This month: Jazzmeia Horn
With Jazzmeia her given name (chosen by her jazz-loving, pianoplaying grandmother), the young Texan vocalist always had a lot to live up to. Horn hasn’t disappointed, and her inventive, multioctave vocal gift has earned Grammy nominations for the first two albums, A Social Call and Love and Liberation. Horn cites Sarah Vaughan and Rachelle Ferrell as big influences, but singles out Betty ‘Bebop’ Carter as her role model: ‘She demanded respect and really looked after her musicians… she composed her own songs and wrote incredible arrangements to other people’s.’
Horn fronts a big band for her new record, Dear Love (reviewed in the Dec issue): ‘I’ve played with some of the greatest big bands including the Count Basie Orchestra, the WDR and the Metropole Orkest. I didn’t want to wait as some others have done until I’m in my 50s or 60s to record my own record. I wanted to hear what my arrangements would sound like.’ The album’s exhilarating setlist is interleaved with poetry and intimate spoken-word passages. It’s another aspect to her art she attributes to family: ‘My grandfather was a pastor of a church back home and there’s always a voice there in my head.’
A documentary film on the making of Dear Love is out next year. ‘I really wanted to show that [the project] is not all about me being a cool singer; there’s a lot of work involved that people don’t normally get to see.’ The film will also reveal Horn’s busy life as a mother and an educator. Last year she published a book on singing and surviving in the jazz world, titled Strive From Within: The Jazzmeia Horn Approach.
Her online teaching programme has nearly 2,000 students after just one year. Although Horn herself trained at the renowned Booker T Washington High School for Performing and Visual Arts and later at the College of Performing Arts in New York, she thinks aspiring artists need more: ‘No one explained to me about what stage presence was or about creating a professional business, what booking agents and publicists do, or marketing. I think it is important to share that knowledge.’ Garry Booth
‘I didn’t want to wait until I’m in my 50s or 60s to record my own record’