Dynamic duo
BAM talks with duo Adam & Kizzie about the pair’s new album, their positive attitudes and more.
Adam Ledbetter likens the music he makes with his wife and musical partner Kizzie to gumbo.
“It’s best when you’re experimenting, when you’re getting a little dangerous with it,” said the Oklahoma City pianist, rapper and songwriter who is half of the duo Adam & Kizzie. “It has the extended harmonies that you would find from jazz, but it’s funky. But there’s rap and there’s this singing. It’s just throw it all in the pot … and I think that if you’re honest in that effort, then it never comes off as being gimmicky.”
“We’re not creating anything from complete scratch,” added his wife, Kizzie, a singer and songsmith. “We’re drawing from the vibrations around us, the sounds that already exist around us … and all of our inspirations. And we’re just piecing them together like a big masterpiece of a puzzle and creating new tapestries.”
Whatever metaphor you prefer, the couple, who have been married and making music together since 2011, recently released an eclectic new album “The Book of EEDO Vol. 3: THREEDO,” which they produced and performed all the instrumentation and vocals. Adam & Kizzie will celebrate the new album with a full band show Friday night at the Tower Theater, and the duo embarks Monday on its annual two-week tour of the Metropolitan
Library System through the Neighborhood Arts program co-produced by the Arts Council OKC.
The couple stopped by the NewsOK studios last week to talk about the meaning of EEDO, their positive attitudes and the influence the rape trial of former OKC cop Daniel Holtzclaw on one song.
Q: Let’s talk about what EEDO stands for and what it means to you.
Kizzie: Very simply, EEDO represents freedom. It represents everything that’s genuine, everything that’s good, right, and we approach our music via this motto.
Adam: When we first got together, we were coming from different places musically, and so EEDO was kind of the experiment of seeing how we could fit both of our disparate music backgrounds together in a way so that both were being honored and explored simultaneously. And so, this experiment kinds of expanded because my background is in classical piano, jazz and hip hop, Kizzie’s background is in musical theater and gospel, so finding the common ground in this really kind of revealed that styles are fairly arbitrary. Music is music . ... The term itself was just a made-up word, and it became an inside thing, a catchphrase among me and Kizzie and our friends.
But recently I took a DNA test through Ancestry.com. And I was actually able to find African family members who never left the continent and discovered that I’m
predominantly Nigerian, and the tribe from which I come is a part of an African kingdom that I didn’t even know existed called the Edo kingdom.
Q: Does it all sort of feel like an organic part of your lives to be married and making music and making this kind of music?
Kizzie: Absolutely, and that’s saying something, because we weren’t always fluid collaborators.
Adam: We still aren’t always fluid collaborators.
Kizzie: That’s true. Sometimes it takes some work, but I think that is indicative of what marriage is like. You don’t get married perfect. You never get married perfect. You are constantly working at getting it right each and every day. And that’s how we treat music — our music — as well. It’s a collaborative,
joint effort to come up with this beautiful body of work together.
Q: A lot of your songs have positive messages in them. Why is that a focus for you? Or is that just the way it turns out?
Kizzie: For one, it’s just kind of our natural disposition to look for and toward the brighter side of things, because it’s really easy to sink and swim and just disappear in the darkness. But that honestly is a choice, because when it comes to light vs. darkness, the only one of the two that can snuff the other one out is light. So, we lean on that understanding of the power we have within us to keep our lights burning. And we just want to encourage anyone who listens to our music to keep it burning — because we know how difficult it is ourselves to keep it burning.
Q: Can you talk about the song “On Behalf of the Shaniquas?” I found it to be a very pointed song, but it’s also a very poignant and touching song to listen to.
Adam: The song began as Kizzie and I went to the Daniel Holtzclaw court trials, and that was the original inspiration. We saw these women who had these questionable reputations and histories being put on the witness stand and being cross-examined and being discredited. ... I thought that in a lot of ways it really mirrors the way a lot of black and minority women are just treated by society.
I mean, women in general in this society always get the short end of the stick. And I grew up in a household of black women that were smarter than me, that were better than me in a lot of ways. So, I had the advantage of being able to grow up and aspire to be like them. And that’s kind of like opposite of society in general: We’re trained, we’re brainwashed, to view women as lesser than, as someone who’s supposed to defer to us just because we’re men— and it’s nonsense.
So honestly, of all the songs, “Shaniquas” was written from the most different emotional perspectives. There was a lot of anger behind it when I was writing it. There was a lot of sadness, there was a lot of hope, and there was a lot of just wanting to honor and just wanting to make something that shines a light on these women who have always shined their light on me.