One of the things that struck me the most in life was the phrase of a fellow double bass player I met at a rehearsal session for a new Jazz band.
“You are the most Jazz non-Jazz singer I know”.
This sentence confirmed the perception of me that I had always had and felt deeply, without ever having the courage to pronounce it.
Over the years I had cultivated a certainly not canonical research of what the summa wanted to be, in a unique and personal language, contaminated by all the music genres that I had loved most and that had intrigued me, so much so that I could not leave out any of them.
Can a “crossover” singer call herself “Jazz”?
Technically not.
But in practice, what is Jazz??
Jazz is beauty. Jazz is mastery of melody and harmony to drastically break away in improvisation. Jazz is the extreme play on the tempo, it is a rhythm that changes, gets lost and mutates. Jazz is the voice that becomes an instrument and in this recognition it finds a new space and a new dignity.
Jazz is authenticity to the extreme that goes beyond the boundaries of what is “correct” to express what is real. Jazz is the melodious expression at times, confusing and screaming at others, of the present moment of every singer and of every musician who espouses it.
Jazz is the voice of black suffering that mixes with the white one. It is the evolution and contamination of the roots of black music. It is the mixture of genres that evolves into a new synthesis and which therefore in this union can only become welcoming.
This is its future, what I see and what is already happening to all the singers who, like me, are thought of as Jazz, “felt” as Jazz, animated by Jazz, colored by Jazz, and are not Jazz.
Technically.
But Jazz is the overcoming of technique and limits. And that’s exactly where I meet it.
And it is at that point that I meet those who, like me, love it deeply.
And in it I am recognized.
