Lyrics and lineage
British-born singer delivers jazz in black and white
Growing up in London, Tessa Souter always knew she was different.
“My brother was blond and I’ve got a sort of a tan that’s noticeable in the U.K.,” the jazz vocalist recalled. “People were always asking, ‘Why are you brown?’ ”
It wasn’t until the impressionable age of 12 that Souter got a clue about the origins of her hue, when her mother confided in her that her father wasn’t in fact her biological parent. The man who contributed half of her DNA, long since deceased, her mother said, was Spanish, which sparked Souter’s budding musical imagination.
“She came up with these stories that he was a wonderful singer and his mother was a flamenco dancer,” says Souter, who performs Thursday, Nov. 30, at SFJazz’s Joe Henderson Lab and Monday, Dec. 4, at Kuumbwa Jazz Center in Santa Cruz. “Who doesn’t love flamenco music and identify with that? I told everyone my grandmother
was a flamenco dancer.”
By the time Souter unraveled the truth — that her biological father was alive, a black man from Trinidad — she was in her late 20s, and the revelation left her sorting through the various pieces of her identity.
Then in the mid-1980s she moved to San Francisco, where she supported herself as a freelance journalist, becoming one of the first people to join the Writers Grotto. And once again Souter had to recalibrate her sense of herself.
“Black in America is very different than black in the U.K.,” said Souter, whose recent DNA test indicated ancestry from seven African countries, as well as Native American, Scandinavian, British, Irish, Russian, European Jewish and Middle Eastern heritage.
Rather than exploring her baroque story in an article or memoir, she ended up moving to New York City and pursuing her passion for jazz. Over the past two decades, she’s established herself as an uncommonly creative vocalist and songwriter with acclaimed albums like 2009’s “Obsession” and 2013’s “Beyond the Blue,” an allstar project featuring piano great Steve Kuhn and Souter’s original lyrics for music by Ravel, Debussy, Chopin and Fauré.
Gradually, her struggle to figure out her identity began to manifest itself in her music. In some cases, she realized that songs she loved could carry a whole different level of meaning, like “A Taste of Honey.” Usually pegged as another pop song about lost love, Souter found a narrative “about people being stolen from Africa and those who remained behind.”
It’s one of the standout tracks on her upcoming album “Picture in Black and White.” A meditation on race and identity, the project mines the borderless zone where blood flows into socially constructed categories.
On the song “Ancestors,” former Bay Area jazz singer Vicki Burns provides a profound lyric for pianist McCoy Tyner’s passionate modal entreaty, “Contemplation.”
“I love Vicki’s line: ‘Voices that whisper and sigh in the wind/they’re waiting for you to remember,’ ” Souter said. “I didn’t even know my father was black. I had to go back and find out what that means, and what’s so confusing is that it means nothing and it means a lot.”
The album features an international cast of New York musicians, including Israeli guitarist Yotam Silberstein, Japanese bassist Yasushi Nakamura, Peninsula-raised cellist Dana Leong and drum maestro Billy Drummond. For her California gigs, Souter is performing with a stellar Bay Area band featuring San Jose guitarist Hristo Vitchev, Santa Cruz bassist Dan Robbins and San Francisco drummer Lorca Hart, whose father, drum great Billy Hart, is a close friend.
“I gave him a copy of the album and he came back and said it’s kind of folky, modal and flamenco,” Souter said. “The flamenco is funny, but if you grow up believing in something, you become it.”