love Dying,’ but I hope it happens with something.”
She has written a moving ballad of her own, too: “Moon Song,” a kind of companion piece to the album’s bluesier, aching title track. “Moon Song” has the aesthetic of classic jazz, with Diehl leading a piano trio behind her, but its words meditate on the dangers and discomforts of love, in a way that few old standards do. But none of this feels totally fatalistic. More than anything, “Moon Song” is a demand for love without sacrifice — which is to say, devotion without possession.
Here’s “Until.”
COVID-19 may be putting a cramp on packed house performances for live audiences these days, but it ain’t stopping the music. This virus also may have been the initial inspiration for me to do this series every Sunday—starting in April 2020, with a celebration of Jazz Appreciation Month—however I have no plans to stop ... and as long as there is music to share, both old and new, the groove will go on.
Look forward to reading your responses and hearing the music you post in the comments.