As a change from Kurdish bards, the qin zither, and Mahler:

Not unlike The Haunted Pencil Getting Down with the Kids by grooving to avant-garde songstresses like Dames Nellie Melba and Vera Lynn (cf. Staving off old age), I’ve been inspired by the work of two rather younger women vocalists.

Brought up in Virginia, Judi Jackson moved to New York, building on the style of Billie Holiday and Nina Simone to create her own voice. Since 2017 she has been based in London.

Here’s Still, live at Ronnie’s:

Over the moon, 2018:

and at the London Jazz Festival in 2020:

* * *

By way of contrast, the innovative Cleo Sol (Cleopatra Zvezdana Nikolic! I wish I was called that) was at first quite elusive, doing few live gigs (YouTube). A denizen of Ladbroke Grove, her Serbian-Spanish mother and Jamaican father are both musicians. She has released two studio albums, Rose in the Dark (2020) (these are all playlists):

Mother (2021):

And now Heaven:

and Gold:

In wiki’s choice phrase, “she is rumoured to be a member of” (I like that) Sault, an even more elusive “avant-soul” (WTF) collective (reviews e.g. here and here). Since 2019 they have released six studio albums, dazzling sound collages that include Untitled (Rise, 2020):

and Nine (2021):

Their recent debut mega-gig sounds just as cosmic as the Li family Daoists’ 1942 Thanking the Earth, or the first performance of the Matthew Passion…

I may have come to feel rather at home attending Chinese ritual, and jazz clubs (anyway full of Old Fogeys), but musicking in one’s own culture inevitably excludes some people by reasons of age and class: with some genres it seems impertinent for the Likes of Me to intrude. Anyway, all this is another glimpse of the kind of creativity on my doorstep that has largely eluded me (cf. New British jazz), and it makes me very happy.

For a roundup of posts under the jazz tag, click here. You may note that my amazing playlist of songs is dominated by women vocalists—quite right too.