In the music world the three Bs traditionally stand for Bach, Beethoven and Brahms. For jazz singer José James they stand for Billie, Bill and Badu (as in Holiday, Withers and Erykah).

His most recent album, On & On, was released at the beginning of this year and finds James putting his own vocal stylings to the songs of Erykah Badu. In 2015 he released Yesterday I Had the Blues: The Music of Billie Holiday and in 2018 he released Lean On Me, a selection of songs by Bill Withers.

This Saturday James concludes his summer US tour in support of On & On at The Ford Theatre in Los Angeles. This will be the first and only show of the tour that will feature his entire band that appeared on the album performing with him live.

Earlier this week I spoke with James about Erykah Badu and her music, lessons he’s learned over the years of his career and the challenges he faces as a jazz singer. What follows are excerpts from our conversation that have been edited for length and clarity. To see the full interview, please go to our YouTube channel.

What does this music that you’re performing mean to you now that is perhaps different than what it meant to you when you first recorded it or when you first started playing it live?

I first approached it from what it meant to me. To me, Erykah Badu is kind of like the Joni Mitchell of my generation. She changed the game with her songwriting, with her musicality, with her presentation, with the way that she effortlessly blended all these genres. So I think I first made the album and thought about it in terms of wanting to respect what she had created and find a way in. Now that I’ve been performing it for quite a while, the songs have sort of become mine.

There’s this beautiful moment where the ownership transfers to the performer. That happened with the Bill Withers project, too. You start putting your own thoughts and feelings and emotions into these songs. It really becomes a deeply powerful way to bring a piece of yourself to these songs that are so familiar to all of us. We’ve been kind of taking it in different directions every night. So now what you have is this deeply personal and deeply creative world that exists alongside Badu’s world.

What is the story you want to tell about yourself through her music? 

I think there’s a degree of deep seriousness these days around what jazz singers can do. Why is hip hop and R&B this impenetrable place that jazz singers can’t go? So to me, it’s really about breaking new ground. I’m always excited when it’s something that nobody’s really done before because it feels fresh and it feels like there’s a discovery here. That’s the most powerful thing we can do as artists.

I played Erykah Badu’s songs and I don’t think what you’ve done is a huge leap. This makes complete sense to me.

It’s not a huge leap. We didn’t completely take apart her stuff and make it atonal or something. That’s part of the history of jazz singers, too. When Ella did her celebrated songbook series, she sang the melody, she sang the songs, but it’s the way that she did it, with the phrasing and the rhythm and the inflection and her history that made it jazz to me. Some of the songs I didn’t really change one note of the melody, but in order for me to get inside of her phrasing and then make it my own.

What I was referring to mostly was the fact that I heard a lot of jazz in what she was doing. 

That is so true, especially on her first two albums. There’s like upright bass on there, you know, like Appletree. Maybe it sounds like she’s performing with the jazz trio, which is so cool.

You’re a huge fan of Johnny Hartman and John Coltrane’s collaboration. I think you’ve said that’s the best male jazz vocalist album. Hartman did an interview with the New York Times in 1982, and he said, “The more you sing a song, you are apt to change it. It reflects the moods that you’re in.” Do you share that opinion about the many songs that you’ve recorded, whether they’re your own or somebody else’s? 

Jazz is Shakespeare. This is the classical repertoire. As you mature, hopefully, and deepen, hopefully, and go through some life experiences, then all of a sudden the words in the text become more relevant to you. Definitely when I first sang it, you know, this idea of being touched either physically or emotionally by this other person and kind of reminiscing about that moment, the times was much closer. But now that I’m 45, I can really think of a lot of different ways. For example, like a mentor who opened my world to jazz or to poetry or art kind of changes the feeling of it for me. Even though it’s ostensibly a romantic song, in my mind it’s turned into something else, which I hope comes across in the interpretation.

Should an artist have just a narrow range of interest and a way of expressing his or herself? Does it frustrate you that people seem to want you to be one thing because that’s easiest for them?

It has been frustrating in the past. I think I’ve sort of made peace and found my happy medium with how much I need to explore and how much we exist in service to people. That was a big shift in the pandemic for me. A lot of time to think about why I do it and when I would hopefully come back to jazz singing and performing would I do anything differently. The shift for me was I think I’ve artistically pushed the boundaries as far as I want to. Now my challenge is how creative can I be within sort of like the parameters that my fans enjoy because I definitely pushed it at some points past what my fans enjoy. For the hip hop kids who are like, why are you doing a duo with the jazz pianist? Or for the jazz purist you’re doing trap drums with autotune? There’s beautiful space in the middle, which I love. I think part of getting older is finding what you do best and figuring out how to explore that infinitely.

In an interview that you did in 2012 with the MinnPost you said, “If I could do jazz the way I wanted to, I would, but I just can’t. I can’t do it with the freedom I want or the audience development I want.” Along with your own perspective that you just expressed changing, has anything else changed for you in the 11 years since that comment that makes that less true today?

I think what’s changed is seeing people who have done both and in talking to some of them. Hearing the frustration of some people [who] feel like they’re in golden handcuffs and they can’t write songs or do things or produce that they want to. Then other people who spent their whole career just throwing paint against the wall but now want to sort of hit this commercial high. They’re not able to because they’re all over the map. Being at peace with your choice, no matter what the result is, that’s the challenge.

McCoy Tyner gave you great advice to just be yourself when you were touring with him. Knowing how much Coltrane means to you and how much McCoy Tyner means to you, which was more important, the advice or the man who was giving it to you?

The advice coming from him had a lot more weight. The thing about McCoy, which I found with a lot of living legends across genres, is that they are never looking backwards. McCoy was never telling people how to play. He was always positive. He was always uplifting. He really was in service to the music, to the audience and to his musicians. Never met another musician who was more generous with compliments or energy on stage. 

If you could go back in time to when you were in an a-cappella group called Cerulean and give yourself advice that you think your 16-year-old self really needed to hear to help him navigate his way through the life and career that you’ve had, what would that be?

I can’t believe that you found out about Cerulean, but I love it. I think I would just tell him that everything you believe about music and yourself right now is absolutely true. No matter what comes and goes, you don’t have to worry about anything. The cliché thing is true. The highs and the lows can knock you down. I remember when I was doing Letterman and Conan O’Brien, that was a bit too overwhelming for me. I wasn’t really ready for it. The downs, I haven’t sung in two years because of COVID. I wasn’t ready for that either. In both of those times I definitely did tap into how I felt about music back then because sometimes just putting on your favorite album and remembering this is why I do it is the most important thing.

To see the full interview with José James, please go here.

All photos by Janette Beckman/Courtesy Rainbow Blonde Records

The post José James and The Three Bs appeared first on Cultural Attaché.

“I met my husband 13 years ago,” Fox revealed. “He’s been in the music business his whole life. He took me to a Nicki Minaj concert at the Staples Center. I’ve been dealing with probably some of the most famous living writers of literature. I’m going to go hear Nicki Minaj with my 20,000 friends. So I’m sitting at this concert and I thought, how do I get these people to be hearing great writing? And I said music and dance.”

From there Fox, along with orchestrator/arranger Jonathan Sacks and music director Starr Parodi, have created shows that employ that very concept. This Saturday they will present JAZZ Re-EVOLUTION at The Ford in Los Angeles. The program will celebrate many of the greatest artists in jazz by combining readings of writings by W.E.B. Du Bois, Zora Neale Hurston, Langston Hughes and Jack Kerouac performed by a cast that includes Maria Bello, Keith David and Glynn Turman with music performed by Terrace Martin, Logan Richardson, Antonique Smith and more.

Last week I spoke via Zoom with Fox, Parodi and Sacks. What follows are excerpts from our conversation that have been edited for length and clarity. To see the full interview, please go to our YouTube channel.

Q: Louis Armstrong is quoted as having said, “If you ask if you have to ask what jazz is, you’ll never know.” And he’s probably right. But in 2023, if someone were to ask each of you what jazz is, what would your response be?

Parodi: Jazz represents freedom because in classical music, if you play the wrong note, you’re making a mistake. But in jazz, if you play not necessarily the right note, you can kind of take it anywhere. And so to me, it’s almost a metaphor for life and the ability to pivot. 

Sacks: First of all, I hate defining things. So it’s hard for me to say what jazz is at this point because it’s gone through so much transformation. What it was and what it is and there is this way of playing and that way of playing.

Fox: This is actually my third jazz show. Why I’ve come back to jazz and want to keep letting people know…Antonique Smith, who is singing, was saying that listening to Bessie Smith, she realizes everything she’s doing, everything Whitney Houston, like, they’ve all come through this historical journey and we all stand on the shoulders of these of these icons. To know your history is to be free to create moving forward. That’s why the idea of jazz re-evolution, it’s just the human spirit evolving, making magic. 

Q: With WORDTheatre productions Jonathan, you and Starr both have the responsibility of making the music work with the literature. From your perspective, how does the combination of literature and the work that you’re doing allow for an audience to understand who these people were, what this text was, and what the importance of it was?

Sacks: You can talk about Charlie Parker, but what do they sound like? What do they feel like? Words give you a sense of that to a certain extent, but it’s not the same as just hearing it. For me, the hearing is is what’s most important. And so in a show like this, it’s good to put musical color in so it comes alive.

Parodi: I was just talking right before we got on with the sax player that’s going to be playing with us and talking to him about how we’d like for him to do a Charlie Parker solo and kind of improvization under some of the actors speaking. He was so excited about that. I read him the poem that they were talking about and he’s like, “Okay, I have like ten things in mind.” Writers put their hearts into the words, musicians put their hearts into the music. It’s so strong, clear, cohesive and moving to have them both married to each other.

Fox: When Antonique is out there belting Bessie Smith it’s going to send people back to do the research. I am definitely tricking everybody into learning a lot about the history of jazz and about racism. I uncovered stories. I had no idea how Central Avenue got such shut down or how Marilyn Monroe helped Ella Fitzgerald. You don’t have to be an intellectual to come to WORDTheater. You could be the plumber or the president. A great story, well-told, will excite you.

Q: Wayne Shorter was one of the last of a dying breed of jazz legends from what we commonly define as jazz. So if we fast forward 100 years and WORDTheatre is still around and we’re going to be looking back atwhat jazz was in the 2020s, what are your hopes for where jazz will be and where society will be as it relates to these same issues that are being addressed in the show?

Fox: That’s a really challenging question. The world seems to be going backwards as totalitarian dictators are taking over. Ever since we had a Black president, racism, anti-Semitism, all seem to be on the rise. They had Central Avenue thriving as an actually integrated place in California until the [Police] Chief [William H.] Parker came along in the fifties and didn’t like races mingling and put the kibosh on that by taking everybody’s licenses away. And everything that’s happened with female reproductive rights and the onslaught, jazz is the opposite of that.

Now people are being sent back into the shadows. We’re having to fight for things that my mother was on the picket lines for a long time ago. Jazz is not my area of expertise. I’m a storyteller. I’m about the human spirit and stories. But for me, jazz represents this striving to make connection and magic and art, this continually evolving art form that is the triumph over adversity.

Q: In her essay, How It Feels to Be Colored Me, Zora Neale Hurston compared her visceral response, listening to jazz, to the more benign reaction that her white friend who had joined her had to the same music. And she wrote, “I want to slaughter something, give pain, give death. To what? I do not know. But the piece ends. The men of the orchestra wipe their lips and rest their fingers. I creep back slowly to the veneer we call civilization with the last tone and find the white friend sitting motionless in his seat, smoking calmly.” How does your individual work on this WORDTheatre show bridge the gap between those two responses she depicted in that essay?

Sacks: Well, I’m primarily a musician and a music lover, so if the music moves me and it’s interesting and compelling, I don’t care what kind of music it is. I don’t care who’s doing it. If I’ve made myself open to it, then what’s the problem?

Parodi: I was touring with George Howard, who is a jazz/pop saxophonist, and we were opening for Whitney Houston, touring around the country on her first tour. I was the only girl in the band and the only Caucasian. I remember traveling through the South with them and we were driving through an area where it was obviously some sharecropper’s cabins along with some mansions. This is in the late eighties. This is my first tour. I didn’t know what they were talking about or why they were getting so mad or why they were so upset. I feel like it was such an education for them to share with me their feelings. 

I can understand how one person can feel a certain way and one person can feel another way from the same thing. A lot of it has to do with education and communication. I think that just highlights more reason for people to hear stories, to hear music, to talk with each other, to get off their phones, to get out of there.

Fox: I use that in the piece and the tagline is the white guy goes “Good music they have here.” She’s had this entire history of the African-American experience coursing through her veins. I use that because there will be aha moments for people who go “good music they have here.” It is good music they have there. But I feel that my job is to really have people experience on a visceral level the history of these extraordinary men and women who made this magic through all the challenges. It is life affirming music, but it is wrought with blood and pain. To get some white people to stop and think about that in a different way because this historical context is woven through the entire piece. Then the music tricks you into getting with the program a little.

To see the full WordTHEATRE interview with Cedering Fox, Starr Parodi and Jonathan Sacks, please go here.

Main Photo: From WORDTheatre’s In the Cosmos in 2017 (Courtesy Los Angeles Philharmonic Association)

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