MEET NEW JAZZ STAR LADY BLACKBIRD: SHE WAS ONLY WAITING FOR THIS MOMENT TO ARISE!
“There are no rules with me. I try to be as open as possible.” LADY BLACKBIRD
SAT IN FRONT of a giant Billie Holiday portrait, and with a tiny dog called Sir Reginald on her lap, Lady Blackbird is holding forth on her greatest passion. “I’m a real lover of music and I find my place in all the genres. I feel all of them,” says the singer born as Marley Munroe. “But Lady Blackbird is about stripping away everything. Going right back to basics and taking it raw.” Rawness and emotion are at the crux of
Black Acid Soul, a slow-burning debut from a jazz diva whose voice bridges Chaka Khan’s wildness with Roberta Flack’s expressiveness: “the Grace Jones of jazz”, according to BBC 6 Music tastemaker Gilles Peterson. Munroe escaped her small hometown of Farmington, New Mexico, after singing at all the “fairs, weddings, churches and funerals” it could offer. She took on professional singing jobs in her teens, working on several albums by Christian hip-hopper TobyMac. But when a move to Los Angeles and an album deal with Epic ended prematurely, with just one slick R&B single, Boomerang, going to radio in 2013, she went back to the drawing board. “I tried different producers, different sounds and styles. Just trying to crack the code.”
Things started falling into place in late 2019, when producer Chris Seefried asked her to demo his late-night R&B/jazz hybrid Nobody’s Sweetheart (“The reactions were wild!”) and she suggested they tackle Nina Simone’s stark protest anthem Blackbird in a similar quiet storm style. “It’s one of my favourite songs,” she says. “I always felt like I needed to do something with it. Chris played this weird-sounding bass key and we did a couple of demo takes. It instantly felt right. Like a rebirth.” And while her vocal was later augmented by a band including Miles Davis pianist Deron Johnson and bassist Jonny Flaugher in Prince’s favourite Studio 3 at Sunset Studios, the rest of Black Acid Soul was wrapped quickly from live takes. “That was amazing in itself,” she gushes. “I had never recorded like that. It was magical.”
Covid-permitting, she’s eager to take the album on the road, shedding her past for good. “There are no rules with me. I express what I feel and try to be as open as possible. Coming from such a small town and feeling like a black sheep, you try and conform to the point where you almost disappear. But if you keep going you can break through that. As a blackbird you can fly away. You’re free.”
Lady Blackbird’s Black Acid Soul is released in March on Foundation Music