Tessa Souter sets her story to musicPosted in Articles, Arts, Interviews, Media Archive, United States on 2015-07-21 02:14Z by Steven |
Tessa Souter sets her story to music
The Rochester Democrat and Chronicle
Rochester, New York
2014-06-23
Jeff Spevak, Staff writer
 (Photo: JOSEPH BOGGESS/PROVIDED BY XRIJF) |
Tessa Souter is known as a New York City singer-songwriter, but her biography runs much deeper. She’s taken a few detours on her way to the jazz clubs.
A runaway at 16, a magazine journalist writing for Elle and Vogue, a student of the legendary hipster scat singer Mark Murphy, a house cleaner while waiting for the singing career to blossom.
Souter, who has released four albums, is at the Xerox Rochester International Jazz Festival, performing at 6 and 10 p.m. Tuesday at Montage Music Hall. While in Spain a week and a half ago, she took a little time to answer some questions.
On your most-recent album, Beyond the Blue, you add sultry lyrics to classical pieces such as Beethoven’s Symphony No. 7, Movement 2. What’s it like collaborating with a guy who’s been dead for 187 years?
It’s fantastic because you don’t feel inhibited. If you can’t come up with anything, you don’t have to show it to them. And they’re not wondering what you are going to do with it, or if you will understand what they meant. Of course that doesn’t mean Ludwig isn’t rolling over in his grave right now. But he did write some wonderful vocal music, so he clearly wasn’t anti the whole idea of lyrics…
…You were born in London, your mother was English, your father was from Trinidad. How does that multicultural heritage work its way into that most-American of music genres, jazz?
When I first moved to New York, I sang at a cabaret open mic once, and the pianist said, “You’re not a cabaret singer. You are a jazz singer.” But I don’t try to be “jazz.” A friend, and one of my mentors, an amazing singer called Mansur Scott, once told me, “Just sing your story.” Mine includes the musical influences of my life — my mum singing to me, songs we sang together, my tween obsession with Sandy Denny, Fairport Convention, Pentangle and Joni Mitchell, my discovery of Miles Davis when I was 16 on Cannonball Adderly’s “Somethin’ Else.” Then I found Milton Nascimento and through him Sarah Vaughan and Wayne Shorter, whose Native Dancer is still my favorite album of all time. There are so many styles of jazz. Definitely American in origin. But isn’t jazz kind of like gumbo? It is itself multicultural. One of my very favorite “jazz” singers — Youn Sun Nah, who I discovered relatively recently (and who was a favorite at last year’s jazz festival) — is Korean…
Read the entire interview here.