Jazzmeia Horn 2022

Jazzmeia Horn APRIL 1-2, 2022

JARSON-KAPLAN THEATER ARONOFF CENTER FOR THE ARTS

Building an Inclusive and Equitable Community through the arts The arts offer the potential to change hearts and minds. As the engine for the arts, ArtsWave is working with arts organizations to make inclusion a hallmark of the Cincinnati region’s arts through our Diversity, Equity, Inclusion and Access (DEIA) Commitment, “Lifting As We Learn.”

Goals for

“Lifting As We Learn” Investing in organizations that share a commitment to DEIA.

Promoting the voices of all artists in our community.

Increasing available resources for organizations of color.

Building audiences that reflect the region we serve.

Creating a culture where everyone brings their authentic self to work.

Recruiting staff, board members, volunteers, and vendors that represent our entire community.

Over the past two years, ArtsWave backed up the commitment with action:

Created a new grants program supporting 28 arts organizations led by or mostly serving African Americans

Commissioned 49 Black & Brown Artists to create new works on the themes of “Truth” and “Reconciliation”

Jumpstarted Paloozanoire’s “Black & Brown Faces” exhibition at Cincinnati Art Museum

Funded the artists behind downtown’s “Black Lives Matter!” mural and the “Black Excellence in Zone 15” mural in Lincoln Heights

Partnered with the Cincinnati Music Festival to create an Outdoor Museum in Washington Park

Welcome

MESSAGE FROM FLOW CO-CHAIRS THE HUMAN VOICE IS PERHAPS THE MOST VERSATILE OF INSTRUMENTS. And when the instrument is as fine as the one possessed by Jazzmeia Horn, it has the capacity to surprise and delight us. Heard live in a space as intimate as the Jarson-Kaplan Theater, it also has the power to unite us in a shared, joyful experience.

That connection is the ethos of Flow, An African American Arts Experience, powered by ArtsWave. We created this series featuring top artists from around the country to bring people together across our community and across cultural divides.

Our Flow Advisory Board—Agnes Godwin Hall, Tysonn Betts, Kala Gibson, Deana Taylor, Eric Combs, Kristal Howard, and Alicia Townsend—contributes time and attention to selecting artists who are new to Cincinnati and trailblazers in their respective genres. Our advisors share a deep commitment to equity and inclusion in the arts and an aspiration that Black culture and artists will be elevated and celebrated by all who call Cincinnati home.

Flow is supported by our founding sponsors: Fifth Third Bank; the Greater Cincinnati Foundation and the David Herriman Fund at GCF; the Cincinnati Arts Association, our series’ production partner; Duke Energy; GE; TriVersity Construction; The Cincinnati Enquirer; U.S. Bank; and d.e. Foxx & Associates. Thanks also to Cincinnati Children’s Hospital Medical Center and Clever Crazes for Kids for supporting Flow’s educational programs as well as our media partners, The Cincinnati Enquirer, The Cincinnati Herald, Radio One and Easley Blessed Media. Finally, we thank the many individuals who believe in Flow and what it represents for our community—you’ll find their names elsewhere in this program.

Tonight, we all gather to appreciate excellence and virtuosity in the form of Grammy-nominated singer-songwriter Jazzmeia Horn, who weaves elements of R&B, hip-hop, and fearless improvisation into her native language—jazz.

A lot of her songs, Horn says, “are meditations and have deep meaning that people can listen to, to help free up their minds. People of all creeds and races, and even all generations, because there’s a lot of tradition in this music. They don’t just tell one person’s story, they tell many people’s stories.”

May you find your story in the music of Jazzmeia Horn.

MEL GRAVELY | TriVersity Construction CEO

MARY STAGAMAN |

ArtsWave Impact Executive

in Residence

FLOW 2022 • 3

Welcome

MESSAGE FROM ARTSWAVE’S PRESIDENT & CEO GREETINGS! THANK YOU FOR JOINING US IN WELCOMING JAZZMEIA HORN to the Queen City!

This weekend is particularly exciting—we are lucky enough to hear Jazzmeia literally hours before Sunday’s Grammy Awards where her album Dear Love is nominated for Best Jazz Ensemble album of the year!

Jazzmeia has been compared to musical legends Ella Fitzgerald, Billie Holiday and Nina Simone. She’s a fitting choice for Flow, An African American Arts Experience, as she is inspiring on so many levels. A rising star in the jazz world, she tackles her own pieces and is simultaneously redefining what a “big band” looks and sounds like today.

She’s entrepreneurial as an artist, businesswoman and career-minded mother.

Flow is a key tactic in ArtsWave’s “Lifting As We Learn” diversity, equity, inclusion and access plan. By presenting inspiring Black artists like Jazzmeia Horn this month and Norm Lewis last December, we are intentionally building appreciation for Black artistry and inspiring cultural curiosity. ArtsWave has also increased resources for local Black arts organizations over the last decade, with increased investment as a result of donors to the Circle of African American Leaders for the Arts and through programs dedicated to supporting artists of color. ArtsWave is also leading efforts to make inclusion a hallmark of the Cincinnati arts community, working with 40 of our largest grant recipients to develop their own DEIA plans and goals.

As we sit together to enjoy Jazzmeia Horn, we celebrate Jazzmeia’s journey and her success. We also celebrate all the ways the arts can bring us together and bridge cultural divides.

With appreciation that live arts are back,

ALECIA KINTNER |

4• FLOW 2022

ArtsWave President & CEO

Welcome

MESSAGE FROM CAA’S PRESIDENT WELCOME TO THE ARONOFF CENTER FOR THE ARTS AND THE JARSON-KAPLAN THEATER! We were thrilled to reopen the Aronoff late last summer after a lengthy shutdown, and it feels wonderful to be back together again experiencing live, in-person performances. We’ve missed you!

All of us at the Cincinnati Arts Association are delighted that you are joining us for this wonderful evening with an amazing and engaging artist. We are delighted and proud to partner with ArtsWave in presenting “one of the most exciting young vocalists in Jazz”—Jazzmeia Horn. This is the third in a series of events in ArtsWave’s Flow series, which offers quarterly performances by renowned Black artists and ensembles working in various disciplines.

This event was originally scheduled in April 2020, but was postponed due to the ongoing impact of the pandemic.

It’s been a long two years! We are grateful and indebted to Ms. Horn for her commitment to reschedule this special evening with us.

We are passionate in our support of programs, artists, and audiences and in providing a diverse, equitable, inclusive, and safe environment. We believe that the power of the arts is transformative and that the arts unite us all in their embrace of inclusion and social justice. Thank you for joining us on this journey and for supporting ArtsWave’s Flow. With love, anything is possible!

We look forward to seeing you back at the Aronoff Center and Music Hall soon, especially for future Flow events.

Enjoy the show!

STEVE LOFTIN |

Cincinnati Arts Association President

FLOW 2022 • 5

Jazzmeia Horn Expanded Her Jazz Chops During the Pandemic

The Texas native is a mix of contrasts: new school and old spirit, songwriter and interpreter of classics, jazz aficionado and Earth, Wind & Fire superfan. During the pandemic shutdown, she added “big band arranger” to her resume.

By Bill Thompson

6• FLOW 2022

Photograph courtesy Jazzmeia Horn

S

ome things are simply meant to be, like Jazzmeia Horn’s singing career, which was ordained when her jazz-loving, piano-playing grandmother chose her name. Horn, 30, grew up in Dallas in a churchgoing family and began singing as a toddler. She graduated from Booker T. Washington High School for the Performing and Visual Arts, the alma mater of trailblazers Roy Hargrove, Norah Jones, and Erykah Badu.

Horn moved to New York and enrolled at The New School’s Jazz and Contemporary Music program, where her talent was noticed by veterans of the city’s music scene.

She collaborated with some of those players on her two albums, 2017’s A Social Call and 2019’s Love & Liberation. Each received Grammy nominations for Best Jazz Vocal Album, and the latter was named best vocal album in the NPR Jazz Critics poll and won an NAACP Image Award as Outstanding Jazz Album.

Awards started arriving almost as soon as Horn hit New York. In 2010, she was named Downbeat’s Best Young Vocalist. Two years later, she was honored as a Sarah Vaughan International Vocal Competition Rising Star, and won the award the next year. She followed that with a win at the Thelonious Monk International Vocal Competition in 2015 and as Best New Artist of 2017 in the JazzTimes Critics Poll.

In 2018, she was named Up and Coming Musician of the Year by the Jazz Journalists Association and the Downbeat International Critics Poll Rising Star: Female Vocalist.

On A Social Call, Horn covered some of her heroes, including Betty Carter’s “Tight” and the title track, written by Jon Hendricks and Gigi Gryce. The album also includes “Moanin’,” the Bobby Timmons song made famous by Art Blakey that Horn performed at the Grammy Awards in 2018, a clip that expanded her world beyond jazz aficionados. For Love & Liberation, she added composer to her arsenal,

writing eight of the 12 tracks.

During the pandemic, Horn produced her third album, Dear Love, a departure of sorts from her first two. Accompanied by Noble Force, a 15-piece ensemble, she became the first female vocalist to compose, arrange, and front a big band album.

The 2021 work earned a Grammy nomination for Best Large Jazz Ensemble, which will be announced this Sunday night, and an NAACP Image Award as Outstanding Jazz Album. Horn composed the bulk of the album’s music, with one exception a creative take on The Beatles classic, “Can’t Buy Me Love.”

You went to multiple labels with the proposal for Dear Love but were turned down because of the cost of a big band project. What did you do at that point?

I asked myself what it is that I know how to do. I can teach because of my experience, and I’m

teaching at The New School and City University of New York now.

I can write, so I’m going to write as much music as possible. But I also wanted to tell my story in a different light. So I wrote a book called Strive from Within: The Jazzmeia Horn Approach. When it came out, I shared it with my Instagram family, my social media following, and my e-mail list, and in the first week 15 to 20 people contacted me and said, “I just finished reading this book, please can I study with you privately?” I told them I wasn’t taking private students right now, but I would let them know. The second week, that 20 was 120. By week four, more than 1,000 people had contacted me about studying privately. The book came out in August 2020, so by September I decided to start an online school.

So instead of telling people no [to lessons], I decided to raise the money for my big band record so I could put it out on my own. People from all

over the world, people I didn’t even know liked jazz, started studying in my online school. By February 2021, I was able to put a budget proposal together for this record.

I started my own label, Empress Legacy Records. I went to people like Christian McBride and Maria Schneider, people who have worked in big bands, and asked for their personal experiences. I put the band together and produced the record.

You said A Social Call was a “call to awareness” and Love & Liberation was a call to action. Have people told you to keep politics out of your music?

I really don’t care what they say.

I have a lot of fans, and I appreciate the people who appreciate my music. For someone to say, “Keep politics out of your music,” you may as well tell me to die. Politics are in my life. I’m a black woman, right?

You can’t expect me not to express my reality, my truth, even if it’s not in music, but just in general.

That’s why I decided to call my business The Artistry of Jazz Horn.

The gowns and dresses I make for myself, that’s a part of my artistry. All of the music I compose or arrange, that’s a part of my artistry. Even down to taking someone else’s lyrics and music and arranging it in a way that it kind of sounds like I wrote it, that’s a part of my artistry. You don’t just get politics, you get the whole.

You’ve been compared to legendary jazz singers such as Ella Fitzgerald, Sarah Vaughan, Abbey Lincoln, Bet t y Ca r te r, and B i l l i e Hol iday. Who a re some of t he ot he rs who have LQÁ XHQFHG \RXU VW\OH" I’m look ing at some of my vinyl records here...there’s Aretha Franklin, there’s Chaka Khan, there’s Diana Ross, there’s Dionne Warwick, Donna Summer, Stevie Wonder, R ay Charles, Teddy Pendergra ss, A l Ja rreau, L ou

Rawls, George Benson, Stanley Clarke, and Earth, Wind & Fire.

There’s like 50 Earth, Wind & Fire—I have all of their records!

The Commodores, Kool & the Gang, oh, I love this record! I love Michael Jackson, but if everybody sounded like Michael Jackson this would be a boring place. No disrespect to him, because I have all his records, too (laughs).

If we all sounded like Jazzmeia Horn, it would be boring. Everybody should have their own platform. This is exactly why [singers] that people compare me to—like Ella Fitzgerald, Carmen McRae, Betty Carter, Billie Holiday, Abbey Lincoln, Nina Simone—could all exist in the same time frame. There’s a space for everybody. If you put on an Abbey Lincoln record, you know it’s not Sarah Vaughan, and if you put on a Sarah record, you know it’s not Billie or Betty. You know the difference because they each had something different to offer. I’m very honored to be put in the category with all of those greats, and I’m aspiring to be great. Maybe one day (laughs).

Flow was created to showcase African American artists, but also appeal to a diverse audience. What does your audience look like?

In New York City, it’s very eclectic because of the culture here. If you go to Harlem on 125th Street, you see a huge AfricanAmerican culture. Then, if you go uptown a little bit, from 149th up until the 200s, that’s Spanish Harlem, so you see Dominicans, Cubans, Panamanians, everyone from Latin America who’s African.

Then you go even further, past Washington Heights almost into the Bronx, you see West Indian, you see Caribbean people.

In New York City, my audience has a huge range of cultures and people. The spectrum is large. But everywhere else in the country, they’re mostly white audiences, except maybe Atlanta and Texas.

And mostly older—older than my mother, and she’s 50. It might vary from maybe 35 on up, and I say that because there might be some young jazz lovers on a date (laughs).

You play two nights at Flow.

Will the set list change on the second night?

That depends on the crowd. I go to places where people know my music well, and sometimes they don’t know it at all. For instance, we played in Pinehurst, North Carolina, a big golf community, and they didn’t know much about my music, but they do now (laughs).

I like going to new places in the United States where people have no idea who I am. That’s funny because any time I go outside of the U.S., people go, “Oh my God, I’ve been listening to you forever.” And I’m like, “Forever? I’m only 30.” They’ve managed to find live recordings of me from 2014 or 2012, when I was in college, when I hadn’t even started my career. That’s very surprising, and it’s an honor for me.

Yo u we re s u p p o s e d t o perform at Flow two years ago. Have you returned to the stage since then?

I have. Dear Love was released in September 2021, and I had a whole week at Joe’s Pub in New York. In December, I played in Seattle, Portland, and California with my Noble Force [ensemble], which consists of 15 musicians.

In Cincinnati, it will be a quartet, with Keith Brown on piano, Eric Wheeler on bass, Russell Carter on drums, and myself.

Will you play songs from Dear Love with the trio?

Yes, there are arrangements of the songs for big band, but also for the trio. We will play most of the songs from Dear Love. Then we’ll play some songs from Love & Liberation, and we’ll play some songs from my next album, whatever it will be called.

Artist Bio Jazzmeia Horn

Photograph courtesy Jazzmeia Horn

A

ward-winning vocalist Jazzmeia Horn announces her ever-expanding talents with the release of her first big-band effort, Dear Love, a recording that brims with the combination of her assured delivery and spoken world segments, deft arrangements and fiery musical ideas. Garnering praise from critics and fans alike, Dear Love was nominated for the Best Large Jazz Ensemble Album Grammy Award.

While the album functions as a platform for Horn to showcase both her perception of the world and her endlessly unfolding talents, it also granted the composer a setting to expound on personal experiences, shuttling them through a sui generis musical prism. She swings on an interpretation of classics “He’s My

Guy” and “Lover Come Back to Me”; displays her vocal range and ability to summon the emotional content of her writing on the slinky “Let Us”; contemplates purpose on the subtle and intriguing “NIA”; and closes the album with “Where Is Freedom!?,” a tune deeply rooted in a vamp that would have suited Nina Simone.

“Strive,” a stately composition focused on Horn’s soaring vocal and her ensemble’s plangent horns, finds the bandleader proclaiming determination and power atop a recondite arrangement, expertly navigated by the 15-piece Noble Force ensemble. “‘Strive’ is my mantra right now, because there’s so much going on in the world,” Horn says. “For me personally, I’m a mom, I’m buying a new house, my children are starting

school, there’s paper work for everything. The pressure is pressing, and I’m like, ‘OK, strive.’ So many people relate to that idea.”

The reaction to Horn’s work shouldn’t be a surprise, though. Her talents emerged in Dallas, Texas, and blossomed at an arts-focused high school. Through both unfettered determ i nat ion a nd i n herent skill, the young singer traversed a singular path, raising funds through performance for her eventual matriculation to The New School.

Once ensconced in New York, Horn held down a waitstaff position during the first two years of her education, precariously balancing artistic pursuits, the demands of academia and a thankless job.

The following years, residing in New York and touring the world, revealed a restless aesthetic development that’s defined Horn’s still-burgeoning career. And while Dear Love might seem to be the work of an avowed veteran, the bandleader still has more of herself, her music and her ideas to explore.

“I tried to figure out how the songs can be in alignment with what’s true to me and what’s true in my reality as a Black woman, but then also be relatable to anyone who’s not part of my culture,” Horn says. “I went through my list of charts and said, ‘OK, which of these songs really speaks to love in multiple ways – love for my community, love for my culture, love for my partner, love for my children, love for myself. Which one of these songs is going to speak on all of those different things?’ These songs are love letters to everyone.”

BAND Keith Brown, Piano Eric Wheeler, Bass Russell Carter, Drums FLOW 2022 • 9

WO CINCINNATI OPERA PRESENTS

RL

D

PR

Gregory Spears and Tracy K. Smith

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CASTOR AND PATIENCE

With powerful, soaring music by Gregory Spears and an original libretto by Pulitzer Prize winner and former U.S. poet laureate Tracy K. Smith, this timeless and topical premiere is the buzz of the opera world. Deeply relevant to ongoing calls for racial justice, Castor and Patience probes historical and continuing obstacles to Black land ownership in the United States. TICKETS ON SALE IN SPRING 2022.

COMING JULY 2022 SCPA’s Corbett Theater

IER

cincinnatiopera.org Support provided by

The David C. Herriman Fund of Greater Cincinnati Foundation (GCF)

E

Coming Up Echoes of the Past, Reflections of the Present

Headshots courtesy (Smith) Rachel Eliza Griffiths and (Spears) Dario Acosta

Castor and Patience is a world premiere opera centered on African American family members and the legacies they’ve inherited. By Natalie Clare Two years after its originally intended premiere, Castor and Patience makes its long-awaited Cincinnati Opera debut this summer. The production was originally commissioned for the Opera’s 100th anniversary season in 2020 but was postponed (along with the entire season) due to the pandemic. The harrowing story follows two cousins who find themselves at odds over the fate of a historical parcel of land they’ve inherited in an unnamed town in the American South; performances take place July 22–30 at the School for Creative and Performing Arts’ Corbett Theater.

Castor and Patience is written

by Pulitzer Prize winner and former U.S. poet laureate Tracy K. Smith and composed by Gregory Spears. The story originated from discussions between the two artists about American history, particularly in the South. What does the country’s relationship with the South look like today? How does its history affect the present? Over the course of conversations and trips to the region itself, a complex story about land ownership and its troubling legacy emerged.

Set during the mortgage crisis of 2008, the opera focuses on its titular characters, who are cousins separated by geography but connected by lineage. Castor raises his family in Buffalo, New York, but he’s inherited a financial crisis and hopes to sell his share of the family land in order to manage overwhelming financial challenges. Patience lives on the land in question, raising her own family and ardently defending the land against real estate developers who want to purchase it from her. Doing so would effectively erase the family history and legacy that she and her ancestors fought to preserve.

“They both see themselves as responsible for a lineage or a line,”

says Smith. “Patience is very much more tuned in to the generations she descends from that have made a mark on this land. For her, it’s ledgers and connections between their family and this place and their ancestors in West Africa. I think Castor sees himself as this patriarch who has a lot of responsibility for his family and maybe even the shadow of his parents and what they provided.”

The two approaches collide during dual urgencies caused by the financial crisis and the developers’ interest. “So Castor does what he never thought he would need to do,” says Smith, “which is to go and ask for help to claim his stake in this land.”

Through music and dialogue, the opera illuminates a portion of American history that’s been widely overlooked. In a comprehensive overview of that history, Vann R. Newkirk II writes in a 2019 article for The Atlantic, “The land was wrested first from Native Americans, by force. It was then cleared, watered, and made productive for intensive agriculture by the labor of enslaved Africans, who after Emancipation would come to own a portion of it.

Later, through a variety of means— sometimes legal, often coercive, in many cases legal and coercive, occasionally violent—farmland owned by black people came into the hands of white people. It was aggregated into larger holdings, then aggregated again, eventually attracting the interest of Wall Street.”

Newkirk concludes that Black farmers have collectively lost 12

million acres of land in southern states over the past century, which translates to a financial loss of $3.7 billion to $6.6 billion in today’s dollars. Echoes of this troubling history make their mark in Castor and Patience, combined with themes of family legacy and the weight of inheritance itself. Spears cites the poetic quality of Smith’s libretto as particularly poignant. It presents a reality in which the past and the present coexist in time, and the musical language embodies that.

“We hear it through music, we hear it through dialogue,” says Smith.

“We hear in moments where the past is literally onstage with the present, and these questions also remind us that the past is still something that we’re supposed to be tending to or protecting in some way.”

“Patience has an aria at the end of the first act, and you start with a certain kind of music, which is actually music from the opening of the opera,” says Spears. “She’s telling Castor a story and bringing it back around, as so often storytelling does.

Something has been taught or learned or discovered. Even as you come back to the same place, it looks different.”

Castor and Patience features a cast of 12 and a 36-piece Cincinnati Symphony Orchestra. At the podium is conductor Kazem Abdullah, and Kevin Newbury directs. Flow, An African American Arts Experience is a supporting sponsor.

Learn more about the world premiere production at cincinnati opera.org.

Tracy K. Smith and Gregory Spears collaborated on Castor and Patience.

FLOW 2022 • 11

Many thanks to Flow’s advisors: Mel Gravely • Mary Stagaman • Tysonn Betts • Eric Combs • Laura Gentry • Kala Gibson • Agnes Godwin Hall • A. Kori Hill • Kristal Howard • Kick Lee • Janice Liebenberg • Danielle Martin • Deana Taylor • Alicia B. Townsend • Carolyn Wallace

Come Flow with us on the journey.

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The arts aren’t just nice, they’re necessary for the health of... …our region: they support thousands of jobs and create $300 million in economic impact. …our community: they contribute to safer streets, boost property values and supplement in-school and out-of-school education. …all of us: they reduce healthcare costs, speed recovery times, can improve clinical outcomes, reduce the need for medication and increase overall well-being.

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TO WHAT’S AHEAD IN 2022 We’re making inclusion a hallmark of the arts sector through ArtsWave’s “Lifting As We Learn” diversity, equity, inclusion and access plan.

Live arts are back and better than ever! Get ready for exciting new collaborations, world premieres, mash-ups, celebrations and innovations.

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Thank you to these generous supporters for making Flow possible!