Click here to watch Lizz
Wright's latest music video
There’s something unique about the American South; something fecund in the
landscape, and in its turbulent history, that feeds the creative urge. The
heat and humidity, the heady mix of races and religions, the struggle
between sacred and secular – all these make fertile ground for music. It’s
this gumbo of influences that spawned gospel and jazz, country and the
blues. Yet rarely have they converged in the music of one artist.
Lizz Wright, a preacher’s daughter from the town of Hahira, Georgia
(population 1,626 at the last count), encompasses all those elements. Her
third album, The Orchard, has that rich stew of Southern influences coursing
through its veins – or, perhaps more aptly, seeping from its pores. You can
almost feel the heat oozing from the swamp where Wright poses amid swathes
of Spanish moss for the CD booklet. You can certainly feel the temperature
rise when she tackles Tina Turner’s steamy I Idolize You in a fashion that
would bring a blush to any churchgoer’s cheeks.
“I was nervous when I sang that in front of my parents for the first time,”
the 28-year-old singer confesses. “I gave a big disclaimer ’cause my mom and
dad were there. I said, listen, I’m still familiar with the scriptures, I’m
not supposed to idolise anyone, but Tina Turner is the bomb and I have to
sing this song.”
Unlike Turner, and unlike other singers to come out of the church – Aretha
Franklin and James Brown among them – Wright is no belter. While, at one end
of the spectrum, modern-day R&B divas assail our ears with ostentatious
caterwauling, and at the other, much modern jazz has been buffed to the
brink of becoming Muzak, Wright’s sonorous contralto wraps the listener in
its warm embrace. In a word, she’s got soul.
In performance, she has a natural spontaneity that is a far cry from
traditional stagecraft and has its roots in the way she was raised –
praying, preaching and singing in church from the age of six. “I feel cosy
on the stage, because I still remember when I was in the pulpit in church,”
she says. “But it’s a really hard road to cross over, because I went through
people saying, ‘If you don’t sing for God, you shouldn’t sing at all.’ ”
Ask Wright whether she’s soul or blues or jazz or R&B and she’ll say
she’s just a singer-songwriter. “Defining genres is almost strictly for
marketing,” she argues. “The history behind these types of music is a melted
line. There really isn’t a line: even in my personal history, there are no
strong points of definition.” Certainly not in today’s musical landscape,
where we’re spoon-fed stage-schooled white facsimiles of black soul and jazz
singers from a previous era, in preference to genuine articles, such as
Wright, who have lived the lives of which they sing.
Wright’s early life was dominated by the church, where her father was the
minister and her mother the organist. It was taken for granted that she
would follow them into the church when she left school. “If you’re born into
my family, you get drafted in,” she smiles. “I’ve done everything – from
coordinating the music to teaching Sunday school to preaching sermons and
cleaning.” Ironically, it was her talent in the church choir that took her
away from Hahira for the first time. She took part in choral competitions,
opening her eyes to a world outside her devout community.
The family home was subject to the same strict rules as the church itself:
“Women couldn’t wear pants, play sports, wear designer hosiery, paint their
nails red or cut their hair.” The Rev Wright was meticulous about his home:
“It had to be really clean all the time, and really quiet, under control.”
Wright, who recalls getting into trouble when she came home from
kindergarten singing a Michael Jackson song, used to wait for her parents to
go to prayer meetings so she could listen to Christian radio stations that
broadcast “testimonial dramas”, in which religious converts described the
hard lives they were living before their conversion. “There was a show
called Unshackled. I always remember, because the organ was horrid; this
wretched line they used to play in between each person’s testimony. I would
never forget it, it was very scary.”
There was no television, but the radio was where she first heard jazz, on the
weekly show by pianist Marian McPartland. At 17, Wright decided to leave
Hahira, a place whose conservatism can be gauged by the town council’s
recent decision to officially ban the “sagging” trousers favoured by young
hip-hop fans, making it a criminal offence to display “flesh or underpants”
above the waistband. “It was a difficult decision,” she confesses. “I
completely accepted the faith, and the rules, and that way of life as
reality. I’ll never forget my last day in my father’s church, when the
children made a little presentation for me and told me how much they would
miss me. It was probably the hardest I’ve cried in my life.”
Some of the regular churchgoers even prayed that Wright would stay, but, aware
that she had to move away from the close-knit community to find her own path
in life, she went to Atlanta to study voice at Georgia State University. It
was there that she listened to jazz for the first time, and soon joined a
local jazz group, In the Spirit.
She first came to attention on a Billie Holiday tribute tour in 2002, and has
since picked up plaudits for her warm, resonant voice on two acclaimed jazz
albums for Verve, blending her own storytelling songs with judiciously
chosen covers. Her slickly produced debut album, Salt (2003), brought
favourable comparisons to Nina Simone and Cassandra Wilson; its successor,
Dreaming Wide Awake (2005), introduced a rootsier edge to Wright’s sound.
The producer Craig Street threw dashes of folk and country into the mix, and
the repertoire included an ambitious range of covers, from Fats Waller and
the Beatles to Neil Young and Madonna.
Now, with The Orchard, recorded variously in the Arizona desert, the Catskill
Mountains and urban Brooklyn, there’s a sense that Wright has finally found
her voice. Its inspiration comes from her home town and family. “There’s a
pecan orchard near my grandmother’s house that I’ve seen all my life,” she
says dreamily. “It stretches out so far, your eyes just kinda fall off. It
got me thinking about where I was born and grew up.”
On The Orchard, Wright’s rich, honeyed vocals continue to cruise the highways
linking gospel, soul and jazz without ever resorting to vocal histrionics,
while the music throws up surprises all along the way. With an eclectic roll
call of collaborators, including her regular co-writer Toshi Reagon,
Calexico members Joey Burns and John Convertino, Dylan side man Larry
Campbell and the avant-garde guitar virtuoso Oren Bloedow, it offers folksy
acoustic guitar, searing electric guitar and plaintive pedal steel, bluesy
piano and soulful organ, jazzy drums and characteristically spacious
production from Street, a man with that crucial gift of knowing how to let a
song breathe. Although Wright wrote (or co-wrote) the majority of the songs,
there are some unexpected covers, including a soulful take on Led Zeppelin’s
Thank You and a heartbreaking version of Strange, one of Patsy Cline’s
finest laments for lost love.
If there remains a feeling that her record company still hopes for her to
become a “new Norah Jones”, maybe it’s just because that’s the way the music
industry works – it is, after all, an industry. Yet, while Wright
undoubtedly has the talent and the looks for global success, it would be a
shame if her music ended up as the background for dinner parties. Not that
she would complain if she ended up as “wallpaper music” (my term, not hers)
for other people’s humdrum chores.
“Wallpaper music . . . ” she muses. “There’s something to that. People like to
listen to music when they’re inside their homes a lot, but they like to
feel. I don’t know if we’ve lost the whole ‘feeling’ aspect, or if it’s not
important any more, but coming from church, feeling and vibration and
emotion is everything. If something makes you feel good and safe, and calms
you down, that’s a huge piece of your life; and, if you can make music that
people want to tuck inside their lives, you’re always going to be okay.”
The Orchard is released on March 31 on Verve; Lizz Wright plays the Soho
Revue Bar, W1, on April 20 and 21, and the Sugar Club, in Dublin, on April 22
