Life

LINER NOTES:

Laird Jackson—Life

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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.

On Life, her captivating third album and first since 2002’s Touched, Laird affirms in her sublime, percussive title tune: “You cannot hold me/I am like the tide/I come/I go/On my own timeline.” She returns to the theme on the acapella meditation “The Wind” where she majestically soars with the words: “My spirit is free/Timeless time/My heart is open/I know no borders.” “I am referring to the brevity and uncertainty of life,” she says. ”I was inspired during the pandemic when a friend from St. Vincent told me what

his grandfather had told him on the beach as a young child. Life is like the water. It travels on its own timeline and cannot be stored for later or placed in a basket. Life must be lived in the present for it is all we have.”

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.”

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Laird says she is reaching to whoever the music speaks to. “I’ve lived through trying times that takes years to get through because the only way through is through,” she says. “I’ve recovered, feeling strong and ready to record again. It’s like my song ‘Rainbows’ and the idea that behind some clouds, there is in fact a rainbow. The realization takes some time to recognize.”

Laird says she is reaching to 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.”

Laird reveals herself to be unique in her ability to write compelling, metaphor-rich poetry and marry it to sumptuous melodies. One scribe has called her voice almost too hip for the room. In fact, she owns the room as is evidenced in Life’s 15 songs—10 of which are transcendent originals. She also puts her sure signature on five moving covers including tunes by Bill Withers, Phil Moore, Ned Washington and Jerry Merrick. Plus there’s a delicious take on the public domain classic ”In the Pines,” delivered as a striking duo with stellar guitarist Marvin Sewell.

Life is produced by renowned Beacon, NY-based percussionist/drummer Jeff Haynes who knows Laird’s sensibility well, having played and worked on the final mixes of Touched. He brought aboard many of his colleagues from his Brooklyn days to color, spice, texture, tweak the songs. While the sessions weren’t planned to be expansive, the personnel list swelled to 20 players, including guitarists Marvin, Brandon Ross and John Smith, violinist Charlie Burnham, cellist Eugene Friessen and harmonica ace Gregoire Maret.

“Laird is a serious jazz vocalist,” says Jeff, who recently has not only been on the road with pop star Brandi Carlile but also produced the celebrated two-volume audio narrative Pete Seeger: The Storm King. “This album is very eclectic and adventurous. When she approached me to produce this, I challenged her to not take a traditional jazz road. And she stepped up without fear. And when we got together, the music came naturally. Most of the time we just turned the mikes on and played. And the music went through an organic evolution. It’s a spiritual thing when all these pieces come together like a movie soundtrack.”

On Life, Laird doesn’t swing or groove into a twelve-bar blues. Instead she sings and reads her poetry in spoken-word pockets. Her music may not be typical jazz, but it blooms with improvisation. She’s excited to be in tune with exploring the wide open spaces.

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.”

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 Life. The album opens with the beauty, “I Believe,” an infectious melody built on Jeff’s bata rhythm. In the mix, an uplifting gospel-like by Miraj that brings a buoyancy to Laird expressing the relevance of beauty in embracing “the golden light” after enduring and the dark night and “screaming into the cosmos.” Laird says, “This is a song about strength and getting through times that are rocky, emerging with hope and love in our hearts.”

It’s a poignant thematic key to the rest of the collection that veers away from resentment to wonderful variegation (the childlike, tear-stained take on “Rainbows” that features Eugene Friesen’s perfect cello accompaniment) and ruminations an a cappella rendition on freedom in the deeply emotive, meditative “The Wind” (“I am free of chains/I am free of expectations”). The album captures the image rich “Dusk” at the lighthouse with moving spoken word, the hopeful “Destiny” again with a spoken-word delivery accompanied by a sonic wonderland of effects and Charles Burnham’s magical violin, and with her glowing-embers voice, the dancing, free- spirited “Rounding the Sun,” sparked by Gregoire Maret on simpatico bass harmonica.

Beginning with Jeff’s kalimba beat, the achingly longing “Suhaili“ has gentle dreams of “the sweet shadows in the lamplight.” It sustains Laird with the word’s meaning (trusted companion, special friend) that she experiences in her refuge jaunts to La Sagesse Hotel in the West Indies island of Grenada. She learned about the renowned sailor Sir Robin Knox Johnson who was preparing with his crew to sail on his new boat to England. “I’m not a sailor, but I was in massive awe with these kind and huge-hearted people,“ she says.

A mourning story Laird wrote long ago, “World of Dreams,” features Marvin Sewell who created the lick that drives the song. It’s a tune about great loss. “Marvin took to the sadness and developed the music,” says Laird. “He’s the co-writer. Without Marvin, there’s no song.”

The most riveting and mystical track “The River,” also features Marvin. Laird chose to base the song on the Nile River, one of the most important historical rivers in Africa. Its headwater, Lake Victoria in Uganda, had a power-source hydroelectric dam. “I have close friends who lost family during the Idi Amin regime,” Laird says. “I have since met other Ugandans who also lost family, and I began to research further and learned that sometimes the dam had become clogged by slain bodies from dictator’s reign of terror.” During his rule from 1971-1979, it’s estimated that a half of million people were killed and some were dumped into the lake that caused the dam’s outages. “After learning this story, I decided to make this song about the Nile and to dedicate it to the memory of those who perished under the wretched regime.”

While Laird’s compositional prowess prevails on Life, she also covers five songs, including the Bill Withers tune of longing, ”Smile for Me.” Laird has an affinity to Bill, whose “I Want to Spend the Night” appears on Touched. Laird also champions Phil Moore’s love song gone bad “Tender as a Rose,” with a firm stepping rhythm and Marvin’s hard, sweet slide. She lovingly sings the Ned Washington/Dimitri Tiomkin tune “Wild Is the Wind,” and in an excerpted version, she channels Richie Havens’ take on Jerry Merrick’s poetic, contemplative “Follow.”

The most powerful, show-stopping cover comes with “In the Pines.” It has been performed by a slew of singers over the years, but this deeply soulful rendition stands above as Laird duets with Marvin. (The barking dogs, clucking chickens and crickets in the soundscape are the real deal, Laird says, recorded by Jeff.)

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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.”

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Indeed, with Life, Laird’s music is most certainly art in its finest.

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

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