Chester native Jamai is wowing everybody on ‘The Voice’
Team Alicia it is for Jamai, a musician from Chester who makes his non-show living biz delivering singing telegrams in Delco and his frequent stopping place, L.A.
The funny thing is Jamai, age 28, was not planning to audition for NBC’s “The Voice” this season.
He’d tried out for the primetime talent contest, seen 8 p.m. Mondays and Tuesdays on Channel 10, eight times without making it to air. He decided to sit down the current round.
This time “The Voice” called him.
The ninth time proved the charm. Jamai, in last week’s blind auditions, launched into Usher’s “U Got It Bad,” had team captains Kelly Clarkson and Alicia Keys swaying and sing along from Note One, hit his high note, and did not see what happened next, Kelly and Alicia hitting their “I Want You” buttons simultaneously and turning around to see, and claim, Jamai as a performer in one of their folds.
“I had so much to concentrate on,” Jamai said in a telephone call from Los Angeles, where his “Voice” journey continues Monday. “I wanted to get my song right, and there were the lights, and the camera. I began to think about where the camera was. I hit the high note and am still singing, when all of a sudden I realized Alicia and Kelly had their seats turned and were looking at me. In my mind, I’m thinking, ‘Keep doing your song. Just keep doing your song.” Meanwhile my heart is pounding and my head is going in a hundred directions. But I finished. And then I had to make a choice.
“What can I say? I’m excited and ecstatic.” And cool. Real cool. Whatever was going on inside him, Jamai broke neither stride no sweat when in the spotlight as a chosen team member.
“The Voice” panel was all smiles. Clarkson knew from the way Jamai intoned “Alicia” which way Jamai would be heading. Jamai was sharp enough to acknowledge Kelly as the ultimate in talent show successes considering she earned her stardom as the first winner on “American Idol,” which left Fox to roost last night on ABC.
Badinage ensued, with noncontending captains Adam Levine and Blake Shelton chipping, and Jamai showed he could handle ad lib conversation like a champ. He was as quick and as witty as any of the stars. With this poise under fire, Jamai showed the ease of experience and the charm of a guy who making be shaking from anxiety someplace in his being but mustered the grit to hold his own with Major Leaguers.
Courage has been a constant part of Jamai’s life. Individuality, belief, and perseverance, too. Plenty of perseverance.
Jamai says he always enjoyed singing and always did it despite getting little encouragement.
“My uncle and grandmother told me I did not have a tone.”
Jamai sang anyway. A personal breakthrough came half his lifetime ago, when Jamai was age 14 and attending Showalter Middle School. He was in eighth grade, and there was a talent show.
It was there the performance bug bit him.
Jamai says he liked how it felt to entertain. He was ready to perform and convinced he found what he wanted to do for the rest of his life.
Jamai stuck to those guns. He says he sang everywhere he could.
“I’ve probably sung on every street corner in Chester and at every club I could around Delaware County, Philly, and Wilmington.”
The guy was unstoppable. He had high. At 16, attending Chester High, he used the Christmas money he got from his doubting grandmother and financed an album.
“I was the talk of Chester High that year.”
In those days, Jamai was most interested in rhythm and blues and soul. He says he has since embraced a wide variety of music and is currently into international pop. His idols are Usher, Prince, and Beyoncé. It’s only coincidental they go by a single name, like Jamai who would not reveal his full name.
In fairness, Stevie Wonder is also in the influence mix. Kelly Clarkson, while noting Jamai has an individual sound, advised him not to get too close to Usher’s rendition if he’s doing an Usher song.
Kelly reached receptive ears. Jamai says one of the things that took courage and that made it hard to classify him is he is does not look or sound like people expect.
“I’m an African-American with red hair who dresses in my own style and sings in my voice.
“A lot of people have told me I have to do this or change that to get the success I want, but that isn’t me. I know my music is good and that people will want to hear. I don’t want to change it or me. I need to find the audience that will accept and appreciate me and what I do in the sincere, real way I present them.
“That has taken courage. I found it by always believing in myself. I’ve done what I had to keep going. I have a fire in me that will not be extinguished. I couldn’t quit because I believed , felt positive about myself, and received enough positive attention.
“Ask me to be specific about what kept me going in hard and low times, and I can’t answer because I don’t know. I just had to sing, I had to perform. I had to make my music.
“And I had to be me. I wanted my red hair. I dress as I like (which is neat and comfortable in colorful and tropically patterned shirts). My choices and how I live inspires me. I made my way, and if I learned one thing in the last 14 years, it’s to be true to who I am and my vision of who I want to be.”
So Jamai stuck with his music, went back and forth from Chester to L.A. as jobs, ambition, and the winds took him, and kept working at the music he loved to create and share.
On that note, “The Voice” will keep Jamai busy in L.A., but he’ll be back in Delco Saturday to do a 7 p.m. show at The Venue, 14 S. Lansdowne Avenue, in Lansdowne. The show is called “Jaimi Stripped.”
“But don’t get the wrong idea,” he said. “I’m not taking off my clothes. Well, maybe my shirt. I use the word ‘stripped’ because the show is all acoustic. I play the guitar and sing some gentler music. I like playing small, intimate clubs at times.
“This show is more than about performing. I have received a lot of support from Chester and Delaware County, and I want to say ‘thank you’ for all of that acceptance, encouragement, and love. With this show I am saying ‘Thank you. Thank you. Thank you.”
While Jamai did not graduate Chester High (he spent his junior and senior years at Wilmington’s Mt. Pleasant High School), he thinks of himself as “all Chester” and likes the cheers he’s getting from home.
“Time has taught me so much. It’s taught me realities of the music industry, it’s taught me about performance, it’s taught me to develop my talent and individual approach to music, and it’s taught to keep doing what I enjoy. I’m always singing when it’s telegrams.”
Maybe time has come for Jamai to ride “The Voice” to the recognitions he’s worked for and wanted so hard.
Looking behind the art
From the time Channel 12 producer Karen Smyles learned
about tandem portraits of an African-American couple that date back to 1821, she was fascinated with the story behind the pair so elegantly depicted and wanted to learn more about who they are and they came to be so advanced in a 19th century United States that was riven by slavery and provided little record of the life of free, middle or upper class African-Americans of the period.
Adding to the news that William Pickens III, on behalf of the Montier family preserved in the portraits, donated the paintings to the Philadelphia Museum of Art, Smyles was taken with the Montiers having lived in her home township, Cheltenham, and with the history that preceded and followed the couple having their marriage marked by two magnificent works in oil.
“As a native of Philadelphia and a resident of Cheltenham, I couldn’t believe I didn’t know all of this,” she says.
Smyles’s findings, and the people who let her to them, including William Pickens III, make for a sweeping overview that spans parts of five centuries, from 1691 to 2018, in a half-hour documentary, “The Montiers: Beyond the Portraits,” airing 8:30 p.m. Friday. The program will be previewed in an Art Museum reception on Wednesday and be included in a Philadelphia City Council resolution on Thursday.
The justified ceremony surrounding Smyles’s documentary pales next to how the story of the Montiers augments Philadelphia’s ripe history and introduces little known facts about a family that helps to complete a picture of African-American life in our region and in the preCivil War United States. Smyles’s research and work are excellent. What the Montier story tells is further reaching.
Smyles says one of the challenges of presenting the Montier history is confining it all to one halfhour. “There’s enough material here for a two-hour documentary.”
You can hear the enthusiasm in Smyles’s voice as she speaks by telephone of all she’s learned.
The tale does begin with slavery. Although a Quaker, Humphrey Morrey, who had a farm in what is now called Glenside, on the Western edge of Cheltenham Township, bought and owned slaves.
He manumitted all of them in will of 1715, but his son, Richard Morrey fell in love with one of the freed women, Cremona, and married her. Pickens talks about how this was consensual and not the more commonly reported act of one forcing himself upon a another. Smyles speaks od how the Quaker community accepted the union as matter-of-fact and how Richard and Cremona’s daughter, Cremona, Jr., wed a man of French descent, John Montier, leading to the vivid history of the Montier family.
The couple portrayed in the famous paintings by Philadelphia artist Franklin R. Street is John and Cremona, Jr.’s son, Hiram, and his wife, Elizabeth Brown Montier. In “The Montiers,” Pickens is shown a marriage certificate that and says, “It’s a wedding portrait.” He also points out how much his own daughter looks like her distant descendant, Elizabeth.
Like Smyles, I am taken with the richness and texture of the Morrey-Montier-Pickens history. After talking to Karen and seeing “The Montiers,” I am tempted to go into so much that is important, I fear giving away all that Smyles depicts. I shall be disciplined and refer people to Friday’s rewarding documentary.
Highlights, in addition of going back to rarely spoken-of past, include a visit to the home that was built in Glenside on 198 acres of land Richard Morrey deeded to Cremona, Jr., making her one of the wealthiest African-American landowners in America. Of course, there’s a wrinkle to that, but it’s pleasant one.
To visit a home, it has to be intact, and “The Montiers” shows Pickens and today’s Montier family having a reunion there. The current owner has welcomed the family. Unfortunately, the historic home is not open to the public. I envy Karen getting a tour of it. a
William Pickens III is the primary narrator of “The Montiers.” Others such as PMA general director Timothy Rub, and University of Pennsylvania art historian Dr. Gwendolyn DuBois Shaw, historian Donald Scott, Sr., and David Rowland and Thomas Wieckowski from the Old York Road Historical Society.
Wednesday’s Art Museum screening is set for 6:30 p.m. on a pay-whatyou-wish admission night. A panel discussion includes Pickens, Smyles, Dr. DuBois Shaw, and Deesha Dyer, a Philadelphian who was social secretary to Barack and Michelle Obama during Mr. Obama’s Presidency.
The City Council resolution honoring WHYYTV and PMA is at 10 a.m. Thursday.