This week on Live & Local, Aaron welcomed not one but four celebrated jazz vocalists to the studio, to discuss a new project that brings their individual voices together as one.
It’s called “The Sistering” – featuring Lois Deloatch, Nnenna Freelon, Lenora Zenzalai Helm, and Kate McGarry. All four have built acclaimed careers stretching over multiple decades – they have nearly a dozen Grammy nominations between them, among many other things – and they’ve become close friends along the way. And now, with all four living in the Triangle, they’ve joined forces for a new endeavor.
“Our lives have been so intertwined, we were circling in the same worlds for decades, really,” McGarry says. “So (now) that we all share a zip code, (we said) ‘why don’t we do something with this?’ We’re all from these similar worlds, but each one having our own life experiences as composers and performers and educators.”
The word “sistering” refers in part to the sisterly bond the four women share, but the meaning goes even deeper: “sistering” is also a term in construction, referring to the joining of one structural piece to another to provide support.
Among humans, then, a “sistering” is also an act of solidarity, of two people lifting and holding each other up. For these four women, “sister” is a verb as well as a noun – not just a relationship, but an act.
“We’re family,” says Deloatch. “We are family in the sense that we have a deep and abiding friendship – (and) we all come out of very close knit families. So I think that has in many ways taught us to navigate (our) differences as well.”
“It’s still an experiment,” Freelon adds. “A happy experiment. We didn’t know at the beginning that this would work. And we’re not a group: we are a collective. Four individual voices, four very different voices. To collaborate is to co-labor. It’s not one leader. So there’s a little creative friction there, as you can imagine, each of us being leaders, But we work it out because we love each other.”
And “The Sistering” is not only a showcase for their powerful vocal abilities: it’s also a showcase for their voices as writers. With only one exception (a cover of the standard “It Had To Be You”), the songs on “The Sistering” are all originals, with Deloatch, Freelon, Helm and McGarry each contributing two songs individually and collaborating on the tracks “River Song” and “Origins.”
“That’s what I love at this time in my career: having traversed education, performance, recording and mentoring the next generation of artists, (now) being able to find a home base with these amazing women and finding a new direction to go,” Helm says. “(Even) at this point in my career, I (can) go, ‘Wow, there are new places to go and create.’ And I found them with Kate and Nnenna and Lois.”
Lois Deloatch, Nnenna Freelon, Lenora Zenzalai Helm and Kate McGarry stopped by Live & Local to discuss “The Sistering” and play three tracks: “River Song,” “It Had To Be You,” and “Combat Boots and Glass Slippers.” Listen:
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