‘I had to do dramatic things to get attention’: sax player Lakecia Benjamin on crashing Prince gigs and charming Stevie Wonder
During a fallow work period in the early 2000s, saxophonist Lakecia Benjamin took matters into her own hands. “People weren’t calling me for gigs, so I started jumping on their stages to get them to hire me,” she says. Two attempts to crash a Prince gig in Las Vegas were thwarted, first by the singer’s unexpected medley of unsuitable a cappella numbers and then by a bouncer. After Prince read about the commotion, he invited Benjamin to try out for his band, and she played for two weekends at the end of his residency. “I had to do dramatic things to get attention,” she says.
Benjamin’s striking personality flows through her stories: she embodies jazz as an attitude and a look, as well as a sound. “You’re not here to get out of bed and go on stage looking the same as the guy in the front row,” she says of the metallic clothing she wears on the cover of Phoenix, her fourth album. “Your presentation is a representation of your music before it’s heard.”
Phoenix is an apposite title: a creative rebirth for Benjamin after lockdown. Opening with the whining sirens of Amerikkan Skin, Benjamin fuses her bop vocabulary and funk grounding to create an album that’s urgent and inventive, while strengthening themes of community solidarity introduced on her three previous solo records. Her musical grounding started in Washington Heights, a Dominican neighbourhood in Manhattan, where Benjamin played her first lip-busting sets with local merengue bands and lived with her extended family. “It was completely multi-generational,” she says. Each floor had its own sound: her grandmother played Mahalia Jackson, her great-grandmother “some old-ass ragtime”, her mum Biggie Smalls and Wu-Tang Clan. “I’ll go to floor number three, I’m in the mood for BB King,” she recalls.
At high school in the early 90s, Benjamin engineered a swap from art to band class with a holder of a coveted school saxophone by removing a crucial screw from her fellow student’s instrument, hiding it and offering to pay for any repairs if she agreed to trade spots. Benjamin’s first taste of jazz came through Duke Ellington in big band, then raiding John Coltrane’s back catalogue. The avuncular trumpeter Clark Terry would give Benjamin her first big break in jazz, calling her up to play with his band, “while I was still transcribing his solos”, says Benjamin.
“The hip-hop thing happened by mistake,” she says of what happened next. When a man shouted for her as she walked at night through Manhattan with her saxophone, Benjamin assumed she was being catcalled; instead, he said he needed a player for a session with Missy Elliott the following afternoon. “There was no Missy Elliott there,” she laughs, just Elliott’s cousin. But news of Benjamin fed back to Missy, and she became hip-hop’s goto horn section leader. Gigs with Lil Wayne, Jay-Z and J Cole followed.
But Benjamin’s patience for her employers waned: “I was getting annoyed chasing around these little amounts of money.” A fresh opportunity came in 2008. After playing in two sets at Obama’s presidential inauguration balls, Benjamin got a request for a third that was so last-minute she had to run through the freezing streets in a ballgown. The invitation came from Stevie Wonder: when she performed the sax solo from his 1980 hit All I Do, he squealed with joy. Three months later, a call came asking her to join a threemonth tour departing the next day. “I felt that entire world open up,” she says. “And I no longer had to play with Lil Wayne.”
Since transitioning from session work into a solo career in 2012, Benjamin has been one of New York’s most promising voices, culminating in Pursuance: The Coltranes, an ambitiously constructed concept album of arrangements by Alice and John that was still “drenched in the blues”, as Jazzwise wrote. The acclaim that accompanied its release seems a world away from the subsequent tragedy.
In September 2021, Benjamin was singing along to Kenny Garrett while driving back from a festival in Pittsburgh. The next thing she remembers is being dragged through the woods by a stranger, covered in mud and blood.
Benjamin had crashed her car, breaking her jaw, shoulder blade and multiple ribs, and perforating her eardrum. The person who cut her out of the wreckage fled without leaving a name once the authorities arrived. After completing a tour with her jaw still broken, her recovery was made more traumatic by the pandemic. Fifteen of Benjamin’s family died of Covid-19; “two right now are hanging on for dear life,” she adds.
Thoughts of death and legacy inform Phoenix: the ballad Rebirth reflects her family’s recent losses. Benjamin’s previous releases emphasised her multi-generational approach to jazz, enlisting esteemed performers such as Ron Carter alongside newer voices such as Brandee Younger. With Phoenix, she added another criterion: highlighting “those who aren’t getting enough shine”. Patrice Rushen sits alongside Angela Davis and Wayne Shorter. “We know her after Forget Me Nots but we don’t know her whole
jazz repertoire, her piano playing,” she says. “I’m trying to highlight people so they get their flowers while they’re still alive.” Once, Benjamin would seize stages seeking recognition; now she’s beckoning others back for another bow.
• Phoenix is out now on Whirlwind Recordings