Legendary local jazz vocalist Nnenna Freelon stopped by Live & Local this week, following the recent release of her latest album “Beneath the Skin” – her first album of (almost) all-original music, in a career spanning more than three decades.
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Technically there’s one sort-of cover on the album (an innovative re-imagining of “Oh Susanna”), but otherwise “Beneath the Skin” is, quite literally, nothing you’ve ever heard before – a rare departure, in a genre that frequently measures its artists by how well they perform the standards.
“The jazz genre is famous for covers, (but) I feel like the music moves forward when there are new stories,” says Freelon, a seven-time Grammy nominee. “And so these are pages from my life. These are new stories.”
The end result, recorded last spring in Pittsboro, is Freelon’s most autobiographical album – an act of creation she says was exhilarating and scary and liberating all at once.
“I realized that in my attempt to speak my own language through the standards, I spent a lot of energy arranging and crafting the tune,” Freelon says. “So it says something slightly different this time, because – I wrote the tunes. I could just sing them. Just open my mouth and sing. And even now they’ve evolved into something else on the road, as I’ve sung them live – but at that (initial) moment, they were new to me too. (And) I was just singing the song with such ease. It was like, ‘wow, I should have tried this before!'”
And the songs themselves, all ten of them, are knockouts – from the poignant “Widow Song” to the cheeky “Here’s Your Hat” to the twin powerhouses “Dark and Lovely” and “Black Iris,” both of which celebrate Black beauty and find joy and pride, and above all love, in all that lies underneath.
“I have three granddaughters, (and) this song represents them,” Freelon says of “Dark and Lovely,” which was also the album’s lead single. “It is a way of saying ‘you are beautiful just as you are.’ Not just for them, but for anyone who feels unrepresented. Any of us, no matter what our age, who have little girls inside of them that never felt seen. It’s for them too. And I think we need stories that tell stories about others who have not been represented.”
Remarkably, though, “Dark and Lovely” may not be the most personal track on the album. That would be “Widow Song,” inspired by Nnenna’s own journey through grief after the death of her husband, famed architect Phil Freelon (whose work now graces the National Mall in Washington). That journey also gave rise to a podcast called “Great Grief” and a forthcoming book, “Beneath the Skin of Sorrow,” in which Nnenna explores how the techniques of jazz improvisation – changing keys, modulating energies, collaborating with others – can also help us navigate the process of grieving.
And as for “Widow Song,” Freelon says the response to that one track has been gratifying, in ways she didn’t expect or imagine.
“I was a little nervous about how it would play in a live setting,” she says. “(Then) I had an 83-year-old woman who came up and said, ‘I did not want to come to this show. I just want you to know my brother made me come’…but she said, ‘I’ve been a widow for 12 years, (and) I have never heard anybody sing for the widow.’ And that brought me to tears, because you do feel a level of invisibility in your grief. And she said, ‘I just want to thank you for the feeling of healing, because I’ve been carrying this for 12 years’…
“So you never know. You never know. You think it’s (just) your story, and it ends up being universal. So I feel honored to be a subject of the music. I serve the big muse: not my own story, but the human story through music. That’s what I aspire to. So I’m just so glad I gave myself permission to tell a particular truth.”
Nnenna Freelon stopped by Live & Local this week to discuss the album and play three tracks: “Dark and Lovely,” “Here’s Your Hat,” and “Widow Song.” Listen:
‘Beneath the Skin’: Live and Local with Nnenna Freelon! Chapelboro.com.
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