About

An original to the core, vocalist/composer Laird Jackson asserts that whenever you sing, you’re giving voice to your soul. She spreads her

emotional soundscape wide. She dives deep into dramatic mystery, quiet romance, elemental wonder, profound sadness, ruminative ecstasy,

improvisational beauty and the dreamy tug between longing within and pushing outward away from all boundaries to find freedom.

 

As a teenager, Laird found solace in music. One night she slipped into a jazz club in Detroit and heard a woman singing with a trio. “I was

mesmerized by her as she sang ‘Angel Eyes,’ and I thought that’s what I want to do,” Laird says. “Then I started to listen to the two jazz stations in Detroit WJZZ and WDET. I listened voraciously. That started to send me wandering. Music saved my life.”

 

Attending Western Michigan University with the idea of a career in social work, Laird began to sing with small local bands and got hooked. She took classes in jazz and classical music history and learned music by taking very basic piano and flute classes. “My jazz history professor taught the history as it should be taught,” Laird says. “He brought in the earliest recordings of field hollers and took it from there. He talked about slavery. The progression of the music and the incredible blending of cultures due to terrible circumstances. This is very important. Also, the importance of listening to all good music from everywhere. While the idea of good music is subjective, I have good taste. My listening is varied and global. I definitely wander the globe musically. Music feeds me.”

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That artistic certitude and freedom arrives beginning from her debut album (1994’s Quiet Flame on Venus) through to its emergence with so much gravitas on Laird’s 3rd album (2024’s Life). Laird doesn’t apologize about her hiatus. “Life happened,” says the Cleveland-born, Detroit-bred, New York based artist. “I didn’t stop living. I traveled, I wrote, I recorded on other people’s projects. I stepped back from the business side to deal with the unexpected twists and turns that happened, the things that you literally could not have written. I have definitely lived through some trying times, but I am certainly not unique in this regard. The idea behind my simple song Rainbows is that beyond clouds there is sometimes a rainbow. This realization takes some time to recognize.” Laird says she is trying to reach whomever this music speaks to. “I want to touch people,” she says. “We all cry and feel sorrow and joy. We all mourn loss. There are some of us who can write about it and sing about it and I am one of those. I have no problem expressing my emotional core and the nuances within. Life can be treacherous for people like us.”

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The entirety of Life grows into a community blessed by a special kinship. As I noted in my liner notes for Touched, I quoted Laird in 2002: “Jazz is about freedom and self-expression and experimentation. We all learn from and emulate the masters, but we need to find our own reality and create from that with all the risk that entails. I wish there was more of that happening now. The old songs have been recorded so many times, it sounds like plagiarism. It’s not very creative to learn songs from a record and just sing them back. That’s not art.” Indeed, with Life, Laird’s music is most certainly art in its finest.

 

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Bio extracted from liner notes written by Dan Ouellette, contributing writer for DownBeat, Qwest.tv and author of the book, The Landfill Chronicles: Unearthing Legends of. Modern Music, published by Cymbal Press via Amazon